Thieves in the Temple.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning paycheck fairness and the right to repair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning credit reporting and gun violence.

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

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

Action: concerning the HEROES Act and social media.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Social Security, clean air and clean water, and life-saving drugs.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to block our President's attempt to raid Social Security and Medicare funding through his payroll tax holiday Executive Order, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. You'd be surprised to learn how many of our President's votaries excuse this raid by saying our government has raided Social Security for years! That's how far people have to go to defend this President -- by essentially asserting that two wrongs do make a right! Also, too, they're wrong -- if we do nothing, and the economy doesn't grow (which sure seems unlikely, regardless of what's happening now!), then Social Security will be able to pay out full benefits until 2035 and close to 80% of its benefits thereafter. But if our President gets his way, and repeals the payroll tax entirely? Social Security's disability trust fund will be empty by the middle of next year, and the retirement/survivors' trust fund will be empty by 2023. That's because taxes pay for services. And the only people who don't understand that are the people who must cling to this President no matter what.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our state legislators still push a pro-pollution agenda, this time with HB 2025/SB 950, which would establish the procedure by which the state could establish a carbon tax. Read Sec. 4(b)(3) of the bill and you'll notice a theme -- the bill would only allow our DEP to consider the economic "harm" a carbon tax would supposedly do to big energy corporations which don't have the foresight to switch to renewables; the bill would pointedly not permit our DEP to consider the increased health care costs from pollution (which are economic impacts), and the bill would also pointedly not let our DEP consider the deleterious impacts of climate change from continued fossil fuel emissions (which are also economic impacts!). Now's a good time to note that I care little for carbon taxes -- I prefer good old-fashioned regulation, which has always worked when done by people who give a crap -- but if the Commonwealth chooses to go the carbon tax route, then certainly they should do it right. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your PA state legislator to reject HB 2025/SB 950 and actually take steps to protect our air, our water, and our health.

Finally, big pharma corporation Gilead, which is developing a putatively promising COVID-19 treatment called remdesivir, says it'll "give away" 1.5 million doses -- but that's not the act of generosity you might think it is! After all, a sick person will need more than one dose -- Gilead's own website recommends five- and ten-day treatment courses, depending on the severity of your symptoms -- and Gilead still plans to charge upwards of $2,000 for a drug they developed with almost $80 million of taxpayer money, i.e., your money. Set aside the immorality of charging four figures for a life-saving drug: they needed our money to make it! Which gives us some say over what they do, right? Hence Color of Change helps you tell Gilead to give all of its COVID-19 medicine away, if it works. Why would a right-winger object to that? Well, HOWZ DOEZ THEYZ MAKEZ TEH PROFITZ!!!!!, I suppose (short answer: why must they?), but also fear -- fear that if we don't let Gilead do exactly what it wants, we'll all get sick and die. Fears like that are real, of course, but letting such fears dominate our lives is profoundly un-American. We're not hostages, after all -- we're free people.

Action: concerning financial predators, your private data, and pot legalization.

As states move to cap payday loan rates, yet another "acting" head of an Administration bureau has come up with a scheme to circumvent such caps: it would turn a blind eye to payday lenders as they launder loans through big banks. Such cleverness! Unless you think, as I do, that it's only clever if it does our civilization good. Releasing payday lenders from regulatory "burdens" so they can continue to gouge working Americans with 300% loans ain't good, particularly as tens of millions of Americans still can't regain the jobs they lost due to the pandemic. It's not like payday lenders can't make money at levels like 36% annually -- and frankly I'd set such caps a lot lower than that! -- but our Administration seriously believes that any regulation that actually helps Americans is a profound evil, because only money-making bosses matter. Too harsh? The truth is always harsh, but never too harsh, if you're a grown-up. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to reject its proposal to let payday lenders circumvent strong protections.

Meanwhile, big private equity corporation Blackstone wants to buy Ancestry, one of the corporations that'll read your DNA to determine your genealogical heritage. And you already see the problem with that, right? It's bad enough that one corporation has all that data and our government can't or won't make laws protecting it from abuse or theft, but having a bankster buy up all that data is like another whole suitcase full of bad. And what would prevent a hedge fund from selling your data to the highest bidder? Certainly not their ethics or morals! I mean, the individuals who run Blackstone will pretend to be shocked, shocked! that anyone would ever think such a thing of them, but they're not stupid. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk and federal regulators to block the proposed Blackstone acquisition of Ancestry. Maybe someone should tell our President that Blackstone's CEO said he was stupid! Of course I don't know if he did -- Blackstone's executives and I don't exactly move in the same circles -- but it's not exactly unlikely, is it? And it seems to get results.

Finally, House Democratic leadership may hold a vote on H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, later on this month, so Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to legalize pot and start to repair the damage caused by prohibition by passing the MORE Act. Yeah, I used to think legalizing marijuana was a bridge too far -- though I've always felt putting it on Schedule I of the Drug Enforcement Act was ridiculous, since it's nowhere near as dangerous as drugs like heroin -- but then a few states did it on their own, and they didn't exactly fall apart, did they? No, they did not. The MORE Act would remove pot from Drug Enforcement Act scheduling entirely, and would invest more money into rebuilding the communities that have been ravaged by "war on drugs" policing. "Ravaged" isn't too strong a word, not when you have it from Richard Nixon's own counsel, John Ehrlichman, that the "war on drugs" was never really about drugs, but about oppressing anti-war and black protestors without appearing to violate their rights. And that's a legacy we ought to let go.

Action: concerning good House bills, public land stewardship, and making billionaires pay.

Happy Tuesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yeah, give them the whole list! Senatorial staffers take down your will and communicate it to their bosses -- and then their bosses do the will of their bosses, i.e., us. At least, that's how it'd work in a sane and moral society. Until then, we must insist on sanity and morality -- again and again and again.

Meanwhile, Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell Interior Secretary Bernhardt to remove William Perry Pendley from his job as Acting Director of our Bureau of Land Management. That's right, another of our President's infamous "acting" officers, so installed as to bypass the Senatorial confirmation process -- a process our President is so confident will go his way that he is withdrawing Mr. Pendley's nomination to be the real Director. So he "bows" to our Senators' will, but flouts it by keeping him there in an "acting" capacity! Putting Mr. Pendley in charge of the Bureau of Land Management is fox-henhouse territory to begin with -- Mr. Pendley is yet another Administration leader who believes his own department shouldn't exist, plus he professes to be an adherent of the "shoot, shovel, and shut up" way of dealing with having endangered species on your land. But his numerous denigrations of non-whites and immigrants? Well, that's just special sauce for this Administration. Maybe we can make it a PR nightmare for Mr. Bernhardt, who's Mr. Pendley's boss. Particularly since we're really the boss of both of them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8020/S. 4490, the Make Billionaires Pay Act, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. As the pandemic rages and our economy craters, billionaires make out like bandits, so to speak, their wealth increasing by over $5 billion every day, and if that fact doesn't testify to how little billionaires have to work to make their money, nothing does. We'd all like to make money more efficiently, but this state of affairs isn't efficient if it's not doing our civilization any good. Can you even imagine what could you do with $5 billion? $5 billion wouldn't just pay off your mortgage, it'd pay off 10,000 mortgages -- if those mortgages averaged half a million dollars! You don't even know 10,000 people! No, not even on Facebook! So putting $5 billion in the hands of our richest Americans every day surely doesn't benefit the masses of Americans struggling with, say, health care debt. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Make Billionaires Pay Act would actually remedy that to some degree.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, our Post Office, and endangered species.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now would be a good time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and to reject the suite of bills the Republicans call the HEALS Act. The American people continue to clamor for relief from the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting recession, and the HEROES Act (which our House passed over three months ago!) would give a lot of that relief, not just in extended unemployment benefits and additional stimulus checks but also in the form of COVID-19 testing and tracing. Also, the HEROES Act would extend a moratorium on evictions, since putting people out on the street could cause more COVID-19 spikes. Republican proposals, meanwhile, would attack Social Security, hand out more corporate welfare, and expand three-martini lunch tax breaks; it's safe to say the American people aren't clamoring for these. Don't get hung up on "Democrats and Republicans negotiating an agreement." We're suppose to tell them what we want and they're supposed to do it, and how can Senators negotiate, anyway, without hearing our counsel?

While you have your Senators on the phone, you can also tell them to pass H.R. 8015, the Delivering for America Act, which would roll back the many changes Postmaster General DeJoy has made to U.S. Postal Service operations, changes which have resulted not only in mail delivery delays but also fears that our Post Office won't be able to handle an influx of votes-by-mail, since a lot of folks would rather not risk dying of COVID-19 at the ballot box. Some folks say we're "snowflakes" for wanting to vote without dying of an awful disease! But these folks get their own "courage" largely by getting drunk with denial and rage, so why listen to them? The Delivering for America Act also delivers emergency funding for our Post Office, which still suffers under the Congressional mandate to pre-fund its health and pension benefits 75 years in advance. Those who want our Post Office to run "like a corporation" should note that no corporation in America has do to that! (If you want an email contact tool for this alert, Penn PIRG provides one.)

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to reject its latest plan to weaken endangered species protections, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. As you may recall, our Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed removing species from protections against development if they relocate to a new habitat. Thing is, a species might be endangered precisely because we've developed too much of its natural habitat already, meaning that in order to save the species we have to relocate it to a larger area; thus our FWS would essentially penalizing endangered species for living in a place we've basically overrun, and then prevent them from getting re-established elsewhere! I really do wish folks would use their cleverness to do good things. One could hope that a federal judge will see the inherent contradiction in this rule, and find that it prevents proper enforcement of the Endangered Species Act -- but we've got to help a judge see it with our public comments.

Action: concerning pollution, government spying, police foundations, and bad media.

On the occasion of yet more wildfires in California, MoveOn helps you tell California Gov. Newsom to stop approving new drilling and fracking leases in the Golden State. A lot of folks say there ain't a dime's worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans, and while that's not exactly true, it doesn't exactly help that California's Democratic Governor, nominally an environmentalist, lets all this oil and gas drilling happen, when making climate change worse is an obvious side effect. Having no clean water is another obvious side effect, since hydrofracturing uses a lot of water -- in a state that frequently experiences drought, no less! In a state already appropriating a lot of water for agricultural uses, no less! So, to sum: the solution to burning lungs, brown sky, ashes falling like rain, and so little water they tell you not to flush the toilet is what? More oil and gas drilling? How about more solar and wind, eh? Last I looked, California got plenty of sun, and you might as well use the resources at hand, rather than dig for more just so a few fossil fuel executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes.

Meanwhile, as good Americans continue to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha, WI police -- and as said police seemed strangely uninterested in the militia member who shot several protestors in the middle of the week -- M Power Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect protestors from FBI surveillance, intimidation, and criminalization. We've told our FBI not to do these things many times, but obviously they think admitting that right-wingers commit terrorist acts is a good enough reason to let them continue to harass black protestors, like they've been doing since time immemorial. But admitting that right-wingers commit terrorism -- you know, like the thing I described in the first sentence of this paragraph! -- is not some great gift to us (it's rather like saying water is wet), and I'm old enough to remember when right-wingers threw a hissy fit over our DHS saying the same thing during the first Obama term. And if you'll refer to the first sentence of this paragraph again, you'll wonder why law enforcement spies on black protestors but seems so helpless when some kid kills a few of them. People have rights even if you don't like them, after all.

And while we're on this subject: if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big corporations to stop funding police foundations, then Police Piggy Bank still helps you do that. It's well past time that police foundations came under some scrutiny -- and it's also well past time the corporations that fund them came under some scrutiny, since these corporations are now falling all over themselves to say how much they love black folks. We-the-people have little-to-no oversight over police foundations, since they're private; certainly we don't have the oversight we have over public police budgets! And police foundations don't typically use this money to have barbecues with the good folks in their neighborhoods -- they more typically use it to buy military weapons they then use on the good folks protesting their atrocities. At least big corporations can be swayed by the Big Stick of Bad PR. Yes, even if they've said "black lives matter" out loud! Anyone can say black lives matter, but it takes hard work to make black lives matter -- or, for a start, to make corporations stop funding police who act like black lives don't matter.

And finally: Free Press helps you tell the Fox News Channel to fire Tucker Carlson. His presentation of Kyle Rittenhouse as a victim after he shot three Kenosha protestors (killing two) may be the last straw, but really, he's been leaving a trail of slime for a long time, most vividly in his almost pornographic reuse of looting and rioting footage over the last few months. He employed this tactic again in his Wednesday night "report," one late night TV show writer Brian Parise describes at length in a public post on his Facebook page. Go find it; it's quite illuminating. Mr. Carlson didn't mention Jacob Blake (i.e., the black man whose shooting by police stoked the protests!) in his report, though you'd think that would provide much-needed context -- but he did show the same clip of a man kicking a fence three times, as well as a black woman hitting a white woman in a church 800 miles away, whenever that happened. Sadly, what he does isn't uncommon -- watch a lengthy news report about anything and you'll see the same clips being used over and over. The difference? Generally they don't push a pro-murder perspective.

Well, this has been a busy week. I remain optimistic, however, that our efforts will, one day, deliver a lot less drama and a lot more peace and quiet.

Action: concerning Social Security, endangered species, the right to repair, and pollution.

You know our President has tried to delay the collection of the employee-side payroll taxes that pay for Social Security, and you know he's said out loud that he wants to permanently repeal that tax, thus depriving Social Security of its funding -- but you may not know that Social Security Chief Actuary Stephen Goss has said that Social Security would be out of money by 2023 if we made this payroll tax cut permanent! Which means Mr. Goss will be getting a lot of death threats this week from our President's votaries. But this is one Social Security-will-be-out-of-money prediction you can count on, because, well, when you zero out a revenue source that pays for a program, you won't be able to pay for that program anymore. Cue the Arthur Laffer Clown Car, claiming that zeroing out revenues increases revenues! Of course, we shouldn't let the greediest and stupidest among us make all the decisions in America -- which is what happens when we keep silent. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any legislation that would permanently end the Social Security payroll tax. We earned Social Security, dammit.

Meanwhile, another day, another Administration attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act by rewriting the rules so that it's a lot harder to protect endangered species from oblivion. I shouldn't have to say why that's a good thing, right? I mean, when a species is gone, it ain't coming back -- just like the fuel we dig up from the ground will one day be gone, and then where will we be? Not reproducing species from fossils in amber, that's for sure! Seriously, this is a world where we have renewable sources of energy, like solar, wind, and geothermal, and we could make these our main sources of energy if Our Glorious Elites would just get with the program, but instead our Administration proposes to redefine "habitat" downward to make endangered species virtually homeless, and thus subject them to the mercy of our madness for development! Hence Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to withdraw its proposed rule changes that would hamper our ability to protect endangered species under the law.

In other news, H.R. 7956/S. 4473, the Critical Medical Infrastructure Right-to-Repair Act, would compel corporations that make critical hospital equipment (think ventilators!) to release the information that would allow third-party repair techs at hospitals to fix them. And just to head off industry propaganda, our FDA found in 2018 that third-party technicians are just as good as manufacturer-authorized techs in fixing medical equipment. You'd think our FDA might have said the opposite, so that executives in the medical equipment field could continue to restrict "proprietary" information, but they did not. And while I don't believe in trade secrets über alles, we're not even talking about releasing trade secrets that could lead competitors to reverse-engineer products -- we're talking about releasing spare parts, service diagrams, and diagnostic software that could help save lives. Hence US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to make fixing machines and saving lives easier by passing the Critical Medical Infrastructure Right-to-Repair Act.

Finally, Samsung, of all corporations, is mulling investing in the proposed Vung Ang 2 coal plant, even though its builders would put it in the same fishing village that saw its livelihood wiped out by the notorious Formosa steel plant spill of 2016! And things ain't much better four years later, which you would figure, knowing that the Formosa disaster contaminated 20 miles of coastline with cyanide. A couple of big corporations have already pulled out of Vung Ang 2, and Samsung has already changed its mind about investing in the proposed Adani Carmichael coal plant that would further befoul the Great Barrier Reef, so we know the Big Stick of Bad PR can sway them. But only if we wield it! Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Samsung to pull out of the proposed Vung Ang 2 coal plant. If Samsung winds up staying with Vung Ang 2, I would have to at least wonder if they pulled out of Adani Carmichael because that plant might have affected the air and water of mostly white people, whereas Vung Ang 2 would affect the air and water of mostly non-white people. I mean, I like to think the best, even of big corporations, but too often they make that hard.

Action: concerning good House bills, taxing the rich, pollution, and health care data.

Happy Wednesday, good people! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. These bills promote voting rights, internet freedom, public lands, and consumer safety, among so many other good things, so our Senators have no excuse to ignore them. And ignore them they will, unless we make that impossible.

Meanwhile, you've heard about how well Jeff Bezos, Marc Zuckerberg, et al have been doing during this pandemic, even though you and I struggle to make ends meet? Well, S. 4490, the Make Billionaires Pay Act, would impose a one-time 60% tax on skyrocketing billionaire wealth, and would direct the proceeds toward Medicare so it can cover the out-of-pocket health care costs of all Americans for the next calendar year. The total take from this tax -- according to the bill's original sponsor, Sen. Sanders (I-VT) -- would be close to $422 billion, and would still leave said billionaires a little over $310 billion of their windfall during the pandemic, so brook no silliness from right-wingers about how extortionate this bill would supposedly be. Frankly, leaving them over $300 billion is extraordinarily generous -- I'd want to tax them until they stop acting like they're the only people who ever mattered. The 91% tax bracket sure did curb a lot of insanity in the old days, and we need only look to our whiny baby of a President to understand the damage the absence of the 91% tax bracket has done. Anyway, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to strike a blow for fair taxation by passing the Make Billionaires Pay Act.

In other news, our EPA has proposed new smog regulations that -- wait for it -- make literally zero improvements on the smog standard we already have, even though said smog standard is now inadequate to the amount of air pollution (and the resulting health care costs) we now face, and (this part is really important!) even though the law mandates that our EPA revise our smog standards every few years to adapt to changes in our atmosphere and in our scientific knowledge! It's beyond asking "how likely is it that our smog problem is exactly the same as it was five years ago?" and on toward asking "how likely is it that we now think smog is exactly as harmful as it was five years ago?" So, yeah, this is another pro-pollution "environmental" "regulatory" effort that will likely die a cold death in court -- but not if we don't weigh in with public comments! Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our EPA to do its damn job and enact more vigorous smog standards. In 2015, our EPA lowered the standard from 75 ppm to 70 ppm; now we want them to lower it to 60 ppm, and if big polluting corporations whine about it, we can just remind them that they're bold and can rise to new challenges. You know, the way Americans do.

Finally, if your head is still spinning from all the which-data-is-the-right-data drama that our President and his votaries like to foist upon us, then you'll be interested to know that H.R. 6585/S. 3850, the Equitable Data Collection and Disclosure on COVID-19 Act, would not only mandate that our CDC and our Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services publish daily updates on COVID-19 cases, testing, and treatment, but would also force these agencies to publish that data by race and ethnicity, among other categories (and would require our Indian Health Service to collect COVID-19 data for the populations it serves). We all know -- well, those of us who've thought about it for a minute and who aren't addled by devotion to this particular President -- that COVID-19 disproportionately hunts down poor folks and folks of color, and that's a damn shame. We also know that this President questions the data like he has a vested interest in the data being wrong or something, and his votaries like to muddle the waters with abject falsehoods. So the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to support accurate medical reporting by passing the Equitable Data Collection and Disclosure on COVID-19 Act.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, racism, police surveillance, and fuel efficiency.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and reject the suite of bills known as the HEALS Act. It ain't that damn hard, really: the HEROES Act would fund expanded unemployment benefits, would fund our Post Office, would fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, would fund public education, would fund the states and localities hit hard by this pandemic, and would issue another round of stimulus checks that would exceed the ones we got from the CARES Act. Plus, the HEROES Act would expand working family tax breaks and repeal the gazillionaire tax break that "somehow" made it into the CARES Act. And what would the HEALS Act do? Speed up Congress's ability to cut your Social Security benefits, expand the three-martini lunch tax break, fund considerably less-expanded unemployment benefits, and immunize corporations from lawsuits when they injure or kill good Americans like you and I. I think our duty as Americans is quite clear here, even if our leaders mean to mystify it.

Meanwhile, a Kenowah, WI police officer shot Jake Blake seven times in the back this past Sunday, so Color of Change helps you tell state and local decision-makers to fire the officer who shot Mr. Blake. All ye need ask yourself is this one question: does anyone deserve the death penalty before being charged with a crime? If the answer is "yes," you might want to see a therapist about your anger management issues. And if the answer is "no," then no amount of propaganda concerning "everything happened so quickly" or "what was he doing out there?" matters. If a police officer kills a person without due process of law, well, victims can't exactly get do-overs, can they? Too many police officers get do-overs after killing Americans, particularly Americans of color, but the victims can't. It's that damn simple. Admit no "Jake Blake was no angel" in your conversations about this matter. Admit no "but how many arrests did he have on his record," either. Clearly I have been far too kind toward my opponents about these matters; that stops now.

In other news, Cancel Ring helps you tell big online retail corporation Amazon to end its numerous "partnerships" with local police departments. These "partnerships" entail Amazon helping police departments collect Ring doorbell footage without warrants, a weapon our police too readily turns on protestors and folks of color. If they were trying to catch burglars, you'd still make them get a warrant, or at least you would in a sane, moral, and decent society, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, Amazon just helps police get all the information they want, law and order be damned. No, it is "law and order" to ensure that all Americans, even the guilty ones, get Fourth Amendment protections guaranteed by our Constitution. Those who watch TV news channels that have been replaying the same footage of looting for the last two months may not see how untrammeled police power might actually threaten their freedom. But I always wonder why someone would be happy remaining in a state of rage all the time. I mean, they get tired, don't they?

Finally, our EPA is still trying to roll back fuel efficiency standards because ANYTHINGZ TEH OBUMMERZ DIDZ IZ TEH BADZ!!!!! And worse, big auto manufacturing corporations are rolling back their own support for said standards! Remember when the Obama standards came with the endorsement of big automakers? Well, apparently their word didn't mean much. Who'da thunk it? Seriously, don't let anyone come at you with "you were naive to believe the big automakers," because either this is a civilized society in which your word means something, or it's not. Too many Americans will shrug and say it isn't once you spring that trap on them, and then you will know that doing right is less important to them than "owning the libs" or "being on the winning team." And they'll have to take that to the Pearly Gates one day! Anyway, the Sierra Club helps you tell big auto manufacturing corporations GM and Toyota to drop their support for this Administration's pro-pollution, anti-fuel efficiency policy. Their executives will have to answer at the Pearly Gates, too; maybe they'll take that to heart.

UPDATE. I did not realize that Mr. Blake was still alive. Which is excellent news! Hence I've changed one word in the second paragraph above. (Not the rest of it, though -- I'm pretty sure that when you shoot a guy seven times, you're trying to kill him.)

Action: concerning our Post Office, facial recognition technology, vaccine profiteering, and our national parks.

Our House passed H.R. 8015, the Delivering for America Act, on Saturday after convening a rare August session; the bill would roll back the many changes Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has made to U.S. Postal Service operations, and would prevent him from making any more changes -- particularly those that result, and have resulted, in mail delivery delays -- until we get COVID-19 under control. Now's a good time to call your Senators and tell them to pass the Delivering for America Act. What reasonable objection they could have I could not say -- surely they wouldn't say it's "not Congress's place" to tell the Postmaster General how to run our Post Office? I hope not, but these are, as they say, interesting times; used to be folks would say outlandish things to get attention and then apologize to get more attention, but now they just say outlandish things and then say more outlandish things to get double the attention. I suppose our Senators could point to our President's threatened veto, but Congress can override vetoes, so really, they have no excuses.

Meanwhile, our Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) has lately contracted with Clearview AI for facial recognition technology, which we know tends to do a bad job of telling folks of color apart and thus get some 60-year naturalized citizen deported one day (if it hasn't happened already!). But Sens. Markey (D-MA) and Merkley (D-OR) have introduced S. 3284, the Ethical Use of Facial Recognition Act, which would ban the use of facial recognition technology until further legislation mandated by the bill establishes sound legal boundaries for its use. So few Americans seem to understand the whole concept of boundaries anymore -- folks tend to act like every issue in life is either-or; we can either have facial recognition technology or IMMIGRANTZ CRIMEZ RAMPAGEZ!!!!!! Of course, we can manage technological advancement so that it doesn't cause us harm; this is, in fact, one of the crucial challenges of maintaining a civilization. I know, how old-fashioned of me. Anyway, Ban Facial Recognition helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban facial recognition technology until such time as we can actually use it for good.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to prevent big pharma corporations from profiteering off any new COVID-19 vaccine, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Too many Americans (our President included) think of things like randomized double-blind tests as "bureaucracy." They're not -- they're how we get good science that actually helps people. Of course, for a big pharma corporation, the need to get a vaccine right -- which is to say, a vaccine that works, and without life-threatening side effects -- impedes the insane drive to profits. If we lived in a sane, moral, and decent society, big pharma corporations that made billions of dollars from rushed, bad vaccines would withdraw in deserved shame and humiliation, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, these same corporations assume they have a "right" to get away with it. Making us a sane, moral, and decent society has, admittedly, been a crap-ton of work, but if we can keep big pharma corporations from profiteering off pandemic vaccines, we will make that work easier.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2491/S. 1311, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. The Roadless Area Conservation Act would (deep breath) tell our Administration that they can't actually just ignore the Roadless Rule in promoting development in federal lands (sigh). It's a shame we have to do that, but these are bold thinkers in this Administration. Wait, my attempt to make "bold" into a cuss word during Tha Bush Mobb years didn't take hold ? Well, we can't all have six-figure promotional budgets. Anyway, our Administration wants to (I'm paraphrasing here) ignore the Roadless Rule, but legally, mainly so they can drill in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the world's biggest intact temperate rainforest, where the trees are centuries (or millenia!) old and some of the animals there can't be found anywhere else. But yeah, let's churn yet another national park into fuel that'll just get burned up and pollute our air and water. That's real conservative of these fools.

Action: concerning foreign policy and "conversion" "therapy."

H.R. 8050, the Israeli Annexation Non-Recognition Act, would prevent our government from recognizing or aiding Israel's ongoing annexation of the West Bank. Yeah, I know, they've "paused" their annexation plans, but just like Mr. DeJoy's "suspension" of changes to our Post Office, this "pause" is meaningless, since annexation is so far along already. And we know Israel would have a much tougher time annexing the West Bank if we didn't send them so much of our taxpayer money. Folks who interpret my position as "anti-Israeli security" should consider, again (I mean, I feel like I've said this a hundred times!) whether Israel guarantees its security through its ongoing occupation of Palestine, or jeopardizes it. And folks who look at H.R. 8050's sponsor list and say ZOMG ITZ TEH SQUADZ!!!!! need to stop imagining politics as team sports. Your team is America, people! And we can absolutely be a friend to Israel and stand up to apartheid at the same time. Hence Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 8050.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to ban "conversion" "therapy" across our great land, then Change.org still helps you do that. What is "conversion" "therapy" and why do I put it in obviously ironic quotation marks? Because it purports to change gay folks into straight folks, which is impossible, and it purports to do so through "therapies" that include re-enacting past sexual abuses and "exercises" involving nudity and intimate touching. Surely its proponents can see why such "therapy" so often leads to depression and suicide for the "converted"? Alas, many do not -- many only see their own hatred of gays, their own self-hatred, or their own need for attention and drama. I suspect many of those who do find that changing is a lot like turning around a cruise ship. But there's hope for such people. You know why? Because changing into someone who doesn't live to hurt others is much, much easier than turning gay folks into straight folks.

Action: concerning freedom of the press and water shutoffs.

In the wake of the arrest of Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri at a Black Lives Matter protest in late May, Amnesty International helps you tell Iowa state prosecutors to drop all charges against Ms. Sahouri. They've charged her with "interference with official acts" and "failure to disperse," and dragged their feet providing evidence against her, arguing that her case was too "low-priority" (since the charges are misdemeanors) for them to provide, say, body-camera evidence they couldn't even say for sure existed although Des Moines police officers have had to wear body cameras for three years now. Which only goes to show you that they don't do things like this, necessarily, to establish a precedent for sending journalists to prison, though I'm sure they think that's gravy. They do it so that journalists who want to do actual journalism that actually speaks truth to power will throw up their hands and say it's not worth it. I mean, can you imagine police arresting, say, Chuck Todd? No, you cannot -- speaking truth to power is obviously the farthest thing from his mind.

Meanwhile, Food and Water Action helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 4362, the Emergency Water is a Human Right Act, which would (among other good works) establish a national moratorium on water shutoffs while this pandemic is still raging. There is no need to include S. 4362 as part of COVID-19 relief bill "negotiations," really -- our Senators can just pass the bill, send it to our House, and then our House can pass it, and then our President can sign it. If your right-wing uncle wonders out loud why we're still letting people get water for free, remind him that there's a pandemic going on, and people can't wash their hands, or their dishes, or their houses, with water they don't have. In other words, we're not just doing it for people who, through no fault of their own, can't work and therefore can't get paid and can't pay the bills -- we're doing it for all of us, since any of us can run into someone who's had their water shutoff and get a debilitating disease from them that might kill us. And why should we let that happen? To satisfy someone's "philosophy"?

Action: concerning voting rights, phony recycling, and Social Security.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Has our House passed all these good bills because they know our Senate won't pass them and our President won't sign them? It's quite possible! Would such cowardice matter if our Senate and our President bow to our will? Of course not! But if we don't communicate that will, it'll be a moot point.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: some state legislators want to, ah, innovate on the definition of "recycling" so that it includes things that are patently not recycling -- like converting single-use plastics into oil or fuel -- and this would mean big corporations could claim that facilities dedicated to that purpose are "recycling" facilities. Recycling ain't just about decreasing pollution (which converting single-use plastics into fuel decidedly does not do) or reducing trash (ditto, since pollution is trash), it's also about getting utility out of trash, and if fuel burns once and is gone, well, that's about as "single-use" as you can get. Even if we could agree that corporations should do it -- as opposed to, say, solar or wind, which won't increase demand for single-use plastics! -- they shouldn't get goodies from our government for doing it, and we certainly shouldn't murder the definition of "recycling" just so they can get those goodies. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislators to protect our air and water by rejecting HB 1808.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our President's raid on Social Security funding which he calls a "tax cut," then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. We shouldn't regard his obsession with cutting payroll taxes as something unique to him; rather, we should regard it as part of the right's obsession with destroying Social Security by hook or by crook. The fact that he's taken it up only demonstrates that he's one of Our Glorious Elites -- not their enemy, as a lot of his votaries fantasize. Now, I think folks generally understand that taxes pay for services we may all use -- and all of us want to live long enough to collect Social Security. Unfortunately, too many of our media "personalities" act like they don't understand it, and you can catch people off-guard if you repeat lies with conviction, and if no other media personalities call them on their lies right there and then. This is how lies get spread in America -- not just because of malicious people, but because of the cowards who don't stand up to them. But we are neither of these, and we will keep fighting.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, our Post Office, infrastructure, and health care.

It's Monday, so it's time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and reject the suite of bills Republicans call the HEALS Act. It really is as simple as a Goofus and Gallant strip: the HEROES Act would fund our Post Office, fund unemployment benefits, fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, fund localities and states, and issue another round of (bigger) stimulus checks -- while the HEALS Act would make three-martini lunches fully tax-deductible, immunize corporations from lawsuits when they kill people, and make it a lot easier for Congress to cut our Social Security benefits. Don't worry that the two parties are "negotiating" over what a final COVID relief bill would look like, because the HEROES Act is what that bill should look like. Besides, we don't have to negotiate with them -- they have to negotiate with us. You might call that naive, but I've seen it work enough times to want it to work all the time -- and we can make it work all the time by speaking out all the time.

Speaking of our Post Office, MoveOn helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to remove its new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. I guess his defenders will say he's a "logistics executive" who's "shaking up" our Post Office, but we all know logistics employees, not executives, have all the expertise, and cutting off overtime, slowing mail delivery, embarking on a mass firing spree, removing mail sorting machines, and moving blue mailboxes around all look less like "shaking things up" and more like "sowing chaos for our drama king President." And yet there are more even pressing reasons to remove Mr. DeJoy: he still owns a considerable stake in his former corporation, which feeds extensively on taxpayer funds including USPS contracts, and recently bought stock options in Amazon, which uses our USPS a lot but which is also trying to establish itself as a USPS competitor. Adding corruption to incompetence is a tried-and-true formula for our President, but we don't have to put up with it.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act. What does the Moving Forward Act do? It would (among other things) extend this year's infrastructure funding for another year, extend several other transportation- and safety-related funds for the next five years, establish a fund to rebuild transportation infrastructure in rural areas, strengthen safety rules across all modes of transportation, and fund the rebuilding of lead-lined water infrastructure. Here's a sad note: despite the obvious need for infrastructure funding, and the bill's concentration on rural areas and clean water, H.R. 2 got exactly three Republican votes, one of whom was a Democrat until late last year. If the big media pundits got a hold of this information, they'd whine about the bill's lack of "bipartisan" appeal. Sane people, of course, would retort that Republicans have no interest in governing, and thus no "bipartisan" appeal can work with them. And that's why we step in.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our Indian Health Service, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. I'm sure I don't have to say don't they know there's a pandemic on? -- especially since the Navajo Nation, in particular, had it worse than New York state three months back, and you remember how bad New York state had it. But I may have to address folks who, while not particularly bigoted, may wonder "why we're still doing stuff for the Indians." Because obliterating Native cultures might take hundreds of years to redress, that's why. "But I didn't have anything to do with that," such folks might respond. I could respond in a number of ways -- "it's not all about you," "your relative lack of culpability doesn't fix the problem I just described" -- but how about we just say America is a great nation, capable of undoing the harm it inflicts upon the undeserving.

Action: concerning Social Security, government spying, and bad media outlets.

As you know, our President signed an Executive Order late last week directing employers not to collect that half of the payroll tax workers owe -- the tax that funds Social Security and, to a lesser degree, Medicare -- through the end of the calendar year. They call it a "stimulus," but we know what it really is: a first step toward eradicating the payroll tax entirely and leaving Social Security and Medicare funding up to the whims of whichever party controls Congress and the White House. We don't know that merely because we suspect it -- we know it because our President has said so, out loud. And of course it's not a tax cut per se, since you'll still owe that money at the end of the year. He issued those Executive Orders late last week (and not earlier, when it would have received more attention from our media) for one reason: to look like he's "doing something." I get tired of leaders constantly looking like they're "doing something"; maybe they ought to just do something? Well, we'll do something, by demanding that Congress fight this Executive Order, as Demand Progress helps you do.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell our FBI to stop spying on black protestors. What do they expect to find, looting? We now know that a lot of these looters aren't "blacks burning down their own neighborhoods," but white agents provocateurs who get their jollies breaking stuff and blaming other people for it. How many work for our government, I wonder? It's a question worth asking! In the meantime, our FBI spies on black protestors for one reason only: because they think their free speech threatens their power. Well, maybe it is a threat, to their power to run roughshod over any Americans they like, but our FBI doesn't deserve that power any more than our hapless President does when he deploys his brownshirts to big cities. "Law and order" hotheads always complain more about black folks than about, say, corporations dumping filth into our air and water. They'll never see that the latter is a legitimate law-and-order concern, but we do.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on the Fox News Channel entirely. They might profess to find that notion counterintuitive, as Fox News has lately started outdrawing even the traditional over-the-air networks in ratings (not just the other cable news outlets) between 8 pm and 11 pm. But frankly that's overblown -- the over-the-air networks don't run very much of consequence during the summer, Fox News always gets ratings bumps during Presidential election seasons, the over-the-air nightly newscasts are doing a lot better than they have for some time, and Fox's flagship shows are only drawing about as much as a certain loofa-lover's show did back in the day. Besides, Fox News peddles hatred and stupidity; why would a corporation want to support that with its money? All Fox News does is condition its viewers to react to every tiny or imaginary slight with bottomless, inarticulate rage, and no corporation should enable that program with its advertising dollars.

Action: concerning health care, climate change, and drug policy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government that a COVID-19 vaccine should be available to anyone regardless of how well-off they are financially, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. Specifically, you'll tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7296, the Make Medication Affordable by Preventing Pandemic Price Gouging Act, and H.R. 7288, the Taxpayer Research and Coronavirus Knowledge Act, which would, taken together, prevent big pharma corporations from charging you an arm and a leg so you can get a COVID-19 vaccine. This ain't Big Gummint running roughshod over your rights, this is our government protecting our investments -- our government spent most of the money ever spent on coronavirus research before the pandemic, and our taxpayer money has gone into almost all of the more promising COVID-19 vaccine candidates, so don't we get some say over whether we get gouged or not? This Administration pretends we don't, but we know better.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the destruction of the Amazon rain forest. They call the Amazon "the lungs of the world," thanks to its unparalleled ability to contain carbon emissions and produce oxygen, but the Brazilian government -- led by Jair Bolsonaro, one of our more disgusting Glorious Elites and as a result a man our President obviously aspires to be more like -- has been encouraging developers to set large swaths of it on fire. Of course, American corporations are hip-deep in all of that, but that means we're hip-deep in all of that, too, because where would American corporations be without our consumer dollars? Well, looks like we have a lot of power to change things here, too -- even in the Amazon/Facebook era, our choices aren't "spend money with big corporations or don't buy stuff at all." And in the Amazon/Facebook era, the Big Stick of Bad PR packs a big hurt. But only if we wield it.

Finally, the House Judiciary Committee has lately passed H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, and that means it can get a full House vote next month. The MORE Act would legalize pot by removing it from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, and tax its sale and using that money to help communities hit hardest by our now half-century-long obsession with putting down communities of color under the guise of being "tough on crime." I want those communities to recover, and would happily invest my tax dollars for that purpose, but I'm not thrilled with the proposed 5% sales tax -- it'll hit working families harder, and I would rather tax the profits of the entity making and/or selling the pot, like we do with everything else. Still, as the Libertarians will tell you, a lot of racist policing will end once marijuana is legal. Hence Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your House Reps to pass the MORE Act, with objections like the one I've noted above, if you like.

Action: concerning corporate divestment from police foundations, social media "fact-checking," and online abuse.

Color of Change helps you tell big corporations such as Amazon, Target, Starbucks, and Comcast to divest from police foundations. Police foundations are a two-pronged menace: they fund our burgeoning police state, and they show up state, local and federal governments for failing to fund police in the first place! If we're going to have police -- and ideally, as I've said before, we will have them doing far fewer jobs -- then we ought to fund them properly, and not use tricks like asset forfeiture, the 1033 program, and police foundations to paper over that lack of funding. Police foundations, being private non-profits, also fund police departments with very little or no public oversight, which means police departments can spy on citizens and fire rubber bullets on protestors without anyone accountable to the people having actually signed off on that! Which also gives our worst public servants an unearned sense of relief, I suppose. Need I mention that corporate influence on police is a) undesirable and b) no substitute for making corporations pay their share of taxes? The only people who should be influencing police are the people police officers serve. So it's time to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR again.

Meanwhile, Facebook somehow seems to outsource its third-party fact-checking function to the worst far right-wing "news" organs, and The Daily Caller (founded by Tucker Carlson because of course it was) is just one of them. Guess what else The Daily Caller does? It tries to raise money for our President's re-election effort! Think Snopes, Factcheck.org, or PolitiFact are raising money for Joe Biden right now? (If you responded OF COURSEZ TEH LIBRUL MEDIAZ DOEZ TEH THINGZ!!!!, please navigate away from this page. And maybe see a therapist about your rage issues.) I take issue with outsourcing your fact-checking function to some big media corporation to begin with -- millions of people are looking for jobs as we speak, and my experience tells me most of them have much better BS detectors than they get credit for having! -- and I also take issue with isolating "fact-checking" as if it's some special function of a news organ rather than that news organ's reason for existence. Nonetheless, I don't want obviously biased news organ telling me what a fact is. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to stop using The Daily Caller as a "fact-checker."

Finally, YouTube has decided (as of the end of September) to remove the feature that enables users to add features such as closed captioning and translated subtitles to videos; this Community Contributions feature sure is a fresh breath of 2007, when (regardless of whatever else was going on in the world!) it seemed like any of us could use the internet as a force for good, even if that good was merely helping deaf folks and foreign-language speakers enjoy the same videos we're all enjoying. But Google (YouTube's owner, sigh) claims it's removing the feature because it "was rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse," and I figured spam and abuse would be the real reason, but you know how you counter spam and abuse? You be like Wikipedia and you hire enough people to effectively monitor the feature for spam and abuse! Just like, you know, if you want to do fact-checking, you hire enough people to check the facts, not outsource it to some corporation or throw up your hands at how hard it is. Anyway, Change.org helps you tell Google not to remove the Community Contributions feature from YouTube. If you like, you can tell them to manage it better, too.

Action: concerning good House bills, law and order, and birth control.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now 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. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Our House has passed a lot of good bills that fight discrimination, vote suppression, and corporate greed; our Senate has responded by ignoring them. Our duty is clear: we either guide them out of their ignorance, or hold them accountable for it at the polls. We'd prefer the former, but we're ready to do the latter.

Meanwhile, Moms Rising helps you tell the Pittsburgh (PA) public school system to get police out of their schools. I've been saying for a while now that we use police like they're the Swiss Army knives of our civilization, and though some folks have been calling for expanding their training so they can handle all their multitudinous tasks better, I would prefer that we just use police officers for very specific purposes -- serving warrants, making arrests, and investigating crimes. We should not be sending them out to solve domestic disputes, talk folks off ledges, or "scare kids straight." Seriously, any school district that needs police officers to control kids' bad behavior needs a new spine. And the best part? Having police officers in schools doesn't do schools (or our children) any good, since a police officer's training (and therefore intuition) is to respond to situations with violence; having the right number of counselors, nurses, and psychologists does do schools (and our children) a lot of good. They said the future would be all about relatable skills, and they were right! It's the mark of a civilization that grows and makes progress. We ought to make this that civilization, wherever we can.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7861, which would repeal the Helms Amendment and make it legal for foreign aid to be used for abortion care. No one in the world wants more abortions, but making abortions illegal (or impossible to get, which making them illegal doesn't necessarily do) would let civilizations force women into breeder roles, and the right to abortion is the best tool we have to avoid that sorry state of affairs. The Helms Amendment has, since 1973, prohibited any foreign aid from going to abortions, and I shudder to think at all the women all over the world who haven't been able to make a better life for themselves because of it. And by "a better life" I don't merely mean a life where women can make a decision that's best for their family -- I mean a life where women don't get routinely raped, often as children, and whose resulting pregnancies become merely another way for men to control them, because that's the reality in a lot of the world today, and the Helms Amendment pretends that reality doesn't exist. Want to make abortions disappear from our planet? Support birth control, at no cost, for anyone who needs it. Right-wing swordfighters can't even do that anymore.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Social Security, surprise medical bills, and private prisons.

Congress is off the rest of the month, but we should still call them and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and reject the suite of Republican-proposed bills known as the HEALS Act. This remains very simple: the HEROES Act extends enhanced unemployment benefits, funds our Post Office, and funds states and localities -- while the HEALS Act gives corporations undeserved immunity from lawsuits filed by the people they hurt and business honchos get to deduct 100% of their meals instead of 50%. Republicans must be very confident they're going to win elections this year for them to go all-in on something as moronic as the HEALS Act. Of course, our "liberal" media is helping them out, by casting Congress's failure to pass another COVID-19 relief bill as either a bipartisan or a Democratic failure. Stone cold truth is that it's a Republican failure -- the Democrats, for once, passed the HEROES Act almost three months ago, and that bill would do what the people want it and need it to do, but Senate Republicans did nothing. And we don't just "get along" with people who do nothing.

And while you have your Congressfolk on the phone, tell them to fight to the death our President's recent Executive Order deferring payroll tax contributions until after the election, because those contributions fund Social Security. Our President has said, out loud, that he'd prefer to "terminate" these contributions and fund Social Security and Medicare from general budgeting, which of course will lead eventually to at least one body of Congress throwing up its hands and saying we just can't afford it anymore! But we should not tolerate the government of the greatest nation on Earth saying we can't "afford" a dignified retirement for all our citizens. No equivocation is possible here -- a large number of politicians and not just Republicans are thrilled that our President is willing to take the PR hit for achieving one of Our Glorious Elites' long-standing goals, the destruction of Social Security. They will not stand up for Social Security unless we stand up for Social Security -- and we must stand up in such numbers that our will cannot be mistaken.

Meanwhile, previous COVID-19 legislation ensured that COVID-19 tests would be free to anyone who needed one -- or so we thought! As we speak, good Americans still get slammed with surprise medical bills ranging from $150 on the low end to $3,000 on the high end. Turns out those bills didn't address the matter of health care facilities partnering with "out of network" facilities to get the tests done, but hey, last I looked, "free" meant "free," not "free unless your local ER is out-of-network," or "free unless this particular ER doctor is out-of-network even though all the others are in-network," or "free unless we're dumb enough to use an out-of-network lab," or "free unless we gouge you by using an out-of-network lab." What do I always say? Incompetence is malice! The stupid-or-evil debate doesn't matter if the end result is evil! Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to end surprise medical billing during this pandemic. Surprise medical bills always make the news, so you'd think ending them would be a bipartisan cause. Alas, only if we make it so.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell TD Bank to divest from notorious private prison corporation GEO Group. TD invested heavily in GEO during the pandemic's early days, and I wouldn't blame you for thinking that's a bit of a head-scratcher there. Did TD Bank think our President's anti-immigrant cruelty was the wave of the future and it was time to get on board? Did they think there was going to be a motherlode in imprisoning folks during a pandemic? Did they fantasize that private prisons would control the pandemic better than everyone else, instead of the obvious truth that they'd do worse than everyone else, since private prisons operate facilities where you can't even pee in private? We may never know! What we do know is that private prisons, despite their relative favor with this President, put immigrant detainees in concentration camps and even if they didn't, they'd still generally do a crap job of spending taxpayer money. What we also know is that the Big Stick of Bad PR works on big corporations. If we wield it, that is.

Action: concerning public schools, pandemic data, and COVID-19 vaccines.

MoveOn helps you tell Congress to prevent our Administration from withholding federal funding from schools that do not fully reopen this fall. You contemplate our President suggesting he might do exactly that last month, and you wonder why he's so anxious to get kids packed like sardines into buildings where they can't possibly socially-distance, and you might well conclude that he's trying to get all those pesky unionized public school teachers killed. I wouldn't put it past him! But if you think that's a bridge too far for him, consider that he might decide to give all that money unused on public schools to private schools, because it's an "emergency." This is why I say incompetence is malice -- people like our President, just like George W. Bush before him, go out of their way to screw up as much as they can so they can prove "government doesn't work," and then they funnel all our taxpayer money to their cronies. But this is America, and we don't have to put up with any of that.

Meanwhile, you may recall that our Administration, faced with rising COVID-19 infections, decided to order health care providers to send all COVID-19-related data to the Department of Health and Human Services rather than the Centers for Disease Control. Presumably our President has decided he can "trust" HHS more than CDC, since the CDC is, by all appearances, actually trying to help Americans during a pandemic, while our President is only trying to help himself get re-elected. Fittingly enough, the numbers we are getting (I use Worldometers to get the latest) are still pretty damning for our President, but you would not be alone in suspecting that HHS might be concealing some information that's even worse than what we're getting. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would make sure all COVID-19 data gets shared with the CDC as well as HHS. I guess if HHS wants to have a pissing match with CDC, I can't really stop them. But I would warn them that we good Americans don't have the same tolerance for drama that we used to. In fact, I would say most of us are profoundly tired of it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk that any COVID-19 vaccine must be available to everyone regardless of their "ability to pay," then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. Rather than asking if individual Americans can "afford" the vaccine, we should ask if we, as a civilization, can afford to let hundreds of thousands of good Americans die merely because they're not banksters! I mean "afford" in the metaphorical sense, of course -- I know some cynic out there stands ready to retort that TEH DEADZ DON'TZ NEEDZ ANY MOREZ OF TEH HEALTHZ CAREZ HA HA HA HA SNORT!!!!!! But you measure the worth of a civilization by how it treats its most needy members -- a civilization that routinely says TO HELLZ WITHZ YOUZ HA HA HA FREE MARKETZ!!!!! may not deserve to endure. And there is also the practical matter of all these folks who would be unvaccinated-because-they're-poor, and thus would be able to keep the various COVID-19 strains going. For Americans of a certain stripe, of course, that's a feature, not a bug. But this is America, and they don't get all the say around here!

Action: concerning good House bills, plastic pollution, and healthy food.

Happy Wednesday, good folks! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass 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. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. This week we add H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act, which finally passed the House last week. Our Senate has no business sitting on bills that fight discrimination and promote voting rights, internet freedom, and working families. And if we tell them enough, they'll learn it one day.

Meanwhile, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (or TCEQ) has proposed rules on regulating plastics so they don't wind up in our water, and surprise, surprise! They're not good enough -- everyone wants to keep Coke bottles out of rivers, but the TCEQ would do nothing about microplastics, which also wind up in our water and too often also wind up in our bloodstream, causing or exacerbating all manner of health problems. The TCEQ apparently did not take health care problems into account; only "environmental" problems, as if environmental problems somehow don't cause health care problems. The TCEQ, like any agency wishing a "smooth" relationship with the corporations it supposedly regulates, would give plastic manufacturing corporations another year to comply with the rules. And if people suffer for it, too bad! They must be sacrificed so that regulators and corporations can get along better! Seriously, government agencies should cultivate an adversarial relationship with the corporations they regulate; maybe then they'll do their job. So Public Citizen helps you tell the TCEQ to regulate plastics in water much more vigorously than they've thus far proposed.

Finally, our Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee -- which helps our Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services put together the Dietary Guidelines for Americans every five years -- has recommended that the Guidelines for 2020-25 advise that we limit added sugars and address how we grow food so we can actually have an agricultural sector in the coming decades. These are absolutely necessary recommendations! And of course there's no guarantee that this Administration will follow them. Word on the street, of course, is that our President -- with advice from former Bush Mobber John "The Crusher" Yoo -- has read our Supreme Court's DACA ruling (which went against him, you recall) as permission to do whatever he wants until someone sues him under the Administrative Procedure Act. And if you responded by saying I thought he was doing that already!, you win a prize, but consider that he now may feel even less constrained by the rules and norms of civilization than he did before, and consider, also, that he loves junk food and he thinks planning for the future (which "not eating sugar today" most certainly is) is for "losers." Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our government to adhere to the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee's recommendations.

Action: concerning government spying, pollution, food safety, and fracking.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to reauthorize the notorious USA PATRIOT Act, then the aptly-named Stop the Patriot Act still helps you do that. It sure seems like every Congressperson except Russ Feingold, Ron Paul, and Barbara Less voted for the PATRIOT Act in the immediate aftermath of 9.11, but the PATRIOT Act hasn't made us safer -- it's just made our government more likely to spy on us. What makes us safer, then? Treating people like they're not obstacles to your own wealth, obviously. That's human nature, you say? Don't justify your cowardice with a low opinion of humanity, I say. And you'll notice that our President now calls antifascist activists "terrorists," though I think they only people they "terrorize" are our President and his most racist followers. Well, we said the "war on terror" would become a tool to attack whichever group of Americans some President or other doesn't like, and we were right! (No, this country is not "on fire," Fox News viewers. Go outside on occasion. And wear a mask when you do.)

Meanwhile, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) is once again daring not to live up to its name, let alone its mandate, by deciding that perchlorate winding up in our drinking water is not a big deal. The other places you commonly find perchlorate? Rocket fuel and explosives. But if you're thinking "well, people overstated the problem with that chemical from Agent Orange years ago," rest assured that scientists have a) found perchlorate in all but five American states and b) have found perchlorate disrupts thyroid function and brain development in children and fetuses. And, not for nothing, but our EPA used to find perchlorate in excess of 15 ppm to be unsafe, and our FDA still does, so what happened? We elected an Administration that thinks all regulations that actually help people must be destroyed, that's what happened. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our clean water from the ill effects of perchlorate. Laws can overrule regulations, after all.

In other news, did you know that our Food Safety and Inspection Service (or FSIS) has granted almost 20 waivers to big corporations that want to speed up their meat processing? And that these waivers allow pork processing plants to monitor inspections on their own and chicken processing plants to let nearly three chickens per second go by? Don't they know that food poisoning always makes the news? Would our government think it's OK to let high school students test themselves, or let auto corporations speed up their inspections? And don't they know there's a pandemic going on? Do they only care about big corporate profits? I mean, only caring about big corporate profits is not conservative; it's corporatist, and that's a descriptor you don't want to take to the Pearly Gates. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to force our federal food inspectors to do their real job, which is to keep our food safe.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Governor Wolf sure picked the worst time to sign HB 732, with all its corporate welfare handouts to the fracking industry, because the Attorney General's Statewide Grand Jury investigation into fracking pollution was full of PR black eyes -- like literally "nauseating" air quality, black sludges in toilets, chronic illnesses for folks living near wells, pets dying, and farm animals giving birth to deformed or dead offspring. And that's before we get to irredeemably polluted water tables and the climate change gut-punch delivered by methane emissions from fracking wells. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell Gov. Wolf to suspend all new gas drilling permits until he can put in some more vigorous health and clean air and water protections. Fracking ain't that popular outside of fracking CEOs and their politician lackeys, you know. And no parent ever says fracking may have stunted my child's development, but at least some CEOs got to get even richer!

Action: the HEROES Act yea, the HEALS Act nay.

Today we have one simple task: to call our Senators and tell them to pass the HEROES Act and reject the HEALS Act.

It's one simple task because the choice is simple: the HEROES Act, which has already passed the House and which would actually help a lot of good Americans get through this pandemic -- or the HEALS Act, actually a suite comprising 10 different bills, which is a steaming piece of dung. The HEALS Act's centerpiece -- a provision that would not only effectively give big corporations immunity from lawsuits when they reopen so stupidly that they cause you to get sick and die, but would let them sue workers who demand safety from said illness and death -- is noxious enough. But the bill would actively injure the American people in other ways: it would slash enhanced unemployment benefits by $400/week, it would create a commission to cut Social Security benefits "behind closed doors," and it would funnel $25 billion of your money to defense contractor corporations so they can continue to flush money down the toilet on planes that don't work. The bill would also continue the Paycheck Protection Program, which has become a notorious corporate welfare mill, with minimal additional restraints on the PPP continuing to hand out taxpayer money to big corporations. And of course the bill would also do negative damage, as it would allocate exactly zero dollars to our upcoming election, our Post Office, our states and localities, and our public schools they're so hot to reopen so they all become COVID hotspots.

But in the meantime, the HEROES Act would -- at the risk of turning this into a Goofus and Gallant strip -- help fund our states and localities, help fund our Post Office, extend unemployment benefits as they are through the end of January, and it would do all that without the stupid "corporate immunity" or "cut Social Security behind closed doors" or "hand out even more corporate welfare to defense contractor" provisions. The HEROES Act would also expand certain working family tax cuts and repeal a big bankster tax-cut-for-the-rich that "somehow" made it into the CARES Act. It would also cut working families another stimulus check -- a more sizable one than the CARES Act did, and also a more sizable one than the HEALS Act would. It would extend and expand national moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures; the HEALS Act would let the current, more limited moratoriums on these things expire immediately. And, not for nothing, but the HEROES Act's COVID-19 testing and tracing provisions are better than those of the HEALS Act. Our President loves bragging about the number of tests we've done, but America has over 330 million inhabitants, so bragging about how you've done more tests than, say, Luxembourg is just empty bragging. I chose Luxembourg for a reason, of course: that nation performs over five times as many tests per million inhabitants as we do, and they have noticeably fewer cases per million and deaths per million, too. (If your right-wing uncle says it's easier for Luxembourg because they're smaller, just remind him that great nations don't make excuses.)

I hate to make it seem to cut-and-dried, but it is: the HEROES Act is a good bill, and the HEALS Act is a bad one. I wish Republicans were less of a clown car than they are -- it seems to me it would be quite easy to create a conservative COVID-19 relief bill, one that would (for example) actually protect mom-and-pop shops instead of pretending nationwide restaurant chains with hundreds of employees are "small businesses." But they are a clown car -- indeed, one would better conclude that Republicans saw this ongoing pandemic as yet another opportunity to convert trillions more of our hard-earned taxpayer dollars into corporate welfare handouts for their cronies, as well as an opportunity to destroy even more of the institutions (like our public schools and our Post Office) that actually sustain a civilization through hard times like these. Needless to say, these actions demand that we issue them not merely a decisive defeat at the polls this year, but a humiliating one, one that discourages any of their kind from ever holding office again. In the meantime, we tell our Senators today to pass the HEROES Act and reject the HEALS Act; as always, you can find your Senators' phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone), and you may have to call their local numbers if you can't reach their D.C. number. Good luck, and God bless.

Action: concerning corporate immunity, Democrat weakness, and abortion.

We've talked about what a good COVID-19 relief bill should and shouldn't have, but one item on the Republican wish list requires more scrutiny: immunity for corporations from lawsuits after they force their workers back to work before it's safe or otherwise expose them and their customers to COVID-19. Because when Mitch McConnell contemplates this pandemic, his first thought, apparently, isn't "help the people" but HELPZ TEH CORPORASHUNZ!!!!!! Seriously, the proposal they've unveiled looks calculated to crash and burn in negotiations with Democrats -- except these are Democrats we're talking about, who think "bipartisanship" is all about giving in to Republicans. If we raise our voices, though, they won't have any choice but to follow us -- see how our President's pet payroll tax cuts are already off the table? We did that. Hence a group of good government groups helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject corporate immunity in any future COVID-19 relief bill.

Speaking of weakling Democrats pre-emptively conceding to Republicans, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said earlier this week that his party could be flexible on the exact amount of the unemployment benefit extension, saying "it's not $600 or bust." And they wonder why they keep getting rolled! Look, here's Negotiation 101: ask for more than you want, and you increase the chances of getting what you want. Republicans understand this well enough; it's one reason they've been able to push the center ever further right in America. Really, everyone understands this -- except for Democrats. Unless, of course, they're merely pretending to be stupid so we don't think they're evil. In any case, one thing they do understand is a complete inability to call their big donors because we've tied up their phone lines telling them to work for us on this issue. Toward that end, you can find Rep. Hoyer's contact numbers here. Hell, I'd demand $1,000 a month in extra benefits for the unemployed just because I'm so damn sick of Democrat weakness.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. You no doubt recall the multitudinous anti-abortion laws states have passed over the last decade, ranging from forcing women to get ultrasounds before getting abortions to closing down abortion clinics that don't meet absurd health "standards." Our Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's clinic closure law, but not with any particular enthusiasm for women's rights -- Chief Justice Roberts all but said the decision came down to precedent and little else. But abortion is a right, and laws seeking to derail women from exercising that right are simply wrong. And I'd err on the side of caution when considering when and whether a fetus is a person -- but I don't get to dictate to others how they ought to feel about that, and frankly I feel even worse about turning women into breeders, which outlawing abortion will do.

Action: concerning good House bills, future COVID vaccines, and bear baiting.

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass 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. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. It's July already, I know, and the best time for the Senate to pass these bills was last year. But the second-best time for them to pass these bills is now.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to mandate that any and all publicly-funded COVID-19 vaccines be available to everyone, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. Because if your taxpayer money funded the vaccine, you should benefit from it -- and, by the way, that's most drugs, not just a future COVID-19 vaccine Congress has allocated $10 billion on just this year. That's $10 billion of our money, folks! You don't think Congress just gets lucky at the casino, do you? And yet our Great and Glorious True American Administration says they can't guarantee we'll all be able to get it, because we need private corporations to do the work and they "deserve" to make whatever profit they see fit. They have the relationship exactly wrong: we don't need them to do the work; they need us to give them the work. And frankly, if we did the work ourselves -- that is, if our government hired the scientists and paid them to do the research -- we'd have a cheaper vaccine more quickly.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to reject bear-baiting in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Imagine people actually thinking they're TEH GREATEZTZ HUNTURZ EVAHZ!!!!! if they can lure a bear out of its den with jelly cream donuts and then shoot them dead! How sporting is that? And why should civilized people allow it? There lies the rub, of course: this Administration loathes civilization, because civilization prevents us from giving in to every conceivable impulse -- and impulse control sure is a problem with this President! And civilization also reminds us that there is not only a past but also a future; but for this Administration, the past only exists to put women and folks of color in their "place," and the future only impedes the mad drive to make money today. But those of us who value civilization will work for it, even if our politicians don't.

Action: concerning your right to be free from government spying, corporate spying, and secret police.

Our President has deployed unnamed and unmarked federal officers to certain American cities in order to "contain" "violence" that has been over for weeks and at least partly the work of obvious agents provocateurs -- and the officers sent to "contain" the violence have, of course, restarted the violence. Oh, and they abduct people off the streets and detain them without charge. Pretty un-American, eh? But we are not powerless in these times, though our President would like us to feel that way, hence today we get on the phone with our Reps and Senators and tell them we support three amendments to various appropriations bills. One would make anyone carrying out a "law enforcement action" funded by the Department of Defense to identify themselves and their agency. Another would zero out Commerce/State/Justice funding for any more "responses" to "looting" or "rioting" without a written request from the state or locality, plus it'd also force identification of any officers sent for that purpose. And a third would zero out DHS funding for the above-described "responses." So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone), and good hunting.

In a completely related note, Stop the Patriot Act helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the notorious USA PATRIOT Act that has dramatically expanded surveillance on American citizens. Yeah, our President's deployment of federal officers who act like they're in a dictatorship and not America does remind us that concentrated spying power is noxious anywhere, especially in our government. As it happens, today marks the four-month anniversary of the expiration of the bill's surveillance powers -- after our President threatened to veto it, no less, possibly because of his belief that our government used it to spy on him and/or his compadres -- and our NSA has maintained for years that it doesn't actually need all the spying powers the PATRIOT Act gives it. Which would make sense, since the more information you have, the more you have to sift through. You'd still like to see our government indulge in less adventurism abroad, but let's prevent our government from indulging in adventurism at home.

Finally, if you've used services like Ancestry and 23 and Me to discover more about your family heritage -- and, hey, I've been tempted myself! -- you may not know that these services can buy, sell, and trade the DNA info you give them without your knowing or your consent. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell our government to enact the most vigorous DNA privacy standards possible. These would include: requiring corporations to get explicit permission from customers before sharing any DNA info with other corporations; securing DNA data from unauthorized access (i.e., hackers); prohibiting the use of DNA data for insurance underwriting purposes; and preventing corporations from charging customers for any of these things, since that, you know, prevents some folks from guarding their personal info, and everyone should be able to do that. Personal to those who would say well just don't use the service then: why must a useful service come with unacceptable risks? Because the "free market" says so? It ain't a "free" market unless we're all free.

Action: concerning COVID-19 relief legislation.

We begin this week by calling our Senators and telling them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. All our media's been talking about lately was Republicans trying (and failing) to put together a new COVID-19 stimulus/relief bill, but the House has already passed one -- one that would fund our Post Office, fund testing and tracing, fund states and localities, expand working family tax cuts, repeal a tax-cut-for-the-rich, and issue another round of bigger stimulus checks -- so all that needs to happen, really, is for our Senate to pass the HEROES Act and our President to sign it. Really, there is no need for all this drama about giving lawsuit immunity to corporations that make people sick, or exactly which tool they'll use to destroy Social Security under the pandemic's cover. The HEROES Act already does a lot of good, and the only reason the Senate hasn't passed it is because, in Mob Boss Mitch's immortal words, "I get to decide what we vote on." I'm old enough to remember when Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and still allowed votes on dumb Republican ideas. There's a lesson in there, somewhere.

Speaking of Social Security: while you have your Senators on the phone, make sure you tell them that Mitt Romney's notorious TRUST Act -- which would allow Congress to cut your Social Security benefits without all that pesky debate, or, as Sen. Ernst put it, "behind closed doors" -- should not be in any COVID-19 relief bill. (The Alliance for Retired Americans also provides a petition to sign.) Yes, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) has lately said the TRUST Act will be in the Republican relief proposal, and why? Because cutting Social Security benefits is hugely unpopular and can only be done in an "emergency" -- and any emergency, including a pandemic, will do. Can we assume Democrats will say no to the inclusion of the TRUST Act in any relief bill? We can trust that they'll make noise about it, certainly -- but we cannot trust that they won't cave to the "pressure" of "doing something." Not unless we make it impossible for them to cave, that is. I'm pretty sure that's all that's kept Democrats from caving so far.

Of course, passing the HEROES Act doesn't obligate us to shut up about even better ideas, and so Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to provide $2,000 a month to every adult and $1,000 to every child, per month, until the pandemic is over. Most civilized nations are doing more than we are -- basically, we've given Americans single $1,200 checks and funneled hundreds of billions of dollars into corporate coffers. This proposal resembles proposals from Sen. Sanders and Rep. Waters; this one would cost roughly $3.25 trillion over four months, and how will the haters respond? By saying it would increase the deficit? Boy, has that ship sailed! Certainly no one can claim "concern" about the deficit if they supported the 2017 tax "reform," not to mention the $3 trillion-plus CARES Act that just passed in March -- and such folks should support a 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, a billionaire wealth tax, and an expanded Estate Tax. You very likely already know why they don't.

And besides his evil payroll tax cut, what has our President insisted upon for the next COVID-19 relief bill? That it zero out federal funding for COVID-19 testing, of course! Gosh, it's like he's trying to make everything worse, which (regardless of our President's stated admiration for Richard Nixon) is straight out of the George W. Bush playbook: when you've screwed up, divert attention from it by doing something even more horrible. Admittedly this President has taken that stratagem to a whole new level, but I remember how Tha Bush Mobb operated, even if today's right-wingers pretend they don't. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Senators to include COVID-19 testing and tracing in the next coronavirus relief bill. Yes, the HEROES Act already has it, but a lot of time we need to tell them the same thing over and over again in a slightly different manner before they finally get it. And as I've already suggested, those who want to do the right thing but lack courage need the cover of massive public outcry.

Action: concerning law and order matters, plus fire Tucker Carlson.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to refuse to fund our Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) until our President stops sending DHS officers to abuse protestors in our cities. Maybe our President pulled this stunt because he knew a DHS appropriations bill was coming up, but I'd take this bait, not just because he's wrong, and not just because funding DHS is our leverage here, but because beating up protestors is far less popular than he thinks. And the CRIMEZ IZ OUTZ OFZ TEH CONTROLZ!!!! and TEH ANARKITZ AREZ TEH ENEMIEZ COMBATANTZ!!!! narratives only enrage a small portion of the population -- that portion that either watches Fox News non-stop or think it's weakness to admit you've made a mistake in any of your political choices over the last 20 years. Those of us who understand that people who make such shows of "strength" are the real weaklings have a healthier view of this situation -- like, that sending federal jackboots to fight "crime" is something fascist countries do.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell Fairfax Financial Holdings CEO Prem Watsa to divest from America's for-profit bail industry. Why? Because cash bail is evil -- hey, if it puts folks in jail for months or years before they've had their day in court, that's evil! -- and also because Mr. Watsa has lately said all the right things about racial justice issues, even co-chairing a "Canadian Council of Business Leaders Against Anti-Black Systemic Racism." If you're truly against "anti-black systemic racism," of course, you shouldn't invest in America's cash bail system. I've just described the problem any American would have if they didn't have the money to get out, but it just so happens that black men tend to get considerably higher bail amounts set for them than white men do! That's before we get to the whole "system overtargets black folks in the first place" part. No, black folks don't "commit more crime" than white folks do; they merely get targeted more by police, and they suffer more.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell Fox News to fire everyone's favorite bow-tied fascist, Tucker Carlson. I'd fire him for everything he's ever done, frankly, but just so happens a recent sexual harassment lawsuit names Mr. Carlson, among other Fox News "personalities," and while big corporations have been slow to help their workers make ends meet, they have been awfully quick to get rid of famous sexual harassers lately. And we can all name at least one famous Fox News bloviator who finally had to leave for the world of podcasting after the 2017 revelation that he'd spent almost $50 million to settle various sexual harassment lawsuits. We can only hope that, one day, we'll be able to render this current lot of corporate wannabe Nazis unnameable as well. In the meantime, let's at least have Mr. Carlson find new employment. No, pressuring corporations to fire people is not a violation of their First Amendment rights! Our First Amendment doesn't grant a "right" either to a platform or a multi-million dollar salary.

Action: concerning good House bills, renewable energy, methane regulation, and "conversion" "therapy."

Happy Thursday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass 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. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Don't be swayed by the hype that "Mitch McConnell will never pass these bills." He ain't in charge; we are, and the more we assert that, the better off we'll all be.

Meanwhile, our Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (or BOEM) is now taking public comments on a "supplemental environmental impact statement" on Vineyard Wind, a proposed 800 megawatt offshore wind power project. But our BOEM has already done an environmental impact statement on Vineyard Wind, and given our President's vocal and loud opposition to any form of renewable energy, you might well decide this Administration is merely stalling until they can reject the project without criticism. Well, too bad! The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our BOEM to get on with issuing permits for Vineyard Wind already. Aside from the normal ridiculous arguments about noise and ugliness and avicide, you'll hear about "the need for wider transit spaces between wind turbines" -- but Vineyard Wind has already compromised on that, and asking them to do so again would all but announce that our Administration wants to kill the project while making Vineyard Wind look like the bad guys. So let's not get rolled here.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: our state's Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) has proposed methane regulations that fall short of what's necessary, so the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our DEP to strengthen methane regulations for good Pennsylvanians, so we can breathe cleaner air. Clean air is a big deal in Pennsylvania, since we're third in America in greenhouse gases and second in natural gas production, and these are not necessarily things you want to say WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. (I'd prefer to be number one in renewable energy production. Pennsylvania ranks 42nd in that.) The DEP proposal would exempt "low-producing" wells, though their definition of "low-producing" happens to include most wells, and it would also reduce inspections on wells that had previously passed inspections, as if leaks can't happen at any time. That latter one sticks in my craw a bit -- the people who want to flood liberal cities with jackboots also want to go easy on corporations when they pollute our air and water. Some "law and order."

Finally, Change.org helps you tell North Dakota state legislators to ban "conversion therapy," the "therapy" by which "doctors" try to convert gay people into straight ones. You might as well try to convert a bulldog into an ocelot! And "conversion therapy" ain't "tough love," as some folks say -- it's abuse to make gay folks "relive" molestation and do naked touching and promise them they'll be cured when they'll more likely want to kill themselves. Republicans dominate North Dakota's state legislature, but that doesn't mean they're all a bunch of bigots. But some of them will pretend their "religious" "beliefs" mean more than the fact that no reputable medical or psychological professional association thinks "conversion therapy" is actually a thing with either scientific basis or good results. Those folks need to be exposed, whenever they stand in the way of real compassion and love, and demanding that they outlaw "conversion therapy" may well be a good way of outing them. So to speak.

Action: concerning Social Security, fascism on our streets, polluting pipelines, and public water.

Word on the street is that the Republican COVID-19 "relief" proposal will, in fact, include the payroll tax cut our President has obsessed about since the pandemic started. Because 140,000 dead Americans and destroying Social Security go hand-in-hand! We always suspected that reports of Republican resistance to the payroll tax proposal were exaggerated, and now we know. So it's time to get on the horn with your Reps and Senators (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page) and tell them to reject the Republican COVID-19 relief proposal. Their proposal, by the way, would also include liability "relief" for big corporations that have already profited enough from this pandemic, and would tie any school funding to schools fully reopening, health of students and teachers be damned. Call it trash; tell them you're angry this is the best they can do -- they deserve our counsel, after all, and they deserve all of it, even if it hurts their fee-fees. Quite frankly I'm tired of protecting the feelings of bad people.

While you're on the phone with your Reps and Senators, you can also tell them to fight our President's efforts to deploy troops in American cities to control "rioting." We said the creation of a Department of "Homeland" "Security" would result in law "enforcement" running rampant against the innocent, and we were right! And our "leaders" in Congress have shown their usual amount of cowardice about the matter, letting only Rand Paul speak out against it, probably so our media can reduce this all to Republican-on-Republican crime when it's actually government-on-American crime. And, boy, be prepared for your fellow-Americans to spout utterly disgusting trash. What will you do when protestors to tear down the Liberty Bell? was one I actually heard yesterday. Yes, benighted souls, when the jackboots come for you, you may console yourself that at least the Liberty Bell still stands! And, please, enough with the either-we-accept-fascism-or-we-all-die. That's a hostage situation, and for the 297th time Americans deserve better.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell insurance corporation Liberty Mutual to stop insuring the Trans Mountain pipeline in Canada. The hook? That pipeline spewed out over 50,000 gallons of tar sands oil in British Columbia last month. The other hook? Liberty Mutual's contract to provide insurance on Trans Mountain expires next month! Naturally, the Canadian government just greenlit an expansion for the pipeline, though 85 spills in 10 years doesn't bode well. Maybe you think 85 spills in 10 years ain't a whole lot! Less than one per month, maybe you're saying! Just remember that if that one oil spill hits a water table, there goes your clean drinking water, and there goes any chance of having decent health care, and you won't be sitting in your kitchen saying "well, it was only one spill! That's a pretty good record, really!" Well, some corporate troll will, but you won't. And you know how much water gets polluted via the transportation of wind and solar power? Yes, you do. And it's well past time we realigned our priorities to reflect that truth.

Finally, speaking of clean public water, private water corporation Aqua Pennsylvania (a subsidiary of Aqua America) is trying to snap up public water systems in the Commonwealth, figuring that a lot of them don't have a whole lot of money in the middle of this pandemic. But HB 2597 would require any proposed sale of a municipal, public water system to a private corporation go before the voters of that municipality first! Imagine that! People deciding not to sell their public water systems to the highest bidder for easy money today! I say "easy money today" because it'll be much harder money tomorrow, when the private water concern jacks up your water prices just because it can, and then when they shut it off because you can't pay it, what will you do? Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell your PA state legislator to support the people's control over public water by passing HB 2597. If you're the one who says people won't bother to vote to keep their public water, just go ahead and show yourself out. And don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, our Post Office, labor rights in Mexico, and encryption for Twitter messages.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Yes, we should tell our Congressfolk that we want unemployment benefits extended past the end of this week, as we did yesterday, but we should also tell our Senators that the HEROES Act already does that. Plus, the HEROES Act would also fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, would fund our Post Office, would help states and localities endure this pandemic a little better, and provides, would extend working family tax credits and repeal a big bazillionaire tax credit, and would also provide another round of stimulus checks to working families. One of the things the bill doesn't do, of course, is fulfill Mob Boss Mitch's wish that big corporations get "blanket immunity" from any lawsuit arising from their mishandling of pandemic-related guidelines. But they already have the money to fight lawsuits; what about our ability to fight corporate neglect? And what about our need for economic sustenance during this pandemic?

Meanwhile, the HEROES Act would extend funding for our Post Office, but (as we've discussed before) the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 caused our Post Office's funding troubles, by forcing our Post Office to fund its pensions 75 years in advance, an absurd mandate our government forces upon no other entity public or private, and one Congress obviously intended to cripple our Post Office. Thus we've been hearing of funding shortfalls for the last decade-plus, when our Post Office had been entirely self-funding since 1982. Thus Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, so that our Post Office can continue to provide the good services we deserve while funding itself. You'd think a conservative would approve of our Post Office funding itself without taxpayer money, but apparently today's "conservatives" only care about converting everything into unearned money for some crony or other. That sound you hear is Russell Kirk spinning in his grave.

In other news, the Mexican government recently detained Susana Prieto Terrazas, a labor lawyer and activist, for three weeks on trumped-up crap; the Big Stick of Bad PR helped get her released, but now her government is planning new trumped-up crap to charge her with, all for trying to organize labor unions against maquiladoras, or foreign-owned factories which generally export their goods to the owning corporation's country of origin. You may be thinking that her plight is tragic but outside the scope of your activism, but actually, it's not! Mexico just signed the USMCA trade deal with Canada and the United States, and one of the things they're now legally-bound to do is stop harassing labor activists like this. Hence Rethink Trade helps you tell your Congressfolk to pressure Mexico into holding up their end of the deal. After all, it is their job now; trade deals can't do better by us if no one will enforce them.

Finally, you may have heard about the hack that breached popular Twitter accounts -- but you may not have heard that the hackers might have been able to get at Twitter users' private direct messages, since Twitter hasn't embraced end-to-end encryption, as other messaging apps have done. And this isn't just about shielding that R-rated direct message to your beloved or that smack-talking thread about your boss from hackers; it's also about journalists and activists who use encryption in their messaging. And not because they're "probably criminals," as Mike Pompeo has said, but because they may be living in countries that'll kill them if they find out what they're saying. Imagine trying to evade rogue police abducting protestors without encrypted messaging! Which is most certainly not something that only happens in other countries! Fight for the Future helps you tell Twitter to help out all its users by implementing end-to-end encryption on direct messages.

Action: concerning health care data, unemployment benefits, concentration camps, and Muslim bans.

As you've no doubt heard, our Administration ordered American hospitals to send their data directly to the Department of Health and Human Services instead of the Centers for Disease Control, where they'd been sending it. What's the difference? Why, the public can view the CDC's data, but not HHS's data! Which will of course be managed by a private corporation from Pennsylvania which of course received a noncompetitive contract for the data and whose CEO of course has donated to Republican politicians! It's a two-fer: they hide data from the public and funnel taxpayer money (i.e., your money) to a crony corporation! Hence MoveOn helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent our Administration from playing a shell game with vital health data in the middle of a pandemic. Our CDC makes our President look bad because CDC scientists know what they're doing and our President doesn't. But we're Americans, dammit, and we don't have to take that. Particularly since it could be a matter of life and death.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make sure they extend expanded unemployment benefits past July 25. That's right, those benefits expire in less than a week, and for a minute there Congress seemed happy looking more at the 6 million jobs created the last two months and less at the almost-40 million jobs lost the previous three. But if you possess the ability to subtract a one-digit number from a two-digit number, then you know why good Americans still need those benefits. The HEROES Act would already extend them, and we'll tell our Senators to pass that bill tomorrow, but in the meantime, they should hear from us, loud and clear, that we want the unemployment benefits extended -- without the nonsense about how "lazy" unemployment benefits supposedly make people, and certainly without the poison pills Mob Boss Mitch loves attaching to must-pass legislation. Oh, and not for nothing, but this pandemic's getting worse.

In other news, Sign Here Now helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) for its response to COVID-19 in its concentration camps. We might reasonably expect such an investigation to conclude that it's no better than our Administration's disastrous COVID-19 response generally, but our Congressfolk should still investigate on our behalf. True, learning that ICE is wantonly spraying cleaning chemicals on immigrant and refugee detainees, for example, won't move any of our President's votaries -- who generally interpret any cruelty toward non-white folks as "toughness" and any perceived slight against white folks as "bullying" -- but learning about such things may move good Americans who already have a lot to think about in their lives. Personal to those who claim anyone who opposes cruelty to immigrants and refugees in concentration camps must ipso facto support "open borders": God doesn't like trolls.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. To review: the NO BAN Act would not only reverse our President's notorious and nefarious Muslim ban (i.e., his travel ban on six Muslim-majority nations, with North Korea and Venezuela thrown in solely so he could claim he didn't base his ban on religion), it would prevent future Presidents from enacting similar bans in the future. If you're still thinking that maybe keeping Muslims out of America is a way of reducing terrorism, please remember that a) we've got plenty of domestic terrorists who we can't just keep out of their own country and b) if we stopped interfering in Middle Eastern affairs, then we'd go much, much farther toward reducing the possibility that Muslims will fly another plane into another building. Also, appeals to fear are always wrong.

Action: concerning law and order, small businesses, and public lands.

You heard about the string of "suicides" last month, where black men just happened to be found hanging in trees? Change.org helps you tell Morristown, NJ police to reopen an investigation into the death of Amani Kildea found hanging from a tree an hour from his home, whose death they ruled a suicide. Mr. Kildea, all of 20 years old, apparently aspired to join law enforcement one day, and what a bitter irony it would be if police officers lynched him! We don't know that they did, but the thought has occurred, even though I know police officers who would stop their fellows from lynching someone. And this has happened before. Some people say "every time we gave blacks something in the '60s they rioted," but that's not true in almost any sense -- setting aside that recognizing their rights would be a hell of a way to describe a "gift," the actual timeline was usually a) law got passed, b) police killed black man, c) folks rioted. Hopefully an investigation into Mr. Kildea's death would help break that wheel.

Meanwhile, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our government to ensure that taxpayer money meant to go to small businesses actually goes to small businesses. It's a shame we have to tell our government to do the thing it already said it was doing, but we got a lot of stories this week about big corporations getting CARES Act money intended for small businesses, and we haven't heard nearly as much about the (at least) 66,000 small businesses that have permanently closed since the beginning of this pandemic. Of course, our government has pretended, for a very long time, that everything it does for big corporations it does for small businesses. It wasn't that long ago that Republicans were telling us that taxes shouldn't go up on rich people because of "the effect it'd have on small businesses," though that was total BS. Big corporations have been using small businesses as a human shield for decades now -- often to avoid regulations that would never hit small businesses as much as they hit big corporations! At least we're on to them, and at least we can communicate to the politicians that we're on to them.

Finally, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness covers a million acres of northern Minnesota and receives more visits than any other wilderness area in America. You know what's coming, right? Of course a big mining conglomerate wants to mine copper and nickel there, hence H.R. 5598, the Boundary Waters Wilderness Protection and Pollution Prevention Act, which would withdraw nearly a quarter of the Boundary Waters Wilderness from mining leases and only allow similar kinds of development if they don't pollute the land, water, or air in the area. That's the most important thing about public lands, after all -- that they're clean enough for good Americans to enjoy for generations to come, not whether they can be converted into money that'll get spent faster than you can say "don't drink the water." You'd think "most-visited wilderness in America" would carry some weight with our government, but apparently not -- at least, not if we don't speak out! Hence Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect public lands by passing the Boundary Waters Wilderness Protection and Pollution Prevention Act.

Action: concerning public water, paid family leave, and plastic pollution.

H.R. 2, the Invest in America Act, has its strengths, but it also has one glaring, intolerable weakness: it would make privatization of water systems a lot easier. Some folks no doubt believe that private corporations would do a better job than our government would, but the only thing private corporations do better is charge you more for your water. You may well respond well, the lead pollution in Flint's water supply was caused by a government, but a right-wing government caused that -- with an unelected "Emergency Manager," no less! -- and that right-wing government no doubt hoped that the good citizens of Flint (and elsewhere!) would simply throw up their hands and give over their water to private corporations. But the only solution to bad government is good government, not unaccountable and unelected private corporations who care only about their money. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to take our public water away from us and give it to corporate cronies.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislator to support HB 1739/SB 580, the Family Care Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The Family Care Act would create a paid family/medical leave program in the Commonwealth, one that would pay less than the average wage in Pennsylvania in all cases (the formula in Sec. 305 [a] is a bit complex), but that's better than what we've got, and would allow good Pennsylvanians to take care of themselves or their loved ones and not get kicked out of their house or apartment or have their water or electricity shut off. Really, that's what "insurance" is all about, isn't it? The payroll tax the bill would levy is a little over one half of one percent (and is not "58 percent," "liberal" media! They make "mistakes" like that because they're malicious!), which, for someone making $50,000 annually, would amount to less than $25 monthly. And that's not a whole lot to ask to get all Pennsylvanians the paid family leave we deserve.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to put the brakes on plastic pollution by passing H.R. 5845/S. 3263, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. As Penn Environment's latest email missive puts it, "(n)othing we use for a few minutes should be allowed to pollute our oceans and rivers and threaten wildlife for centuries." And the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act would ban a lot of single-use plastics like polystyrene, and enact a moratorium on new plastic-manufacturing facilities. If the words "job-killing" come to mind when you hear these things, remember that we can create many different kinds of jobs in America, and we need not only create jobs in industries that dump the equivalent of a garbage truck full of trash into our oceans once per minute. At the risk of beating a dead horse, we could choose to create renewable energy jobs, jobs that would reduce trash and pollution, but we don't do that, because (as Ralph Nader used to say) nobody can own the sun. Maybe we could stop putting money at the center of every single thing we do?

Action: concerning good House bills, corporate welfare, and police brutality.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass 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. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. They're good bills that would reduce poverty, discrimination, and vote suppression, among other evils, and your Senators have no excuse for sitting on them. They'll keep sitting, though, if we stay silent.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our state legislators failed to pass an elephantine $670 million tax break for fracking corporations earlier this year, so now they aim to attach it to an unrelated, non-controversial bill and hope no one notices. Too late! Penn Environment helps you tell your legislators to reject any bill that would hand out corporate welfare in the dead of night. This latest would-be abomination comes not even a week after our Attorney General's office issued a grand jury report detailing the pollution fracking causes and our state's poor record in controlling that pollution. And, of course, it also comes in the middle of a pandemic, when our leaders really should be thinking of other things than how much of our taxpayer money they can funnel down some fracking executive's gullet. That's what it's really all about, after all -- it's not about "jobs," it's about executives being able to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Maybe politics should be about us?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end the 1033 program that supplies police officers with war weapons, then Fight for the Future still helps you do that. Don't get caught up in the hype that police officers' lives are so dangerous that they need bazookas to deal with it! Police officers' lives can be dangerous at times, obviously, but they won't bring down drug kingpins with bazookas -- they bring them down with superior detective work. The real reason they need bazookas, by the evidence, is to attack protestors who protest police brutality! And, yeah, that's a problem that creates itself. If you're still thinking they need bazookas to bring suspects in, ask yourself why officers so often shoot black folks dead without provocation but were able to take Dylann Roof to freaking McDonald's on the way to the station. Don't be tempted to respond with "because Dylann Roof came peacefully" -- to the degree white people "come peacefully," it's because police don't go at them with guns blazing.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, immigration, and health care.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Yes, we should tell our Congressfolk that we want proper COVID-19 testing and tracing and we want to fund our Post Office, but should also tell our Senators "the HEROES Act would already do both!" And the HEROES Act would also help states and localities plug the major funding holes left by the pandemic, and it would also provide another round of stimulus checks to good Americans making less than six figures (and, depending on your family's size, it'd be a bigger check than the one the CARES Act provided). Not for nothing, but the HEROES Act would also expand certain tax credits working families enjoy, while repealing a tax credit only very wealthy people enjoy. As if they're the needy! Your local redhat will probably retort that rich folks "create jobs." Go ahead and remind them that working families actually create the jobs by buying goods and services. Without us, rich folks would be nothing.

Meanwhile, our Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) has decided to force international students to take in-person classes in order to stay in America! You see the problem with that, I trust: many colleges will not be conducting in-person classes this year! And ICE waited until hearing about that to implement their rule change! Of course our President still imports foreign workers for his businesses, and pays them in dung pellets, but then his foreign workers are TEH BESTEZTZ EVAHZ!!!!! Not like those kids at Harvard and MIT, eh? Seriously, you would have to be some kind of monster to do this -- and some observers have speculated that the cruelty actually isn't the point, that our Administration implemented this change merely to force colleges to open fully regardless of how many hundreds of thousands of Americans have died of COVID-19 by then. Whatever the actual evil, LeftNet helps you demand that ICE rescind its obviously-cruel rule change.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to ensure that all Americans can get a COVID-19 vaccine, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. And when your local redhat asks you why you want to just give vaccines away when big drug corporations take risks all the time and deserve to make profits, just tell them that their taxes paid for the development of that drug. Really, that answer obliterates all arguments! The American taxpayer has spent over $5 billion on COVID-19 vaccines just in the last five months, so we deserve more of a say how we get that vaccine. And getting $5 billion in taxpayer money sure does mitigate a lot of risk! It even calls into question big pharma corporations' "right" to make profits -- do they have a "right" to make profits off public investment? Maybe we have more of a right to profit from public investment! I'm quite serious -- if we're the investors, why doesn't our government treat us like investors?

Action: concerning Social Security, defense spending, and our Post Office.

One of the consequences of nearly 40 million Americans losing their jobs during a pandemic? They'll pay less into Social Security this year, and thus get fewer benefits when they retire. But H.R. 7499, the Social Security COVID-19 Correction and Equity Act, would help improve that situation by increasing benefits by 2% across the board, increasing the "special minimum benefit," and expanding benefits for (among other vulnerable folks) grandparents who are raising grandchildren. So, to sum: politicians like Sen. Ernst of Iowa would get Congress "behind closed doors" to cut Social Security benefits, and politicians like Sen. Rubio would rob Social Security benefits to pay for paid family leave -- while others, like Connecticut's Rep. Larson, would put Social Security on a sounder financial footing while increasing benefits. Gosh, I wonder which approach is better? Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect working families' retirement by passing the Social Security COVID-19 Correction and Equity Act.

Meanwhile, the Sanders-Markey-Warren amendment to the defense authorization bill would divert $74 billion away from defense spending and toward investing in communities with a high poverty rate. I hate to sound like a broken record (full disclosure: I do not actually care whether I sound like a broken record), but we already spend more on defense than the next eight countries combined, and for what? For foreign soldiers to use improvised explosives to flummox our efforts? Too many folks think power is all about whom you can hurt, but it's really all about whom you can help, and civilizations that don't get that die. And they deserve to die! We've been going backwards for almost my entire lifetime, and if we keep going down this path, we'll eventually join Babylon and Assyria and all those other nations history classes barely cover anymore. We can take a small step toward avoiding this collapse by letting Win Without War help us tell our Senators to invest less in weapons systems and more in people.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our U.S. Postal Service. You'll be telling your Senators to do this again tomorrow when you tell them to pass the HEROES Act, but our Congressfolk often need extra reminding about what's important. Our Post Office performs essential services for its owners, the American people -- and will be particularly important this coming Election Day, when a lot of good Americans are going to be mailing their votes in for the first time, so as to avoid getting COVID-19 from waiting in line for hours on end. (Have you seen that meme on Facebook that goes "I wait in line for Walmart, etc., so why shouldn't I wait in line to vote?" Stupidest. Argument. Ever. Like COVID-19 isn't even happening! Have I mentioned how much I hate stupidity?) Of course right-wingers like our President want to privatize our Post Office, which would be an utter disaster, as privatization efforts are. Tell your Congressfolk to save our Post Office, and we can avoid such a disaster.

Action: concerning pandemic management and defense spending.

Now that our President is trying to bully America's schools into reopening this September -- threatening to cut the funding they'd need to reopen and keep folks safe from COVID-19, naturally! -- Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk that we need to ramp up COVID-19 testing, tracing, and isolation in a big way. Our President loves telling everyone we do more tests than every other country, but doing "more tests" doesn't matter very much in a land of over 300 million people -- and certainly not if you don't take the time to figure out where infections come from and isolate their sources. And, you know, if you're thinking America's size is an impediment to doing things right, you should also remember three other things: a) America's population density is very light in much of the country, which helps stop the spread of disease; b) America's also bounded by oceans east and west, which also helps stop the spread of disease; and c) great nations don't make excuses.

Meanwhile, Roots Action joins with World Without War to help you tell your Congressfolk to divert approximately $74 billion in defense spending toward things actual human beings need, like pandemic management, education, scientific research, and fighting pollution. If you believe the best defense is a healthy civilization that prioritizes people over corporations in its budgeting -- like me! -- you'll want to tell your Congressfolk to support this amendment. If you fear diverting any money from defense spending will result in terrorists parachuting into your front yard and converting your daughters to Islam, then I recommend navigating away from this page and never returning to it. We already spend more money on "defense" than the next eight countries on that list combined, and I put "defense" in ironic quotation marks for a reason -- we would better describe a lot of "defense" spending as "corporate welfare," or "corruption." So let's maybe make people a little more important.

Action: concerning government spying, WHO funding, and fracking.

Fight for the Future helps you tell your Congressfolk to block reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act. Because increased, intrusive surveillance of good Americans has done what over the last two decades? Besides chill free speech and prompt law enforcement fishing expeditions? I know some folks will respond to "what has the PATRIOT Act ever done" with the answer "you'll never know how many terrorist attacks it's foiled, because telling you that would jeopardize national security." But think about that answer -- you not only can't prove or disprove it, but you would have to accept life in an untenably fragile world, where no quest for truth can be undertaken lest it lead, however indirectly, to a terrorist attack somewhere. I'm old enough to remember when we accepted that freedom doesn't guarantee good things all the time. Today, we don't -- and, as a result, we're less free. So bollocks to the PATRIOT Act, and all the politicians who fearmonger with it.

Meanwhile, our Administration has actually submitted formal notice to the World Health Organization (or WHO) of its intent to withdraw from the organization. You know, because the WHO's relative competence has embarrassed this Administration, whose incompetence has reached the point where its advisors now say their message is that Americans should "live with" 50,000 new cases a day! I will admit I am a little surprised that they actually had the stones to go through with it, but, you know, our system of government doesn't actually leave a whole lot up to our President -- even though we've left far too much up to our President for far too many years now, and that's sure blowing up in our faces now, isn't it? Anyway, this would be a good occasion to call your House Reps (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page) and remind them who holds the power of the purse in our government -- and then call your Senators and remind them whom they're supposed to serve.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: late last month, our Attorney General released results of a two-year, grand jury investigation into gas drilling operations and regulations -- and guess what it found? "Systemic failure" on the part of our state government in preventing fracking from polluting our air and water! Preventing pollution is more our government's job, after all, than ensuring gas drilling CEOs make a crapton of money. The report makes eight recommendations, mostly concerning safe transport of gas, better tabulation of air pollution, and more thorough disclosure of fracking chemicals, and enacting these recommendations would certainly reduce pollution in the Keystone state -- but I'm feeling ornery today, so Food and Water Action helps you tell your PA Governor and state legislators to ban fracking entirely. How much air and water pollution comes from solar, wind, and geothermal? Maybe those are the industries we ought to be promoting!

Action: concerning good House bills, health care for Native Americans, and abortion.

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! Now 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. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 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 now we add H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, passed by our House. These bills would deliver (among other things) better health care, better voting rights protections, better internet protections, and better wages for working families -- if our Senators would do their jobs. We just have to get in their grills until they do.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund the Indian Health Service. Unsurprisingly, Native Americans have also suffered disproportionately from the COVID-19 pandemic, just like other folks of color and senior citizens. And yet our government spends less than a dollar on the IHS for every $10 it spends on health care generally. Why Native Americans should suffer even more by our hand after all we've done to them over the centuries is beyond me. Worse, some state and federal officials won't let tribal epidemiologists see the COVID-19 data they've amassed over the months, and other states won't help them with contract tracing so they can keep infections down. Everyone knows data sharing and contact tracing work -- well, everyone who's not so emotionally-invested in defending their Personal Lord and Savior Our President at all costs. So we should ensure that our Native American population gets the same access to health care that the rest of us do. (And, yeah, we should all have more access to health care.)

Finally, our Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that would have shut down all of that state's abortion clinics, but only because Chief Justice Roberts recognized that the Louisiana law was virtually identical to a Texas law our Court had already struck down. But we don't need to hold to that slim reed in order to protect abortion rights in America, because H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women’s Health Protection Act, would sweep away the limits states have placed on women over the last decade, including the absurdly high standards placed on providers and facilities that absolutely intend to keep women from getting abortions. I have no animus toward those who abhor abortion, but I do have a very particular animus toward those who simply don't want women to control their bodies. There is actually a difference between the two, and it's why I come down on the side of abortion rights. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect women's rights by passing the Women's Health Protection Act. (And, sorry, they are women's rights -- until men can give birth, at least.)

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Russian bounties, and corporate welfare.

Happy Tuesday, good folks! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Your Senators do not need to reinvent the wheel here -- the HEROES Act already would extend unemployment benefits, already would give extra funding to states and municipalities, already would fund our Post Office through the end of the year, already would fund contract tracing so we can track the spread of COVID-19 better, already would expand working family tax cuts, already would repeal one big hedge-fund manager tax cut, and already would provide another stimulus checks to folks making less than six figures (plus it'd be a bigger check than the one the CARES Act cut for you). Our economy may have added close to five million jobs in June, but we still have over 11 percent U3 unemployment (18 percent by the more informative U6 rate, which picks up data the U3 rate doesn't), and the spike in COVID-19 cases lately, well, doesn't exactly predict continued expansion. So let's make sure our Senators do the right thing.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard that Russian officials paid bounties to Afghan rebels for killing American soldiers -- and, of course, our intelligence agencies told our President this in a Presidential Daily Briefing several months ago, which is most assuredly not called that because it's a thousand pages long and full of irrelevant data. It sure does seem like our President has a blind spot when it comes to Russia, but still, you'd think he'd be angrier about a foreign nation paying people to kill our soldiers. Alas, he expends all his anger these days on liberals who "shame" right-wingers for their bad behavior. Gosh, we finally get it through our heads that we're not too good for shaming and we're still wrong! It's like right-wingers will never be happy with us! Anyway, Secure Families Initiative helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate the matter and punish the wrongdoers. We shouldn't fight wars like the Afghanistan war in the first place, but we shouldn't tolerate this offense, either.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop corporations' abuse of the CARES Act's small business relief fund by passing H.R. 7076/S. 3855, the CORE Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Imagine our government establishing a "Paycheck Protection Program," ostensibly to help small businesses continue to meet payroll during this pandemic, but then essentially giving away $500 billion of our money to banksters, which then handed out big chunks of taxpayer cash to their big corporate cronies. But wait, there's more! Now imagine our President getting rid of all the Inspectors General who might have actually overseen this program so it didn't become a big corporate welfare trough, and then imagine our government asserting that the people can't see which corporations got PPP money because such information is "proprietary" and "confidential." Sadly, you don't even have to imagine it -- it all happened. So we must stop it.

Action: concerning immigration, public health, and another Presidential veto threat.

First things first. Our Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) plans to deport Steven Tendo, an ordained minister and asylum-seeker who will very likely be killed if he's sent back to Uganda. I say "very likely be killed" because the government of Uganda tortured him -- amputating two fingers -- and killed several family members. Sounds like the kind of fellow you'd like to help, right? Not to our government! Our government promptly put him in a concentration camp, where he's been for two years, not getting appropriate care for his diabetes, of course, which means he's now blind in one eye and going blind in the other. Plus, you know, COVID-19 is running rampant in these camps! I don't expect our President's votaries to evince any sympathy about any of that, but all that means is we have to be louder than them. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell our Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (yeah, that's ICE) to stop deportation proceedings on Mr. Tendo and help him seek asylum.

Meanwhile, Social Security Works helps you tell your local and state governments to require that folks wear masks on their faces. Our federal government ain't gonna do that -- our President can't even be bothered to model good behavior every once in a while! -- but maybe local officials, who will more likely see disgruntled citizens every once in a while, will be more responsive. Absolutely positively brook no silliness about how not wearing a mask is a fundamental freedom guaranteed by God and our Founders, because it isn't, actually (no, it was not the 20 1/2th Amendment), and virtually everyone who's thought about the matter knows that wearing a mask will reduce the possibility that other folks will get COVID-19 from you. Hopefully we're not so addled as a civilization that we don't care about making other people sick -- or that we more easily digest lies about TEH MASKZ MAKINGZ TEH PEEPULZ CHOKEZ!!!!!! since masks are inconvenient. They irritate my ears, too, but when I became a man I put away childish things.

Finally, from the "Things We Shouldn't Even Have to Bother With" file: our President has said he'll actually veto the next defense authorization bill if it includes an amendment requiring that our government rename military facilities currently named after Confederate figures. After all, what says "patriotism" more than memorializing traitors? It's odd that this is the hill our President wants to die on; it's almost like he's only chasing the Nazi wannabe vote. I mean, at least 25% of the electorate will vote for him no matter what because they're nuts, but the Venn diagram of "bat-guano insane voters" and "Nazi wannabe voters" already has a lot of overlap. No use saying he's just "fighting political correctness," either, not when right-wingers now define "political correctness" as "any time you don't act like a complete prick." Really, the term is just about meaningless now. Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to hold its ground in the face of this absurd veto threat.