Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning fair contracts for workers, tax cuts for working families, and lower insulin costs for all Americans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strike a fairer deal with railway workers, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and cap insulin costs for all Americans. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Both More Perfect Union and Patriotic Millionaires help you tell your Congressfolk to strike a fairer deal with railway workers, i.e., a deal that gives them more paid time off like all workers deserve. Railway workers are always on call and get one day off a month – one! – so we shouldn’t be forcing a bad contract down their throats. No use arguing that “these workers are too important” to give them more paid time off, because bosses have been using that argument against workers forever. Hospital workers are too important! Teachers are too important! Jesus Mary and Joseph if they’re that important, shouldn’t we make sure we take care of them?

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 permanent. That expansion put $250 or $300 checks per child every month in working families’ bank accounts, and it sure helped them weather skyrocketing inflation in 2021, but Republicans and Joe Manchin let it expire. If Democrats had run on their vote for (and, ah, their opponents’ vote against) the Child Tax Credit expansion in 2021, I think they’d have kept their House majority and expanded their Senate majority. Still, good works are good works, and bringing back that expansion now would help keep children out of poverty now.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the Medicare $35/month insulin cap to all Americans. Because all Americans deserve it! Don’t let your friends be like Herschel Walker, telling everyone they “gotta eat right” and imagining that’s the answer to diabetics (including the many who’ve had it since birth!) risking death by rationing their insulin! And don’t brook Republican attempts to overturn the protections we got in the Inflation Reduction Act, either! These Republicans are objectively anti-health, objectively pro-sickness, and objectively pro-inflation. And you thought being objectively pro-big donor was bad enough!

Action: concerning corporate welfare, tribal lands, and marriage equality.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop handing out corporate welfare and pass the Advancing Tribal Parity on Public Land Act and the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act, and tell your Senators to pass the Respect for Marriage Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop handing out corporate welfare to big corporate donors like they do every year. We just had a midterm election that was, ah, not as big a win for Republicans as they’d hoped; once they formally organize to lead our House again, they’ll propose all kinds of stupid corporate tax cuts for their big donors, so we need to communicate our will to our Congressfolk, again. Like I said, they do this every year, at the end, when we’re all preoccupied with the holidays, but there’s another reason to deny them this year: corporate profits are driving at least half of the worst-in-40-years inflation we’re suffering. Make sure to tell them that.

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8108/S. 4421, the Advancing Tribal Parity on Public Land Act, and H.R. 8109/S. 4423, the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act. The former bill would prohibit sale of any public land where a native American nation has treaty or other reserved rights, while the latter would establish a federal system protecting sites of cultural significance to native Americans. That all sounds pretty common-sensical to me; the only people who’d hate it are the big corporate executives who want to turn everything into a mine or a mall. And we’ve already taken enough away from native Americans.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which somehow still hasn’t passed our Senate, despite getting 47 Republican yea votes in our House back in July. And sadly the other side’s arguments against it are profoundly disappointing – they won’t say they just don’t want gay and interracial couples to marriage, so they can’t land a punch! One announced that “This Depraved Law Would Allow Pedophiles to Marry Children,” as if there's literally no such thing as consent, as if our laws don’t already prohibit adult-child marriages. So let’s not let bigots have all the say about everything.

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, law and order, and climate change.

Long story short: tell President Biden to force big corporations to reveal campaign contributions, tell our DOJ to indict Donald Trump already, and tell our DOT to implement the climate change-reporting rule they promised (and which our laws mandate). Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to issue an executive order forcing all corporations receiving more than $1 million in taxpayer money to disclose their campaign spending. Such an order would cover a lot of corporations, since a lot of corporations contract with our government, and while we’ve got to do something about all this big corporate campaign donations helping to elect utter fools, we also have a right to know whether big corporate campaign donations also help corporations get federal contracts they don’t deserve. So President Biden could shine a light on corruption big and small – but he won’t, unless we get in his grill about it.

Woman Up helps you tell new Justice Department special prosecutor Jack Smith to indict Donald Trump already. If you get a little annoyed with right-wingers shouting in your ear that YOUZ CAN’TZ EVENZ SAYZ WHATZ TEH TRUMPZ DIDZ!!!!!, just remember that this is how he wants it – he wants chaos and disorder so you’ll forget what coherence and order feel like. Also remember that he knew he lost the 2020 election but spread lies about it for the express purpose of overturning the will of the American people and staying in office. And that’s enough of a reason to indict the man. And it's just for starters! If we let him off, if we embrace cynicism, we’ll never have real law and order in America again.

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our Department of Transportation (or DOT) to implement a new greenhouse gas-measuring rule already. A 2012 law mandated the rule, the Obama Administration took its time writing one, and then the Trump Administration said, as it so often does, to hell with the law and the only thing that matters is worshiping mammon; then the Biden Administration took office, announced they’d do something, and then, nothing. Because DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg thinks the Democratic party will be the same in 2028 as it is now! Thus we get in our DOT’s grills again.

Light posting notice plus action.

Posting will be light over the next week-plus, so enjoy your holiday, and prepare yourself for the drama of a Republican House (albeit one with a rather slim majority).

For today, though, two items: the U.S. Senate may vote on H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, as early as today, so you'll want to get on the horn with your Senators and tell them to vote for that bill. This bill might actually pass, and if it does, it will protect gay marriage and interracial marriage from whatever horror our Supreme Court is cooking up. I told my right-leaning Senator, who will be replaced by John Fetterman in January, not to listen to people who claim their "religious" "conscience" demands that our government prevent gay folks from marrying. If you don't want to gay-marry, I said, then just don't gay-marry. Shame that rage-filled right-wingers seem to have no idea how that works.

Also, Pennsylvania residents, take note: not long after I declared the Larry Krasner impeachment dead, the Pennsylvania state house up and impeached him, for something, I guess. Two-thirds of Pennsylvania's state Senators will have to vote to remove him from his office as Philadelphia District Attorney; Pennsylvania has 29 Republicans out of 50 state Senators, so they'd have to bully at least four Democrats into voting to remove him. Thus now's a good time to call your state Senator and tell them not to enable this right-wing sore loser drama Republicans want to inflict upon us. (Republicans rushed to impeach Mr. Krasner because, pending the results of two races in the Philly suburbs, they may have lost the Assembly.) Mr. Krasner has, frankly, enacted rather mild criminal justice reforms in his five years as DA, and any cop who says I CAN'TZ DOZ MYZ JOBZ ANYMOREZ!!!! simply because he can no longer indefinitely detain a guy for peeing against the wall of a bar at 3 AM is a whiner. And Jesus Mary and Joseph I hate whiners. I hate whiners with guns even more.

Anyway, enjoy time with family and friends this week, and thank you for all your good works.

Action: concerning drug prices, Presidential power, and social media.

Long story short: tell President Biden to expand public drug manufacturing capability to lower drug prices, tell your Congressfolk to make Presidential legal memos more transparent, and tell big corporations to stop advertising on Twitter. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to expand public manufacturing capacity for insulin so that it doesn’t cost good Americans hundreds of dollars every month like it does now. With Republicans finally getting the 218th seat that’ll give them a majority in our House, we sure can’t expect any such action coming from them. But President Biden can use existing authority in the Bayh/Dole Act to allow our government to make more insulin at low prices – insulin that’ll compete with price-gouging big pharma corporations. Hey, the “free” market isn’t providing! And when that happens, our government must step in.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to require the Presidential Office of Legal Counsel to publicly release all of its legal opinions, past and present. Why should they keep them from us, after all? I kid, of course – they keep them from us because they know we’d see through them! After all, our government hasn’t just used OLC “secret memos” to shield Donald Trump from accountability – these memos have also justified torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions (and American law) and expanded, unconstitutional war-making power for our Presidents. Don’t buy the “national security” argument, either. They should be able to keep us safe and be accountable to us.

Finally, Inequality Media helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Twitter. General Motors has suspended advertising on Twitter, and if big corporations to follow suit, we might even think of them as guardians of civilization again one day! Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a cesspool of hatred and drama since buying it, and we must hold him accountable for that; absent legislation making social media liable the way publishing houses are, we can wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against any corporation that would advertise on Twitter. We should ask them not to advertise there first, though. We are civilized, after all.

Action: concerning data privacy, internet freedom, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell our FTC to keep law enforcement’s grubby mitts off our private data, tell our Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner, and tell President Biden to remove Donald “Lee” Moak from our USPS Board of Governors. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop private data-collecting corporations from selling all your private info to law enforcement. If law enforcement wants that information, they should get a warrant from a judge; supporting “convenience” or “efficiency” here is nothing more and nothing less than supporting fascism. Seriously! If law enforcement can just buy your personal data, and look at it whenever they like, what’s to stop them from going on fishing expeditions once they decide you’re an enemy? Hey, were you at George Floyd rallies in 2020? Well, congratulations – now you’re an enemy. It’s way too easy for cops to do that, which is why we restrict their power.

Demand Progress also helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner with a quickness. They’ve been dragging their feet about this nomination for two years, and as a result, our FCC can’t do the work Congress has given them to do – work that not only includes reinstating network neutrality as virtually everyone in America left right and center wants them to do, but also allocating a lot of infrastructure money, since Congress has passed a few of those bills over the last two years, too. Currently our FCC suffers from 2-2 votes caused by not having a fifth Commissioner, and if Gigi Sohn is extraordinarily well-qualified no matter what corporate lobbyists say. So let’s get on this.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to replace Donald “Lee” Moak on our USPS Board of Governors, preferably with a nominee who will replace the notorious Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Mr. Moak is one of Mr. DeJoy’s biggest supporters even as he freely admits – because such admissions apparently mean nothing anymore! – that he hardly understands his work on the Board. The only thing he seems to “understand” is that raising prices, slashing jobs, and cutting services in a nation where many Americans rely on our Postal Service for life-saving medicines is somehow a good plan! And that’s why he’s got to go.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, health care, and homelessness.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to cut corporate taxes, to sustain expanded Medicaid and CHIP coverage, and pass the Ending Homelessness Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk not to cut corporate taxes during the upcoming lame duck session. Corporations are making record profits, said profits being responsible for half our current inflation, so why give them more handouts? We know cutting corporate taxes is unpopular, not just because Republicans cut them dramatically in 2017 and lost the House the next year, but also because our Congressfolk always leave corporate welfare giveaways until the end of the year, when they hope everyone’s tired and not watching anymore. Well, we’re watching, and fatigue doesn’t keep us from our duty, so let’s give them what-for.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect expanded Medicaid and CHIP coverage in end-of-year legislation. You know, instead of their aforementioned habit of handing out corporate welfare! You’d think our Congressfolk wouldn’t dare cut children’s health insurance – the first three letters of CHIP do stand for “children’s health insurance,” after all – but then Congress totally let the CHIP program lapse in 2017 because they were working too hard on tax cuts for rich folks and not hard enough for, you know, our children. So, yeah, we need to remind them to work for working families.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4496, the Ending Homelessness Act. Rents are shooting through the roof and folks are behind on their rent thanks to pandemic job losses, so yeah, we’d be cruel not to give working families more help affording a place to live. The bill also prevents our government from using criminal history to deny housing assistance – gosh, do we believe in rehabilitating people or not? – and would also prohibit housing discrimination because of a renter’s veteran status. Hey, it ain’t our soldiers’ fault we make them fight stupid wars, so let’s not injure them coming and going.

Action: concerning monopolies, data privacy, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell our FTC to investigate the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, tell big tech corporations to protect our data, and tell our DOL to crack down on corporate misclassification of workers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to investigate the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, which would merge at least a dozen grocery store chains into one bloated corporation. Sound like a good idea to you? Only if you enjoy job losses, higher prices, fewer choices, fewer stores, and less local control over groceries! Executives love that crap, because it enables them to pay themselves more money, but they shouldn’t get all the say about everything. Oh, and this merger would also enable hedge fund banksters to bleed Albertsons dry as a condition of the merger! Why, it’s like they negotiated this merger in the Bizarro world! So let’s put a stop to it.

The Kairos Fellowship helps you tell big tech corporations like Google and Meta to protect our personal data a lot more vigorously than they do now. Many folks have kinda given up and said there’s just no privacy on the internet, and maybe that sentiment induces folks to put up fewer shirtless photos of themselves on their newsfeed, but it more likely induces them to just give up on protecting their privacy, though corporations have no inherent right to sell your personal data just because you’ve given it to them. Seriously, why must everything be for sale? And not for nothing, but with the end of Roe v. Wade, we sure don’t want corporations selling our personal data to anti-abortion activists.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor (or DOL) to crack down on corporate misclassification of their workers. Big corporations be all like all our workers are contractors LOL so they can avoid giving workers health insurance and paid time off – and also so they can avoid paying their legally-mandated half of Social Security and Medicare taxes! Should they be allowed to do that, merely because it’s “clever”? Folks think of a lot of “clever” things I don’t think of, but the reason I don’t think of them is I’m not constantly trying to get over on the rest of the world. And people who are shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning data privacy, the debt ceiling, and treating prisoners like human beings.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop passport data abuse, ditch the debt ceiling once and for all, and pass the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent our State Department from giving law enforcement access to your passport data willy-nilly. Ideally law enforcement would need a warrant to get your passport application data, but our government has spent the last 20 years assaulting the very idea of getting a warrant – this, even though judges will get out of bed to give warrants if the situation’s that urgent, and even though getting a warrant was good enough for our government for over 200 years. No, 9.11 did not “change everything”! And people who think 9.11 “changed everything” are exactly the sort of people I do not want in my foxhole!

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to eliminate the debt ceiling once and for all. Republicans said they’d take the debt ceiling hostage to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, so let’s take the weapon away from them before they break our damn country with it, shall we? The debt ceiling doesn’t do anything for America; politicians have only ever applied the notion of “fiscal restraint” to spending that actually helps good Americans, but time was our Congressfolk just raised the ceiling whenever we got too close to it. Now it’s like pulling teeth to get it raised, with Republicans the way they are now, so it was never any good coming or going, and have I mentioned that I really, really hate drama?

Finally, both Americans for Financial Reform and Color of Change help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. This bill would give our FCC the power to cap prices for phone calls from prisoners to their family, since now big telecom corporations charge an arm and a leg for that, and prisoners don’t exactly have an arm and a leg to spend. But when prisoners keep in touch with their families and get out of prison, they tend to stay out; folks still think we’re supposed to help criminals get better, right? So let’s help criminals get better by passing this bill. Putting profits above people is evil.

Action: concerning immigrant kids, bankster fees, and judicial ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Children’s Safe Welcome Act, clamp down on predatory overdraft fees, and pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

RAICES helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8349/S. 4529, the Children’s Safe Welcome Act. You remember family separation at the border under the Trump Administration, and the revelation that the separated kids lived in squalor in our detention centers? The Children’s Safe Welcome Act would prevent that, by prohibiting family separation, ensuring that unaccompanied kids get legal representation, and giving more health care to kids at the border. Nobody’s afraid of immigrant kids getting legal representation, right? And the answer to “why do they get it but not me?” ought to be “why doesn’t everyone get it?” We are the greatest nation on Earth, right?

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to rein in usurious bank overdraft fees. When you think about it, banksters collecting $35 every time you overdraw your account is an awful lot like not working. And if you’re the person who says then just budget correctly and don’t spend more than you have, well lucky you! With the cost of higher education and health insurance (to name just two costs Americans can’t just ignore!) rising much, much faster than inflation has done, maybe not everyone has the headspace to realize that their next $3 cup of coffee will put them in the red. And $35 fees sure overstate the tiny amount of work a bank does to keep them afloat!

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would at long last make Supreme Court Justices adhere to the same ethical standards as every other federal judge. Clarence Thomas (whose wife helped immensely with the attempted January 6 coup) isn’t the news hook here, for once: this time it’s Amy Comey Barrett, who hasn’t been transparent about her husband’s work representing corporate clients. Always they think they’re too “great” for ethics rules. But what’s the lesson of America? The American people are great, and individuals who think they’re better than the rest of us are fools.

Action: vote!

If you have any problems voting today – said problems may include, but are not limited to, finding the polling place, voter intimidation, accessibility issues, voting machine problems, and provisional ballot issues – or if you witness anyone having these or any other problems – Election Protection has a toll-free line for you to call. It's 1.866.OUR.VOTE – or, if mnemonic devices such as "OUR VOTE" actually slow you down when you're trying to dial (as they do for me!), that's 1.866.687.8683. We’re already witnessing plenty of vote suppression and intimidation going on, from armed “poll watchers” accusing voters at drop boxes of being “mules” to actual Republican officials going door-to-door to tell good Americans they can’t vote. So don't be skittish about making that call, just as our enemies aren’t skittish about preventing you from voting.

Do not despair about the possibility that Republicans will gain either or both houses of Congress today, because if you despair, and don’t vote – or worse, if you don’t vote because you don’t think your preferred candidate will win! – then the forces of evil will be that much stronger. I haven’t looked at a poll in weeks, once I decided that Republicans were “gaining momentum” in polls for no good reason. The war on Ukraine is going as badly for Russia as it ever has, job growth remained robust in October and November, and our GDP increased by almost three percent during the third quarter of 2022; even inflation has gone down rather more than the current year-over-year figure would indicate – year-over-year it’s still over eight percent, but over the last three months for which we have inflation figures (July, August, and September), we’ve seen a hike of only around one percent total, which works out to a little over four percent annually. So what, exactly, has happened to suddenly give Republicans “momentum”? If anything, Democrats should have momentum, not just with the January 6 attempted coup showing the Republican Party’s true face, and not just with our Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade – an act Alexander Cockburn said, at least once, would cast Republicans into the electoral wilderness for a generation – but with Republicans saying, out loud, that they’d take the debt limit hostage to force Social Security and Medicare cuts. Yikes, why would anyone vote for a Republican after all of that? And yet a lot of folks will, so you’ve got to get out there and vote.

I know at least a few of you will read the previous paragraph and decide that I’ve become “captured” by Democrats. Consider, however, that over the last two years, Democrats have done more to earn our votes than they have in many, many decades. The Biden Administration is fighting monopolies more aggressively, and successfully, than any Administration has done in at least 40 years, and the Fed’s interest rate hikes will also help break the banksters’ stranglehold over our economy; I cannot overstate the game-changing, paradigm-shifting nature of these moves. And this Democrat-led Congress has passed legislation that will create renewable energy jobs and fight climate change, saved our Postal Service from the crippling benefit-funding mandate under which no other corporation or public entity ever had to operate, capped insulin prices for Medicare recipients at $35/month, and let Medicare negotiate the prices of drugs – not all of them, and not until 2026, but once the foot’s in that door, it’s going to be very hard to shut. And yet Republicans like Marco Rubio are arguing at this very moment that the progress we’ve made on Medicare drug price negotiation should be reversed! Again, they deserve no seats in Congress, let alone whatever they wind up with.

Finally, once again, remember that voting is a citizen's absolute minimum duty in America. This is our government, no matter how little it resembles a good government, and our duty as citizens is to make it a good government, first on Election Day, but also on every day thereafter. Still, our work on every day thereafter will be a lot harder if we don’t turn all the Republicans out of office we can. And there are only bad reasons for not voting. Negative campaigning is an especially bad one – folks do realize politicians run negative campaigns in order to alienate voters and make them stay home, right? If you stay home, you can't vote against the bad people who want you to stay home! And cynicism about the state of the nation is not only a bad reason to stay home, it's a bad reason to do anything. Yes, things get discouraging. But I pray that we always have the strength to refuse to drink from the cup of cynicism.

Action: concerning Social Security, Medicare, food assistance, and taxing the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect Social Security and Medicare, approve additional food assistance spending, and pass a Billionaires’ Mininum Income Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Social Security and Medicare. From whom? From Republicans, of course, who have actually come out and said that if they take either or both houses of Congress next week, they’ll take the debt limit hostage again so they can force benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare. You know, as opposed to the Medicare cost cuts Democrats passed in the Inflation Reduction Act, the same cost cuts Republicans are trying to portray as benefit cuts! They really do live in an up-is-down world, but if they take either or both houses of Congress, they’ll try to force us to live in that world, too. And that’s why we communicate our will early and often.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to approve the $100 million they’ve already authorized for the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which, as its name suggests, helps working families who can’t get enough food from our “free” market. Don’t fall prey to “this program only helps Those People” horsedoodle, because you could be one of “those people” at any time if you lose your job. Politicians keep acting like programs taxpayers pay for could never help them. Gosh, I wonder why that is. And by “I wonder why that is” I mean “they mean to keep voters in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage as they pick their pockets.”

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax. From spring 2020 to spring 2022, billionaires’ net worth increased 70% – did your net worth increase 70% during that time? No, it more likely went down, since you were more likely out of work at the beginning of that time! And sadly, while all that extra money doesn’t buy happiness, it sure does buy politicians (cough Kyrsten Sinema cough) who’ll let them pay less in taxes than working families do. You want to know what else it could buy? Programs we all benefit from even if we don’t actually fall on hard times.

Action: concerning treating prisoners like human beings, corporate spying, and chemical disasters.

Long story short: tell the Alabama Department of Corrections to treat prisoners more humanely, tell our government to investigate TikTok’s parent company for illegal spying on Americans, and tell our EPA to protect good Americans from chemical plant disasters. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Alabama Department of Corrections to start treating prisoners like human beings again. You need not indulge in any if you can’t do the crime don’t do the time horsedoodle or you sound like you want all prisoners to eat caviar horsedoodle or how is it different from any other prison horsedoodle; all ye need do is consider that our Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Alabama in 2020, saying they violated prisoners’ Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. That's right, the Trump DOJ did this! So go ahead and assume it must be pretty awful, and act accordingly.

Public Citizen helps you tell our government to investigate potential criminal behavior by TikTok or its parent corporation. ByteDance, the corporation that owns TikTok, stands accused of either tracking locations of particular American citizens or planning to do so – no, not even tracking locations so they could sell more ads, and certainly not tracking them as part of an internal workplace investigation. No, they just wanted to spy on Americans! If we’re not going to tolerate that from our own government, and we shouldn’t, then why would we tolerate it from a corporation? Why would we tolerate it from a foreign corporation? We would not, so let’s not.

Finally, Public Citizen also helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to do everything it can to protect good Americans from chemical disasters. While our EPA’s revised Risk Management Program for chemical plants improves on our existing one, it could still do more, like make chemical plants submit their own risk management plans more quickly than within four years, or requiring backup power on all equipment, or create a third-party anonymous reporting hotline to supplement in-house reporting and whistleblowing. When it’s your neighborhood on fire from a chemical plant, you’ll think these are all good ideas, too, so let’s help ensure we’ll never have to contemplate such things.

Action: concerning voting rights, treating prisoners like human beings, and immigrant youth.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Mail Act and the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act, and pass legislation protecting immigrant youth. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 4487, the Election Mail Act. The bill would (among other things) require our Postal Service to process all mail-in ballots the same day they get them, to process mail-in ballots free of charge to the voter, and require states to count mail-in ballots postmarked on or by Election Day that arrive up to seven days after Election Day. And if that makes Republicans whine about how we should always know the winner by 8 pm on Election Day, well, tough toodles. Better to make mail-in voting easier for all Americans. And we all have to deal with change, so why should we coddle Republicans in their incessant efforts to avoid dealing with change?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. Big telecom corporations get to charge usurious rates for prisoners to talk to their families, and these big corporations have massive bankster funding behind them – thus explaining why Americans for Financial Reform brings you this action alert. Prisoners who stay in touch with their families are also more likely to stay out of jail once they get out; you can see why banksters invested in big telecom corporations and private prison corporations don’t want that, but again, why should they get all the say about everything?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation protecting immigrant youth (i.e., “dreamers”) from deportation. To a nation they left when they were very young and therefore not of their own free will and therefore also to a nation they won’t recognize, I feel compelled to mention again. In the meantime, we could keep hoping that reactionary judges (and Justices!) might interpret the law in such a way as to not be cruel bastards – or we could tell our Congressfolk to solve the problem with legislation. And if they don’t, we tell them again until they do. Easier than relying on a right-wing judge, that’s for sure.

Action: concerning workers' rights, data privacy, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell our Department of Labor to crack down on bosses misclassifying workers as “contractors,” tell Uber to stop selling customer information to third parties, and tell President Biden to improve our Postal Service. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor to crack down on worker misclassification. Corporations like calling their workers “independent contractors” even when those “contractors” come to the office every day and use their facilities to get their work done, and why is that? So they don’t have to cover their health insurance, workers’ compensation insurance, or (even!) pay the employer’s half of the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare. For too long we’ve just assumed that if a corporation calls its workers “contractors” we just have to put up with it. But we don’t! Of course, we need to tell our government that.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Uber not to sell its customers’ ride history to advertisers. Sound innocuous? You know, besides the fact that somebody knows what you’re doing and now wants to sell you something based on that, which is pretty creepy? Now imagine people using Uber to get to church, or a doctor’s office, or an abortion clinic, and I trust you begin to see the problem. And if you’re tempted to retort but it’s just for advertising, remember how many intrusive technologies have entered our lives by being “just for” something else. You may have brought an Alexa into your house so it could play music more easily, but now it’s recording your conversations.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to replace Donald “Lee” Moak on our U.S. Postal Service’s Board of Governors once his term expires at the end of this year. Mr. Biden has shown a disquieting willingness to keep Mr. Moak on the Board, though Mr. Moak has been a key ally of the notorious Postmaster General DeJoy, so we have to get in our President’s grill. Of course, as Public Citizen reminds us, it’s not just about ousting Mr. DeJoy – who has slashed services and raised prices like Americans don’t depend on our Postal Service for life-saving medications or anything – but about improving our Postal Service with services like postal banking.

Action: concerning data privacy, political prisoners, and forever chemicals.

Long story short: tell our FTC to protect our data from law enforcement, tell various world government to stop oppressing political opponents, and tell our EPA to protect us from “forever chemicals.” Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to bar law enforcement from buying private data sold by third-party data collecting corporations. Since Congress won’t move on the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would accomplish the same end, we must turn to our federal agencies, which also have the power, granted by law, to protect us from law enforcement fishing expeditions. I guess the cops will say how can we do our jobs, just like they do when we try to stop them from killing Black folks when they brandish a cellphone. But your rights and your freedoms matter more than law enforcement’s convenience.

Amnesty International helps you take action on 10 separate cases of world governments oppressing political opponents. Read about their stories (in the internet age, that never takes as long as it seems like it should) and you’ll notice disturbing patters: people protesting peacefully or expressing an opinion that’s different from that nation’s Glorious Elites, then that nation throwing them in jail on trumped-up charges and/or torturing them. It’s a tired, tired story common to snowflake governments, tired enough that you may get tired yourself – or, worse, that cynics may exploit your fatigue. Never let a cynic tell you what to do. Cynicism is evil, its proponents prisoners of evil.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect good Americans from PFAS chemicals. Which we call “forever chemicals” for a reason: they’re awfully durable, which must have seemed a positive back in the day, but we now know they’re so durable we can’t get them out of our air and our water – and our bodies. And scientists link PFAS chemicals to cancer, fetal development issues, and other health issues, with folks in Black and Brown communities more affected (since industrial plants more likely exist close to these communities). So we need to tell our EPA to take the most vigorous action possible under the law, not least because we can get them in court if they ignore us.

Finally, I’ve started making campaign donations again – apparently that $200 I gave to Doug Jones in 2020 was a gateway drug! – so in the interest of full disclosure I’ll list them here. Surprise: they’re all Democrats! Because the Republicans are the party of whining and drama and sedition and book banning and spreading COVID and banning birth control and cutting Social Security and Medicare and they ain’t worth my money! So: $100 each to Katie Porter, Matt Cartwright, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Gary Chambers, and Val Demings; $27 to Charles Booker, and $25 each to Tim Ryan, Cheri Beasley, Catherine Cortez Masto, Raphael Warnock (though I’m still deleting all his emails!), and John Fetterman. I'm sure I've missed many worthy candidates (though I urge you to pay more attention to Ms. Perez, in Washington's 3rd House district), and I want all these folks to win their races. But whether they will or not is up to us, and then after Election Day it’s up to us whether they do our will or not.

Action: concerning racism, tax cuts for working families, and immigration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and codify DACA protections for “dreamers” into law. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first: as you may know, the GI Bill helped a lot of WWII soldiers buy houses they wouldn’t have been able to buy otherwise, but racist enforcement of the GI Bill left most Black soldiers behind. No, really – when you’re Black and you fill out your application five times and your government loses it five times, that’s racism. But H.R. 5905/S. 3210, the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, would help fix that, by making survivors and direct descendants of WWII Black soldiers eligible for the GI Bill benefits their forebears were denied, the benefits that lifted so many Americans into the middle class for the first time. So this bill merits a phone call to your Congressfolk.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion that helped so many good Americans weather the pandemic and inflation in 2021. The CTC expansion deposited $250 or $300 checks (per child!) every month in working families’ bank accounts in 2021, and why aren’t Democrats running ads saying we cut your taxes and Republicans fought us? Regardless of their negligence in this area (or because of it!), we should get in our Congressfolks’ grills and make our will known, that the CTC expansion kept millions of kids out of poverty and we should bring it back so they can get back out of poverty. Why does anyone deserve poverty, after all?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to permanently enshrine DACA protections for immigrant youth into law. I’m speaking, of course, of the children who came here long before they were capable of remembering their birth country – and thus had literally no say in coming here, of course – and who have maintained a residence here and contributed to American society. I have just given at least three reasons why deporting them would be unconscionably cruel. We’re either a great nation or we’re not, and if we’re unconscionably cruel, then guess what? We’re not. So let’s not let such cruelty be our legacy.

Action: concerning the war on Yemen, money laundering, and the debt ceiling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to get us out of the war on Yemen, pass the ENABLERS Act, and abolish the debt ceiling. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers Resolution getting us the hell out of the Saudi/UAE coalition’s war on Yemen. Because it’s killing good Yemeni civilians as well as taking out some of the world’s best fighters against al-Qaeda, funny how that works out, right, Kurds? Saudi Arabia’s also cut back oil production as a sop to Russia, whose government deserves no sops at all. Too many politicians act like we have no alternative to allying with Saudi Arabia, too many generals wind up becoming consultants for Saudi Arabia, and too many regular Americans act like Saudi Arabia’s OK because Iran’s worse. Like the Greatest Nation on Earth should ever have to choose!

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5525, the ENABLERS Act. I’ve been calling folks who give aid and comfort to dictators “enablers” for close to two decades now, so it’s nice to see Congress getting into the act. The ENABLERS Act would give our government more tools to crack down on the many forms of money-laundering that enable Russia to continue its doomed-but-still-evil war on Ukraine; I suppose some folks on the right (cough Rand Paul cough) would complain that this would give government more tools to snoop into your bank account, but it’s actually hard to look like you’re laundering money for Russia unless you’re doing that.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to abolish the debt ceiling. Used to be the debt ceiling was just useless, since Congress raised it all the time without controversy, but now the debt ceiling is a tool of evil, since Republicans take it hostage every time they want to hurt good Americans. I am not overstating the case! As we speak, Republicans are telling us that if they get control of either house of Congress again, they will create another debt limit drama aimed at forcing cuts to Medicare and Social Security. Republicans are being so obvious about it that Democrats are even running ads about it! So, as with the filibuster, it’s best to take weapons away from legislators when they abuse them.

Action: concerning social media, monopolies, and intrusive government.

Long story short: tell big social media corporations to stop spreading election-related BS on their platforms, tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, and tell Florida to stop collecting information on girls’ periods. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell big social media corporations Meta, Google and TikTok to stop passing along election-related BS. We’re all aware that lies spread on these platforms before the truth can even get its pants on, but if you recall Facebook’s role in helping Myanmar oppress Rohingya Muslims a few years ago, or have noted Meta’s rubber-stamping of ads calling for violence in Brazil (the runoff Presidential election is this coming Sunday), you know the situation is even more dire than that. And you also know that social media algorithms push evil right-wing content on you even if you’re King of the Liberals, so we need to brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR once again.

Both Demand Progress and Public Citizen help you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger. Mainstream media reports make it seem like it’s just Kroger and Albertsons joining together, but these corporations already own over a dozen big grocery corporations, so why should they get to consolidate their power further? Our choice is clear: either we allow big corporations to funnel even more unearned money toward their executives, which right-wingers seem to think is our only duty as a civilization – or we stop corporations from gaining even more power to price-gouge, which more closely resembles our actual duty as a civilization.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell the Florida High School Athletic Association (or FHSAA) to stop collecting information on female athletes’ periods. Yes, this is where we are in some areas of the country: where anti-gay and anti-trans insanity reaches a fever pitch, they start monitoring when you have your period, for your own safety and security, of course. How offensive: they do it for the “safety” and “security” of the small, weak people whom right-wingers herd from one manufactured outrage to the next, so they don’t ever connect with the real outrages that should drive them to act. “Leave girls alone” should be the motto of our public education system, even in places that aren’t Florida.

Action: concerning transgender, data privacy, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell the government of Paraguay to legally recognize transgender folks, tell our FTC to protect our data privacy, and tell our Justice Department to break up ticketing monopolies. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Paraguay to recognize transgender folks there. You know how Republicans in America want nobody to play a sport with any folks other than those in the same birth gender? In Paraguay, they’d get their wish on that and many, many other things – trans folks literally can’t get the documentation that would match their gender identity, plus they get banned from protesting, or beaten up when they don’t get banned. Trans folks ain’t hurting nobody other than the testosterone-addled men who want to fuck everyone, so we should all be giving them what they need – which, for many, is the right to be seen and recognized and then left the hell alone.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to protect good Americans’ data privacy as vigorously as possible. Our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) issued pretty good privacy rules in 2016, but then the Republican Congress of 2017 repealed them using the “resolution of disapproval” process, and that’s an evil act for which far too few of them have been punished. Still, we ain’t powerless, especially now that our FTC has decided to weigh in on the matter, and especially now that our FTC isn’t packed with right-wing ideologues who think corporations should police themselves, even though corporations will never police themselves. So let’s get to it.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division to break up Live Nation Entertainment. Still known more popularly as “Ticketmaster” over a decade after Live Nation absorbed it in a 2010 merger, it now dominates over two-thirds of the ticketing and live events market, and that’s reason enough to blow them up. But if you’ve been to any live show lately, I bet you can think of a few other reasons – like huge surprise fees and higher prices that sometimes go up even after you put the ticket in your cart! And Judd Legum at Popular Information describes even worse behavior; you’ll definitely want to blow them up after reading it.

Action: concerning political prisoners, campaign finance disclosure, and chemical plant safety.

Long story short: tell Iran to release Vahid Afkari, tell President Biden to require campaign finance disclosure for federal contracting corporations, and tell our EPA to protect good Americans from chemical spills and explosions. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first: Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to release political prisoner Vahid Afkari immediately, expunge his record, and drop any charges against him. Mr. Afkari's story has a lot of recognizable particulars: participated in peaceful protests against Iran’s repressive regime, got arrested on trumped-up charges, got sentenced to over 30 years in jail (plus 74 lashes), has spent the last two years in solitary, and now has health issues that I’m sure are completely unrelated to the injustices his government has inflicted upon him. But, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, only a snowflake government does this to their own people. And if we pressure them enough, they’ll fold, because that's what snowflakes do.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to force corporations that contract with our government to disclose their campaign spending. This should be a layup – most corporations do business with our government sooner or later, and they spend taxpayer money, which is to say our money, so we deserve to know which politicians they’re funding. Right-wingers will whine that this would have a “chilling effect” on “free speech,” but it won’t, because money is not speech. Corporate executives will still be able to say what they like; they’ll just be less able to bribe their way to getting what they like. And why should they have it so easy, when the rest of us must howl to be heard?

Finally, the National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous Risk Assessment Plan possible for American chemical plants. More than one out of every three Americans lives within three miles of a chemical facility, meaning more than one out of every three Americans faces a significant chance of exposure to toxic leaks, fumes, fires, and explosions. And not for nothing, but most of these Americans are Black, Brown, or poor; why, it's almost like that's the idea. But if we believe that everyone deserves a chance in America – and even right-wingers make a show of believing that – then we must protect everyone from the toxic waste that could sicken, injure, or kill them.

Action: concerning pollution and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject bills that would call plastic incineration “recycling,” pass bills lowering drug prices for all Americans, and reject bills that would repeal the drug price-lowering planks of the Inflation Reduction Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject legislation that would reclassify plastic incineration as “advanced recycling.” “Recycling” it into what? Plastic incineration would merely pump out more toxins and carcinogens into our air, while allowing big plastic corporations to circumvent the Clean Air Act at the same time. They say they can recycle more plastics this way, but burning crap still ain’t “recycling” any more than burning a log “recycles” wood. We already have too much plastic in our drinking water, and therefore in our bodies; we don’t need another crap-ton of it in our air as well. So let’s get in our Congressfolk’s grills about this.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices for all Americans with a quickness. Too many right-wing politicians act like “price controls” is a cuss word, when good Americans suffering under 8% inflation would like some control over the prices they pay. And prescription drugs can cost an arm and a leg – and with insulin, especially, that phrase is too often literal. Republicans already voted against capping insulin at $35/month for all Americans; how much longer can they get away with flouting the people’s will and the popular good? Let’s make the answer to that “never” by communicating our will in force.

Finally, in a related note, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would repeal the lower drug-price planks in the Inflation Reduction Act. Yes, some Senate Republicans are actually trying to do this! These include James Lankford of Oklahoma, who isn’t as far ahead of his opponent in polling as Oklahoma’s red-state status would predict, and Mike Lee of Utah, who’s actually tied with independent candidate Evan McMullin in at least one recent poll. And they also include Marco Rubio of Florida, who must not realize he’s drawn a fierce candidate who can beat the pants off him – a disturbing image, I know, but also what he deserves.

Action: concerning abortion, dicamba, and insurrectionists.

Long story short: tell our VA to maximize abortion coverage for our veterans, tell our EPA to ban dicamba, and tell big corporations to stop donating to Republican insurrection-symps. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Moms Rising helps you tell our Veterans Administration (or VA) to enact the most vigorous abortion rights protections possible. Our VA provides care to about 6.5 million American veterans, and they risked their lives for us – no, really, they did, even though our politicians have largely sent them off to stupid wars for the last few decades – so they deserve the strongest health care protections they can get. And that includes abortion care! Currently our VA only proposed covering abortion care under very narrow circumstances; luckily the commenting tool leaves space for you to describe some more conditions requiring abortion care coverage. As we learned this summer, not everyone knows that information, and they need to.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban the notorious herbicide dicamba. Our Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals banned dicamba in 2020, which set off predictable howls of WE’LL NEVER HAVEZ FOODZ AGAINZ!!!!! from right-wingers, but if we can’t make food without spraying toxic pesticides all over it, then we deserve death. (Luckily right-wingers are being dramatic about all of this, as usual – we’re all still eating two years later, after all.) Dicamba also has this nasty habit of drifting to other farms and killing other farmers’ crops, and we still care about farmers, right? And not just about big ag corporate executive pay? So let’s get in our EPA’s grills about this, so they do the right thing.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell big corporations to actually keep their word and stop donating to Republican politicians who tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now, over 70 corporations, including the likes of PepsiCo, Target, and Zillow, have kept their word, and they deserve our thanks for that, but a slew of other corporations – some 1,200 corporations and industry groups – have broken their word, mainly by donating to corporate PACs they must have thought nobody was watching. But we were watching! And we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR! Corporations don’t like bad PR, but if they deserve it, we must give it.

Action: concerning endless war, taxing the rich, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal Iraq War authorization, tax billionaires a lot harder, and pass the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Win Without War and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). Yes, it’s still on the books, though the Iraq War has been over for more than a decade and both Presidents Obama and Trump have abused it to launch more unwise and unconstitutional military adventures. No one calls them “wars,” of course, since wars kinda have a bad name now. Why do wars have a bad name now? Why, mainly because of the Iraq War, which the 2002 AUMF authorized, a profoundly evil war George W. Bush and his votaries used to tar all their political opponents as traitors. If you want to stop that from ever happening again, then raise hell about the 2002 AUMF.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire Minimum Income Tax. Billionaires made out a lot better than the rest of us during this pandemic, not because they’re “better people” or because they “worked harder” or because they “contributed more to society,” but because when you start out with billions of dollars, it’s much easier to make billions more, particularly when our civilization acts like “letting the rich do what they want” is not only a good idea but the only idea. A half-century ago we had only one billionaire, and (not coincidentally!) a much fairer America, and the Billionaires Minimum Tax will help us get that America back.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would outlaw state-level “right to work” laws, which we might better describe as “right to work for less money, fewer benefits, and fewer protections from bosses’ whims” laws, even though I suppose that's not as snappy "Right to work” laws allow workers to work in union shops without paying union dues, but no one who joins a union simply doesn’t know that dues fund the many services a union provides, and not for nothing, but the higher salary workers make when they're in unions tends to outstrip dues. Certainly that's been my experience for a few decades now.

Action: concerning various forms of corruption.

Long story short: tell Puerto Rico’s government to end its association with the private power corporation that is failing its citizens, tell Pennsylvania state Senators to reject corporatists on the state Public Utilities Commission, and tell President Biden to replace two USPS Commissioners with folks who’ll fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

MoveOn helps you tell the government of Puerto Rico to cancel LUMA Energy’s contract to deliver power there. Given the near-daily outages good Puerto Ricans suffered before Hurricane Fiona plunged them into near-total darkness, I’d say LUMA hasn’t even fulfilled its contract! And yet Puerto Rico’s government, which has until November 30 to renew LUMA’s contract, might well feel like they “have no choice,” despite good Puerto Ricans taking to the streets to protest LUMA’s failures. Don’t they know this is what private corporations do – do such a bad job that they make you feel like you “need” them? Let’s encourage Puerto Rico not to fall into this trap.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Food and Water Watch helps you tell your state Senator to reject Gov. Wolf’s appointment of a pair of corporate cronies to the state Public Utilities Commission. One’s a re-appointment of a Commissioner who tends to come down on the side of private energy corporations more than objectivity demands, while the other has long-standing ties to energy corporations as a lobbyist. Right-wingers love telling you that only people in the industry understand the industry enough to regulate it; hopefully you see that as a pile of dung. They don’t say only burglars understand law enforcement, but their own logic compels them to conclude that.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to avoid renominating U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors Commissioner/Trumphole Donald Moak, and Daily Kos helps you tell Mr. Biden to replace both USPS Commissioners with expiring terms and replace them with folks who’ll fire Mr. DeJoy. These Commissioners approve of Mr. DeJoy’s cut services/raise prices/slash jobs plan, especially considering how many good Americans depend on our Post Office for their life-saving medicines. But we won’t get the service we deserve from our Post Office unless we speak out.

Action: concerning overtime pay, workers' rights, and climate change.

Long story short: tell President Biden to extend overtime pay protections to more American workers, tell Starbucks executives to rehire the workers they illegally fired for organizing, and tell our Department of Transportation to fight climate change as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell President Biden to expand overtime pay protections for millions of Americans. Currently workers making up to $35,000 annually can earn time and a half for every hour worked over 40 hours in a week – former President Trump actually did raise the limit from $23,476 annually while in office, which makes four things he did right in four years – but folks making $35,000 annually doesn’t put you on Easy Street, as anyone making that amount of money already knows, raising the limit to $83,000 (roughly equivalent to the “happiness wage”) would help our working families a lot more.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you demand that Starbucks executives rehire workers they illegally fired for trying to organize unions at the workplace. Starbucks bosses must think they can convince our NLRB that they really fired all those people for improperly disposing of lattes or something, but everyone knows Starbucks treats their workers badly by now, so they’d do better just admitting they were wrong and bringing back the workers they fired. Bosses really do forget where they came from – or, perhaps, they’re ashamed of where they came from, and spend a lifetime trying to cover that up. Whatever! They do evil, and we need to stop them from doing evil.

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our Department of Transportation (or DOT) to enact the most vigorous climate change rules possible. Our DOT has proposed a rule requiring state and local governments to report on climate change emissions on roads and train routes and reduce those emissions; naturally fossil fuel corporations, who already get too much say about everything, stand ready to whine about being made to do anything differently, but remember that when they whine about “jobs” and “mandates” they’re really whining about their executives making less money, and preserving executive pay is no reason to make important decisions.

Action: concerning drug prices, marriage equality, and affordable housing.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans, tell your Senators to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, and tell your Congressfolk to expand affordable housing in year-end spending bills. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans. The Inflation Reduction Act caps insulin prices for Medicare patients, since that was all they could get through reconciliation; Democrats did try to get 60 votes for legislation capping insulin prices for everyone, but 43 Republican Senators opposed, so that legislation failed. Are Democrats running ads excoriating them for their vote on the insulin cap, particularly since they all also voted against the insulin cap for Medicare patients? If they are, they’re being quiet about it, which defeats the purpose of advertising. So we’ll do it for them, then.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which would codify gay marriage and interracial marriage rights into our laws, preventing our Supreme Court from obliterating them, as they did with abortion rights in the Dobbs decision. Word on the street is that Democrats almost-but-not-quite got 60 votes for the bill or for some version thereof, but decided to wait until after the midterms, when they figured the voters might have delivered more Senators to the Democrats. But who cares what they want? They’re supposed to do what we want – to protect rights for which we’ve fought.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand affordable housing funding in their year-end spending bills. Because that sure would be a better way of spending money than handing out yet more corporate welfare in the form of “tax extenders”! Eviction moratoria are long gone, too many Americans are way behind on their rent, and rich folks are still buying up too much of our housing just so they can show “assets” and get cheap loans from banks. That last era is about to end, thanks to our Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes, but good Americans still need – and deserve! – affordable housing, and where the “free” market won’t deliver, our government must.

Action: concerning immigration, pollution, and corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the DREAM Act, reject efforts to gut the National Environmental Policy Act, and prohibit Congressfolk from trading in stocks. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 264, the DREAM Act. Like President Biden's recent moves on marijuana pardons and student loan debt, the DREAM Act is not some radical act, but a bill that would simply expand the number of immigrants brought here as children who can stay in the only country they know anything about, as long as they demonstrate continued residence here and continued contributions to society. Shouting about PROTECTINGZ TEH BORDURZ!!!! and BUILDINGZ TEH WALLZ!!!! is entirely inappropriate in the context of someone who literally had no say in coming to America. In fact, it’s damn cruel. Is it so fucking much to ask for people not to be cruel in America?

US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk not to weaken the National Environmental Policy Act. When you hear the likes of Joe Manchin talk about “permitting reform,” they really mean they don’t want federal agencies to evaluate big gas, oil, and pipeline projects for the harm they might do to our clean air and clean water, hence the drive to “reform” the National Environmental Policy Act. I guess we should be happy that Republicans helped take down Mr. Manchin’s infamous “side deal” on “permitting reform,” which they appear to have done out of pique. The pique of evil people is a hell of a thing to count on, though; we’d do better to count on ourselves, doing our job as Americans.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation banning members of Congress from owning or trading individual stocks. Because you can’t trust people who are compromised by their own investments! And if your Congressperson pretends to get all offended at that, trust your own common sense rather than their histrionics. Congresspeople oversee vast swaths of our economy, and if they invest their own money in the parts of our economy they’re overseeing, they won’t do it on our behalf, but on their own. It’s that simple. Congress has really dropped the ball on this matter this year, but that just means we have to make them do better.

Action: concerning banksters, government spying, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and tell your Senators to pass the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5648/S. 3022, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. You know how banksters buy up corporations just to bleed them dry, putting people out of work and depriving others of services they need? The Stop Wall Street Looting Act would fix that, by protecting workers first when corporations go under and ending the hedge fund manager “carried interest” loophole, among other reforms. I know, I know, we’ve agitated for this bill for years, it seems like, and even Democratic Congresses never hold votes on it. But that doesn’t mean we give up – it means we get in their grills more about it.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would prevent private data corporations from selling your personal data to law enforcement. If you think that’s not a problem now, you will when law enforcement uses the data they bought to go on fishing expeditions that ensnare you or someone you love! Because they’ll do that, sooner or later, if only to justify their existence. Demand Progress also points out that our own military has just bought software that will let them monitor some 90% of all internet traffic, and I would hope that nobody thinks our military should spy on us without a warrant.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Good Americans are organizing for better working conditions like they haven’t done in years, but big corporations still herd them into mandatory anti-union meetings and then threaten the workers they can’t brainwash; the PRO Act would all that a lot harder. If bosses don’t want workers to unionize, they should try doing better by their workers, rather than saying there’s no money. Bosses say “there’s no money” because they take all the money! And that ain’t right when working families are trying to figure out which bill they can get away with not paying this month.

Action: concerning fracking, flooding, and recycling.

Long story short: tell the Delaware River Basin Commission to do more to protect folks from fracking, tell insurance corporations to treat Floridians affected by Hurricane Ian better, and tell our EPA to regulate “widely-recyclable” plastics more vigorously. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

MoveOn helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to give the good citizens of the Delaware Valley a more comprehensive ban on hydraulic fracturing, a.k.a. "fracking." The DRBC has decided to ban this kind of gas drilling in the Delaware River Watershed – which is good, since fracking pollutes drinking water – but has not banned either importing fracking wastewater or exporting clean water for use to frack elsewhere, which is not so good. I mean, if we’re trying to protect our clean water from pollution, we must protect it from all fracking, not just the fracking that could occur in our backyard. For once we befoul our drinking water with fracking chemicals, we don’t ever get it back.

Change.org helps you tell insurance corporations to stop shorting good Americans injured by Hurricane Ian. You’d think insurance would cover flooding caused by a hurricane, right? Particularly in a climate change era? Sadly, no: insurance corporations have been going rather far out of their way to deny good Floridians the help they need, and no this isn’t “people’s fault for not knowing what insurance they need” – flood insurance is actually hard to get, and when folks don’t know what insurance they need, that’s mostly because insurance corporations avoid telling them the truth and governments don't stop them. But can insurance corporations withstand (even more) bad PR from denying (even more) claims? I think we’re about to find out!

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to regulate “widely-recyclable” plastics a lot more vigorously. You’ve heard of “wish-cycling,” where you throw a lot of different plastic containers into your recycling bin hoping they’ll take them all? Anyone with a good heart has done that at some time or other, but the way things are, manufacturers, not our EPA, get to declare their plastics “widely-recyclable,” which means more not-actually-recyclable plastics choking off life in our oceans and making their way into our bloodstreams. So if our EPA needs to shorten the list of “widely-recyclable” plastics, they ought to do it. Then we can deal with our plastic problem a lot more honestly.

Action: concerning taxes and war.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion and make it permanent and pass a wealth tax on the ultra-rich, and tell your Senators to repeal the 2002 Iraq War AUMF. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion (from the American Rescue Plan Act) and make it permanent. That CTC expansion put $250 and $300 checks (per child!) in good Americans’ bank accounts every month in 2021, which sure did help when inflation shot upward, but Congress let it lapse at the end of 2021 – or rather, 50 Senate Republicans and Joe Manchin let it lapse at the end of 2021. Working families sure could have used it last year, and they sure could use it now, too. And frankly bringing it back should be a no-brainer – even for a Congress that all too frequently demonstrates it hasn’t a brain in the building.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax on the ultra-rich, and with a quickness. A recent Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) report told us what we all kinda knew already, that the richest one percent of Americans have increased their wealth by almost $30 trillion over the last 30 years; meanwhile the rest of us worry about getting slammed with surprise medical bills and wonder how much of the rent we can get away with not paying this month. So yeah, we’ve gotta change that, and it sure ain’t like taxing the rich harder polls badly! I guess all that’s left is for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) to intone for the 211th time that she won’t raise taxes on the rich because working families small businesses tough times Arizona I’m a maverick.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to repeal the notorious 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq, which the last four Presidents have all used to justify all manner of military misadventures that have spilled our blood and treasure for the greater glory of American defense corporations. Sorry, in the absence of a strategy at least somewhat moored in reality, I must assume that’s why it still happens, and if we take away this AUMF, there’ll be less of it. And not to pile on, but that’s five words they’re using to say “wage war.” Why don’t they just say “wage war”? Couldn’t be a profound lack of courage, could it?

Around the table: containing at least three trips down Memory Lane.

What’s the latest BS 2020 election conspiracy theory? Why, that certain “voting machines have features built into them under the auspices of protection or equal access for people with disabilities that can be used nefariously,” and supposedly were in Maricopa County to help deliver Arizona to Joe Biden. And why is this a BS theory? Because (among many, many other things!) over 90% of Maricopa County’s ballots were mail-in ballots, and only a few hundred folks even used the equal-access machines in Maricopa County, in a state Mr. Biden won by over 10,000 votes. And why is this theory even more disgusting? Because it implies that “helping disabled people vote” equals “cheating at elections,” and thus we should never fight discrimination ever. And what should we do to folks who come up with such “theories”? Shame and shun them unto death, that’s what. Healthy communities put up boundaries, and healthy communities also know when to get tough.

University of Exeter-led study surprisingly finds that Alzheimer’s disease changes non-neurons rather more dramatically than it changes neurons. Scientists had long supposed, reasonably, that Alzheimer’s has its biggest effects on neurons, but the Exeter-led study was able to isolate different kinds of cells much better than previous studies had done, hence the finding. This finding could change or expand the kinds of treatments doctors can use on patients with dementia; if you’ve witnessed first-hand how dementia takes over a mind, this will give you hope that folks in the future may be spared this debilitating disease. I wish the researchers the best.

Did you know that the FBI compiled a file on Aretha Franklin that was over 270 pages long? Given her lifelong involvement with the civil rights movement, I guess it’s not surprising, though the sheer clumsiness of the FBI’s efforts to tie her to pretty much any fevered fantasy is either amusing or disgusting, depending on your level of spiritual elevation. (I vote “disgusting” and I still don’t know which level is higher or lower.) I guess I’m curious about the FBI files on Robin Gibb; perhaps our FBI was listening a little too closely to “I Started a Joke.”

When I hear that tech billionaires are not only “dumber than you think” and think of themselves as “utterly powerless to affect the future” in the face of apocalypse, but are also “comedic monsters, who really mean to leave us all behind,” I am reminded that several of these fools are running for U.S. Senate right now, namely J.D. “Pretend Redneck Bankster Robot” Vance in Ohio, and yet another "libertarian" with a face even a mother could punch, Blake Masters in Arizona. I am also reminded that though my father’s and grandfather’s gardening talent has largely eluded me, I could still feed myself in an apocalypse far better than any of them could.

When I hear that New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc has now taken his third distinct position on the 2020 election – in order, he said it was stolen, then that it wasn’t stolen, and now that he doesn’t know – I’m reminded that people hate flip-floppers. He’d have done a lot better sticking to “it was stolen”; even the folks who don’t agree will more likely respect a man who sticks to his guns, as it were. I’m also reminded that Scott Walker took three separate positions on birthright citizenship in just one week that time he ran for President; anyone remember how many delegates he won? Oh, right, he flamed out before the primaries.

Finally, Herschel Walker sure has had a rough week, what with that allegation he paid for a woman's abortion and his son's turning oh him. I wonder if all this news is coming a bit early in the month, but then I also wonder if too many voters suspect any revelations they hear in late October, so maybe early October is the new late October. It sure was for Roy Moore in 2017 – though it wasn’t for Donald Trump in 2016 and, more importantly, was for Hillary Clinton that same year. Will right-wingers have pause before pulling the lever for him? I kid, of course – the only thing that matters to them is power, which they’ll have more of if Mr. Walker beats Sen. Warnock.

Action: concerning "free" trade, government spying, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Trade Adjustment Assistance program and pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act and the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Trade Adjustment Assistance program (or TAA). TAA expired this past July 1, but good Americans have lost their jobs to “free” trade agreements that outsource jobs to other nations since then, so they need our help – and if your job gets outsourced one day, you’ll need that help, too. Right-wing criticism of TAA essentially amount to “too many of the wrong people getting too much help,” which surely doesn’t resonate with anyone who's gotten help, and anyway is beside the point – if our government can do it better, they should, but “this could be done better” doesn’t equal “this should not exist,” except, apparently, in the right-wing mind.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Currently our laws prevent your internet service providing corporation (or ISP) from selling your private data to law enforcement – but our laws do not prevent your third-party data-collection corporations (which buy your data from your ISP) from selling your private data to law enforcement! If law enforcement thinks you’ve committed a crime, they should get a warrant from a judge to get your private data, not simply buy it from some corporation that should never even have had it in the first place. Our Founders gave us Fourth Amendment protections from searches and seizures for good reason.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would make it harder for bosses to prevent their workers from organizing by threatening and propagandizing them – a lot of workers have organized lately! – plus it would nullify notorious “right-to-work” laws at the state level, which you would do better to call “right to work for less” laws. Remember: they say “right-to-work” laws “give you a choice” whether or not to join a union, but if you don’t join a union, you’ll have a lot less choice about everything – pay, benefits, working conditions. So don’t believe the hype.

Action: concerning voting rights, discrimination, and saving our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell state Secretaries of State to make it easier for college students to vote, tell the Biden Administration to stop discrimination in health care, and tell our USPS to fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

RISE helps you tell state Secretaries of State to make it easier for college students to vote. You’ll hear right-wingers say college kids aren’t really invested in the area where they’re going to school, though, hey, nobody likes people who act like the Emotion Police! Right-wingers also love saying you should have to work harder, not easier, to vote, though if you have to “earn” rights, they're not really rights! Of course their real problem is that college kids don’t vote Republican very often, but if they don’t like how they vote, maybe they should try attracting their vote, instead of suppressing it. That's what a bootstrapper would do!

Moms Rising helps you tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to enact the most vigorous rule possible prohibiting discrimination in health care. Moms Rising also helps you describe how you’ve faced discrimination in health care; chances are, if you’re Black or Brown or female or gay or transgender, you have, whether it’s a doctor dismissing symptoms because “Black women always exaggerate” (yes, some doctors say that!) or a doctor refusing to treat a trans patient because of his “religious” “conscience.” I’ve said it before, but if you won’t treat people because of your “religious” “beliefs,” you need to find another profession – maybe one that doesn’t involve service.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell President Biden to install two more members of our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors so the Board can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Who really, really deserves it – he’s cutting services, raising prices, and slashing jobs like this is some private corporation he can bleed for his own benefit or his shareholders’. But our Postal Service is a government agency that belongs to us, and thus should serve us, not some corporatist ideology. One of the main reasons they should serve us? They deliver a lot of our life-saving medicines through the mail. And if we want our Postal Service to do that right, we have to get rid of the bosses who’d do it wrong.

Action: concerning housing, privacy, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to increase affordable housing funding and pass the Protecting Data at the Border Act, and tell your Senators to pass the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase funding for affordable housing in America. Why? Because rents are skyrocketing, because a lot of good Americans face eviction, because too many rich folks block too many working families from buying a good home – and because we were a much, much stronger country when we took affordable housing seriously. Don’t brook any rubbish about how folks just need to bootstrap, because when rents shoot up higher than inflation, ain’t no bootstrapping happening. Don’t brook any dumb jokes about “the projects,” either. Racism looks intractable, but to just throw up your hands about it? That’d be un-American.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5524/S. 2957, the Protecting Data at the Border Act. Typically our government has to get a warrant to see your cellphone, but officials have been searching everyone’s cellphones at the border willy-nilly, our Constitution be damned. The Protecting Data at the Border Act would require our law enforcement to get warrants before searching cellphones at the border, and before you protest but they’re not citizens, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) consider how easily our government could abuse this loophole to harass American citizens at the border, if they, you know, happen to be the “wrong color.”

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Your right-wing Senators will likely lecture you about giving workers a “choice” to organize, but they ignore the bosses who don’t give them that choice! Bosses make workers’ lives miserable, demanding more for less pay, and then force workers to attend anti-union propaganda meetings and threaten those who organize by telling them they’ll fire them or outsource their job or close their plant. If all that’s OK with your Senator, he’s a monster. If it’s not OK with you, then you’re a decent person, and you ought to give your Senators what-for about it.

Action: concerning Social Security, the filibuster, and marriage equality.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, and tell your Senators to ditch the filibuster and pass the Respect for Marriage Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723/S. 3071, the Social Security 2100 Act. Republicans sure are getting, ah, courageous about wanting to injure our Social Security benefits – Sen. Ron Johnson (E-WI), running for re-election as we speak, thinks we should make Congress authorize it every year, never mind the promise we made to seniors a lifetime ago, and he also thinks we ought to invest it in index funds, never mind that the stock market goes up and down enough to make you puke. Better to tax the rich harder and invest that money in higher Social Security benefits, as the Social Security 2100 Act would do.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to get rid of the damn filibuster already. Yes, that was Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) saying this: “Not only am I committed to the 60 vote threshold, I have an incredibly unpopular view, I actually think we should restore the 60-vote threshold for the areas in which it has been eliminated already.” Indeed, you have “an incredibly unpopular view”! You should be used to that! More to the point, of course, is that it’s an incredibly injurious view – only an aspiring Galaxy Brain would tell us we need even more gridlock, as if Republican filibuster abuse hasn’t been giving the middle finger to the popular will for close to two decades. So, yeah, we need to get in our Senators’ grills about that.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act. Our House passed it, it would protect gay and interracial marriage from our Supreme Court, and Justice Thomas has said out loud that our Court should use the Dobbs decision to go after gay marriage, so our Senators need to act, regardless of their “calculations” of Democrat caucus numbers after the midterms. Yeah, it looks good for Senate Democrats, but we’ve heard that before! And the time for justice is always right now, so let’s get in their grills about this, too.

Action: concerning voting rights, pregnant workers, and credit reporting.

Long story short: tell your state legislators to create ranked-choice voting in your state, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and reform our credit reporting system. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to create a ranked choice voting system in your state. Maine and Alaska use it, so now third-party candidates no longer create openings for right-wing ogres (cough Paul LePage cough) to win elections. Right-wingers no doubt cite that as a reason not to use this system, and indeed, I haven’t heard a single coherent argument against it. Ranked-choice voting – in which you have to essentially seed candidates in order of preference – not only ensures that independent candidates can run and win, but also ensures that the two major parties can’t use independents to defeat the other guy. I think that’s something we can all get behind.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1085/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. We’ve gone over how the PWFA doesn’t “make it impossible for bosses to manage their workers,” but I have neglected to mention that the bill would protect all female workers who could get pregnant, by preventing bosses from making workers miserable if they get pregnant after being hired. A woman of child-bearing age could get pregnant at any time, but that doesn’t mean they suddenly lose all the skills and qualifications that got them hired in the first place! Sadly, too many bosses act like it does, because they’re not up to dealing with challenges. But they shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to overhaul our credit reporting system. Why? So that it doesn’t make so many mistakes, so credit agencies can’t let identity thieves steal your personal data, and so credit reporting doesn’t allow historical racism to keep crushing Black and Brown folks! Our private credit reporting corporations do all of that, and we just put up with it, thinking there’s no other way. Of course, there is another way: a public credit reporting agency, accountable to the American people, competing with the private ones! Now let’s watch the big credit reporting corporations soil their shorts.

Action: concerning overtime pay, drug policy, and offshore drilling.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to help more Americans get overtime protections, decriminalize pot at the federal level, and end offshore oil and gas drilling leases. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell President Biden to update our nation’s overtime rules so more good Americans can get overtime pay. You may also want to tell him to do better job than President Obama did; the Obama rule, overturned by a Texas District Court Judge late in 2016, essentially established the difference between workers with executive/administrative duties and workers without only by salary, when the rest of us establish that difference by, you know, looking at a worker’s actual duties. President Biden can avoid this by raising the pay threshold for overtime pay, without overreaching (or sabotaging!).

Progress America helps you tell President Biden to take marijuana off of Schedule I (and not move it to any other Schedule), which would essentially decriminalize pot at the federal level. This is exactly the wrong place to be a “law-and-order” politician – why, many right-wingers who fancy themselves “law-and-order” adherents actually support legalizing pot! And despite his reported misgivings, Mr. Biden promised on the campaign trail to “decriminalize marijuana, period,” “let out” anyone serving time for possession, and “expunge” the crime from everyone’s records; it’s really, really hard to find any wiggle room there. So he can start by descheduling pot.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Bureau (or BOEM) to end offshore oil and gas leases. Again, President Biden said he’d put an end to that, and his attempt to do so got overturned in court, but this public commenting process allows us to establish a body of evidence that might get the next oil/gas drilling lease ban through a court – our laws don’t allow our Executive branch to solicit public opinion and then simply ignore it, after all. Think we should keep drilling for oil and gas in the ocean? Then think of the Spillageddon in the Gulf slamming our shrimp industry in 2010. And think of oil/gas drilling killing our salmon industry in Alaska.

Action: concerning taxes, refugees, and insulin.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, and cap insulin prices for all Americans. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk “No Tax Breaks for Corporations Without Relief for Families.” You’ll specifically ask for the return of the expanded Child Tax Credit (or CTC) which put $250 and $300 checks every month in working families’ bank accounts through 2021; Congress wants to pass a bunch of corporate welfare tax breaks at the end of the year, just like they do every year in the hope that no one will notice, but certainly we should tell them not to do that if they won’t help working families at the same time. And, frankly, we ought to tell them to stop giving corporations handouts, too. The letter the FCNL helps you write will give you space to say that, if you like.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8685/S. 4787, the Afghan Adjustment Act. The Afghan Adjustment Act would let allow more good Afghan citizens escape the Taliban, as long as they meet certain requirements, like serving in our military or the former government’s military, and when right-wingers scream at you that THEZE PEEPULZ AREZ NOTZ TEH VETTEDZ!!!!, kindly repeat the bit about “certain requirements” at them. Right-wingers love pretending that nobody screens or vets a refugee in America, when actually that process can take years! So don’t put up with any BS about that, any more than you put up with BS about crime.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans. Republicans stand at the ready to campaign against lower drug prices! Do I have to admire their chutzpah at deciding to die on this completely unpopular hill? No, I do not, because if it works – or, at least, if it doesn’t look like it fails – then all future Republicans will feel even more emboldened to take unpopular positions that hurt good Americans. I don’t know how many more times Republicans have to tie the woman to the train tracks for Republican voters to get it, but we’d better plan on it being a few more times – and we'd better play offense.

Around the table: of dictatorships and monopolies, and the good folks who fight them.

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept assesses “The Dark Odds Facing Iran’s Brave Protestors.” Protests have followed the state’s murder of a woman for not wearing her hijab in strict accordance with new right-wing government laws, and though we want better for good Iranians, Egyptians and Syrians have failed to capitalize on the Arab Spring because “life under dictatorship had not allowed any alternative institutions to grow that could easily replace the tyrannies now in place”; Iran’s police state has similarly suppressed such institutions. That’s a cautionary tale for those Americans who think crime is the number one issue facing them because they’ve watched the same four or five clips on the TV news for two years now.

Matt Stoller assesses our progress in our fight against monopolies. Long story short: yes, our government loses antitrust cases in court, but has also made progress on right-to-repair, wage-fixing, and price-fixing. Still, “(i)n a highly concentrated economy, losing merger challenges simply shouldn’t happen,” but he also reminds us that we lose before very, very bad judging. Mr. Stoller remains hopeful that lawyers will figure out how to win cases even against bad judges, and that judges aren’t evil per se but “just operating on autopilot with antitrust. And he also reminds us that the “narrative of powerlessness is perhaps the most powerful weapon in the monopolists’ arsenal, because it causes us to give up on self-government itself.” We definitely need to hear that more often! The “phony war” metaphor at the beginning is a bonus.

When I hear that 80% of Americans want a federally-funded paid family/medical leave program, I recall that Newt Gingrich used to say if 70 percent of Americans want something, they should get it, though I bet he would just mouth a bunch of BS about it now and our “liberal” media wouldn’t challenge him on it. I’ll bet most of Joe Manchin’s constituents want a paid family/medical leave program, too, and if he’s scared that his approvals in West Virginia are upside down now that he’s helped bring the Inflation Reduction Act to fruition, I would remind him that his job ain’t just to do his constituents’ will, but to convince them when he’s actually done it.

Ho hum, Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State candidate wants to end mail-in voting because of alleged/nonexistent “voter fraud,” but not only has he voted by mail numerous times, he’s also done it while living in a different state from the one in which he was voting. In a sane, moral, and decent civilization, this news would finish his campaign; in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, he needs only hope he’s worshiped enough at the altar of His Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump to please the big man’s votaries. Having claimed to be a “victim of election fraud” as the Republican nominee for Nevada’s 4th U.S. House district in 2020 – he lost that race by over 16,000 votes and nearly five percentage points – he may be well on his way toward this goal.

When I hear that Republicans actually plan to campaign on repealing drug-pricing caps passed entirely with Democratic votes – and that they’re using the same horsedoodle arguments about “stifling innovation” and “drug takeover schemes” and “price controls,” phrases that anger far-right partisans and literally no one else – all I can say is that I guess they’re counting on gerrymandering to deliver them the House, because they sure ain’t counting on making winning arguments. The shame of it is that it might work, especially given our well-founded suspicion that Democrats don’t want to win elections as much as they want to raise campaign money.

Finally, how about some good news? Over 270 workers at the Roosevelt Boulevard Home Depot in Philadelphia have filed a petition with our National Labor Relations Board to form a union. Much like Walmart, Home Depot has unusually terrific workers they get to treat like crap because those workers don’t have the opportunity to take their skills somewhere else anymore – which, of course, is because Home Depot has crushed smaller, independent hardware stores everywhere it’s gone. So let’s add “balancing monopoly power” as yet another reason we need more unions.

Action: concerning corruption, drug prices, and campaign finance disclosure.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress, stop trying to prevent Americans from importing prescription drugs from Canada, and pass the DISCLOSE Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress. Yes, you’re telling them to pass laws that would prevent themselves from trading in stock, but hell, if you’re serving in Congress, you ought to be quite familiar with the temptations of power by now – and you should also know that power corrupts. Congressfolk investing in corporations will absolutely make them less willing to take on those corporations when they prey on consumers of pump filth into our air and water, and they’re supposed to take on polluters and financial predators on our behalf. They say we can trust them; I say it’s our duty as Americans not to trust them, and to demand better behavior from them.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to prevent good Americans from importing prescription drugs from Canada. Why do folks do that? Because the drugs cost a lot less, that’s why! And how do they cost less? Because Canada’s government buys drugs on behalf of its citizens, and with the bargaining power of an entire nation, they can get better prices. Hmm, there’s a lesson in there, somewhere. In the meantime, Congress might actually pass a FDA funding bill that would include a provision preventing good Americans from getting cheaper drugs, so we need to tell them to cut that out.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 443, the DISCLOSE Act, which would (among other things!) force disclosure of all big campaign finance donors who give more than $10,000 to campaigns or committees. I know, I know, Senate Republicans blocked it yesterday, but why take that from them? Why assume that we can't express our will because they've expressed theirs? And, let's face it, their will sucks. Money isn't speech, campaign spending is a far, far larger impediment to free speech than making big donors donate in public, and calling campaign finance disclosure "bullying" can just cry into their thousand dollar bills. They really shouldn’t whine about it, though. Nobody except a Trumphole likes whining.

Action: concerning paid family leave, law and order, and credit reporting reform.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass paid family/medical leave legislation, expand our Supreme Court, and reform our credit reporting system. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass paid family/medical leave legislation. Yes, Our One True Great and Real American President Joe Manchin famously vetoed paid family leave almost a year ago during Build Back Better Act deliberations, and perhaps worse, suggested it was a stupid idea! This is the same fellow who thought families were spending their expanded Child Tax Credit on drugs, so we should take what he says with a grain of salt, but folks who can’t take care of their kids or their parents or themselves without fear of losing their jobs wouldn’t think it’s stupid! And unpaid leave isn’t enough! Since it’s, you know, unpaid. Labor unions demand paid family/medical leave in their contracts for good reason.

Demand Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand our Supreme Court already. I suppose the right-wing answer to that would be just win more elections already, but you can’t fill Supreme Court openings that don’t exist, and right-wing hypocrisy on this matter is legendary – they wouldn’t let Barack Obama fill the opening left by Antonin Scalia’s death, because TEH PEEPULZ SHOULDZ DECIDEZ!!!!, but then filled the opening left by Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death mere weeks before the 2020 election, the people, apparently, be damned. And we have every reason to believe the six-member right-wing majority on the Court’s reign of terror is just beginning – by the time they’re done, nobody will have any rights at all. Unless we get some more liberals up there.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell Congress to reform our credit reporting system in America. They suggest more than a few good reforms, but my favorite one is the public credit scoring entity; that’s bound to work better than the private ones! Remember all those years they said government was stupid and only private corporations knew what they were doing? Yeah, that was a load of horsedoodle – now private credit reporting agencies lie to you about how they’re arriving at their credit scores or simply giving you inaccurate scores, and when private corporations hurt us, our government has to step in on our behalf. Otherwise, why are we paying taxes?

Action: concerning marriage equality, health care, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, extend the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act, and stop USPS Postmaster DeJoy’s plan to cut jobs and close down post offices. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Daily Kos and Moms Rising help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act. Democrats have decided to hold a vote on this bill after the midterms, perhaps figuring that the voters will give them a sort of mandate at the midterms, but they’ve been wrong about that before – not too long ago, in fact! – and anyway our job isn’t to align with Democratic Party aims but to press all of our elected representatives to do our will. And I think it’s pretty clear by now that very few people still have a sad over a gay couple getting married – and even fewer folks still get mad over interracial marriage. And the Respect for Marriage Act would protect both. So let’s not let a tiny, whiny minority have all the say about everything.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act, which provides compensation and health care to folks exposed to nuclear testing and uranium mining. These folks are disproportionately Native Americans, by the way, in case you thought environmental racism was a recent phenomenon. We stopped testing nuclear bombs in 1992, but that was only 30 years ago, so quite a few of the folks who got sick off that test (and others) are still with us and still need our support. Sadly we’re still mining for uranium, despite all the evidence telling us it pollutes our water and makes us sick, so we’ll need to keep this program around for longer yet. But we won’t, unless we get in our Congressfolks’ grills about it.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our Congressfolk to stop Postmaster DeJoy’s plan to close post offices and slash jobs. Our Post Office isn’t some corporation for banksters to drain; our Constitution actually mandates that our government run it, and run it well. Also, our Post Office is all some rural and urban folks got, and cutting jobs and services will make it harder for good Americans to get the life-saving medicines they need. Our USPS delivers a lot of that now, and who’ll do it if they don’t? Some private corporation that’ll charge you an arm and a leg? No thank you, I’ll take the Postal Service that belongs to us, not because we’re shareholders or customers, but because we’re Americans.

Action: concerning voting rights, pollution, and pregnant workers.

Long story short: tell state and local legislators to secure voting rights, and tell your Congressfolk to protect us from pollution and make the workplace fairer to pregnant workers. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Common Cause helps you tell your federal and state legislators to stop jailing people for unintentional voting errors. More precisely, the state should not affirm your right to vote and then jail you for exercising that right! Right, Ron DeSantis? His government just arrested 18 folks for “voter fraud,” and then the world learned that Florida county governments had told all of them they were eligible to vote! That’s some drama they got going over there. And frankly, the state shouldn’t take away your right to vote for any reason! But let’s at least protect those who vote in good faith because the state told them they could vote. This just ain’t that damn deep.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to abandon efforts to weaken enforcement of the National Environmental Policy Act. This could be the Manchin “side deal” he demanded so we could pass the Inflation Reduction Act, but he should have put it in the bill if he wanted it so badly! I mean, having demanded that President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda be split up into parts that could be “bipartisan” and parts that couldn’t – and having prevented most of the latter from passing at all! – he should know when he’s getting his own medicine. But seriously, we can’t rubber-stamp fossil fuel projects without ensuring they don’t spew filth all over the place, lest we hurt our children, and our children’s children.

Finally, the National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1085/S. 1486, the Pregnant Worker’s Fairness Act. Perhaps I haven’t been explicit enough: folks who would tell you that the Pregnant Worker’s Fairness Act would “prevent managers from doing their jobs” are lying. (Does it do any good to assume folks just don’t know what they’re talking about anymore? Nah.) And you don’t need to take my word for it – just read the bill and note that it requires that bosses make “reasonable accommodations” for their pregnant workers. And folks who think it isn’t “reasonable” for bosses to give extra bathroom breaks and not refuse to hire pregnant workers merely because they’re pregnant shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning political prisoners, discrimination in health care, and climate change.

Long story short: tell the government of Egypt to release Alaa Abdel Fattah, tell our HHS Department to prevent discrimination in health care, and tell our DOT to properly measure the climate change emissions caused by our transportation system. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Egypt to release Alaa Abdel Fattah from prison. So let’s play “what are the charges?” In 2013 he got 15 years for, dig this, “organizing a political protest without a permit”; any government that’ll give you 15 years for that is a snowflake government which will resort to any tyranny to oppress its people. Eventually they shortened that sentence, but in 2021 gave him five years for “broadcasting false news,” another charge favored by snowflake governments. They even tried a “shooting at soldiers” charge in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, but couldn’t make it stick! They should let him out before they embarrass themselves further.

The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell the Biden Administration to enact the most vigorous anti-discrimination-in-health-care rule possible. The Affordable Care Act authorizes our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to enact rules protecting good Americans from discrimination, and a lot of folks experience it, from the person who doesn’t speak English well getting post-surgery instructions only in English to the transgender person not getting care because their doctor doesn’t like them, or the Black woman getting her symptoms dismissed because their doctor doesn’t like them. All of that’s horrible, and nobody’s “religious” “beliefs” should allow them to inflict it on their patients.

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our Department of Transportation to issue the most vigorous greenhouse gas emission tabulation rules possible. So we can better fight climate change! You can guess the Republican response to DOT’s proposed rule – that it would be a “burden” on corporations. They’re so law-and-order about detaining Black folks indefinitely, but not so much about corporations polluting your air and water. Funny how that works; you might almost think the amount of corporate money they get for their campaigns warps their thinking! And that’s why we have to get in their grills about it.

Action: concerning our media, Social Security, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, fully-fund our Social Security Administration, and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Remember that time I told you to tell your Congressfolk to reject the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act? Well, Matt Stoller has convinced me I was wrong, so feel free to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass it. I said the bill would have “link taxes” in it, and while such a thing could happen, it hasn’t happened in Australia, where a similar bill passed and has revitalized the journalism industry there. The bill would basically allow newspapers to collectively bargain for better ad rates with Google and Facebook; newspapers can’t do that now because it would run afoul of antitrust law, but farmers get this exemption under certain circumstances, and newspapers should, too.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to fulfill President Biden’s request for additional Social Security Administration funding. We’re finally starting to fund our IRS so we can go after rich tax cheats, and Republicans are telling lies about it – the IRS is coming for you, working person, as though that wasn’t all they were already doing! What will Republicans say about funding our Social Security Administration so it can reopen offices and extend hours? I mean, Rick Scott already said any cut to Medicare spending equals a cut to benefits, so the opposite must also apply, right? I kid, of course – they’ll say whatever. But our seniors deserve more help.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuel corporations. Joe Manchin made sure the Inflation Reduction Act had some of those, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still tell our Congressfolk that we don’t want to spend any more taxpayer money (i.e., our hard-earned money) on dying industries that pump filth into our air and water. But, as the Inflation Reduction Act also does, we need to subsidize emerging renewable energies more than we subsidize oil, gas, or coal. And the only folks who don’t see that are the folks who make all their money from oil, gas, and coal – and the Congressfolk they buy, of course.

Action: concerning chemical safety, consumer protection, and fuel emissions.

Long story short: tell our EPA to protect communities from chemical pollution, tell our FTC to protect consumers from unscrupulous car dealers, and tell our DOT to protect communities from fuel emissions. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue the most vigorous chemical safety disclosure rules possible for industrial polluters. Which will fight them tooth-and-nail, as they did under the Trump Administration, because kill jobs cause inflation nanny state environmental extremists but the real problem, as usual, is that making big polluters pollute less affects executives’ ability to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home, and nothing else. Besides, don’t the (mostly Black, Brown, and poor) communities deserve to know how their air and water gets polluted? It helps them fight for cleaner air and water, that’s for sure, and everyone deserves a fighting chance.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to issue the most vigorous rules possible protecting car buyers from shady practices. And “car buyers” will almost certainly include you sometime in the future! And you may face a car dealer who won’t tell you what’s really wrong with the car you buy or charge you more than the advertised price or even change the terms of your financing after you’ve driven off the lot, and you deserve better than all of that from car dealers. So let’s make sure our FTC hears that we want more disclosure, fewer lies, and stronger penalties for those who won’t do the right thing.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of Transportation (or DOT) to issue the most vigorous transportation emissions rules possible for our states. Which can then have the freedom to reduce emissions in a manner more consistent with their constituents’ will – such as more bike lanes, more public transit, more electric charging stations, and more walkable streets. And remember: the only people in America who want more pollution are the folks who don’t want to clean up the messes they’ve already made – or the messes they’re planning to make. And they shouldn’t get all the say about everything in America.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and prison phone justice.

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to count mail-in ballots when they get them, and tell your Congressfolk to enact insulin price caps and pass the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to let vote counters count mail-in ballots when they receive them, instead of waiting until after Election Day to start counting them. That’s what created the illusion of Donald Trump leads in both Pennsylvania and Michigan the day after Election Day – and it helped create the illusion of a “stolen” election, almost like that was the whole idea! And can you imagine legions of Doug Mastriano votaries brandishing guns at vote counters at every location in the Philly/Pittsburgh area so that they don’t count the mail-in votes? If you can, then you see the need for reform, I trust.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin prices for all Americans. The Inflation Reduction Act capped insulin prices for Medicare patients, since the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that was all they could get through reconciliation, and therein lies the problem: 10 Senate Republicans won’t vote to keep insulin prices low so good Americans don’t go broke paying for a life-saving medicine. I mean, we can’t be the greatest nation on Earth if we let people die because the medicine that’ll save their life is too expensive. So we have to keep on our Congressfolk, and punish them with losing elections if they keep defying our will.

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2489, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act, which would prevent big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners and their families when they try to call each other. Just because prisoners are literally a captive market doesn’t mean we should let big corporations charge them whatever they want for phone calls, and not just because prisoners who stay in touch with their families go back to prison a whole lot less. It’s also fucking cruel. Too much “free” market ideology still infects our politics; we act like “interfering” with the “free” market is sacrilegious, though that's what sacrilegious. So it’s time to get right with God.

Action: concerning marriage, pregnant workers, and baby food safety.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the Respect for Marriage Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, and tell all your Congressfolk to pass the Baby Food Safety Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Amnesty International helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which would protect gay marriage and interracial marriage from future Supreme Court decisions declaring them unconstitutional. Recall that Justice Thomas has told the Supreme Court to do just this, using the logic, such as it is, of the Dobbs ruling. And still Republicans pretend the Respect for Marriage Act is a “stupid waste of time,” in Marco Rubio’s words. You know what’s a stupid waste of time? Marco Rubio. And if we all call our Senators and demand they pass the Respect for Marriage Act, we’ll have to waste much less time on him.

The ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1085/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would make it harder for bosses to fire or harass workers for the cardinal sin of getting pregnant. Specifically, the bill would force bosses to make “reasonable accommodations” for pregnant workers – including less strenuous assignments and more bathroom breaks – and would prevent bosses from refusing to hire someone instead of making those accommodations. Let me guess the Republican argument against it: lazy sluts trial lawyers nanny state right to work fuck your feelings. I don’t think a pregnant woman going to the can for the 12th time would find any of that persuasive.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2229/S. 1019, the Baby Food Safety Act, which would limit the amount of certain heavy metals (like mercury, lead, and inorganic arsenic) that could be present in baby food. Since they damage babies’ brains! I guess the Republican argument against this one might be a bit more cogent: more regulations means more baby food shortages and you remember baby food shortages? But n.b. I said “a bit” – a great nation can insure its baby food is safe and plentiful at the same time, and demanding that we sacrifice safety for plenty is the mark of someone who doesn’t believe America is a great nation anymore.

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure, self-managed abortion, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell President Biden to issue campaign disclosure rules for federal contracting corporations, tell state Attorneys General to protect self-managed abortion, and tell President Biden to appoint two new USPS Board of Governors members who’ll fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to issue an Executive Order forcing federal contracting corporations to disclose their political campaign spending. They are taking our money, after all, so we deserve to know how they’re spending it! You may recognize that since most corporations contract with our federal government for some reason or other, this Executive Order would, to some degree, get around our Congress’s refusal to pass the DISCLOSE Act. If folks don’t like that, they can try to take away our President’s authority to issue such an Order! Rather than whine about TEH AMURIKAN CAESARZ!!!!, I mean. Whining is so unseemly.

Daily Kos helps you tell your state Attorney General to protect the individual right to self-managed abortion. Thanks to technological advances, self-managed abortion (largely with mifepristone or miferpristol) is now generally safe up to the 12th week of pregnancy, and while states have largely left self-managed abortion alone even in their anti-abortion zeal, some prosecutors still go after self-managed abortions – particularly in poor/Black/Brown neighborhoods. But Attorneys General can (among other things) prioritize resources in different directions. And to stop America from turning women into mere breeders, they should.

Finally, Save the Post Office helps you tell President Biden to nominate two more qualified individuals to our USPS Board of Governors, so they can get rid of Postmaster General DeJoy. Why get rid of Mr. DeJoy? Roll call! He tried to interfere with the 2020 election! He had money in the corporation that provided free COVID tests this past winter! He’s raised prices, cut services, and slashed jobs! And all this drama means good Americans who rely on our Postal Service to get their life-saving medications suffer. And that’s a sin we should definitely punish Mr. DeJoy for committing.