Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning taxes, pollution, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end the Trump tax cuts and pass working family tax cuts, reject the so-called Energy Permitting Reform Act, and pass the Snowmobiles Aren't Weapons 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 youtell our House's Ways and Means Committee to let the Trump "tax cuts" expire and focus on delivering real tax relief for working families. Because the Trump "tax cuts" delivered massive tax cuts for the rich and tiny tax cuts for working families, whereas the Child Tax Credit expansion under President Biden delivered $250 and $300 checks per child per month to qualifying families in 2021. Will Republicans do any of that? Of course not! But will it cost them politically if they ignore us when we get in their grills? Yes, it will. After all, tax cuts for working families are popular, whereas tax cuts for the rich are, er, not.

The Native Organizers Alliance Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Energy Permitting Reform Act, which would fast-track approval of fossil fuel projects – whether they're actually safe or not, what's the difference? – and would also open up more public lands to mining and oil and gas drilling. "Fast-tracking approval," of course, also means taking away tools good Americans have to stop pollution in their backyards. Too many Americans think faster is better with every damn thing, but faster isn't better when you're trying to avoid spewing filth into our air and water. I'd say you should err on the side of taking your time and doing things right, but gosh, that would sound awfully conservative of me.

Finally, the Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Snowmobiles Aren't Weapons Act, which would, as its title implies, ban using snowmobiles to murder animals on public lands. Because who would do that? Some asshole in Wyoming, apparently, who ran over a female wolf with his snowmobile and then paraded her not-dead-yet body around a bar before finally shooting her. But this bill is so obviously a lay-up that it's nine House co-sponsors include four Republicans, including the bill's main sponsor, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, and the otherwise-notorious Matt Gaetz of Florida. But too often a no-brain Congress forgets to pass no-brainer bills, so we should still speak out.

Action: concerning “free” trade, cruelty to animals, and cruelty in credit reports.

Long story short: tell our government to make fair trade deals, protect elephants from trophy hunting, and keep medical debt out of credit reports. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Biden Administration you don’t want their proposed Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (or APEP) to be like all those “free” trade deals of years gone by. Yes, the Biden Administration is actually taking comments on it! And if they didn’t want to hear from us, they shouldn’t have asked us to speak. Among the things you’ll ask an APEP to do: get rid of the investor-state dispute settlement (or ISDS) systems that put money before law and order, and raise labor and climate standards in Latin American nations. The main reason our big corporations relocate there, of course, is so they can pay workers in dung pellets and make them work like slaves! So we’ve got to fight that, same as we fight cruelty everywhere.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ban all imports of trophy Amboseli-West Kilimanjaro elephants. Because they deserve better than to be hunted to death for sport! And if we ban their import, we can dry up the market for it in Africa! And who hunts an African elephant? Not someone who needs food or shelter, that’s for sure! No, it’s always some no-work-doing bazillionaire who’s never had to struggle to earn a damn thing in his life. Putting down an elephant in its reproductive peak just because it has hundred-pound tusks is damn sure not a way to earn the respect of anyone who matters. Yet, because money, it’ll still happen – unless we tell our government to make sure it doesn’t happen.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to follow through with their plan to ban credit reporting corporations from using medical debt in their scores. There’s more to this, of course, than just preventing your credit score from taking a hit just because you got hit by a car or got cancer: our CFPB’s proposed rule would also ban debt collectors from using medical devices as collateral – I mean, folks want to keep using their wheelchairs and prosthetic arms, right? And not for nothing, but a lot of medical debt reporting is just plain wrong, and why should someone else’s mistake literally cost you an arm and a leg? “Money” is not an adequate reason, for that or anything else.

Action: concerning animal cruelty, warrantless spying, and paid family/medical leave.

Long story short: tell California state legislators to pass the OCTO Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act and enact a paid family/medical leave program 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.

California residents, take note: Eko helps you tell your state legislators to pass the Oppose Cruelty to Octopuses (or OCTO) Act, which would ban octopus farming in a state with some 840 miles of coastline (per the Congressional Research Service). Octopi are hella intelligent and hella solitary – know anyone like that? – but octopus farms are as bad as factory farms for chickens, putting octopi in confined spaces until they eat each other out of frustration and misery. If that makes you laugh, navigate away from this page now; it’s not for you. But if you empathize them, and you live in California, maybe help them out a bit.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would stop big corporations from selling our personal data to our government without our government getting a warrant first. That’s all we’ve ever demanded – that our government get a damn warrant like they’d been doing for over 200 years, but which in 2001 suddenly wasn’t good enough for an incompetent Executive like George W. Bush. What happens when our government uses our tax money to buy up our personal data without a warrant? Our government gets yet more power to abuse us, that’s what. And we should always fight that.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a national paid family/medical leave program, not least so that mothers – who already have full-time, no-time-off, no-pay jobs as mothers – can actually get time off at their paid jobs so they can take care of themselves and their families. Don’t listen to any WHEREZ WILLZ YOUZ GETZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!! rubbish, either – everyone won’t take off at the same time, and Sen. Gillibrand’s bill proposed to take a mere $8/month from a worker making $50,000 annually. Eight dollars a month! And that’s a moderate approach – you know I’d tax the rich to pay for that.

Action: concerning birth control, animal cruelty, and autonomous weapons.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to make health insurance corporations cover over-the-counter birth control pills without prescriptions or co-pays, tell our government to stop hunters from going after wolves with vehicles, and tell our government to ban autonomous and AI weapons from the battlefield. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to mandate that health insurance corporations must cover over-the-counter birth control pills, with no prescription and no co-pay. After all, it’s safe and won’t be a controlled substance, so why would women need prescriptions? So someone can control them, I guess! But that’s not a good reason to do it. Personal to folks who claim “religious” “consciences” about the matter: I never demanded back my tax money used in the Iraq war, so you can sheathe that “conscience,” which is only meant to guide you anyway.

Environmental Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service to stop allowing hunters to go after wolves with vehicles. Even if hunters weren’t running over wolves with snowmobiles, it’s not very sporting, frankly, to give yourself such a tremendous advantage over your prey. I mean, they are trying to relive how their ancestors lived, are they not? Well, our ancestors didn’t use such high tech; I hope I never see the day hunters go after wolves with laser rifles. Personal to those who profess to worry about wolves eating cattle: we can’t solve problems with just any old solution.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to forbid robot fighter jets and/or any other autonomous weapon from the battlefield. Remember the Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon”? War was so easy for the aliens in that story – “targets” “destroyed” as if in a video game, with citizens willfully marching off to gas chambers afterward – that it went on for five centuries! Remember the Philip K. Dick short story “Second Variety”? The drones in that one started to wage war on humans – who are on the ropes when we come in – until ultimately starting to wage war on each other. Ultimately I bet autonomous weapons are like AI and bitcoin – scams for rich suckers. But why appease scam artists?

Action: concerning public lands and elephant-hunting.

Long story short: tell our government not to run roughshod over Native American rights in Big Cypress, tell Tanzania to stop elephant-hunting on their land and at their borders, and tell our government to reject large-scale old-growth logging in Vermont’s Green Mountains. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell the Biden Administration to halt their attempt to convert Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida into a wilderness. But what’s wrong with converting a preserve into a wilderness, you ask? Good question! Currently federal law allows the Miccosukee nation to use and occupy Big Cypress, and converting it into a wilderness would likely result in the Miccosukee getting kicked out! Since that is, historically, what happens. Native Organizers Alliance helps you ask that the Biden Administration pause this process until a supplemental environmental impact statement can ensure the Miccosukee get heard.

Care2 helps you tell the government of Tanzania to reinstate and enforce a moratorium on elephant-hunting. Too many elephants die for their tusks, and to what end? Money? Yikes, folks who think money is the be-all-end-all of existence have a disease called cynicism. Religious artifacts? Virtually anything can be a religious artifact if it means enough to you or someone you love! And if hunters argue with you that older elephants should be fair game because they’re past their prime, ask them if it’d be OK for aliens to hunt their grandparents. Either all elephants are important, or none are; needless to say I tend to agree with the former argument.

Finally, Earth Justice helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service not to allow logging in Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest. Whether it’s public water or old-growth forests, seems we’re always telling our government not to let big corporations siphon off resources on our public lands, and though the cynical would say HA HA HA THAT’S WHY YOU DON’T LET GOVERNMENT DO ANYTHING HA HA HA SNORT, reasonable people know that once you win something in this world, you have to keep winning it, and if we didn’t have public lands and public comment periods, we’d have no say over what happens.

Action: concerning bankster pay, big ag, and food safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the RECOUP Act, reject the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act, and pass the Expanded Food Safety Investigation 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.

Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Recovering Executive Compensation Obtained from Unaccountable Practices (or RECOUP) Act. Remember how the Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, and Signature Bank (the last one had Barney Frank as a director, ha ha) all collapsed a little over six months ago? And did you know that Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO sold over $3 million in stock right before its collapse and a few First Republic executives sold about $12 million in stock in the months before its collapse? The RECOUP Act would, as its acronym implies, allow our government to recoup such executive compensation a full two years before a bank collapse. Maybe that’ll teach executives that they’re supposed to look out for their customers before they look out for themselves! OK, perhaps not. But if we don’t come out in force for this bill, it’ll be much harder to provide such teachable moments to executives in the future.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act. The bill sure sounds like it has a good name, but it’s an Orwellian title like so many others: it would nullify any state and local laws governing animal cruelty and food safety, which I have to say is real fucking “small government” of them! Right-wingers insist that the smallest communities know best how to govern themselves – until those communities stand up to right-wingers’ big ag paymasters and won’t allow them to put animals in cages in which they can barely stand or pollute their rivers with hog poop. I think the smallest community should get to set stricter standards without worrying about how billionaire corporations will cope – and if they want to set looser standards, we have to make damn sure they don't hurt anyone else. But you don’t get to have “states’ rights” just to oppress Black and Brown folks but not for anything else. End of.

Finally, in a related note, the Center for Science in the Public Interest helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Expanded Food Safety Investigation Act, which would allow Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) and Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) workers to go into factory farms and sample the kinds of diseases animals have that people could get. No use squealing BUTZ TEH ADMINISTRATIVZ STATEZ!!!!! about this, since a disease doesn’t respect state or local boundary lines any more than processed food does. How are we going to stop pandemics if we don’t deploy people to where they might be able to stop them? And why must corporate profits always be more important than our health, or our civilization? Folks who’d want to “debate” these matters should have no say about a damn thing in America.

Action: concerning labor, law and order, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell your Senators to confirm Gwynne Wilcox to our NLRB, and tell your Congressfolk to end qualified immunity for police officers and ban cyanide bombs from our public lands. 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 Senators to confirm Gwynne Wilcox to our National Labor Relations Board. Ignore anything right-wingers say about how our NLRB is waging a “war on employers” or something – they’re just shilling for their big corporate donors, as always, and those big corporate donors would vastly prefer to pay their workers in dung pellets and then prevent them from ever organizing for better pay and working conditions. If they stonewall the Wilcox nomination, our NLRB won’t have a quorum of members to get things done. That’s what right-wingers want. Don’t let them have it.

Both the Daily Kos Liberation League and Defending Rights and Dissent help you tell your Congressfolk to end “qualified immunity” for law enforcement officers. “Qualified immunity,” a doctrine born entirely of a Supreme Court decision, gives police officers too much immunity from wrongdoing, by requiring the circumstances of their wrongdoing to be exactly the same as previous instances of wrongdoing before we can do anything about it. That makes them too protected from accountability. Do we want anyone too protected from accountability? Particularly if they have the power to arrest us and shoot us?

Finally, the Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell Congress to outlaw cyanide bombs on public lands. Cyanide bombs supposedly aim to kill predators, but truth is they’re indiscriminate killers – they maim and kill animals that don’t do any harm to the circle of life, plus they maim and kill people, too. Civilized people don’t accept that as the eggs we must break to make an omelette. I trust I don’t have to argue this point any further.

Action: concerning worker safety, Medicare, and animal abuse.

Long story short: tell our government to better protect workers from extreme heat, tell President Biden to better protect seniors from privatized Medicare, and tell world governments to ban any products that come from octopus farming. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor to do more to protect good American workers from extreme heat, while Civic Shout helps you tell our Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) to do the same. President Biden has already directed our Department of Labor to issue hazard alerts related to the heat, but our DOL could be doing more. And OSHA has yet to issue a standard protecting workers from extreme heat, even though we’ve told them to do that before. Folks are dropping dead in the Texas heat, and going to burn wards in Arizona just for falling on the sidewalk, so ignore the politicians who seem to be objectively pro-heat death.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to protect our seniors from the greed of private health insurers who have too many grubby hands in Medicare. President Biden has moved a bit slowly on this matter, which is why we’re getting in his grill about it now. Our government has privatized more and more of Medicare over the last 20 years, even though, frankly, anyone who still thinks government couldn’t do better than private corporations in delivering health care is a fool. At least half of all seniors on Medicare Advantage switch back to traditional Medicare in their last year of life, but we don’t want so many seniors to get out of the claws of private health insurers so late.

Finally, Eko helps you tell world governments to ban any and all products that come from farmed octopuses. You don’t need to have seen an octopus squeeze its way off a boat to know that these creatures deserve better – frankly, we shouldn’t wait for animals to impress us with their intelligence before we treat them better! Octopus farms shine a constant light on animals that obviously prefer darkness, plus these farms kill octopi by putting them in freezing water; think you would like that? No, you would not. Doesn’t matter that some corporation thinks they can make a profit doing this, because profit doesn’t justify torture. I can’t believe I still have to say that.

Action: concerning government spying, animal abuse, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Cooper Davis Act and pass Canyon’s Law and the FATCAT 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 Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Cooper Davis Act, which would force internet service-providing corporations to report to our Attorney General regarding substance abuse violations. I got a better idea: how about our government get warrants for that information? And I got an even better idea: how about we stop putting drug users in jail and start getting them the help they need instead? Sure, we’d have to start seeing drug users as patients and not criminals, and ending the war on drugs also means less racism. But I’m all for enabling our personal growth as a nation – just not by giving law enforcement more weapons to bludgeon us with.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Canyon’s Law and outlaw the use of cyanide bombs to kill animals on our public lands. Because cyanide bombs are absolutely heinous! They result in a slow, painful, and torturous death for anyone nearby, and n.b. that pronoun – cyanide bombs don’t just kill animals that prey on livestock, they can also kill any animal who happens to be nearby, and they can also kill any human being who happens to be nearby. In fact, the bill’s authors have named their bill after an Idaho boy who almost died from cyanide bomb exposure. Could it be that just throwing hurt and pain around isn’t the only way to solve problems?

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fueling Alternative Transportation with a Carbon Aviation Tax (or FATCAT) Act. Again, the acronym isn’t as unwieldy as you might have expected! Believe it or not, folks with their own jets actually pay less in fuel taxes than folks who fly commercial flights (i.e., you and I), but the FATCAT Act would increase that tax eightfold (from 22 cents per gallon to $1.95 per gallon) and end exemptions for oil exploration and logging. Oil and logging CEOs hardly need the handout, after all! And given how oil tax breaks helps foster the right-wing movement that eventually destroyed the New Deal, perhaps we should be more careful about that.

Action: concerning pollution, apartheid, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell our EPA to limit carbon dioxide pollution from existing power plants, tell President Biden to withhold military assistance from Israel until it stops oppressing Palestine, and tell our BLM to stop using cyanide bombs on animals. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous carbon dioxide pollution standards possible. Our EPA has proposed limiting CO2 pollution from existing plants for the first time – Obama-era limits only addressed new plants, you may recall – and that is, as a famous philosopher once said, a BFD. Of course the big polluting corporations will flood our EPA with comments about KILLINGZ TEH JOBZ and STRANGLINGZ TEH INNOVASHUNZ!!!!, so we’ve got to remind our EPA that fighting pollution reduces health care costs for everyone, creates jobs for folks who implement the new standards, and helps corporations innovate their processes. I think that does it.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to withhold military/security funding to Israel until it dismantles its apartheid system in Palestine. Hey, Jimmy Carter said it almost 20 years ago! And he actually brokered a peace deal between Israel and Egypt back in the day, so he might know what he’s talking about. You don’t have to believe Mr. Carter, of course – you need only note that Israeli forces are bombing a refugee camp in the West Bank as we speak. Who bombs a refugee camp? Two kinds of people: one, someone actually trying to create terrorists, and two, someone whose sense of self-preservation has gone so wrong they commit atrocities. If Israel is the latter, we can work with that.

Finally, the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to ban the use of cyanide bombs in animal control. Yes, we really do that, and it’s as awful as it sounds: the notorious M-44 cyanide bomb lures coyotes and foxes in with a sweet aroma and then shoots out a deadly poison leading to a long and painful death. And of course it’s not even as discriminating as all that, for it also lures in other animals and gives them that same painful death sentence. If a coyote attacked your dog or your child, you still wouldn’t be a civilized person if you wished for such an execution. Civilization demands more of us than that, even in our most inconsolable pain.

Around the table: the drama, it burns! Part 398.

Florida Gov. DeSantis signs SB 1580 into law, which means that Florida doctors and health insurers can now simply refuse to provide any health care to anyone if it contradicts their “sincerely held religious, moral, or ethical belief.” Remember, the next time Mr. DeSantis says governing is less about “virtue signaling” and more about “results,” that all of his “results” are all about “virtue signaling,” even if his chief "virtue" is being an asshole. We’ll get another reminder of all that when Neil Gorsuch (the author of Bostock v. Clayton County, you may recall) rules that the bill’s proscriptions against discriminating on the basis of “sex” actually compel Florida doctors to treat transgender folks regardless of their "beliefs."

What is “The Ugly Truth Behind ‘We Buy Ugly Houses,’” according to ProPublica? That HomeVestors preys upon desperate homeowners and isn’t above flat-out lying to them to get them to sell their homes for less. That’s after you consider that HomeVestors does some of its most lucrative advertising in neighborhoods just slammed by a hurricane, and that HomeVestors might not stop bugging you if you just got divorced or if you’re a senior who just broke your hip. And I wouldn’t point to a 96% approval rating if I were them – 4% of your customers hating you is actually a lot.

Ho hum, a lousy ABC/Washington Post poll “Creates” the “Illusion of Public Opinion on Debt Ceiling.” The amazing thing is that even a biased poll which teaches nothing about the issue can’t convincingly argue that people prefer the Republicans’ position – which, to review, is “hold the debt limit hostage to force spending cuts that hurt people.” A mere 26% of poll respondents actually thought we should tie spending cuts to the debt limit, reminding me, once again, of my working theory that about 25% of our electorate is batshit insane. (58% of poll respondents said no to that, but don’t worry: somehow the Post was able to claim that folks were “evenly-divided” on the matter.)

Lengthy Office of Special Counsel report finds that the former U.S. Agency for Global Media “breached editorial firewall regulations, engaged in gross waste of public funds and abused his authority.” Before serving the public, such as he did, this individual was a right-wing documentarian, his most recent film being 2020’s Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, which should clue you in to which President appointed him. If you need another hint: the best people!

As if we needed another reason to rue CNN’s decision to give Donald Trump and his biggest supporters free airtime the other night: America’s Last Journalist, Greg Palast, reminds us that all of Mr. Trump’s ramblings about the “stolen” 2020 election may not have convinced very many good Americans – but it did prompt legislators in several states to pass laws suppressing the vote. They pretended it was all true! You’ll still want to read Mr. Palast’s extensive takedown of 2000 Mules. You won’t convince Trump votaries they’re wrong, because nothing can penetrate a feedback loop of masturbatory rage. But you might be able to stop someone else from entering that loop.

Finally, as if we didn’t have enough of a reason to abandon Twitter to permanent oblivion: Twitter apparently enabled the proliferation of animal snuff films through its autocomplete function. Put in the word “cat” and it would autocomplete to “cat in a blender” which would lead you to some truly evil video footage; put in the word “dog” and it would autocomplete to “dog stabbed by screwdriver” which would lead you to, well, you get the idea. Of course, Twitter responded first by ignoring the issue, then by responding to media inquiries with a poop emoji, and finally by taking down autocomplete for all searches, thus demonstrating that they don’t know what they’re doing and they’re assholes. I left Twitter years ago over much less than this, and I think you should leave Twitter, too, if you value your immortal soul.

Action: concerning cruelty to animals, water pollution, oil drilling, and family separation.

Long story short: tell world governments to ban octopus farming, tell Trinseo PLC to stop polluting the Delaware River, and tell President Biden to reverse course on the Willow Project and reject efforts to bring back family separation. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Avaaz helps you tell world governments to ban octopus farming. Octopi, in case you haven’t heard, are intelligent enough that folks joke (or perhaps “joke”!) that they’re aliens from another planet, so let’s not create a massive torture chamber for them – as an octopus farm would surely be – so food corporation executives can make more money. Note well that elephants mourn their dead, and nobody eats an elephant – and we’re making headway keeping people from hunting them for their tusks. Is this is a slippery slope to starvation, as we one day discover that chickens and cows and salmon are sentient and pissed? We don’t have the tools to say that yet, and by then 3D printers might actually be good food replicators.

Change.org helps you tell Trinseo PLC to stop poisoning the drinking water of good Americans in the Delaware Valley. You heard of the chemical spill in the Delaware River a little over a week ago? That was Trinseo PLC of Bristol, PA, leaking 10,000 gallons of butyl acrylate, methyl acrylate, and ethyl acrylate into good Americans’ drinking water, and sadly, they’ve got a record of screwing up, as most chemical corporations do. Is that an excuse to throw up your hands and say that’s just the price of living with chemicals? A right-winger would do that, but a civilized person wouldn’t! A civilized person would demand that we “live with chemicals” by keeping good Americans safe from them.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to reverse course on the Willow oil drilling project in the Arctic. Yes, the Biden Administration approved it in mid-March, but at the same time prohibited all other drilling on federal lands nearby, which means he could, in theory, do the same thing to Willow. Possibly he’s gambling on ConocoPhillips competitors (ConocoPhillips got the permits to pursue the Willow Project) suing the project into endless delays, but let’s not assume Presidents play 13-dimensional chess. Instead, let’s play 3-D chess, where we demand that he does the right thing until he does it.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden to scrap plans to bring back the family separation policies for which Donald Trump became rightly notorious. OK, one of the many, many things for which he became rightly notorious! But as with Title 42, the program that pretends COVID pandemics come from Mexicans more frequently than from rage-addled Americans, this is yet another stain on our national character we need to scrub out of our national character. And, you know, there’s a reason we call detention centers “concentration camps” – they treat detainees badly. And as I’ve often said, a great nation doesn’t have to do that.

Action: concerning education, cruelty to animals, and Arctic drilling.

Long story short: tell the College Board to stop caving to right-wingers over its AP African-American Studies course, tell your Congressfolk to ban glue traps, and tell our government to reject the Willow drilling plan in the Arctic Ocean. 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 National Campaign for Justice helps you tell the College Board to stop caving to right-wingers over the AP African-American Studies course. The Florida Board of Education rejected it, and then Gov. DeSantis (E-FL) said it was worthless, and how did the College Board respond? By removing “controversial” elements and adding more right-wing Black content to the curriculum! They said educators were weak, and they were right! Not that I mind teaching people about Thomas Sowell; at least it’ll innoculate students against folks like Thomas Sowell in real life. But we’ve got to stop treating right-wing whining as if it’s “serious discourse.”

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing glue traps. We think of glue traps as a “humane” way to get rid of mice, but it’s not – it causes the pest to starve to death, at the very least, and can even cause it to suffocate (if its mouth gets in the glue, presumably); a more humane way of getting rid of mice would be to get a cat or two, and usually cats don’t even have to kill mice, but merely deter them. You know, we don’t know a whole lot about death – we think about it a lot, and we tell ourselves stories about it so we feel better about it, but we imagine things like glue traps aren’t cruel merely because all the animals’ suffering happens out of our sight. But “out of sight” doesn’t mean “doesn’t suffer.”

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to reject the Willow drilling plan in the Arctic ocean. By now you know the drill: cleaning up spills in the Arctic is many times harder than cleaning them up in temperate climes (and corporations don’t want to clean up their messes there, either!). Also, we know so little about the ecosystems up there that we really ought to avoid screwing it up – though we do know enough about the salmon industry in Alaska (one of the world’s biggest) that we know we’ll screw it up if we’re not careful. And it’s never a matter of “if” a big oil corporation will spill a lot of oil into our oceans – it’s always a matter of when. So, yeah, let’s not do this stupid thing, either.

Action: concerning workers' rights, separating families, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell Amazon to negotiate with organized workers already, tell your Congressfolk to outlaw separating families over unpaid foster care bills, and tell our government to outlaw cruel hunting practices. 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 Amazon to negotiate with its labor union already. When evil can’t prevent something from happening, what do they do? They stall, in this case by simply refusing to meet with the union that the workers have already approved to get them better pay, benefits, and working conditions. This is like when Republican Presidents simply delay writing legally-mandated clean air and clean water regulations, because they can’t win the argument on the merits, and they can't simply disregard our laws. And Amazon may think they're Too Big to Fail, but they can’t disregard our laws, either. Particularly if we all let them know we’re watching them.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation ensuring that states can’t take children away from families over unpaid foster bills. This mainly affects families who become homeless and put their kids in foster care, but that could be any of us but for the grace of God, and anyway why aren’t our taxes paying for temporary foster care? Ask the politicians who’ve been slashing taxes at the behest of their corporate and wealthy masters. I’m sure state and local officials will say well, we need money, too! But great civilizations don’t split up families to collect debts. And great civilizations certainly don’t treat people as a commodity – especially children, who can’t even legally consent to much of what happens to them.

Finally, the Humane Society helps you tell our National Park Service to outlaw cruel hunting practices in Alaska. This is a no-brainer, seriously, and what do right-wingers say in response? That we should “trust hunters” to do what’s right? If you don’t know it’s wrong to kill mother bears in their dens while their cubs watch so you can hang a trophy on your wall, then we shouldn’t “trust” you any more than we “trust” our elected officials to do the right thing. We all have a duty to maintain and strengthen our civilization, and identifying a group of “tough guys” you want to pander to (and if they’re so tough, why do they need pandering?) doesn’t excuse them from that sacred duty.

Action: concerning debt limit drama, factory farms, and OAN.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end debt limit hostage-taking and pass the Farm System Reform Act, and tell Roku to boot OAN from its streaming TV lineup. 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 “end the debt limit game of blackmail” and actually reform the whole system. And not in the way Sen. Hawley (E-MO) would – by simply exempting Social Security and Medicare from the debt limit, which won’t end right-wing hostage-taking – but by either passing the Protect Our CREDIT Act (which would force Congress to disapprove of a Presidential debt limit-lifting by a two-thirds vote) or simply repealing the debt limit altogether. I prefer the latter solution, and that’s what I’ll tell my Congressfolk to do. So a clean debt limit now, repeal it in the future, and enough of the damn drama already.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Farm System Reform Act, which would ban the construction of new factory farms and phase out existing ones by 2040. Don’t be the fool who says but then chicken will cost a million dollars, because big corporations raise prices whenever they feel like it; indeed, we’ve received a Master’s-level education in this truism over the last two years. And factory farms cause or enable a host of other evils, be that antibiotic abuse, animal abuse, or a complete refusal to rotate crops or try new varieties of crops. The worst evil, of course, is the evil factory farms do to the small farmer who’s trying to do the right thing and make a living.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell Roku to drop One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN) from its free channel lineup. You may hesitate before this task. We asked big cable corporations to drop OAN, but those were big cable corporations charging us an arm and a leg for their product; if you’re not paying for Roku, then what’s the harm? Here’s the harm: inclusion in a free channel lineup like Roku or Pluto TV gives a channel legitimacy, and invites corporate advertisers to place their wares before their viewers, which entrenches that unearned legitimacy. Anyway, who says we can’t tell Roku what to do? People who believe in private property über alles, and those people should not get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning Guantánamo Bay, ivory poaching, and public water.

Long story short: tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay already, tell the British Parliament to include hippo teeth in the UK Ivory Act, and tell the California Water Board to protect good Californians’ water from private corporations. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility already. We’re still holding 35 Muslim men there, and we haven’t charged most of them with a crime; at the risk of beating a dead horse, if they were that dangerous, we should be able to charge them with something. Plus we’ve tortured more than a few of them, which of course means we learned nothing of consequence from them, in addition to staining our national heritage further. Generally, if George W. Bush did it, we should stop doing it. That’s a good rule for life as well as politics. And if Joe Biden wants a foreign policy victory, he could get one here, by doing our will and closing Guantánamo.

Care2 helps you tell the British Parliament to improve the UK Ivory Act – which bans the sale of elephant ivory – by also banning the sale of hippopotamus teeth. Hard to believe, but that’s where the demand has gone, now that most countries ban the sale of elephant ivory. Guess which other species has had a hard time sticking around? That’s right, hippos, who (like elephants) are losing habitat all the time and face poachers. I guess right-wingers who didn’t like the UK Ivory Act would natter on about the “unintended consequences” of the law, i.e,, that it’s spurred poaching of hippo teeth. But that’s horsedoodle. When criminals change their tactics, that doesn't mean we just throw our hands up and walk away; it means our laws have to change as well.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell the California Water Board to stop Blue Triton from siphoning public water out of the San Bernardino National Forest. You know the drill by now: big corporations take public water from us for pennies a gallon, and then resell it as “bottled water” for a lot more than that. A government that allows this is either evil or very, very short-sighted. And all that rain California’s gotten lately doesn’t change the fact that they’re still in a drought (since a drought ain’t over after a few days of flooding any more than climate change is over because it snowed three feet). And the money you get from selling off public water lasts a short time, but public water lasts forever – if we can keep it.

Action: concerning taxes, animal abuse, and endless war-making.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits, pass the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, and repeal the 2002 Iraq 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.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits. Yeah, gas prices have been coming down for about a month – too late for June’s inflation figures, you may notice, but maybe not too late for July’s, which come out on August 10 – but big oil corporations are still making far too much money “dealing with circumstances” that they might better deal with by eating some profit and being good to Americans. Of course, the powerful don’t do that, unless we make them. And then they whine about how “onerous” our laws are! But when we make them do the right thing, we make good things happen. History always shows that.

The Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7398, the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, which would, as its title suggests, make it illegal to conduct a wildlife killing contest on public lands. The bill specifically excludes invasive species, in case your right-wing neighbor was going to launch that objection without reading the bill, as they often do, but a wildlife killing contest strikes me as merely an excuse for testosterone-addled men to be cruel, and we really shouldn’t be giving them more opportunities to do that. Especially on public lands, where protected species don’t all walk around with signs around their necks.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq War Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). Why bother after all these years? Because Presidents still use it to launch illegal and unconstitutional war efforts, like former President Trump’s assassination of Iranian General Soleimani, and you give a President a weapon like that, they’re going to use it sooner or later. And bad people will use and abuse bad laws, and the 2002 Iraq AUMF is a profoundly bad law that did profound evil. That Mr. Bush ever asked for it, and Congress ever passed it, still deeply offends me, and it’s not the kind of thing you just “let go” of, not if you want to stop it from happening again.

Action: concerning Medicare, COVID, workers, guns, pollution, and cruelty.

Long story short: tell our President to fix inflated Medicare premiums and use his Executive powers to fight the COVID pandemic, tell Delta’s CEO to do better by Delta flight attendants, tell Facebook to enforce its gun sale ban, tell our EPA to reject the proposed Pebble Mine project, and tell North Carolina to protect bears from being hunted at bear sanctuaries. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fix inflated Medicare premiums by rebating overcharges back to seniors. You may recall the issue: Medicare raised its premiums by 15%, the biggest hike in history, largely due to their decision to cover a very unproven and very expensive Alzheimer’s drug; now that Medicare has (under popular pressure, probably including yours) reversed course and will only cover the drug when used in clinical trials, the price hike ain’t necessary. So they should give the money back! They’re claiming it’s too hard, but how hard it is to issue rebate checks? They have no damn excuse and we shouldn’t tolerate it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to use the powers Congress has already granted him to keep fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, Congress should have already approved another COVID package, but our President sure ain’t helpless — he can use the Defense Production Act to manufacture more Paxlovid, for example, or he can use "march-in" rights to break through the corporate stranglehold on vaccine patents so that more folks worldwide can get the vaccine (more folks worldwide getting vaccinated, of course, means less COVID for us in the future). And those aren’t the only things he can do! He’ll do nothing, of course, if we don’t get on him about it.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Delta’s CEO that you support Delta flight attendants’ efforts to unionize. They’re the only flight attendants who haven’t unionized yet — which may well be why Delta flight attendants have to put up with staffing cuts and forced overtime and illegal shifts and their bosses changing their schedule without notice, sometimes after you’ve already flown a thousand miles and were kinda counting on getting home to pick up your kids from day care. Naturally Delta has responded to the workers’ wishes not by trying to fix the problems, but by trying to stop them from forming a union. If Delta won’t learn, we’ll have to learn ‘em.

Free Press helps you tell Facebook to actually enforce its rules banning gun sales on Facebook pages. Hey, it’s their rule! And currently you have to break that rule 10 times before they even look in your direction, and by then, the kid who could’ve cured cancer might be dead in a bloody heap in his biology class. Facebook also lets folks post “calls to arms” on its site, because free speech I guess, even though demanding that everyone actually take up weapons for your cause isn’t necessarily First Amendment-protected speech. Telling everyone to tell Facebook to actually enforce its own rules and stop actively making the world a worse place? I’m pretty sure that’s First Amendment-protected. And necessary!

Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to protect Alaska’s Bristol Bay from the notorious Pebble Mine project. Yes, it still walks, despite all the head shots we’ve given it! And not just us, either — even Scott Pruitt’s EPA was none too eager to rubber-stamp copper mining in the Bristol Bay, home to (among other things) the last great wild salmon fishery employing tens of thousands of good Alaskans. And plenty of potential financiers have pulled their support from Pebble Mine as well. And when all that happens, some too-rich dude will stillsay no one likes it, so I’ll make a killing off it! Sadly, that won’t be the only killing going on if our EPA lets this project proceed.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell North Carolina legislators to ban killing bears in bear sanctuaries. Yes, our world is so sick, immoral, and decadent that we have to tell legislators to do that, lest some too-rich dude come along and threaten sanctuary workers’ jobs if they don’t let him bag a trophy. Thinking maybe this was a workaround for a population-control issue at sanctuaries? If so, you were giving the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission too much credit! The Commission said it was about letting hunters hunt more, and also about bear-human conflicts later resolved by (get this) bear-proofing food lockers! Like I said, sick, immoral, and decadent — unless we fight.

Around the table: featuring people who fought for things!

Thomas Alter II at In These Times writes about "The Radical Immigrant Farmers Who Helped Defeat the Robber Barons." And by the end you might be saying oh, so that's why so many right-wingers seem to be so anti-immigrant these days! You might also be reminded that a lot of what we take for granted these days -- or, at least, what we took for granted half a century ago -- came about only because folks smeared as "radical" and "socialist" held their ground and fought for a better life. These farmers fought slavery in Texas, too; I don't know how many of my contemporary Americans would have fought slavery if they'd lived in Texas in 1848. But I do know how many of them are doing nothing about fascism in America today.

Speaking of which, Russian anti-war activists, facing jail time for the nefarious offense of opposing Mr. Putin's little adventure in Ukraine, have had to get a little more creative in spreading the word. We're not as close to an era where a One True Great and Awesome American President can just put people in jail for opposing his wars, but we are much closer to an era where a One True Great and Awesome American President can incite his votaries to smash heads of anti-war protestors. So if you see a lot of Paladin memes on Facebook during that time, that might be a good way for American anti-war protestors to find each other. Facebook's algorithms sure won't do it, because that only works for racists.

It's not a big surprise that pro-choicers overstate the case somewhat that abortions since Roe v. Wade are safer -- one would imagine technology has improved over the last 50 years! -- but right-wingers no doubt cite this very fact (though not likely from Snopes!) as if winning a point in an argument is exactly the same as winning the entire argument. It's a form of personal attack -- ha ha, you're incorrect on a technical point, therefore I win the whole game just for pointing it out! Let's see any of those clowns inflict their morality on their daughters when they get pregnant. They'll all be saying "it's her choice" at that very moment. And I'm not inclined to see that as a strength, but as a weakness -- I mean, if your values don't challenge you, they're not very good values.

Can we really know if "your practice of Buddhism through listening to podcasts or use of meditation apps is 'authentic'"? Not to put too fine a point on it, but yes, if you don't sit in awe of podcasts and apps as this completely unprecedented technology, or as a direct conduit to magic learning. Anyway, long story short: "If digital Buddhist practice approaches the good life as eudaimonic -- as leading to human flourishing based on the pursuit of a deeper meaning -- it can be judged to be authentic. An inauthentic practice is one that just furthers hedonism by merely peddling bliss and relaxation."

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (E-NC) lost the Republican primary for his own House seat last week -- after a series of scandalous behaviors came to light somehow, and please understand that by "somehow" I mean "by the will of other state Republicans" -- and, well, he's not taking it too well: "I am on a mission now to expose those who say and promise one thing yet legislate and work towards another, self-profiteering, globalist goal...It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command." What does "dark MAGA" mean? Does it mean MAGA but actually shooting people? Seriously, the right needs to reinvent itself as a "new" right every few years because it has nothing nourishing to offer Americans; how many more of these must we sit through?

Finally, a Utah hunting guide faces jail time for baiting a bear out for Donald Trump, Jr. to shoot -- and he baited him out with "a pile of grain, oil and pastries"! I sure do hope "pastries" is what everyone remembers about this incident. Here's what else I hope folks remember: pretend-hunting -- hunting that isn't for subsistence, or even for training for the possibility of having to hunt for subsistence -- is uncivilized enough. But cheating at it is even worse! How lousy a shot is Trump the Younger?

Action: concerning the Child Tax Credit, drug prices, Social Security, tax filing, animal cruelty, and our FCC.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit, lower prescription drug prices, reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits, let most Americans file their taxes for free, pass the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, and confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC. 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.

NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the expanded Child Tax Credit that delivered $250 and $300 checks into working families' bank accounts through most of 2021. Inflation was 8.5% last month; think those checks would have come in handy as working families bought groceries and clothes and school supplies? Yes, I think they would have. But Republicans don't want working families to have them -- every last one of them voted against the CTC expansion in the first place, we must remember. I repeat for the benefit of angry independent voters: every last Republican voted against the CTC expansion. In the meantime, your Reps and Senators need to know that working families need the expanded CTC, and rich folks have to pay more in taxes to fund it, well, we're all in this together, right?

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans. What's the news hook this time? Rep. Kurt Schrader (D?-OR) saying in a TV ad that he's fought for Medicare drug price negotiation when he actually did his damnedest to water down Medicare drug price negotiation proposals -- then also claiming that lowering drug prices would "stifle innovation"! I've said it before and I'll say it again: no rich corporation innovates on a damn thing; innovation comes only from necessity, and a corporation that's gamed the system so that all of its decisions result in it getting richer never faces necessity. That's just one reason we need to communicate our will to our Congressfolk, again and again and again until they do our will.

National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to cut Social Security benefits, including efforts like the notorious TRUST Act, which would allow Congress to fast-track Social Security cuts without debate. Does that sound like democracy to you? Or does it sound like a way to steal what belongs to the people without having to account to the people? I kid, of course; it sounds exactly like the latter, and though of course Republicans love anything that lets them bypass democracy, you'd hate to think that Democrats would be so cowardly that they'd support a system that lets them do unpopular things without facing the anger of the people. Again I kid! Of course that's right in their wheelhouse. And that's why we fight their efforts to the death.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to let most Americans file their taxes for free. This is already legal! Our IRS already has all the info on your W-2, and can autofill the blanks on your tax form without the assistance of any third party! And yet we still trundle off to joints like H&R Block to "get our taxes done." Why? Because of a "deal" our IRS cut with tax prep corporations years ago that allows them to (among other things) offer "free" tax filing at the end of a bureaucratic labyrinth you won't likely have the patience to get through. I say if you have leverage -- and if you have the law behind you, you have leverage -- you use it for more than getting next-to-nothing out of big corporations. So let's tell our government to do that.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7398, the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, which would, as its title suggests, ban most wildlife killing contests; the only exceptions would be certain kinds of birds and invasive species. I guess some folks will tell you wildlife killing contests help keep down populations of predators, but not only do scientists find that's not true, they also find that the animals who feed on the bullet-ridden carcasses get poisoned and/or killed as well. And certainly don't brook any silly allegations that this bill is "anti-hunting." It's not "anti-hunting," it's anti-sadism, it's anti-cruelty, it's anti-uncivilized behavior. Killing animals is a desultory job if you have to do it; celebrating it as a "game" just cheapens your soul. And don't we have enough of that?

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to confirm pro-internet freedom warrior Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission. How do you know she'd do a good job at our FCC? Not just because she helped get strong net neutrality rules enacted during Mr. Obama's second term, but because big media lobbyists have fought her nomination to the death! Currently our FCC only has four Commissioners, which means they can't bring back net neutrality or ensure that rural and urban areas get their fair share of infrastructure money because every vote will end 2-2. Ms. Sohn will break those ties, and she'll break those ties in the direction of the people's will. Seriously, no one opposes net neutrality except big corporations and their lackeys. And they shouldn't get all the say around here.

Action: concerning accountability, Russia, climate change, campaign finance, hunting trophies, and law and order

Long story short: tell our DOJ to investigate and possibly prosecute Donald Trump, tell fossil fuel corporations to abandon their Russian investments, tell our Transportation Department to release a promised climate-change reporting rule, tell state legislators to get private corporation campaign donations out of sheriffs' elections, tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to ban importation of hunting trophies, and tell President Biden to pardon non-violent marijuana offenders. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Common Cause helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate Donald Trump for attempting to subvert the will of the American people after winning the 2020 election. Late last week House January 6 panel lawyers alleged in a California federal court filing that Donald Trump and several of his allies committed crimes as part of their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and if the January 6 panel has enough evidence to say that, then our Department of Justice has enough reason to hold Mr. Trump accountable. We witnessed a lot of these alleged crimes happening in real time, not just on January 6, of course, but also on January 2, during that alternately begging/threatening phone call to Georgia's Secretary of State. But a lot else happened in the dark, too, which is why we need to shine a light on it.

Sum of Us helps you tell French fossil fuel corporation TotalEnergies to quit investing in Russia, and also to quit fossil fuels. Yeah, it may not do the latter just because we say so, but it's more vulnerable to pressure on the former -- though it stands virtually alone among Western fossil fuel corporations in keeping its investments in Russia, saying that no sanctions have compelled them to divest thus far, and also suggesting that gas drilling is a more "realistic" option for getting off climate change. Set aside the fact that wherever gas drilling wells leak methane, they pack a bigger climate-change punch than coal. Switching to gas is the "reasonable" option only because that's their will to begin with! If they put their capital behind renewables, we'd see a lot more renewable energy right now.

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to release the Biden Administration rule mandating measurement of climate change emissions from our national highway system. "Measurement," too, not mitigation! We've tried to get mitigation passed during the 2021 battles over the Biden agenda, with limited success. But the Trump Administration overturned this rule while in office because of course they did, while the Biden Administration has announced they'll reinstate it. Thing is, they haven't actually done that, hence our efforts to get more out of them than they've delivered thus far. They really ought to, since it could very well wind up in court one day, which never went well for Mr. Trump.

Color of Change helps you tell your state legislators to get private corporation campaign donations out of county sheriffs' elections. You know how politicians always tell you that campaign donations aren't bribes because they're not quid pro quo transactions and anyway of course you can rely on them to separate what's good for them from what's good for the public? They lie about all of that, of course, but county sheriffs have a much harder time lying all of that when some private prison corporation, or some real estate magnate, or some big telecom corporation, fills their campaign coffers. Gosh, what could these actors possibly want? Like, you know, land for a private prison, more arrests to fill those beds, usurious phone rates for prisoners? Win here, and we can one day win everywhere else.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ban importing elephant trophies under the authority of the Endangered Species Act. Savanna elephants are endangered in Africa, which is, of course, where hunters go get their trophies, and maybe once upon a time we could argue that we must deploy trophy hunting as a necessary evil in regions where elephant populations have overrun human populations, but that time sure in hell ain't now, not when elephants all over Africa are in danger of disappearing in our lifetimes. And not for nothing, but if you've ever seen an elephant mourn its dead, you sure as hell wouldn't parade around your neighborhood with a bloody tusk shouting look what I did! The more we learn of our world, the more responsible we must be, but hey, civilization ain't easy.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell President Biden to pardon non-violent marijuana offenders. He campaigned on doing that, so he ought to start keeping that promise. There will be right-wingers who will say "you're not supposed to pardon people to further political ends." Go ahead and ask them how they felt about George H.W. Bush pardoning a slew of Iran-Contra participants or Bill Clinton pardoning big campaign donors or Donald Trump pardoning Steve Bannon, because those are all examples of "pardoning people to further political ends." Pardoning folks we shouldn't have jailed to begin with? That's just righting wrongs, which is something civilized people always do. And if folks want to call "righting wrongs" "political," then let them get caught with their cynicism hanging out.

Action: concerning health care, indigenous folk, good Afghans, facial recognition, and factory fur farms.

Long story short: tell Germany to support the pandemic waiver at the WTO, tell Tanzania to stop evicting indigenous folk from their ancestral lands, tell our government to release Afghani citizens' funds, tell our local governments to stop using ODIN facial recognition tech, and tell the European Union to ban fur farms. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell Germany's government to stop blocking the COVID vaccine patent waiver at the World Trade Organization (or WTO). Yeah, Germany's in on that, too, putting corporate intellectual property rights above the health of the world's people. Two and-another-things about that: one, we should be calling it, at the very least, intellectual property shared by corporations and our government, since taxpayer money and research made those vaccines, and two, by "the world's people" I mean all the world's people, not just the folks too poor to pay for COVID vaccines, because if they get it, then everyone's going to get COVID again, and maybe not as friendly a variant thereof as we've seen so far. Also, if we get Germany to back down, it'll make the Biden Administration's obstruction harder to justify.

Avaaz helps you tell Tanzania's government to stop evicting Maasai indigenous folk from their ancestral lands in the nation's northern area. It ain't just indigenous folk in the Amazon or Ecuador fighting this battle; indigenous folk are defending their land from big corporations all over the world, and it just might be that they know what's best for the land they live on. Too conservative? Not one "conservative" bloviating in public today would put indigenous people above money, even though all money goes the way of all flesh, while civilizations based on lasting values can endure forever. The Maasai may not be battling drilling and mining corporations, but they are battling a tourism/trophy hunting corporation from Saudi Arabia, so yeah, I think they know what's best for the land they've lived on for centuries.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to disperse good Afghan citizens' funds. Because the money belongs to them! And we should pressure the Taliban in ways that don't require starving Afghan people! You may well be asking yourself, self, what if the Taliban gets hold of this money before it can get to its rightful owners in Afghanistan? But I doubt they'll do that -- a government can only create so much chaos before it backfires on them, and when a mere 2% of Afghan children have enough food to eat, I think we can all see the Taliban is well past that point. Which means, again, the compassionate thing to do is also the practical thing to do. Funny how often that happens -- but not so funny how our politicians never seem to see it.

The Kairos Fellowship helps you tell your local governments to stop using ODIN facial recognition technology to spot and harass homeless folk. One more time: facial recognition technology sucks! And using it to arrest homeless folk also sucks! You know what wouldn't suck? Putting homeless folks up in tiny houses, which would cost less than picking them up and putting them in shelters or hospitals or jails. If folks saw how tiny these tiny houses would be, they wouldn't feel jealous of someone else getting "something for nothing," either. You know what else wouldn't suck? Well-funded public housing and rent control laws. When we stopped spending money on public housing in the 1980s, the homeless population exploded, and I think there's more than mere correlation there.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell the European Union to ban fur farms. Now I have nothing against folks making fur coats for themselves, just like I have nothing against folks raising chicken for themselves, but the fur farms that Italy has recently banned feature squalid conditions that you probably won't find completely unfamiliar, like almost impossibly small and almost impossibly dirty cages. That's right: fur farming is very much like factory farming of chickens and pigs in the United States! We might do better calling them factory fur farms, in fact! As I said, you want to make a coat out of animal skins, you go right ahead. But factory fur farms don't care about anything but efficiency -- or, more precisely, efficiently making their executives money -- and that goes hand-in-hand with soul-destroying cruelty.

Action: concerning drug prices, clean water, animal abuse, public lands, and family separation.

Long story short: tell our Department of Health and Human Services to allow generic manufacturing of an overly-expensive cancer drug, tell our EPA to get the lead out of our drinking water, tell Facebook to stop allowing illegal endangered wildlife sales, tell our government to keep copper miners out of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, and tell our Department of Homeland Security to reunite families separated at the border. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell HHS Secretary Becerra to permit generic manufacturing of Xtandi, which its manufacturer currently sells for $400 a pill -- in America, at least! In other nations (including Japan, where Xtandi's manufacturer, Astellas Pharma, has its headquarters), it "only" charges about one-fifth of that, and I put "only" in quotation marks because that's still $80 a pill; allowing a generic of Xtandi would likely cut that price to $3. And our HHS can do that, using the "march-in" rights granted by the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act; most of us would say that our government should take control of a drug if the corporation that manufactures it is charging us an arm and a leg for it. I think we would say that even if Mitch McConnell calls it "socialism" or "communism." So let's do it.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to get the lead out of our drinking water. Just so happens our EPA is mulling this very thing, and for good reason -- basically any exposure to lead also exposes you to brain damage (and the developmental problems that come with it), and the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended a standard of less than one part lead per billion. Yes, that infrastructure bill provides a lot of funding for removing lead pipes, but you would hate for that money to get wasted in the wrong places just because some Congressperson or other had an outsized influence on the matter; if our EPA can contribute solid research telling us where the most lead pipes are, for example, that would help forestall such a tragedy. Wasted money here will be wasted life.

Avaaz helps you tell Facebook to ban sales of illegal endangered wildlife species on its platform. Or, as they put it, "make the illegal wildlife trade extinct" -- which spells MIWTE, so we won't think of putting that on a red hat, but still, it's a worthwhile goal for a civilized people. As we speak, only 7,000 cheetas exist in the wild, but unsavory types have sold over 4,000 more on Facebook! Don't succumb to the temptation to feel sorry for Facebook -- just like most evil people, their whole M.O. is to stoke drama, and if they can get attention for promising to make it better just like every wife-beater does when they're cornered, all the better. Still, the Big Stick of Bad PR can save lives here -- if we but wield it against Facebook. Saying most people oppose animal abuse wouldn't be a reach.

Both Environmental Action and MoveOn help you tell our Bureau of Land Management to protect the famous Boundary Waters Wilderness from copper mining. Copper's an intensely useful mineral -- if our hospital tabletops were still made of copper, we might have had a much easier time with this pandemic! -- but if you get a finite amount of a useful material by permanently damaging an otherwise renewable resource, then you're doing resource management wrong. And the Boundary Waters Wilderness -- so named because it straddles the border between Ontario and Minnesota -- contains over a thousand lakes and over a thousand miles of rivers and streams, and covering as it does around 1,700 square miles (an area bigger than Rhode Island), when pollution gets in one area, it's going to get to the others. We'd want to prevent that.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell our Department of Homeland Security to reunite families separated at the border. You can amend the ACLU's comment tool as you see fit, but certainly we should demand that the Biden Administration reunify separated families and give them the due process they deserve -- which includes counseling for their suffering and accountability for those who caused it. Family separation was Trump Administration policy, but it's now the Biden Administration's problem to fix, and they ain't going as fast as justice demands. Luckily they're asking the American people to fix it for them, and I'm sure a few rage-heads will write comments I'd prefer not to contemplate, but I suspect the vast majority of Americans don't want families separated no matter where they're from. We were all from somewhere else once, after all.

Action: concerning taxes, social media, Saudi Arabia, and various forms of pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, tell our government to regulate Facebook more vigorously, tell your Congressfolk to void President Biden's proposed $500 million deal with Saudi Arabia, pass the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act, and ban cyanide bombs from the wild, and tell our Department of Energy to reject uranium mining. 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 to raise all Build Back Better Act funding by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. If you're an Arizona resident, you'll definitely want to call Sen. Sinema, since she seems to be the one Senate Democrat who opposes raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. Stop me if you've heard this before, but over two-thirds of Arizonans support raising taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the Build Back Better Act. As usual, the "inscrutable" "iconoclastic" "maverick" "earns" her reputation by simply defying the will of her own constituents, in favor of the big corporate donors she seems to hobnob with every weekend. That's not very mavericky, frankly! And we shouldn't let her get away with it.

Free Press helps you tell our government to regulate Facebook a lot more vigorously than we currently do. Specifically, you'd urge Congress to pass data privacy and algorithmic abuse laws and tax social media advertising, and you'd ask various Executive branch agencies to crack down on abusive data practices. I've thought a lot lately about what the internet was like before Facebook; I visited at least four different social networks regularly in the mid-2000s, and visited half a dozen blogs and websites regularly for my news, but now we go to Facebook for all of that (and more -- remember Flickr?), and why should we? And why should they get to do whatever they like with our data, and why should they get to use algorithms to mindlessly ensure white supremacists feel less alone in the world? They've become a monopoly, and we know what to do with monopolies. Even if our politicians have forgotten.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to block President Biden's proposed $500 million weapons deal with Saudi Arabia. Yeah, I know, the money is supposedly for helicopter maintenance, but the Saudis ain't using those helicopters for humanitarian airdrops! The ongoing war on Yemen is just one reason to starve this particular beast, and using Saudi Arabia as a "hedge" against Iranian power in the region is not only a dumb idea but an immoral one, since the Saudis don't exactly use their power for good. Besides, if we didn't invade Iraq in 2003 for no damn good reason, we wouldn't need such a hedge against Iranian power! You look back over the last 20 years in particular and you begin to think we really have been conducting foreign policy for the express purpose of making the world worse. But we don't have to put up with what they do in our name.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4963/S. 2669, the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act. Much like the "forever chemical" PFAS, scientists have long linked phthalates to cancer, brain damage, and birth defects, plus they're everywhere in our plastic products and they get into our bodies to wreak havoc there. Our Consumer Product Safety Commission banned phthalates from children's toys back in 2017, which will protect kids a bit, but we all need that kind of protection. Hence the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act would ban phthalates in food packaging products outright and instruct our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to review the products our FDA typically regulates to see where else we can ban them. If you're worried that we won't have as many food prep gloves after this, remember that this is America, the can-do country, and we've adapted to worse.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell Congress to ban our use of cyanide bombs in the wild. You think it's inhumane when land mines planted 50 years ago in a foreign country blow somebody's arm or leg off decades after the war is over? Now consider that cyanide bombs kill pretty indiscriminately as well -- the bombs don't exactly wait until their target animal is near! In fact, the bombs lure animals in with a sweet scent, so they're actually worse than landmines, which don't exactly lure people to them with hundred-dollar bills or promises of free broadband. How we treat animals tells the world what kind of civilization we are. Yes, even if we raise animals for food, we can still treat them in a civilized manner. We should be able to report to future civilizations that we did a pretty good job at it, and getting rid of cyanide bombs is just one way to do that.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Department of Energy not to fund uranium mining. Uranium is, as you know, a radioactive element that too easily finds its way into our drinking water and into the bodies of wildlife. And of course we haven't figured out a way to store the waste yet. These days you'll mostly find uranium in nuclear weapons, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear power plants, and depleted uranium weapons; stop me if you hear anything you like in that list! Yeah, you'll also find it (in much, much smaller amounts) in wool, silk, stage lighting, photo chemicals, and even more rarely in glass, but ain't no mining corporation looking to make a killing in these markets -- they're looking for the big weapon money! And for these reasons we say no to uranium mining.

Action: concerning voting rights, privacy, law and order, defense spending, cyanide bombs, and plastic recycling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the People's Response Act, and tell your Congressfolk to cut defense spending, ban cyanide bombs, and put responsibility for recycling plastic on its manufacturers, not people. 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 Public Citizen and People for the American Way help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act, which would do almost all of what the For the People Act would do -- it would make Election Day a national holiday, enact same-day voter registration and 15 days of early voting across America, give ex-felons back their right to vote, and clamp down on partisan gerrymandering and "dark money" campaign financing, plus it would block states from overriding election results that give them a sad. It's basically the For the People Act minus the ethics reforms, which leads one to wonder if all that drama Joe Manchin put us through really worth it. And he could still move the goalposts, as he's done repeatedly on other bills this year. Still, this is America, and what he wants should matter a whole lot less than what we want.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Our Fourth Amendment, you recall, protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures by law enforcement, but currently law enforcement can grab your personal data if they get it from a third-party data broker -- which buys your data from your internet service providing corporation, which latter corporation cannot hand over your data to law enforcement without a warrant. The law protects you from your ISP, then, but not from the corporations your ISP sells your data to. A certain strain of right-winger loves to point to this loophole as proof that government doesn't work and laws don't work, when all this loophole proves is that real security is a lifelong effort. I guess right-wingers don't like work.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act. This bill would create a Division on Community Safety within our Department of Health and Human Services, and this Division would help states and localities stop using our police officers as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization, and instead implement better approaches to community problems. I think police should be serving warrants and making arrests -- I don't even want them getting kittens out of trees, because we have animal control officers to do that. And that's just one area where we already accept an alternative to policing without yelling about "defunding the police." Pass the People's Response Act and we can get our state and local governments to do better in other areas as well.

Both Win Without War and World Beyond War help you tell your Congressfolk to cut defense spending already. Because we already spend more on our military than the next 12 nations combined do! And how much of that is for defense, really, and how much of it is for enriching some defense contractor crony or other? We should also question, given the long-term effects of our meddling (still think our CIA planning a coup against Mr. Mossadegh in 1954 was a good idea?), whether we're really a positive force in foreign affairs. No, it's not "unpatriotic" to say so; in fact, I'd say it is unpatriotic to simply refuse to question yourself, since America is all about doing better, and if you're not asking yourself the hard questions, I sure as hell don't want you in my foxhole. Or anyone else's, for that matter.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban our use of cyanide bombs in the wild. You don't like how land mines kill and maim people 50 years after the war's over, right? Now contemplate a capsule that not only lures wildlife in with a sweet smell, but sprays cyanide around indiscriminately when triggered, indiscriminately enough that it kills any and all wildlife in an area, not just the wildlife our government is trying to kill. It sounds like a developer's dream, actually, though I don't imagine unexploded cyanide bombs will just overlook them. Don't be the one who says this is no big deal because "death is always violent." The mere existence of violence doesn't justify perpetrating any and all kinds of violence on other living creatures. And civilization abhors nihilism.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the big plastic-manufacturing corporations, and not taxpayers, take responsibility for recycling their products. They've got more money, after all! You remember when soda manufacturing corporations started advertising their "shatterproof" bottles in the late '70s? You'd see a big bottle of Pepsi bounce on the floor again and again. We sure didn't know what that would bring to our world -- not just dead animals dying of plastic pollution, not just trash islands forming all over our oceans, but good Americans who now ingest about one credit card of plastic every week just by using the plastic products that are now everywhere. So it can't just be your local sanitation department, paid for by your taxes, doing all the work.

Action: concerning law and order, immigration, antibiotic abuse, food safety, marketing to children, and dog-fighting.

Long story short: tell California judges to stop setting absurdly-high bail that no one can afford to pay, tell President Biden to reunite the rest of the families torn apart by President Trump's family separation policy, tell McDonald's to stop enabling antibiotic abuse on factory farm, tell Pepsi to get glyphosate out of its food products, tell YouTube to stop using autoplay and recommendation features on its Kids channel, and tell Russia to ban dog-fighting. You can find email/petition links for each of these action alerts in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Color of Change helps you tell the California Judicial Council to stop setting bail higher than defendants can reasonably pay. Some folks will react HOWZ CANZ TEH COPZ DOZ THEIRZ JOBZ!!!!!, but note well the words "defendant" and "reasonably pay" in the previous sentence -- if we're putting people in jail indefinitely before convicting them of a crime, we're not being a law-and-order nation; we're being a dick-swinging nation, and we should stop doing that. Furthermore, the California Supreme Court has lately ruled, in In re Humphrey, that "conditioning freedom solely on whether an arrestee can afford bail is unconstitutional," so the Judicial Council would be following the law in issuing a new guidance that conforms with the law. We want judges to follow the law, don't we?

The ACLU helps you tell the Biden Administration to keep reuniting families separated by the Trump Administration's evil border policy. Yeah, they've begun that process, but they've got at least a thousand families to go. And you'll specifically ask them to reunify families, bring them to America, protect them from deportation, provide support for them, and stop separating them to begin with. Some folks will bristle at the prospect that having your family carved up would gain you immediate, if not permanent, entry into the United States. But, really, it's the least we could do for them after putting them through everything we've put them through. And the likelihood they'll turn out to be (fill in name of whomever Republicans are drumming up hate against this week) is really very small. Most immigrants are running from far more serious trouble than what we imagine they'll create here!

Avaaz helps you tell big fast food chain corporation McDonald's to stop sourcing its meat from farms that abuse antibiotics. If we must have big corporations, we might as well leverage them toward our ends -- a big customer like McDonald's can change farming practices all over if we can use the Big Stick of Bad PR to make them stop getting their beef and chicken from farms that pump their animals full of antibiotics. This will be a life-and-death matter at some point in the future, because using seven out of every 10 antibiotics on nominally healthy feed animals sure is a great way of creating superbugs that can't be put down with antibiotics. It could take us back to the 18th century, a time when your next cut could kill you. Must that be the price we pay so we can have absurdly rich big ag executives?

In a similar vein, the Environmental Working Group helps you tell Pepsi to get glyphosate out of its food products. I don't just mean the infamous soda pop, I mean Quaker Oats, Lays, Tostitos, Doritos, Rold Gold, Life, and Rice-a-Roni, among others, and Pepsi owns all of these! Scientists have linked glyphosate to cancer for many years now, and Pepsi has done considerably less about glyphosate in their food than other big food manufacturing corporations, to the point where some Pepsi foods have nearly five times as much glyphosate in them as scientists consider safe. Again, Pepsi owns a lot of foods, and they don't like the Big Stick of Bad PR any more than anyone else, so if they do the right thing here, they can effect a lot of positive change in America. Just as their executives imagined they'd do, I'm sure, the day they set out to be rich!

Fight for the Future helps you tell YouTube to stop offering autoplay and recommendations features on its YouTube Kids channel. Because then the kids just watch videos all damn day! And they watch videos that are bad for them all damn day! You don't trust YouTube to give you good suggestions about anything but music videos, do you? I have friends who watch a lot of YouTube videos -- good YouTube videos about politics and science, they do exist! -- and then get recommendations to watch Jordan Peterson videos. Their algorithms don't serve your interests, after all, they serve YouTube's interests, and YouTube's interest is in keeping you watching videos, and shoving rage-inducing videos in your face is the easiest way to keep you watching. Why would we imagine they'd run a kids' channel any better than that?

Finally, Care2 helps you tell the Russian government to ban dog-fighting. You'd prefer the Russian government ban Vladimir Putin, perhaps, but just consider how awful dog-fighting is from the dog's point of view. Would you enjoy the humans you trust forcing you to fight another dog for several hours until one of you dies? Would you enjoy being the "bait dog" who has all his teeth removed and his mouth sealed shut so other dogs can practice their killing skills? How would you bright-side your way out of these scenarios? Yeah, dog-fighting is as old as the hills in Russia, but just because it's "history" doesn't mean we need to keep doing it, or tolerating it. See "statues, Confederate" for more information on that topic.

Around the table: in which we are reminded, once again, that long-term thinking is better than short-term thinking.

Simon Davis-Cohen at In These Times details the battle good rural Wisconsinites fight against big ag industrial farming operations trying to muscle onto their land. But they're not just battling the big hog processing corporations that pollute their water and sicken their animals and distort their economy -- they're also battling state legislators who preempt local ordinances and generally do big ag's bidding. Hey, that reactionary legislature has passed preemptions against localities who want to offer municipal broadband and rent control, so extending their gnarled hand to the throat of localities trying to protect themselves from factory farms is a no-brainer for them.

Now it can be told: "A Green New Deal Is Actually More Affordable in the Long Term Than Fossil Fuels," per C.J. Polychroniou at TruthOut. Not just because the likely alternative -- runaway climate change on a hopelessly-polluted planet -- is actually far more expensive, but because green infrastructure spending will not only reduce pollution but create jobs doing so, and those folks with jobs will all pay taxes, too. Also, renewable energy will be cheaper than fossil fuel energy in the long run, since you don't have to repeatedly churn the Earth in order to get renewable energy. That reminds me to create that Let's kick climate change's ass! bumper sticker.

This likely won't surprise you, but lower-income folks tend to overpay property taxes while wealthy folks tend to underpay them, and "the inequities in tax assessments are both very large and very common." You know what else won't surprise you? Some counties (shout out to Maricopa County, Arizona!) actually do a pretty good job of making sure property taxes don't fall mostly on the folks who can afford it least. Sounds like our politicians just need the will to do the job, as usual -- which will require action from us, as usual.

The more I read about how easily QAnon votaries dismiss the actual sex-trafficking accusations against an actual sitting Congressman, the more I think he talked so loosely on Tucker Carlson's show -- normally a bad idea when you're under investigation or about to get indicted! -- just to give these folks more to talk about. A theory so hungry for information to distort does need that information, after all. And thus we are reminded, yet again, that there is no debate possible about whether folks are "stupid of evil," not just because stupid is evil, but because looking stupid is too often the cover for evil.

Finally, dig Sen. McConnell (E-KY) actually saying the corporate criticism of Georgia's anti-voting law is "a coordinated campaign by powerful and wealthy people." And thus Mob Boss Mitch pretends to care about the non-wealthy, pretends the "Outrage-Industrial Complex" doesn't operate almost entirely on his side of the political spectrum, and, worst of all, pretends backlashes occur "outside the constitutional order," as if we don't have a right to say anything unless we say it directly to a legislator, and as if criticism anti-voting laws is "unconstitutional." Of course Mr. McConnell is this big a hypocrite so you'll be stunned into silence.

Action: concerning diplomacy, monopolies, trophy hunting, and abortion access.

President Biden did run on a diplomacy-first foreign policy, and though one could easily say he broke that promise when he ordered a missile attack on Syria, we could compel him to renew that promise by telling our Congressfolk to pass S. 434, the Iran Diplomacy Act, as Peace Action helps us do. Contra what you've heard from Trump votaries still unable to admit they made a grievous error in supporting the man -- I have no sympathy for them, of course, since admitting your mistakes builds character -- the Iran nuclear deal was achieving its aim (i.e., of keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons) until Donald Trump withdrew the United States from it because IRANZ IZ TEH BADZ!!!!!! Seriously, if he explained it better than that, he must have only done so to the mirror. Of course, when someone good at being evil comes along -- cough Tom Cotton cough -- we won't be able to avoid war with Iran very easily, unless we've already got the Iran nuclear deal back in place and it's continued to work for a couple of years. Do good works and you inspire people; sustain good works and you make evil works a lot harder.

Meanwhile, Roots Action helps you tell our U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights to break up Amazon. Not just because half of all online commerce goes through Amazon -- and half is far too big a market share, frankly -- but because Amazon has driven so many businesses small and large out of business (I, for one, think a world without Encore Books is a rather smaller world). The Roots Action petition -- a DIY campaign created by a user named Vahid R. -- explains further: Amazon's monopoly status enables it to treat its employees badly, bully its business partners, and reach out and monopolize other sectors of the economy. We all worried that Amazon would eventually monopolize grocery stores when it bought Whole Foods, but it's already done worse than that in cloud computing, where it currently controls about a third of the market, more than its next two major competitors combined. Politicians like to make a show of being mad about big tech, but if we stay silent about monopolists, they won't do anything about it.

In other news, Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore the ban on importing trophy animals like elephants. You may recall this being an issue of some notoriety in late fall of 2017, after a photo of one of his offspring sporting a bloody elephant tail went viral on social media, and Mr. Trump actually delayed his plan to reverse the ban -- for nearly four months! Hey, shame doesn't work as well on everyone! And generally we should avoid electing the people most immune to it! In any case, Mr. Trump did follow through on reversing the ban before spring had sprung in 2018, so now it's time to remind our Congressfolk that even though elephants aren't "endangered" in America per se, they are pretty obviously endangered in Africa (i.e., where you'd go to get hunting trophies), where their numbers have sunk from 10 million to less than half a million. And, hey, if you got to know an elephant -- they mimic you, they mourn their dead, they adapt to change, they work together toward common goals -- you'd never hunt one down and cut its tail off just to show everyone what big balls you have.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell our President to lift unnecessary restrictions on abortion. Specifically, you'd ask President Biden to lift the in-person restriction on getting mifepristone (which, when used in tandem with either misoprostol or gemeprost, induces medical abortion) and instruct our FDA to review all of the restrictions it's put on the drug. Our FDA requires that folks pick up mifepristone in person, which sucks during a pandemic, but also sucks at other times, because Jesus Mary and Joseph you can get Xanax delivered through the mail, so there's no reason you can't get mifepristone through the mail, either. Not to pile on, but if you're poorer, getting the drug through the mail might be your best option. Maybe Mr. Biden -- being personally opposed to abortion but unwilling to tell everyone else how to feel about it, which closely resembles my position on the matter -- thinks being pro-choice but letting our FDA restrict access to mifepristone is a "compromise." But there is no compromise possible with right-wingers, certainly not on abortion. At least not publicly! Ask Scott DesJarlais what I could mean by that.

Finally for-real-this-time, our House didn't vote on the COVID relief bill yesterday, but they'll likely vote on it today, so give your House Reps a call and tell them to pass it, even if you called them yesterday.

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

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. It's July already, I know, and the best time for the Senate to pass these bills was last year. But the second-best time for them to pass these bills is now.

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

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

Action: from good House bills to bad hunting regulations.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. These are all good bills: the Voting Rights Advancement Act, for example, would put the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act that our Supreme Court knocked out, while the Save the Internet Act would reinstate the FCC's pro-internet freedom net neutrality rules as the law of the land again. So tell your Senators to pass these bills, with no excuses.

Meanwhile, H.R. 7221, the Prohibiting Law Enforcement Use of Chemical Weapons Act, would (as its title suggests!) prevent police from using tear gas as a weapon. If you're of the mind that reforms such as these would "keep cops from doing their jobs," please think about it: how many crooks do police apprehend with tear gas? It is an enormously cumbersome and imprecise weapon, much more so than a handgun or a taser. Of course, crooks don't get apprehended with tear gas -- but peaceful protestors sure do! And that's who the tear gas is really for. You would also want to consider why police would need a weapon soldiers haven't been able to use since 1997; I would discard answers that include the phrase "because the streets are so much more dangerous now," because a) that's not true and b) I just said that tear gas is a bad weapon to fight crime with. No, really, people do pretend to be that stupid. Anyway, the Other 98 helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect peaceful protestors from police violence by passing the Prohibiting Law Enforcement Use of Chemical Weapons Act.

In other news, Amazon has stepped up its feel-good PR campaign -- you saw the ad with the deaf single dad? Yeah, they'll fire his ass, too, if he walks too slowly in the warehouse -- almost like they know they achieved their position as the world's number one online retailer mainly by doing evil! Amazon has also lately imposed a one-year moratorium on police use of its infamous (and pretentiously-titled, don't think any of that Kraftwerk coolness rubs off on you!) Rekognition software. You remember Rekognition, right? The facial recognition software that's almost as bad at telling black folks apart as your right-wing uncle is? A one-year moratorium is exactly the kind of thing that's designed to make people feel good about using Amazon again -- and then quickly forgotten once the PR storm passes over, as it will for a lot of Americans, though not for a lot of black Americans who still have to face random police brutality. Anyway, MPower Change helps you tell Amazon to cut all of its ties with law enforcement. They're still providing cloud computing services to ICE, after all; think that helps out anyone but Amazon?

Finally, our National Park Service finalized rules in several Alaska national parks allowing hunters to kill bears and cubs while they hibernate and shoot wolves and coyotes while they're with their pups; the rules also allow hunters to shoot coyotes from motorboats and lure bears out of their dens with donuts so they can shoot them. Well, that all sounds very sporting, doesn't it? It doesn't sound like "good Americans ritualizing how their forebears used to survive"! It doesn't even sound like "an excuse for a bunch of guys to hang out and get drunk," as one hunter described hunting's purpose to me years ago. No, the word we're looking for here is cruel, though Alaska's Congressional delegation supports the change, claiming that it -- hey, not my words, but Sen. Murkowski's! -- is a "matter of states' rights"! Who knew the "right" to own slaves was at play here? And on federal land, no less! So, in short: it's not just cruel, it's also bad law-making. And since our Administration wants to do this to other Alaska national parks, the Alaska Wilderness League helps you oppose similar cruelty in other federal parks in Alaska.

Action: concerning good House bills and good farm policy.

Happy Thursday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to protect voting rights, internet freedom, secure pensions, higher wages, and many other good things by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. I wouldn't blame you for thinking we're doing no good, since it's been almost a year and a half for some of these bills. But these bills are good works on issues from voting rights to internet freedom to the minimum wage, and we can't stop fighting for them until we win.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6718/S. 3221, the Farm System Reform Act, would achieve its stated aim by banning new factory farm construction and the expansion of existing factory farms, plus it would phase out current factory farms over the next 20 years. Factory farms have created many evils -- we've gone into two of them, pollution and antibiotic abuse, at some length over the years. But you know what else factory farms have done? They've helped make the small family farmer almost nonexistent in America! Factory farms can scale down expenses and scale up profits better than any small farmer can, but to what end? So that America becomes dependent on miserable animals, dung-filled waterways, and rampant antibiotic-resistant superbugs just to have relatively inexpensive chicken parm? So that a few big ag executives can dictate policy to the American people, policy that'll benefit them a lot more than it benefits us? Big factory farms aren't just bad for our health, our air and water, and our small farmers: they're bad for democracy. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner agricultural policy in America by passing the Farm System Reform Act.

Action: concerning health care, animal abuse, and paid family leave.

H.R. 3815/S. 1926, the PrEP Access and Coverage Act, would expand good Americans' access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP) anti-viral pills, and thus reduce incidence of HIV. The bill would ensure that all private and public health insurance plans cover PrEP without copays (the drug can run as much as $2,000/month in out-of-pocket costs), and it would also prevent health insurance corporations from charging people higher premiums if they're using PrEP, which essentially insulates Americans from their insurers using PrEP as a pre-existing condition. I guess the "religious" "conscience" crowd will whine about it, but if you know folks are born gay, and that drug addicts and couples of mixed status (i.e., one has HIV, the other doesn't) don't deserve to die of AIDS, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from HIV by passing the PrEP Access and Coverage Act.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that over a dozen states still use sodium cyanide bombs to kill coyotes and foxes -- and you may also have heard that these cyanide bombs don't just kill and injure the predators for whom they're intended, but also other animals, family pets, and even people. Hence H.R. 2471/S. 1301, the Chemical Poisons Reduction Act, would outlaw sodium cyanide and sodium fluoroacetate in animal control devices nationwide. The bill is also known as "Canyon's Law," after the 14-year-old Idaho boy who lost his family dog to a sodium cyanide bomb, and who suffered injuries himself from the bomb. It sure seems commonsensical to demand that animal control devices do no harm to animals who aren't hurting anyone -- in fact, one might well say it sounds conservative. Hence Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Americans and animals from the unintended consequences of sodium cyanide bombs by passing Canyon's Law.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to pass HB 1739/SB 580, the Family Care Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Much like the FAMILY Act at the federal level, the Family Care Act would establish a paid family leave insurance program in the state of Pennsylvania, and would pay for it by instituting a small payroll tax, and by "small" I mean a little over half of one percent. Per the bill, workers would get 90% of "the portion of a covered individual's average weekly wage that is equal to or less than 50% of the Statewide average weekly wage," and then 50% of the portion above that; the benefits are a little low for my taste, but lower-income workers would wind up getting most of their paychecks, and they're the ones who can least afford to take days off to take care of sick family members (or sick selves). So let's get these working families some relief and some peace of mind for once.

Around the table: our Constitution may not save us! And other sad truths.

Heritage Action executive director pens editorial explaining why we should all vote for Republicans this year. Your jaw will hit the floor when he says electing Democrats will increase partisan bitterness, as if Beltway partisans like him don't already look for any excuse to ratchet up the bitterness; most of the rest of it is better, I suppose, but it'll only move you if you already believe it, and three paragraphs of pablum about health care reform being better at the state level is no answer to the reality that Republicans tried to take away our health insurance. The worst thing about this op-ed, though? How the last paragraph suggests that the "noise" in American politics comes from anywhere other than our President and his votaries. That's some hardcore gaslighting there.

Green Party candidate for state auditor of Missouri writes damning piece about how "liberal" media reporting -- at least as far as his own race is concerned -- only covers "Issues That Don't Matter." Worse than the big media organs' refusal to cover issues brought up by him (and his Constitution and Libertarian cohorts), worse, even, than those organs' fascination with the Democrat and Republican candidates exchanging "jabs" and "harsh words," was the journalist telling him that there just "wasn't room" for discussion of issues in his article, and anyway "we need to write about what interests our readers, and they just want to know what the Democrats and Republicans say." Typical, how journalists think so little of us! They can rest assured that most readers (definitely including myself!) return their contempt in spades. There's a solution in there, somewhere.

Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs warns us to "be careful" about assuming our Constitution will save us from things like our President's efforts to end birthright citizenship for certain brown-skinned babies born on American soil. Long story short: "(c)onstitutions are very important documents," but "(t)heir words do not mean anything, though, if there is nobody in charge who is willing to uphold them," like, you know, the five right-wingers on the Court right now (not to mention the sixth or seventh, if Justices Breyer and Ginsburg pass). Thus even an abjectly stupid argument about what one of the original writers of the 14th Amendment "thought" it meant (an argument Antonin Scalia would have rejected!) could become "precedent" in the hands of unscrupulous folks like Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

How about some good news? a U.S. District Judge rules that Wyoming's ag-gag laws are unconstitutional. This means not only that folks working to expose animal abuse at factory farms can breathe a little more easily now, but folks testing water downstream from factory farms to expose pollution can also breathe a little more easily, since Wyoming's ag-gag law prevented that, too. One day we'll all take for granted that corporations shouldn't have more rights than people, and this ruling helps bring us one step closer to that day.

Finally, how about some more good news? Our FDA has banned the use of lead acetate in hair dyes. Responding to a petition filed by several groups including Consumers Union and the Environmental Defense Fund, our FDA found the 1980 study allowing lead acetate in hair dyes to be scientifically deficient, but note well that scientists have said for years there is no "safe level" of lead in just about anything. Hair dye may not sound like such a big deal, but a lot of people use it, and you probably don't even know how many! So this is a big deal, and kudos to our FDA for doing the right thing.

Action: concerning immigration and humane treatment of animals.

After getting in so much trouble with the American people for its "zero-tolerance" family separation policy, our Administration has proposed a fix to the problem -- by essentially terminating the Flores settlement that keeps our government from separating immigrant children from their parents in the first place! Then it'll be Super Happy Indefinite Detainment Fun Time Land in America again! But since our Administration's plan involves the Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) and the Department of Health and Human Services to issue new regulations, they must take comments from the public on the matter before moving forward -- which I'm sure angers them! -- so the ACLU helps you tell our Administration not to terminate the Flores agreement with new regulations. We have until November 6 to leave comments; as fate would have it, November 6 is also Election Day. Leave your comment now and you won't have to worry about doing both on the same day.

Meanwhile, Joann Burrows, of Yonkers, NY, has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Bronx Zoo to release an elephant named Happy to an elephant sanctuary. Why? Because the Zoo currently has Happy in a form of solitary confinement, after two newly-acquired elephants charged at her lifelong roommate (named Grumpy) and killed him in 2002, and her next roommate, named Sammy, passed in 2006. The Zoo decided at that point not to acquire any more elephants, which left Happy all alone, since they weren't going to have her live with the two elephants who killed Grumpy. But elephants need to be social, and Happy can't be, now -- the Zoo says she has "tactile and auditory contact" with the two elephants with whom she doesn't get along, but why would anyone think that's good enough? Better to find a place with other elephants for her. But they won't do it, of course, until we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Action: concerning public water, airline fees, and animal experimentation.

First things first. Asahi-Schweppes (you may know Schweppes' tonic water and bitter lemon sodas from your grandparents' liquor cabinet) is pumping a few hundred thousand liters of groundwater from the town of Stanley in Australia, and then selling it as, well, "better" than what comes out of your taps, I guess. Thing is, Stanley has nut and fruit orchards which provide the town's 370 residents with a livelihood, and those orchards need groundwater to keep going. (Oh, and people already pay taxes so they can drink clean water, too.) The good folks of Stanley seem to have exhausted all their legal options; now it's up to us to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against Asahi for picking on a town of not even 400 people thinking they won't be able to stand up for themselves. So Sum of Us helps you tell Asahi to stop taking Stanley's water from them. Over 95,000 good folks have signed this petition, at this writing; I bet those 370 Stanley residents don't feel so alone now.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the FAIR Fees amendment to the FAA reauthorization bill. You just love being hit with unexpected airline fees for changing flights or checking bags, right? Of course you don't; nobody does, but if the FAIR Fees amendment passes, our Department of Transportation (or DOT) would have the authority to tamp down high airline fees. I guess right-wingers will squeal BIG GUMMINT!!!! at the thought of our DOT actually making sure these fees have something to do with the "services" airlines supposedly provide in exchange, but I'd just respond you like big airlines better? The three biggest airlines collected over $16 billion in fees in 2016 alone -- and none of us are getting across the country in five hours by train or automobile, so what do we call that? A hostage situation, that's what. And whenever predatory corporations take us hostage, we have to get our government to stop them.

Finally, the White Coat Waste Project has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell our government to retire and release lab animals at the end of federally-funded animal experiments. You don't have to oppose animal experimentation to see that letting them go to good homes is a much, much better idea than simply killing them off, which is what otherwise happens to those animals at the end of experiments. If you fear that the animals would never adapt to a life outside of being imprisoned in a cage, then I would urge you to have a little more faith in a living thing's resilience. And if you'd rather just kill them off so we can spend less taxpayer money, then I would urge you to a) slap yourself and b) contemplate more fully the idea that civilization should take some effort on our part to maintain, and maybe it should even cost more money than barbarism. You may also want to contemplate the fact that rich folks sure could be paying more in taxes.

Action: concerning campaign finance disclosure and gestation crates.

Good news, everyone -- the DISCLOSE Act is back! This time it's H.R. 6239/S. 3150, and it'd do the same thing it's wanted to do since its initial introduction back in 2010 -- shed some sunlight on folks spending billions of dollars to influence your vote. Most Americans agree that money isn't speech, and most Americans agree that more money in political campaigns is a bad thing -- and most Americans also agree that they want to know who's behind campaign ads. What are Our Glorious Elites afraid of, then? They're afraid of losing wealth and positions they never earned in the first place, that's what. No use arguing that "it takes a lot of money to build an effective campaign," because our Constitution isn't about "effective campaigning" but about redressing grievances with your representatives, and any articulate citizen can do that. Hence a group of good-government groups helps you tell your Reps and Senators to support the DISCLOSE Act.

Meanwhile, Mercy for Animals has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Brazilian corporation JBS, which is the world's largest meat-processing corporation, to stop putting their feed animals in gestation crates. You may recall the nefarious "gestation crate" from previous action alerts; the entire European Union has banned them, as has Canada and 10 American. Gestation crates are about two feet wide and around six and a half feet long; think it'd be enjoyable to spend your entire life in one of those, as a lot of feed animals do? Pigs can't turn around in them, and it drives them bananas, as it would do to any intelligent and social animal. And these crates don't even have a bottom, so that animals' poop and urine can be sprayed out from underneath them with minimal effort. Only a big corporation would think a gestation crate is a splendid idea, but they don't get all the say around here.

Action: concerning taxes and animal bans.

On the occasion of the 6-month anniversary of the Republican tax scam, and the Republicans' stated intent to pursue another tax-cut-for-the-rich before the midterms, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Republican tax scam, oppose another tax-cut-for-the-rich, and enact tax policy that actually helps working families. A couple dozen dollars every week ain't nothing, but giving a couple dozen dollars to working families while giving billions to corporations and hundreds of thousands to millionaires just ain't moral -- ultimately, it's a way to bribe working families so that rich folks can get even more powerful. If Congress wants to help working families, they can tax the rich harder, so that they're less able to buy Congressfolk who'll write laws that help them run roughshod over the rest of us. Sounds a lot like common sense -- to anyone but a Congressdolt dependent on campaign funds to survive, that is.

Meanwhile, airline corporations have met with some much-deserved bad PR over avoidable pet deaths, the most famous (from almost a year ago) being the bulldog puppy who suffocated after a United Airlines attendant insisted the dog be put in the overhead compartment. So Delta Airlines (which had a dog die during a layover on one of its flights last month) has compounded the problem by banning pit bulls from their flights, even if they're service or emotional support dogs. I can't be the only one who's had nothing but positive experiences with pit bulls. And this ban happens to violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, since no one who has a seeing-eye pit is going to go through the trouble of training (and trusting) a dog of a different breed just to fly Delta. Hence Sara Enos has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Delta Airlines to get rid of their pit bull ban.

Action: war-making powers, immigrant child abuse, and animal abuse.

As you likely know, S.J.Res. 59 is one of them-there "authorizations to use military force," like the one Congress passed after 9.11 -- except that S.J.Res. 59 would give our President a virtual blank check to wage war whenever and wherever without the Congressional approval our Constitution requires. And that's a bad idea! Our Constitution gives our President the power to wage war, not declare war, and talk about "not hamstringing the President to respond to threats" is precisely the opposite of the point: the Constitution aims to hamstring our President from ordering young folks to die! Thus Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S.J.Res. 59. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on S.J.Res. 59 two weeks ago, and still hasn't voted on the bill, but don't get complacent: they're just waiting until they think no one is watching to ram the damn thing through. So let's let them know we're watching them.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell our Customs and Border Protection officers to stop abusing children verbally, physically, and sexually. There are laws against that, you know! Even though these children are "only" undocumented immigrants! The ACLU uncovered some 30,000 pages of evidence of CBP abuse between 2009 and 2014 (at the risk of beating a dead horse, being "tough on illegal immigrants" got President Obama exactly zero love from the right!), abuse including food and water deprivation, threats of rape and death, and, of course, actual rape. No whining about how tough it is to be a CBP officer! If they can't stand the heat, they should get out of the kitchen! And if you can't help but abuse children, America shouldn't enable you! (In fairness, I do suspect CBP officers aren't paid enough, trained enough, or have enough decision-making power, but we can help them in these areas without tolerating abuse. That's what civilized people do.)

Meanwhile, you may have heard some police officers in Illinois and elsewhere oppose pot legalization because, get this, they'll have to euthanize all their pot-sniffing dogs if pot becomes legal. That's a nice two-for-one there -- rhetorical hostage-taking and threatened animal cruelty! Seriously, in what sick, immoral, and decadent society does keep the pot illegal or all the police dogs get it! represent serious, reasonable argument? I mean, in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, even tortured lab animals can be safely adopted as pets, so we should be able to help pot-sniffing dogs become valued members of a family somewhere. First step, of course, is to keep the state of Illinois from killing police dogs, which Amanda Quinonez has started a petition on Change.org to help you do. As for folks who'd continue to hold a gun to a dog's head in order to stand in the way of progress, may God have mercy on your immortal souls.

Action: fighting banksters, cruel housing policies, and cruelty to animals.

Our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) wants to shield its database of over 1.4 million consumer complaints from public view. Because we're not trying to be a Yelp for the financial sector, says CFPB acting director Mick Mulvaney, but, ah, three things: one, the CFPB has used customer complaints to pursue major actions against wrongdoers, like Wells Fargo; two, academics use this database for research about the financial sector, and three, banksters who can't face public accountability over their misdeeds really don't deserve any customers anyway. Regarding Mr. Mulvaney's assertion that complaints go public before they're "fully-vetted": corporations get to respond to the complaint before it goes public. Regarding bankster whining that some complaints are too "general" to be useful: people know how to read. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell the CFPB to keep its customer complaint database both active and public.

Meanwhile, HUD Secretary Ben Carson has proposed tripling minimum rents for the poorest folks who get federal housing, and though the numbers might not seem oppressive -- from $50 to $150 monthly -- I assure you they are oppressive for folks who have families and make minimum wage and have other bills to pay. And if you're ready to respond that these people already get plenty of other federal assistance, keep in mind that our current Administration is trying to cut all of that, too. You don't pick on the poorest working families in America, particularly after giving the richest Americans another massive welfare handout in the form of tax "reform." Would it be piling on to remind you that Mr. Carson spent over $30,000 on new office furniture for HUD in violation of federal law and then blamed his wife for it? Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the HUD minimum rent hikes Mr. Carson has proposed.

Finally, our Department of the Interior would like to overturn its ban on cruel wildlife killing methods in Alaskan National Park preserves. If that sounds a little esoteric to you, consider some of the things you can't do in these preserves that our new Interior Department would allow you to do: kill wolf pups and bear cubs in their own dens, using donuts and bacon to lure bears out to be shot, and shining super-bright spotlights on bears and cubs hibernating in their dens in order to shoot them. Our Interior Department Secretary loves talking about the importance of hunting in our culture, but I'd be hard-pressed to imagine actual hunters finding any of the things I've described above to be sporting. Killing animals and their children while they're sleeping seems, in fact, rather the kind of thing wannabe genocidal maniacs contemplate. So MoveOn helps you tell our Interior Department to stop its pro-animal cruelty rule-making process.

Action: livestock shipping, overtime pay, and the "balanced budget amendment."

The world has seen video of the squalid conditions of ships that transport livestock; these "death ships" are, as you might imagine, overcrowded with inadequate access to food and water, and they're so hot that animals literally cook to death inside -- and then get thrown overboard! All because crowding more animals into less space means more money for corporate executives -- I say that to inoculate you against the hostage-taking argument they're bound to make that making us transport livestock more humanely means higher prices for you. Gosh, they never raise prices when they give themselves more money! Anyway, New Zealand has already banned shipping of livestock for slaughter, and when the World Organisation for Animal Health meets in just a few short weeks, more countries may follow suit. Would it kill people to eat what grows nearby, after all? Avaaz helps you tell the nations of the world to stop the live export trade.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4505/S. 2177, the Restoring Overtime Pay Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. The Obama Administration tried to raise the pay threshold below which corporations had to pay their workers overtime, so that more working families could get overtime pay, and also so that corporations would get tired of paying out all that money and just hire more workers. But a federal judge found that their overtime pay rule violated the National Labor Relations Act by failing to exempt white-collar workers, as the NLRA mandates; thus the Restoring Overtime Pay Act would amend the NLRA by creating an exemption-within-the-exemption for white-collar workers who make less than $48,000 annually, thus getting them overtime. I think it's a fairly clever way to deliver better opportunities for workers -- but only if we support it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject a "balanced budget amendment" that would force cuts in Medicare and Social Security and make raising taxes on the rich almost impossible, then CREDO still helps you do that. Politicians squeal about TEH DEFICITZ!!!!! every time our government works on behalf of the American people, and those same politicians never complain about deficits when they're cutting taxes for the rich or funneling corporate welfare to their cronies. But anyone who's ever bought a car, bought a house, or taken on a student loan knows that sometimes you have to spend more than you've got right now so that you can get ahead later. And hello! Nobody thinks this country's going belly-up anytime soon, so we're not exactly going to run out of lenders anytime soon. Our current President does often seem to be doing his damnedest to make America go belly-up, but this ain't his country -- it's ours.

Around the table: with next moves on net neutrality and the real "bad news" from a New Hampshire poll.

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut explains "How Net Neutrality Can Survive the Trump Administration." Senate Democrats will force a vote this week on their "resolution of disapproval" that would begin the process of reversing the FCC's repeal, plus the OMB is still reviewing parts of the repeal, and several lawsuits are coming, all of which may give us a bit of breathing room until the midterms, when we might get a more net neutrality-positive Congress. If we stay on them, that is.

Ho hum, Utah prosecutor charges six animal rights activists with felony theft stemming from their exposure of rampant animal abuse at a Utah factory farm. Specifically, the activists took three turkeys who were so abused they were going to die anyway, as about a quarter or turkeys "raised" at factory farms do. Faced with the loss of their ag-gag law, "theft" of dying birds is what they come up with! I hope this prosecutorial effort dies the same death the ag-gag law did in federal court.

Also ho hum, the Tax Policy Center informs us that the Republican tax "reform" has not, in fact, "supercharged" our economy. We see no dramatic increases in GDP growth and job creation since the end of December, for example. And if the economy does wind up cratering, Republican apologists will just say it would have been a lot worse without the tax "reform" bill. Or perhaps they'll bust out that "nobody could have predicted" line, although TPC does suggest that the increase in Treasury bond yields could be a harbinger of increased inflation.

Even more ho hum, our Administration is suddenly unable to produce any evidence it considered any of the public input it solicited over reorganizing federal agencies -- or, indeed, any evidence that it received public input, though OMB claimed to have received 100,000 submissions. They keep moving the deadline back for releasing their plan to reorganize federal agencies, too. Well, that's our "law and order" Administration for us.

Our President apparently hired an Israeli intelligence firm to dig up dirt on the Obama Administration officials who negotiated the Iran nuclear deal. And why are they looking for information that doesn't actually have anything to do with Iranian behavior under the nuclear deal? Because they already know they're not going to find that kind of info (just as Mr. Netanyahu's drama from the other night didn't find that info), and when you can't win the argument on the merits, you resort to personal attacks.

Finally, a poll of New Hampshire Democrats puts Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in third place out of eight possible 2020 Presidential contenders, but that news isn't nearly as "bad" "for Bernie" as the headline says. Elizabeth Warren, who's less likely to run in 2020 than Mr. Sanders, is in first with 26%; if the poll hadn't asked about her, where do you think those votes would have gone? I'll tell you where most of them wouldn't have gone: to second-place finisher and two-term Vice President Joe Biden, also less likely to run in 2020. If anything, this poll is bad news for Deval Patrick (who just served two terms as Governor right next door in Massachusetts) and Terry McAuliffe (whose extensive ties within the Democratic establishment haven't resulted in a groundswell of voter support what a shock).

Action: fighting fracking and trophy hunting of endangered species.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to ban fracking and fracking-related activities within the Basin, then CREDO still helps you do that, and with the deadline for comments on the DRBC's proposed ban coming this week, the time to speak out is now. The DRBC has proposed banning the actual practice of fracking in the Basin, which is good, but has also proposed allowing gas drilling corporations to import and release fracking wastewater into the Delaware, which is most emphatically not good. If the whole point of banning fracking is to protect our clean water and thus our health, then why would you let corporations dump nasty-ass wastewater into the drinking water of 15 million good Americans? Imagine King Solomon actually splitting the baby in half and you'll see that this is exactly the sort of "compromise" that makes good Americans hate their representatives. So let's beat it down.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop the importation of elephant hunting trophies, then Avaaz still helps you do that. Don't you just love people who try to tell you that since elephants aren't endangered here in America, then American hunters should be allowed to go over to Africa (where they are endangered) and bring home as many trophies as they like? And these are the same people who constantly whine about TEH MORAL VALUEZ!!!!! They're also, sadly, the same people who respond to any criticism with a defense of hunting in general, as if we weren't talking about the precise immorality of hunting endangered species. But these kind of folks don't get all the say around here. Why is that? Because they haven't earned it. I mean, if you want all the say about everything, you should at least, like, know things, and not just stamp your feet louder than everyone else.

Action: infrastructure, and humane pig slaughter.

You just know right-wingers are going to squeal that since you oppose the Trump infrastructure "plan," you must hate American workers and job creation, right? Of course that's all bollocks, but they'll keep saying it even though it's bollocks, and besides, we do actually have opinions on rebuilding America's infrastructure, and CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to resist Mr. Trump's scam of an infrastructure proposal and support H.Con.Res. 63 instead. H.Con.Res. 63 is one of those "sense of Congress" resolutions, and I'd prefer a resolution that would actually empower Congress to do something rather than just say something, but the principles H.Con.Res. 63 espouses -- public investment over private, protecting clean air and clean water, investing in renewable energy, ensuring infrastructure can withstand disasters, and not gutting Medicare and Social Security to pay for it, among others -- are worth fighting for. So let's fight for them.

Meanwhile, we managed to beat back yet another attempt by poultry corporations to speed up chicken inspections, but the USDA seems determined to speed up pig inspections to the tune of 1300 pigs per hour, or about one pig every three seconds, which the USDA seems to think is plenty of time to detect pus or blood or poop before it becomes food. Of course, not only is that not enough time to detect bad stuff before it finds its way into your pork roll, it's also not enough time to humanely stun and kill a pig. These big corporations all want you to think we can tech our way out of doing the hard work of doing right by their workers and by the animals they kill, when all they really want is to make more money so their CEOs can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. But civilized people don't let corporate executives have all the say about everything, so Change.org helps you leave a public comment about the USDA's proposal to speed up pig slaughter.

Around the table: vampire elites fear sunlight, and other truths.

Theo Anderson at In These Times suggests, and I hope he's right, that economic populist candidates on the left "don't need the establishment anymore." Admittedly, similarly rosy assessments drew on a rather narrower body of information (a city council race here, a special state election there) than the Virginia and Alabama elections have since furnished. And I rather suspect that anyone who adapts the small donor model can either outraise corporate-funded candidates or fool corporations into wasting even more money on candidates no one really likes.

Ho hum, Durham County (NC) aims to require 48 hours' notice before "spontaneous" protests. In a sane and moral society, proposing such a thing would end the career of whomever proposed it -- how "spontaneous" can you be if you give two days' warning, after all? -- but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, it may take a few days for good Americans to say what do you have to fear/ and you really want your Confederate statues so badly you're willing to urinate all over the First Amendment? before county officials back down.

Good Iranian citizens take to the streets to protest their country's government -- at great risk to themselves, I should add! -- but our "liberal" media uses the event as an excuse to talk to the same morons who always want America to drop a crapload of bombs to "liberate" other countries. These "experts" don't indulge in a whole lot of let the Iranian people decide their own fate, I notice! Think that might be a way of suggesting they're "incapable" of doing so? I suppose I am a bit amused that Our Glorious Elites didn't see these protests coming, just like they didn't see the 1979 revolution coming.

Louise Matsakis at Wired tells us why we should be skeptical of folks squealing ZOMG TEH RUSHINZ WILL DESTROYZ TEH INTERNETZ BY CUTTING TEH UNDERWATER CABULZ!!!!! "One of the estimated 428 undersea cables worldwide is damaged every couple of days," she reminds us. "Nearly all faults aren’t intentional. They’re caused by underwater earthquakes, rock slides, anchors, and boats." Even if someone could cut literally every one of these cables at once (which is what it would take, since cutting one cable merely causes traffic to be re-routed through another one), that still wouldn't affect internet transmissions within nations. Lesson: fight the real enemy -- like, say, Mr. Pai's FCC, which would actually take your internet freedom away from you.

Good news, everyone! Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down key parts of Idaho's "ag-gag" law as unconstitutional. I'm startled to learn that Idaho passed this law after an undercover operation at a dairy corporation uncovered, among other things, sexual molestation of animals by dairy employees. You'd think legislators wouldn't want to be caught in the position of making it harder to uncover sexual molestation of animals by food processing corporation employees. And you'd think more of them would start to get disgusted with having to serve evil all the time. Sadly, this is a little like turning around a cruise ship.

Finally, we learn that worker-owned cooperatives are making a stand against "platform" monopolies like Uber. (A "platform" monopoly controls data in a particular economic sphere -- i.e., Amazon is a platform monopoly in online sales.) You'll not only be reminded that over a third of America gets its banking services via a credit union and over a tenth gets electricity from a co-op, but you'll also learn about no less than eight co-ops making a difference -- including Ace Hardware, which likely has a store near you, and has actually expanded over the past year, unlike other corporations closing stores as they redistribute worker wealth upward to themselves. Why, it gives one hope!

Action: Social Security, blood farms, and retirement advice.

Word on the street is that Mr. Trump has abandoned the tax cut plan he pushed during the election -- a tax plan that would have delivered yet another windfall to his rich friends, cut the poorest Americans' taxes a little, and actually hiked taxes for some middle-class folk unlucky enough to find themselves in a different bracket. But now he's pushing another tax cut plan, one that would eliminate FICA payroll taxes, and he'd like to sell that as a "middle-class tax cut," since FICA taxes only affect the first $127,200 of income. And if that number sounds familiar to you, you probably already know the catch: FICA taxes fund Social Security. Gosh, it's like he watched the third season of House of Cards and didn't realize it was a cautionary tale. If you repeal the taxes that fund Social Security, guess what happens? You don't get to collect Social Security when you retire. Because the money is gone. Taxes pay for things, after all, and FICA taxes pay for the retirement you worked for, fought for, earned, and deserve. Tools are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom, if you're using a cellphone) so you can call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject any "tax cut plan" that would cripple our Social Security.

Meanwhile, a few months back we learned that "harvesting pregnant horse blood" was an actual thing that pharmaceutical corporations (mostly in Europe) do, in order to get a magical hormone that regulates a pig's reproductive cycle, and therefore regulates meat production (and thus, I presume, profits) at factory farms. Apparently our activism against this disgusting practice has helped cause at least one pharmaceutical corporation (Merck, Sharpe, and Dohme, which is what Merck & Co. calls itself outside the United States) to announce that it would refrain from using the worst blood farms, but only for its European products, oddly, so Sum of Us helps you tell MSD to do better at getting itself out of the horse blood trade. And Sum of Us also helps you tell the German pharmaceutical corporation IDT Biologika to cut ties with horse blood farms. It's not just the prospect of draining animals of their blood that should give you the willies -- it's also the fact that blood farms tend to drain them until they die, and also induce abortions in the course of their work, since I guess it takes too long for a horse to grow up to the point where they can drain its blood, too.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to submit a public comment telling the Department of Labor to keep the Obama-era rule requiring retirement advisors to put their customers' interests before their own, then the Economic Policy Institute still helps you do that. President Trump is all about getting rid of regulations, you know -- because getting rid of regulations that some banksters find annoying is much more important than keeping regulations that help everyone! -- but Mr. Trump still must follow the rules, and if he's that desperate to get rid of a rule that should be common sense for financial advisors but isn't because financial advisors have proven themselves to be too greedy to police themselves, he still has to take public comments on getting rid of it. And I bet your comment will be better than any of our opponents' comments! I mean, our opponents are actually going on record saying the rule would make too many financial advisors suffer, and even put a few out of business. Hmm, selfish financial advisors being unable to make as much money as they'd like -- isn't that how it's supposed to work?

Action: the Pruitt nomination, law enforcement disclosure, and animal abuse.

Scott Pruitt's hearings for EPA Administrator begin today, so you can use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Senators and tell them to reject Mr. Pruitt's nomination. Mr. Trump's Cabinet nominees have hit upon a fairly clever mantra in their hearings: that their past extremism doesn't matter if their job in the Cabinet will be to enforce the law. But that mantra doesn't even work with Mr. Pruitt, for his current job in Oklahoma as state Attorney General is to enforce the law, but he's left good Oklahomans in the lurch time and time again when he had to choose between enforcing the law and placating some big campaign donor. You think he won't leave America in the lurch, too? Ideologues like Mr. Pruitt and Mr. Trump say regulations get in the way of job creation -- but no corporation creates jobs if it can get away with it! And regulations do create jobs for the people who help corporations comply with them -- the people who help redesign and rebuild power plants, for example. And, really, clean air and clean water are far too vital to leave up to corporatist ideologues.

Meanwhile, Sign for Good helps you demand that the Department of Justice (whoever runs it!) require that law enforcement agencies report all deaths of folks in custody. The DOJ already has the power to do this, too, with authority granted by the Death in Custody Reporting Act, and to folks who reflexively respond that we should just "let police do their jobs," I'd respond: is killing people who have not been convicted of a crime, whether accidentally or deliberately, part of their job? And seriously, what do police officers have to hide? If an unusually high number of Americans die in custody in a particular town, why shouldn't the rest of the town's residents know that? Particularly since, you know, it might directly impact their lives? You won't find a Trump Attorney General who'll agree with you, of course -- Mr. Sessions, during his hearings, has said the Justice Department needs to be more of a "partner" to police. Of course, I'm only satisfied when the police is a partner to the American people. And just because Mr. Trump ain't with us doesn't mean we shouldn't speak out -- if anything, we should be more persistent.

Finally, from the "Dystopia is happening now!" file: did you know that harvesting pregnant horse blood was a thing? Apparently, it is -- (mostly) European pharmaceutical corporations hook up pregnant horses to machines that drain their blood, which often leads to shock, anemia, collapse, and, as you might imagine, death. Why do they do it? Because the blood of a pregnant horse, and only a pregnant horse, contains a hormone used to regulate the reproductive cycle of pigs (and therefore meat production) at factory farms. Always it seems to come back to factory farms! Is it really so great that most Americans don't produce any of their own food anymore? Of course, the horse's story gets worse: no one tells the corporations when they should stop drawing blood -- though you'd think they'd be smart about it, and not take so much that they kill the horse! -- and these corporations also induce both pregnancies and abortions in the course of their work. Next time someone says big pharma corporations are vampires, now you can say "you don't know the half of it!" Avaaz helps you tell the EU to stamp out the pregnant horse blood trade.

Action: witch-hunts, Muslim registries, and animal abuse.

Hot on the heels of a Washington Post "investigation" alleging that some 200 independent news organizations peddled "Russian propaganda," the U.S. House has passed an intelligence authorization bill that would create a committee ostensibly to "counter active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence over peoples and governments" -- but you know where such things wind up! They wind up going on witch hunts against media organs that won't kowtow to the Establishment, particularly when the committee has an overly broad mandate, and if you're thinking this'll go nowhere under a President Trump, who has often been accused of being too cozy with Russia, remember that "other duties as the President may designate" could include going after news organs that criticize him. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to oppose the "Russian propaganda" rider in the House's intelligence appropriations bill. And Democratic politicians who have their shorts in a bunch about Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 election should try putting up candidates who inspire people to vote for them, rather than attack independent media organs for not going along.

Meanwhile, the President-elect has made much noise about creating a Muslim "registry," but you may not know that Tha Bush Mobb had a program called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (or NSEERS), which targeted foreign Muslim men traveling to and from 25 countries (24 of which were Muslim-majority countries, of course), whereas Mr. Trump's ambitions in this regard are, ah, a bit broader -- he'd like to make every Muslim register, including those who are American citizens, thus contravening our First Amendment and, well, pretty much every basic notion of civilization. But our current President can do something about this (and indeed, already has, in emptying the NSEERS program of all of the countries Tha Bush Mobb had listed!), by simply scrapping the regulatory framework that established NSEERS (which, hate to pile on, never caught a single terrorist ever), and he won't even need to go to Real American President By God Mitch McConnell for permission to do it. Hence both CREDO and Moms Rising help you tell President Obama to dismantle the NSEERS registry before leaving office, thus making it harder for the Trump Administration to restart it. "Harder" is all we're getting out of this -- but we can make that count when Mr. Trump starts up his little registry.

Finally, Crate Free Illinois has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell The Maschhoffs, America's third-largest pork producer, to end practices that result in the abuse of hogs. Warning: you will not enjoy the video (total run time: four minutes, 38 seconds) of footage taken surreptitiously by the Animal Legal Defense Fund at a Maschhoffs production facility -- video that shows pigs suffering immensely in absolutely horrid living conditions, and also shows workers literally bashing "sickly" pigs' heads against the ground to kill them (which, as you might expect, doesn't always work the way it's supposed to, leaving those poor animals conscious of the damage done to them as they die). We also learn that pigs can starve "when the automatic electronic feeder malfunctions" -- in an economy where, you know, lots of people perfectly capable of feeding pigs still don't have enough work! We don't have to be vegetarians or vegans to understand that civilized people simply don't treat feed animals like this -- people who only care about profit treat animals like this. And I'll brook no guff about "keeping food prices low" -- these practices don't keep food prices low so much as they keep factory farm CEOs rich.

Action: fighting the oppression of journalists, the sale of private data, and the abuse of animals.

First things first. You may have seen the work of Egyptian photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid, better known as Shawkan, in such outlets as Time and BBC.com, but the Egyptian government has held him in detention for over three years now, torturing him the whole time. Holding a prisoner that long without charges is itself illegal in Egypt, but no matter -- the government finally filed half a dozen charges against him, including possession of a weapon, illegal assembly, murder, and attempted murder, but you could be excused for thinking his real "crime" was documenting the Rabaa massacre, where Egyptian government forces killed at least 800 protestors. Of course, protesting doesn't merit the death penalty, anywhere, at any time -- I wonder how many good Americans will remember that in the coming months and years -- and documenting government oppression doesn't merit criminal charges of any kind, particularly the trumped-up kind. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the Egyptian government to free Shawkan. Not incidentally, Shawkan has contracted Hepatitis C -- for which he's had a hard time getting medical treatment! -- but the Egyptian government has freed other political prisoners suffering from Hep C. Egypt can't even be consistent in how it oppresses its people! It's hard out there for a pimp.

Meanwhile, closer to home, big telecom corporation AT&T has been selling its analyses of your private call data to law enforcement agencies via its Hemisphere project -- and this is true whether you're an AT&T customer or not! (The chances are pretty good that you call AT&T customers or make calls on AT&T-built infrastructure on occasion.) Naturally AT&T hid what it was doing from, because this is immoral coming and going -- a corporation selling your private data and taxpayer money going to buy it! AT&T adds close to four billion records to its database every day, and no use hoping that law enforcement is taking on much more data than it can handle, because searching for data isn't anywhere near as hard as people might think, and desperate states will go a long way to hurt people (just like Egypt has, above). Hence Access Now helps you tell AT&T to stop selling your private information to law enforcement. No use trying to tell me that we need these kinds of tools to foil terrorists now-more-than-ever. You know what kind of tools foil terrorists? The kind of tools that promote real independence for Americans -- higher-paying jobs, good homes with less debt -- which are exactly the kinds of tools corporations are constantly trying to destroy, because then you'll be less dependent on them.

Finally, Dan McKernan of Chelsea, MI has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell Michigan state Sen. Joe Hune (R-22) and state Rep. Gretchen Driskell (D-52) to fight the continuing abuse of animals at factory farms by opposing HB 5987. HB 5987 would extend the phase-out of battery cages in Michigan by five years, but this phase-out is already a 10-year process, passed by the state legislature seven years ago, and Michigan is the first state in the nation to mandate that factory farms phase out the kinds of cages that force animals into confined spaces for their entire lives -- not so food prices can be lower, mind you, but so factory farm executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Of course HB 5987 has a lot of industry support, and as long as big ag corporations can hold the threat of "less food" or "higher prices" over our heads, bills like HB 5987 will have a good chance of passing. The only things we have going for us, I guess, are our voices, and our tradition as civilized people who hate being needlessly cruel to animals for profit. But I'll take that -- big ag corporations are prisoners of their hunger for money, but we're free people.

Action: Medicare and Social Security, animal cruelty, and jobs for rural Americans.

Social Security Works helps you tell President-elect Trump to honor his campaign promise not to touch Medicare and Social Security benefits. Mr. Trump likely BS'd his way to a win in Florida with these promises -- you'll note that in 2012, Paul Ryan was on the ticket with Mitt Romney, and they lost Florida -- and some of his advisors have publicly hedged his opposition to Medicare and Social Security cuts. And, of course, nothing prevents Mr. Trump from saying that he had no idea how "insolvent" these programs were (politicians have been predicting their trust funds' imminent demise for over 20 years now, but never mind) and thus has "no choice" but to make "difficult decisions" on these programs. Of course, the reason it's "difficult" to privatize Medicare and Social Security is that the American people oppose doing so, almost uniformly and across the ideological spectrum. No, the only people who want to raid Social Security and Medicare are the politicians who want to deliver all that Social Security and Medicare money to their big donors. Well, we beat them back in 2005, we beat them back in 2011 (what, you thought it was President Obama who beat them back in 2011? No, he enabled them!), and we'll beat them back in 2017 and beyond. If we remember to fight, that is.

Meanwhile, Hillary Lauren, of Boston, MA, has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Michigan state legislature to punish animal cruelty regardless of the animal's protection status. A little background: states largely protect wildlife animals from abuse by people, but they also classify some animals as "nuisance" animals, meaning animals likely to destroy homes, crops, or property. Ms. Lauren says she was prompted to start her petition after watching a Youtube video of a Michigan teenager beating a porcupine to death while his friends watched and laughed, and then recalling a story about boys in New York butchering porcupines, but apparently porcupines are nuisance animals, and the law doesn't extend protections against abuse to them. Well, why not? Civilized people understand the difference between fighting scavengers and being cruel to them for kicks. And this goes well beyond Bill Murray's famous observation that he doesn't trust people who don't like dogs, but completely trusts dogs who don't like people -- if you cannot treat all animals with the dignity they deserve, even as you decide which ones are threats to your safety and livelihood and deal with them appropriately, then how can you consider yourself a civilized human being? Nobody but Donald Trump says being civilized is easy, but then he's so terrible at it you shouldn't listen to him.

Finally, if you've missed previous action alerts helping you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4456, the RECLAIM Act, which would fund pollution cleanup efforts of old coal mine sites in rural America, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Funding pollution cleanup efforts would actually create jobs in rural America, and with the "liberal" media (commendably, for once!) suddenly focused on those good Americans left behind by globalization, you'd think this bill would have an easy chance at passing. And with the bill's lead sponsor a Kentucky Republican and the bill's two dozen sponsors almost equally divided between the two major political parties, you'd think it'd have an even easier chance at passing. But here's three reasons we shouldn't count on it passing without our help: 1) nothing should pass without our help, ever; 2) Congress is full of evil people who won't pass bills that actually do good for their constituents; and 3) some folks still have this ideological attachment to the idea that only corporations, and certainly not our government, should create jobs. What to do, then, when corporations won't create jobs, which is their preferred default setting? Remember that people care less who exactly employs them than that they're actually employed, that's what. And, really, let's not have the Big Gummint is Always Evil crowd have all the say about everything, OK?

Action: "too big to fail" banks, and pit bull bans.

H.R. 2600/S. 1206, the Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act, would break up so-called "too big to fail" banks "so that their failure would no longer cause a catastrophic effect upon the U.S. or global economy without a taxpayer bailout," per S. 1206's summary. And during the time it takes to break up these too-big-to-fail banks, the bill would also prevent them from getting handouts from the Federal Reserve and keep them from engaging in certain securities trading -- so that these banksters don't pollute the economy with their lust for risk, in addition to distorting the economy with their size. Don't believe any hype from right-wingers that only bankers understand the economy and government should just stay out of it. Virtually everyone in America understands full well what the banks did to our economy with their risky financial "instruments" in 2008. The only people who don't understand that, generally, are people who have a lot invested (financially or emotionally!) in seeing any efforts to rein in the big banks fail. But if we don't rein in society's most powerful members, we fail, and eventually our civilization will die. It's really that simple. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to break up the big banks, and thus keep our economy and our jobs safe. We could call that real security.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that the Montreal City Council -- responding to a brutal mauling of a resident of a Montreal suburb this past June -- has passed a law banning pit bulls (and, indeed, many dogs that aren't pit bulls but that look more or less like pit bulls) from the city. But on Wednesday, a Quebec Superior Court judge suspended enforcement of that law indefinitely, pending further judicial review -- which doesn't strike the law from the books, but merely gives pit bulls a reprieve that'll probably last a few months. So now is not the time to celebrate; now is the time to press our advantage, which this Change.org petition aimed at the Montreal Mayor and City Council helps you do. The Montreal City Council bylaw would not only outlaw further breeding or adoption of pit bulls within city limits, but would ban such dogs from showing up in city shelters, which is effectively a death sentence for them. And for what? To demonstrate that you've "done something" about a brutal death? And we shouldn't even be considering the question of whether scientific evidence exists to suggest that pit bulls are more violent than other species of dogs -- though of course it doesn't, and if you still think it does, you need to remember that dozens of scattered anecdotes about pit bull attacks over the decades still don't constitute science.

UPDATE. I originally said the Quebec judge indefinitely suspended the pit bull ban yesterday, but he did so on Wednesday. Error corrected above.