Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: of unearned mandates, law-and-order posturing, and rich folks acting stupid.

Our Administration finalizes rules putatively allowing them to enforce the Endangered Species Act far less vigorously than before. Among the changes: our government can how "take into account" the purported "economic costs" of saving a species; perhaps our alien overlords will do the same when mulling whether to save humanity! And where does Commerce Secretary Ross imagine our President has a "mandate" to "eas(e) the regulatory burden on the American public"? First off, they're not "easing" a "burden" on "the public"; they're just making it easier for big corporate cronies to make more unearned millions. Second, 54% of the electorate wanted someone else to be President in 2016, so he has no "mandate" other than the ones our Constitution gives -- you know, the ones he ignores at every opportunity. So I guess we'll see these pricks in court, then.

Acting CBP Chief will not confirm for CNN's Jake Tapper that CBP is investigating any of our President's corporations for their well-reported reliance on undocumented immigrant labor. While it is true that "there are investigations going on all the time that you’re unaware of," it is equally true that I am not a schmuck, and I do not expect ICE to show up in Bedminster anytime soon, not because our President is innocent, but because they knows better. Or, maybe, because he's their bastard. I'd prefer the former reason, but either one is alien to a nation where we pride ourselves that no one is above the law.

Speaking of which, Current Attorney General William Barr tells the Fraternal Order of Police that those newly-elected district attorneys who do not shove their testicles in your face to prove their toughness are, of course, "anti-law enforcement." Here's a clue: if you say someone is "anti-law enforcement," you're pretty much telegraphing that you can't win the argument on the merits. It's like saying something is "socialist." And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that his statement that suspects should always "comply first" with police instructions and then "if warranted, complain later" will not resonate very much with families of folks executed by police after, say, pulling out their cellphone or telling a police officer they have a registered firearm in their car.

Visa CEO says he won't block gun sales, saying, as a matter of comparison I suppose, that "(w)e shouldn’t tell people they can’t purchase a 32-ounce soda" and "(w)e shouldn’t tell people they can’t buy reproductive drugs." I guess he brings "reproductive drugs" in because he's trying to say he's Hip Like Us, but comparing guns to soda is rock-stupid, because no Big Gulp has ever killed 30 people in 60 seconds. People like Mr. Kelly love saying everything is a "slippery slope," but actually almost nothing is -- civilized people have been debating the boundaries of what we allow and what we outlaw for thousands of years, but I guess corporate CEOs are too bold to acknowledge history and heritage.

Finally, wealthy supporters of our President who live in the Hamptons whine that they have to keep their support of our President "in the closet" (way to insult the entire gay experience, whiners!) for fear of ostracization and lost business, and even "physical violence." America is going into a "dark place," they say, and given our President's overt racism I sure would have said that differently! If rich folks really fear physical violence they can call a cop, but they don't seem to understand that when folks injure our community, we ostracize them, because that's how civilization is supposed to work. Or, to put it in a way our President's supporters might better understand: fuck your feelings.

Action: concerning internet privacy, endangered species, and conservation funding.

You've heard all the news stories about social media corporations failing to protect our private information, and yet so many in politics would prefer that these corporations get to "police themselves"! When people screw up on the level that these corporations have screwed up, do we let them "police themselves"? Of course not! Hence Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass strong legislation protecting our private information online. That might seem like an uphill climb, particularly if you remember that our FCC did enact decent internet privacy regulations toward the end of 2016, only to see our Congress repeal those regulations in a "resolution of disapproval." Surely they've learned their lesson, right? We should never assume that our Congressfolk learn any lessons unless we've taught them those lessons again and again. But that's why we're here.

Meanwhile, Avaaz helps you tell our world leaders, in advance of a global wildlife summit, to add giraffes to the list of animal species the multilateral CITES treaty protects. Almost half a dozen African nations have already proposed adding giraffes to the protected species list, almost certainly because the world's giraffe population has gone down close to 40% over the last 30 years, putting them at risk of extinction. And a big reason their numbers are down? Illegal hunting, of course. Because giraffe steaks make good eatins for folks who might otherwise starve to death? Well, no -- because well-off folks like to hunt animals. Frankly I'm gobsmacked that anyone who's ever seen a giraffe would want to kill it for sport, and I'm even more gobsmacked when I hear testimonials from folks who've worked with giraffes and found them intelligent and gentle. I guess some folks are just that empty inside and need something, anything, to fill the void.

Finally, Congress still hasn't reauthorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which expired last September 30, and no all the shutdown drama is no excuse, not just because reauthorizing a popular conservation fund isn't exactly a heavy lift politically or logistically, but because this program actually pays for itself, via oil and gas drilling royalties. And you like the Delaware Water Gap? The Appalachian Trail? The Flight 93 Memorial? Well, the Land and Water Conservation Fund created all of these, and many more of our most popular and significant monuments. Of course, our current President only cares about the present -- certainly not the past, and certainly not the future. But those of us who do care about the past and the future can let Penn Environment helps is tell our Congressfolk to get off their duffs and reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund already.

Action: concerning health care, nativism, and pollution.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support real health insurance reform in America by passing legislation expanding Medicare to all Americans. The health insurance industry won't like it, of course, but they've bollocksed up health care so badly in America that tens of millions of Americans still don't have health insurance, meaning they skip visits to the doctor because they can't pay for them, meaning some of them die. And if a single-payer health insurance system brings down health care costs everywhere else in the world, there's no reason it won't do the same here. Oh, I know there are "reasons," but they aren't good reasons -- whining about TEH 34 TRILLYUNZ!!!! a Medicare-for-All system would cost over the next decade, for example, makes no sense in a nation where we're going to spend $49 trillion on health care costs over the next decade. So let's take control of our health care system and get better results for less.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to reject our Administration's nomination of Heather Nauert as U.N. Ambassador. I mean, if we labored to keep John Bolton out of that job, why would we want Heather Nauert? And should a nominee's main qualification be that she makes her predecessor look better? Ms. Nauert used to work for Fox News, where she (surprise!) routinely attacked immigrants and Muslims, and she's spent the last 18 months as a State Department spokeshack. Clearly our President has fast-tracked her because he likes how she talks! But, frankly, we shouldn't be sending nativists or nativist-wannabes to the U.N. I mean, that seems self-evident, doesn't it? Maybe our Senators will grill her and expose her unfitness for the job, but they didn't exactly stop Ms. DeVos's nomination; is it too much to ask that our Senators at least expose their unfitness for their own jobs if they can't stop this nomination?

Finally, with the impending resignation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Senators to demand a new Interior Secretary who will actually protect public lands and not rush to sell them off to big corporations. As seems to happen a lot with this Administration, Mr. Zinke got a lot of notoriety for his taxpayer-funded trips and his profligate spending (remember the $140,000 door? Good times!), but he also did more palpable harm as Interior Secretary, by scaling back national monuments, auctioning off public lands to corporate polluters, and rolling back protections for threatened species. And his number two man, former fossil fuel lobbyist David Bernhardt, sure as hell won't do any better, even if he doesn't literally ride into his first day on the job on a horse, like Mr. Zinke did. Mr. Bernhardt has never met a regulation he didn't consider a burden, and that's not the attitude that'll protect our public lands.

Action: concerning trade, forced arbitration, and endangered species.

Canada, Mexico, and the United States signed the USMCA trade deal late last week -- but still has to be ratified by our House and Senate to take effect. The USMCA has its good points -- namely it's near-obliteration of the "investor-state dispute settlement" (or ISDS) system, which nullifies our laws and bleeds taxpayer money -- but it also has its bad points (namely its corporate welfare for Big Pharma and its weak enforcement mechanisms for labor and environmental standards), so Public Citizen helps you tell your Reps and Senators to demand improvements to the USMCA before approving it. I must say I'm quite pleased to hear no one in Congress demanding a "fast-track" process for trade deals, since "fast-track" processes tend to cut the people out of the process by cutting Congressional debate out of the process. And really, what are "fast-trackers" going to do? Say we need to sign the USMCA now for national security purposes?

Meanwhile, H.R. 7109/S. 3615, the Restoring Justice for Workers Act, would amend both the National Labor Relations Act and the Federal Arbitration Act to prohibit "predispute" forced arbitration agreements between employers and employees -- to which more than half of all employees must now submit! -- as well as class action or collective action bans. The bill would also prohibit retaliation against employees who won't enter into arbitration agreements with their employers. Bosses like to tell you arbitration is better for employees than class action suits (spoiler alert: they're wrong), but then why do they feel they have to force you into arbitration as a condition of employment, or force you to waive your right to a class action lawsuit? I mean, that's awfully suspicious, isn't it? So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Reps and Senators to support the Restoring Justice for Workers Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Reps and Senators not to screw around with the Endangered Species Act, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. Various Congressdolts have proposed "reforms" that would, in essence, gut the Endangered Species Act, "reforms" which have included forcing our government to rescue endangered species in a mere five years (why, it took 40 to save the bald eagle), mandating a full vote of Congress to even designate a species as endangered, and allowing Governors to nullify endangered species designations. But it ain't just Congress: our current Administration wants to introduce more economics into the whole process. Because mammon is everything to our President and his corporate cronies! They should be ashamed of themselves -- and, more to the point, we should shame them, whether we think it'll do any good or not.

Action: concerning the war in Yemen, the war on the popular will in Michigan, and the war on elephants.

The Senate voted 63-37 vote to advance S.J.Res. 54, which aims to get us out of the war on Yemen, but they still must vote to pass the bill, and the sticking point for many Senators seems to be our Administration's apparent refusal to allow CIA chief Gina Haspel to brief them on the CIA's conclusion that Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman did in fact order the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But if our Administration does make her available (which it might, although our President has contradicted the CIA's findings!), those Senators may declare themselves sated and vote the bill down -- unless we remind them that we should get out of Yemen because Congress never authorized our involvement there and because we are helping create a human rights catastrophe there. So let's call our Senators and tell them to pass S.J.Res. 54; the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone) will help you do that.

Meanwhile, from the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: after passing minimum wage and paid sick leave initiatives so that voters wouldn't get to vote on them in a ballot initiative on Election Day, Michigan's reactionary state legislature has already started gutting the minimum wage and paid sick leave standards they passed! The state Senate has passed legislation accomplishing that aim, and the state House will follow suit very soon, before that pesky incoming Democratic Governor takes office, because, as in Wisconsin, evil sure doesn't have a hard time setting priorities. So, if you want to call Michigan state House leadership (you can find phone numbers for them here) and use the Big Stick of Bad PR on them, hey, I won't stop you. I also won't stop you from telling said state House leaders that the entire country is watching them try to subvert the will of the Michigan people, who are their real bosses. I mean, gosh, we're all about freedom here at Thieves in the Temple.

Finally, fewer than half a million African elephants still roam our planet -- but our Administration wants to make it easier for folks to go off and kill these elephants so they can bring "trophies" home. Why would any reasonable person think they're hot stuff because they killed an animal that hasn't developed firearms of its own? And why should our government encourage such behavior? OK, watch our President for 30 seconds and that question answers itself, but the "freedom" to kill an endangered species and beat your chest about it is not exactly the freedom we're all about here -- surely the elephant should have freedom, too, if it's not hurting anyone? Surely being a hunter and being a civilized person aren't mutually exclusive propositions? Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to curtail granting permits to kill elephants for "trophies." And then maybe we won't see as many elephants wailing over their dead.

Action: concerning taxes and conservation.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell the incoming Congress to repeal the Republican tax-cuts-for-the-rich and advance forward better tax proposals. Our duty is our duty, so it doesn't matter that the Republican-held Senate won't pass them! Or, perhaps, it does matter, in the sense that Republicans will have to explain why they won't close corporate tax loopholes, which are popular with approximately no one outside of corporate board rooms. They'd also have to explain why they don't want to raise income taxes on the super-rich, raise the corporate tax rate, or raise the Estate Tax on millionaires and billionaires, to name three actually-popular initiatives. And remember that Republicans passed a tax cut and still lost the House, which suggests that their tax cut propaganda doesn't sway Americans like it used to. Certainly not when Americans don't even notice a tax cut in their paychecks!

Meanwhile, speaking of taxes, People for the American Way helps you tell Congressional Democrats to investigate allegations of tax-dodging that have plagued our President. I didn't want to make this the new Democrat House majority's primary focus, since our President doesn't deserve to be our primary focus -- no, the Founders would instruct us similarly, and about any President! -- but the allegations against him require our attention as defenders of civilization and lovers of law and order. And this petition would also help you demand that future Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates be legally required to release their tax returns, since custom and tradition weren't enough to persuade this President into doing so. Like conservatives, liberals would prefer that custom and tradition work their will. But when they don't, our laws must step in.

Finally, you know that our Administration is working to loosen up the "Roadless Rule" so that more logging corporations can cut down thousand-year-old trees in places like the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, but S. 3333, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, would stop that effort in its tracks, so to speak. I've long said that a new desk for your office is less valuable to our civilization than a thousand-year-old tree, but I've neglected to mention other good reasons for keeping the Tongass wild -- like the 300 species of birds (including the bald eagle) that fly through the Tongass, or the species of moose, bears, and deer that walk the land or the salmon that swim its rivers. And we'd destroy all that for what? Not even for a new desk or chair, really, but for yet another opportunity for corporate bosses to get richer! So Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to support wild places by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act.

Action: concerning Puerto Rico, self-driving cars, and endangered species.

Given the fact that Puerto Rico -- which ought to be a state, so Americans are less likely to think it's full of brown-skinned foreigners -- is still suffering from the ravages of Hurricane Maria over a year later, Amnesty International helps you tell local and federal authorities to investigate our government's response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The immediate news hook: a CBS News report (based on photos taken by a Puerto Rico police officer) that millions of bottles of water sat on a runway in Puerto Rico for more than a year. I guess our Administration will blame REGULASHUNZ!!!!! for that, though is that sort of excuse really worthy of a can-do country? Also, both the Union of Concerned Scientists and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to enact some real relief for the good citizens of Puerto Rico. And if that means building out a renewable power grid and/or ending the forced austerity policies so beloved by the banksters who hold Puerto Rican debt, well, those are sacrifices we should be willing to make.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to oppose S. 1885, the AV START Act, which would let corporations put self-driving cars on the road without ensuring their safety, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You heard about the two people self-driving cars have killed this year, but you may not have heard that road tests commonly find self-driving cars absolutely flummoxed by a little snow or a solitary seagull. One corporation wants to put sensors under cars so they'll "see" the road better. I have a few better ideas: properly fund public transportation, mandate that corporations with known safety problems start disclosing them, and shame people who only buy cars because they're flashy. We'll start getting safer driving after that! Why do we assume machines will do things better than people when machines can't check out my groceries better than a 16-year-old? Because bosses don't want to have to pay workers, that's why. Let's not enable that behavior.

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Administration not to pursue a bunch of regulatory changes that would seriously injure our ability to protect endangered species. Get to stepping, though, because the deadline for your comments is Monday. What does our Administration plan to do? Among other things, they plan to allow agencies to tabulate "economic costs" when deciding how to protect endangered and threatened species and also to ignore scientific data before giving out oil and gas drilling leases. They'd further mandate that every single threatened species in America get its own rule, even though one rule currently covers all of them; is that what right-wingers mean when they say REGULASHUNZ IZ TEH BURDENZ!!!!!? Apparently the right finds cumbersome regulations just fine when it makes the real work of civilization much harder. They'll answer to God for their nefarious works -- but let's maybe help them walk a more rewarding path by speaking out now.

Action: concerning methane emissions, drones, and endangered species.

Another day, another EPA regulatory proposal that would allow big gas drilling corporations to pollute more, specifically more methane. Our Administration has had an absolute hard-on for dumping methane emissions restrictions since the get-go, and Republicans surprisingly failed to pass a resolution of disapproval that would have nullified the EPA's methane emissions rules last year, so they're trying to undo them from inside the EPA now. But methane packs an even bigger climate change punch than coal emissions do, and letting gas drillers vent methane without making them clean it up also deprives America of a) usable fuel and b) royalties if gas drillers are drilling on public lands. Yes, whenever methane floats away on public lands, money that belongs to the American people floats away with it. So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell the EPA to keep methane restrictions strong.

Meanwhile, our Congress is working on a Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) authorization bill, and aims to use that bill to give our government the ability to shoot down drones it considers a "threat." And they don't mean the drones that we use in our unconstitutional war-making activities, but the drones journalists use to get documentation of detention center abuses. One might reasonably respond that if our government didn't do bad things to immigrants and refugees in the first place, they wouldn't need to shoot down any drones recording those things! But that'll fall on deaf ears with this Administration, which is, like Tha Bush Mobb, ignorant and arrogant about it. And while a quarter of the electorate worships them for that, the rest of us can let the Electronic Frontier Foundation help us tell our Congressfolk to reject any FAA authorization bill that allows our government to shoot down drones whenever it pleases.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Fish and Wildlife Service (or FWS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (or NMFS) to reject their proposals to base endangered species decisions more on economics and less on science and common sense, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. Don't be one of those folks who constantly says how's anyone supposed to make money? every time we try to protect endangered species, because that's actually evidence of weakness -- weakness of mind, in the inability to conceive of how business and nature could coexist, and weakness of spirit, in the unwillingness to make things work for anyone other than bosses. I mean, this is America, dammit, the can-do country of world history, and if we elevate mammon to primacy in all our decisions, we will destroy that can-do spirit, and we will deserve oblivion. But those of us with that can-do spirit will continue to fight.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, campaign finance reform, and endangered species.

You already know that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh thinks Presidents should be exempt from criminal proceedings while in office because they're just so busy. But Judge Kavanaugh has also argued that our Presidents can simply ignore laws they believe unconstitutional, and that courts would then have to force them to comply. You can too easily imagine a President concocting such a "belief" in order to avoid executing the people's will. And the fact that "signing statements" existed before today doesn't justify actual unconstitutional behavior from our Presidents. Hence another reason to call your Senators and tell them to oppose the Kavanaugh nomination. Our Whiner-in-Chief acts like law and order is for "little people" like us and keeps "busy" watching Fox News and twittering hateful, noxious crap; he surely doesn't need another enabler on our Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Issue One helps you tell the Federal Election Commission (or FEC) to prohibit "personal use" of candidate leadership PAC money. Leadership PACs have been around since 1978, so that candidates can donate money to other candidates (which our Supreme Court will no doubt call a First Amendment right if they ever evaluate the matter!), but in practice, leadership PAC money far too often winds up funding expensive dinners, golf outings, Broadway musical tickets, five-star hotel stays, and vacations to foreign lands. Candidates will claim that was all "work," but we're not schmucks, not least because we know what work is actually like. And I bet they also claim that they just "have" to spend all that money on expensive outings with power players in order to do a good job. But you don't have to do that to do a good job; you need only stay in touch with your constituents. And big outings with rich people ain't "staying in touch with your constituents."

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration to stop trying to weaken Endangered Species Act protections, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. Congress hasn't been able to gut the Endangered Species Act, even when Republicans run the whole show, for one reason: killing off endangered species so big corporations can put yet another coal or copper or gold mine in the ground is actually very unpopular. Hence our Administration makes a series of obscure-sounding tweaks to Endangered Species Act enforcement -- allowing "economic costs" to be tabulated when deciding how to protect endangered and threatened species, allowing federal agencies to ignore scientific data before handing out oil and gas drilling leases -- that will be just as harmful as previous "reform" efforts coming out of Congress. Luckily politicians don't get all the say about everything: we do. But only if we speak out.

Action: concerning endangered species, national parks, and fairer sentencing.

Everyone likes the Endangered Species Act, right? As evidenced by the fact that Congress has been trying to destroy it for years and have failed? Well, now Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke apparently aims to succeed at gutting the ESA, in proposing several rule changes that would force the agency to take "economic impacts" into account during rulemaking, weaken protections for threatened species, solicit less public input, and insulate wildlife agencies from the consequences of their actions. But it gets better! Apparently one of Interior's proposals would have them write species-specific regulations for every "threatened" species, even though one rule currently covers all of them. And here you thought conservatives were all about "streamlining regulations," not making them so cumbersome they can't be enforced! So the Sierra Club helps you tell our Interior Department to scrap its plans to "overhaul" enforcement of the Endangered Species Act.

Meanwhile, the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado draws 300,000 visitors annually and features dunes as high as 700 feet -- but of course our Administration is suddenly anxious to let fossil fuel corporations drill for oil and gas as close to the Dunes as they can get! And thus our President would give massive corporate welfare handouts to the very same fossil fuel corporations that are rapidly losing ground to renewable energy, and take a dump all over our national parks. It's like killing two birds with one stone! One more time: the oil and gas you pull out of the ground doesn't last forever, and the money CEOs make from pulling oil and gas out of the ground doesn't last forever -- but national parks can be part of our heritage forever. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Administration to scuttle its plan to open up some 18,000 acres near the Great Sand Dunes to fossil fuel drilling.

Finally, the U.S. Sentencing Commission has proposed new sentencing guidelines for 2019, and they're taking comments thereon until August 10, so Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you tell our Sentencing Commission what you think of their proposal. As you might expect, it's got good and bad bits in it. The Commission has proposed studying the effects of incarcerating parents on minor children, as well as whether the Bureau of Prisons is actually motioning for compassionate release as often as they should; neither of these is a policy change per se, but both could lead to policy changes in the future. But the Commission has also ruled out reduced sentencing for first offenders; those of us not completely ruled by our hormones would find treating first offenders exactly the same as folks who've committed many crimes not precisely civilized. So make sure the Commission hears from you.

Action: concerning anti-pollution funding and antibiotic abuse.

The U.S. House plans to vote on an Interior Minibus Appropriations bill very soon, and that sure sounds sexy, don't it? But this bill would do a lot of damage: it'd cut $500 million from various clean air- and clean water-related projects, it'd cut more than $30 million from a program that buys out career, non-political EPA employees, and would essentially amend the Endangered Species Act by putting restrictions on listings. They can't gut the Endangered Species Act because then everyone would hate them -- I mean, who supports making the bald eagle extinct? -- but they can administer death-by-a-thousand-cuts to such programs. I guess it's good news that a Republican-controlled government is settling for death-by-a-thousand-cuts, but that doesn't mean we have to let them do it. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your House Rep to reject the cruel and callous Interior Minibus Appropriations bill.

Meanwhile, S. 3099, the Strengthening Antibiotic Oversight Act, would (as its title says!) strengthen oversight of antibiotics by forcing food-producing corporations to justify any use of antibiotics in feed animals lasting over 21 days to our Health and Human Services Secretary. You may reasonably respond that our current HHS Secretary will merely take big ag corporations' word that they really really need to keep pumping their animals full of antibiotics no matter how quickly it brings about a world where antibiotics are completely ineffective and the next cut kills you, but we're going to get a good HHS Secretary again one day (though not likely before 2020!), and when that happens, it'll be that much harder to undo their work. S. 3099 also mandates that our government inspect various feed-related forms to see how much antibiotics big corporations put in their animal feed, which'll help no matter who the HHS Secretary is. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight antibiotic abuse by passing the Strengthening Antibiotic Oversight Act.

Action: farm policy, and nuclear waste storage.

Here's something else you might not know about H.R. 2, Congress's new, nefarious Farm Bill: Title IX would take consultative jurisdiction over pesticide harm to endangered species from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, so that the EPA has sole jurisdiction over the matter. Defenders of this move may argue that it "reduces bureaucracy" or "right-sizes regulation," but you already see the flaw in that reasoning: we would really leave pesticide oversight solely to this EPA? The whole reason we have several different actors look at the same thing is to prevent one bad actor from doing great harm; yes, it makes the process slower, but wouldn't a conservative argue for doing the right thing more slowly versus embracing a streamlined process above all? Hence Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the "Poisoned Pollinators Provision" of the Farm Bill.

Meanwhile, the House recently passed H.R. 3053, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act, which would establish a massive nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain -- which the good citizens of Nevada have been fighting literally for decades now. Some proponents cite the danger of storing nuclear waste in over 100 areas of the country in order to justify concentrating it all in one location. Problem with that is trucks would have to transport all that waste all across America, and trucks have been known to crash on occasion, and that threatens the millions of good Americans who live near interstate highways with contaminated water and serious health care issues. Would we have these problems if we put the necessary effort into solar and wind power? No, we would not. Food and Water Action helps you to reject the House's plan to build a massive nuclear waste storage area at Yucca Mountain.

Action: "free" trade, endangered species, Census data, and the Tongass Forest.

As you no doubt heard, our President floated the idea of getting back into the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade deal that he got us out of -- an action that would completely undo his one good work as a President. Of course he doesn't deserve sole credit for getting us out of the TPP, or even more than half the credit -- we deserve most of the credit for tanking the TPP, given that our activism against it killed it in the first place, and don't forget that we faced down unified and powerful support for the TPP from virtually all of our government and media elites. And the TPP remains just another "free" trade deal that would outsource our jobs and nullify our laws; for our President even to suggest re-entering it might well send a message to NAFTA renegotiators (who are working as we speak) that maybe they can go ahead and make that deal even worse. So Public Citizen helps you tell our leaders, one more time, to reject "free" trade deals that put corporations ahead of people.

Meanwhile, Wild Earth Guardians uses the occasion of Earth Day to remind us to tell our Congressfolk to keep their hands off the Endangered Species Act. Since the Endangered Species Act sure does seem to attract efforts to destroy it in the name of "reforming" it, "hands off the Endangered Species Act" does seem like the best thing to say to our Congressfolk right now. And these "reformers" aren't exactly interested in making the Endangered Species Act work more efficiently -- their real program is opening up more land to fossil fuel drillers, pesticide manufacturers, and loggers. That's right, it's all about the money. And it's not even about working families' money, but corporate CEO money, some of which (the part those CEOs don't use to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes) will presumably come back to these Congressfolk in the form of campaign donations. Addiction to big corporate money is a sickness, to be sure, but we don't have to tolerate it.

In other news, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep the Census Bureau from asking folks about their citizenship or their immigration status in 2020. It may sound common-sensical to you that the Census Bureau should ask folks whether they're really citizens or not, but let me explain why it actually isn't. First off, folks with cloudy immigration status already avoid the Census; the danger here is that folks whose immigration status is actually quite solid, but who have had trouble cutting through bureaucratic red tape in the past, will avoid the Census. Second, the Census doesn't just count people -- the Census also helps determine the size of Congressional districts, as well as our federal government distributes funding, which means less representation and less money for districts with immigrant populations. In short, the Census citizenship question is actually a backdoor way to deny government services to folks of color -- services they're paying for with their taxes even if they're not citizens! -- and why should we put up with that?

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject road building and logging in the Tongass National Forest. You know, it strikes me as a conservative position to argue that we should keep 1,000-year-old trees around, because they teach us a lot about history and science. Certainly a conservative wouldn't say it's better to cut them down and make them into things that don't last nearly as long, right? But today's "conservatives" seem to think that anything that makes some executive money is an unqualified moral good. And some of them think that mastering the natural world in this manner is itself an unqualified moral good, though that philosophy does sound almost exactly like a conservative stereotype of a liberal philosophy. But civilized people of either political persuasion always concern themselves with teaching our children about what lasts and what fades away -- and civilized people teach Congress about that, too.

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: battling the police state, banksters, and hunting extremists.

First things first: the House's Homeland Security appropriations bill actually allows the President to put the Secret Service at any polling place he likes during federal elections. The Secret Service can accompany the President to the polls, but putting Secret Service folks randomly at polls sure sounds like our government trying to intimidate us, doesn't it? A spokesperson for the Senate's Homeland Security Chair, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, says that bit is not in the bill the Senate Homeland Security Committee passed this week, but that doesn't mean it won't be in the conference bill, and therefore, shortly thereafter, the law. This would be a very, very good time to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and call your Senators and demand that they reject this legislative rider.

While you've got them on the phone, you'll want to tell them to reject S. 2155, the so-called Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which has not yet received a full vote in the Senate, but which has about a dozen Democrat co-sponsors when it shouldn't have any sponsors, period. You may have heard that they're trying to change the bill a bit to make it more palatable. Your first objection to that statement might be how do you make a crap sandwich palatable? But, as David Dayen reports in The Intercept, the "fixes" the Senate has made won't actually fix a damn thing. And it gets worse: the House, which has passed even worse financial "reform" bills, aims to try to get their financial deregulation wish list jammed into the Senate bill via a "manager's amendment." All this, for a bill the CBO says will heighten the risk of another bankster meltdown. So the word of the day is "no."

Finally, the President has decided that he's going to ditch a ban on elephant trophies after all. I guess he figured we've all forgotten about that picture of his son holding a severed elephant tail! Uh, no: Environmental Action helps you tell our President to keep our ban on hunting elephants. Don't brook any nonsense from trolls that if you support the ban on hunting elephants, you must hate hunting. Really, what a flatugasm of immaturity -- I mean, if I said folks who support lifting the ban must really hate elephants, they'd all have a tantrum about it. Elephants' numbers have dropped dramatically over the last half-century, and hunting them down is a big reason why; don't hunters disapprove of hunting species into extinction? Or is that yet another tenet of conservatism that's just not conservative enough anymore for the rageheads who get into sword fights over the meaning of the word "conservative" these days?

Action: protecting internet freedom, election security, and endangered species.

The FCC has formally published its nefarious net neutrality rule in the Federal Register as of February 22, which means Congress has 60 days from that date to pass a "resolution of disapproval" that would overturn it, so you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and ask them to support such a resolution. (I still don't have a bill number for it.) You should have an easy time arguing the point with your Senators: the FCC net neutrality repeal rule opens the floodgates for internet service providing corporations to block websites they don't like, to slow down websites they don't like, and generally inhibit your freedom to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than be herded into junk news ghettoes as ISPs would undoubtedly prefer. For all that, we're having trouble getting a 51st Senate vote in favor. So you may make the difference.

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2261, the Secure Elections Act. S. 2261 -- an actually-bipartisan bill with a motley crew of six sponsors, from James Lankford to Martin Heinrich -- would give states the financial support they need to update their voting machines so that they're safe from hackers, which is a big deal, not merely because we deserve secure elections, but because some 40 states have electronic voting machines that don't provide voters a whole lot of security. Attend Sec. 5(d), and you'll see that S. 2261 also essentially mandates paper ballots for federal elections; it doesn't do so for state and local elections, which you may rightly criticize -- and/or use against your Tea Party uncle when he says S. 2261 means TEH GUBMINT TAKEZ OVERZ!!!!! In the meantime, I'm not letting the perfect murder the good any more than I let the venal and foolish murder the good -- though, in my experience, the latter task takes up far more of my time.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to destroy the Endangered Species Act, then the Environmental Defense Fund still helps you do that. Why do Congressfolk try to destroy the Endangered Species Act? Because it happens to prevent some of their biggest donors from drilling for oil and gas wherever they like. But do oil and gas drilling corporations get all the say around here? Should we blithely sacrifice animal species forever so that corporate CEOs can make more money? And do we not have better ways to wean ourselves off foreign oil, like solar and wind power? Despite the obvious answers to these questions, too many Congressfolk want to automatically anoint state and local data as the "best available science," and they'd also like to hamstring species rehabilitation efforts with "economic impact" statements that only consider the "impact" to oil and gas drillers. So let's get to it.

Action: infrastructure, sentencing reform, and immigration.

Earlier this week, President Trump released a 55-page version of his infrastructure proposal, and, naturally, it takes America hostage: gut all the clean air, clean water, and endangered species regulations, or the crumbling infrastructure gets it! If your kid told you not to make sure he did his homework right because that would impinge on his ability to get it done at all, you'd see that as the BS it is, but Our Glorious Elites stand ready to let our manchild President get away with arguing that regulations prevent us from building things, when actually they prevent us from building things wrong. And really, complaining about regulations all the time does kind of mark you as a whiner -- if not a law-breaker, as Mr. Trump's numerous citations at Mar-a-Lago would suggest. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Trump infrastructure scam and fund real infrastructure building by supporting renewable energy projects.

Meanwhile, S. 1917, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, is up again; it's not everything we would hope for in sentencing reform, etc., but it does represent progress. Admittedly the works it would perform -- reducing sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, giving judges more leeway in sentencing, and making such reforms retroactive so current prisoners can benefit from them, among others -- don't constitute the flavor in the Trump Administration, but they do much better reflect the American people's priorities, which is, after all, the point of legislating in a representative form of government, and long after Donald Trump is gone, we'll still be here. Word on the street, however, is that S. 1917's sponsors -- 10 from each party, none named Rand Paul -- might water the bill down further in order to attract more votes, so use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to call your Senators to insist they support S. 1917 as-is.

Finally, the Senate will be voting on immigration matters this week, so People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to enact a clean DREAM Act, one unburdened by Trumpian demands for a "border wall." The DREAM Act, as you know, would force the Executive branch to keep foregoing deportation proceedings for immigrants brought here as children; these are immigrants who have spent decades here, made a contribution to American society, and wouldn't recognize their home country if they were deported back to it, which would make their deportation an act of cruelty. We should avoid being cruel whenever possible, of course, and if you're the kind of person who can't keep strength and cruelty separate in your head, please navigate to another website. And let's also avoid pandering to President Trump and his need to stoke rage in his votaries with demands for a "wall." Only weak nations build big walls; great nations do right by their people, and thus don't need big walls.

Action: endangered species, and immigration.

So President Trump said he'd be lifting a ban on importing elephant trophies from certain African nations, and then a photo of one of his offspring holding a severed elephant tail circulated on the internet, and suddenly everyone was up in arms, and President Trump then said he'd postpone lifting this ban until he could "review all the facts." Now, this is how democracies are supposed to work -- our leaders try to do bad things, and then the people shame them into submission -- but I do wish it worked more often, particularly with our current President, who seems completely unacquainted with the notion of shame. Anyway, next step is to tell our Interior Department to prevent any elephant trophies from crossing our borders, which Change.org helps you do. Don't believe any backtalk about the importance of hunting, because hunting endangered species isn't a part of that, and don't believe any nonsense about how "controlled trophy importation" can actually help endangered species, because that's sort of like saying tax cuts raise federal revenues, or "constructive engagement" with apartheid regimes can break down apartheid.

Meanwhile, Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop President Trump's attacks on immigrants, which include his ending of both DACA and TPS status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, while the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the DREAM Act, which would protect the DACA program. Both DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program) and TPS represent an effort to be compassionate to folks who've done nothing wrong -- well, unless you think "being from a Third World country" is "wrong"! DACA provides an avenue for young immigrants to stay in America and keep contributing to our society when deporting them to a country they wouldn't recognize would be cruel, and TPS also provides an avenue for immigrants to contribute to our society rather than return to a country (like Haiti, which may never fully recover from the 2010 earthquake that enabled some 60,000 Haitians to get TPS status here) where they couldn't possibly make a living. Of course, if all you care about is I HATEZ TEH BROWNZ-SKINNEDZ PEEPULZ!!!!, you won't be convinced, but ah, if you're in that crowd, you don't deserve to be anyone's intended audience.

Around the table: special "bad news" edition!

If you're wondering why President Trump isn't doing a dance-with-no-pants about how he "made" ISIS abandon its de facto capital in Raqqa, that may be because coalition forces fighting ISIS there allowed about 250 ISIS fighters to leave, along with their families and all the ammo they could carry in a three-mile-long convoy. And this deal gets ISIS out of a stalemate in Raqqa, with no exchange of hostages and no guarantee they won't be back when the Kurds rebuild Raqqa. Our President sure is a deal-maker! But then the "deal" here may be to export terror to other nations, including ours, and so perpetuate the "war on terror" that aims to hold voters hostage to bad leaders. We can put a stop to that, of course.

Ho hum, FCC votes to roll back media consolidation regulations, which just so happens to benefit the notoriously pro-Trump Sinclair Broadcast Group's plan to buy Tribune Media. But I might not focus so much on whether there's an actual quid pro quo between FCC Chair Ajit Pai and Sinclair and more on whether the FCC did its due diligence as required by the law when it rolled back the regulations. That's how Powell the Lesser's FCC failed in a similar effort over a decade ago, after all.

Keystone pipeline shuts down after spilling 200,000 gallons of crude in North Dakota. If only someone had warned us about TransCanada's lousy pipeline safety record! If only a group of stalwart native Americans had risked life and limb to spread the message that pipelines pollute water! (What, you think I should mark this event with something other than snark?)

Well, this news isn't so bad, I guess: President Trump decides to roll back an Obama-era ban on bringing elephant trophies to America, but then says he's put the decision "on hold" after a massive public backlash. Until he can "review all the facts," of course, though that sure is a way of saying your Administration didn't do its job in the first place. And Interior Secretary Zinke should remember that hunting as a great way to bond with your daddy and granddaddy isn't actually the same thing as hunting an endangered species, which is what that Trump offspring was caught on camera doing.

Randall Balmer (whose book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, I highly recommend if you want to understand contemporary rank-and-file evangelicals) instructs us as to why Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore is a "con artist." You'll learn/be reminded of a lot -- that a founding principle of Baptism is the "wall of separation" between church and state (a phrase coined by Roger Williams himself) and the late 19th/early 20th century evangelicals had, shall we say, a stronger devotion to helping the poor than contemporary ones (who traffic in rage and fake martyrdom) seem to do.

Finally, I wouldn't make too much of an NRSC poll showing Doug Jones ahead of Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate special election by 12 points. The scandal over Mr. Moore's alleged mistreatment of teenage and underage girls while in his 30s broke too early -- absent smoking-gun evidence, Mr. Moore will continue his three-step plan of deny-deny-deny, and by the time Election Day gets here, a month will have gone by and folks will justify voting for him by saying no one proved he was guilty and we need another Supreme Court justice. I'd be happy to be wrong, of course, but I fear I'm not.

Action: unconstitutional war-making, elephant poaching, and national monuments.

H.R. 4140/S. 2016, the No Unconstitutional Strike Against North Korea Act, would (as its title suggests) prohibit our government from launching a strike against North Korea without Congressional authorization per Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. Since the end of World War II, Congress has ceded far too much war-making power to the Executive branch, and now we have an Executive who frankly doesn't seem particularly sane most of the time getting into a war of words with a North Korean executive who doesn't seem particularly sane any of the time. Does that sound like a recipe for victory? The Founders wisely wanted Congress to have the power to declare war, rather than etting the President do as he likes, of which I think we've all had quite enough. Hence the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to support sane and Constitutional foreign policy by supporting the No Unconstitutional Strike Against North Korea Act.

Meanwhile, with China phasing out its participation in the illegal world ivory trade, Hong Kong is now the world's number one ivory trader, and given that you have to slaughter elephants to get ivory, number one is not be the number you want to be on that list. (Don't tell President Trump, though -- when he hears we're not number one in the illegal ivory trade, maybe he'll send all his children to Africa to fix that.) The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species banned the international ivory trade almost 30 years ago, and elephant numbers did recover for a while, only to drop again about a decade ago, as demand for ivory from Asia boomed, until last year poachers killed African elephants faster than new elephants were born. Hong Kong's government has proposed legislation shutting down the ivory trade, but of course ivory traders are fighting it, so Avaaz helps you tell Hong Kong's legislature to protect endangered elephants by shutting down their ivory trade.

Finally, the Trump Administration has apparently decided, on the "advice" of the Interior Department, to shrink the size of two Utah national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Don't believe they hype that it's because these monuments exemplify federal government overreach, not just because right-wingers tell you that anything government does that doesn't actually suck is "overreach," but because the real issue here is these monuments are now off-limits to mining corporations. Now, we have considerable doubt, if we know anything about the Antiquities Act, that the President can actually shrink the size of a national monument after its creation, but President Trump has never been much for law and order; he's more the kind of fellow who likes to do stuff and dare you to stop him. We accept his dare, as we have accepted his dare all year, and so The Wilderness Society helps you tell your Congressfolk to stand up to Mr. Trump and stand up for our national monuments.

Action: "free" trade, and endangered species.

With NAFTA renegotiation formally beginning tomorrow, Jobs with Justice helps you write a letter-to-the-editor expressing your desire that NAFTA work for all people, not just rich folks and corporations. As you know, President Trump withdrew from the notorious Trans-Pacific "Partnership" earlier this year, but his recent maneuvers on NAFTA renegotiation don't inspire confidence -- he not only pointedly refused to demand the end of the "investor-state tribunal" in NAFTA that's the main reason we oppose "free" trade deals to begin with, but he's appointed numerous cabinet members who have professed their undying love for outsourcing our jobs and nullifying our laws with "free" trade deals. Why, Commerce Secretary Ross actually said, out loud, that he'd like NAFTA to be more like the TPP! So get out of the mindset, if you're in it, that At Least Trump Has Our Back on Trade -- he's already sold us out on letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, after all. After one meeting with big pharma CEOs, no less.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject H.R. 2134/S. 935, the so-called Endangered Species Management Self-Determination Act, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. This clumsily-named bill would give our government a mere five years to get endangered species back to health, when, frankly, nursing a species back to health is something you'd rather do right than do quickly. Ask the bald eagle, which took 40 years to get off the endangered species list. But wait, there's more! The bill would mandate a full vote of Congress to approve any species put on the endangered list, would let state Governors nullify protections for those species found only within their state borders, and would prevent the courts from reviewing these Governors' decisions -- because developing land and drilling for fossil fuels on their big donors' behalf is more important than, you know, the lessons we teach future generations about what lasts and what fades away.

Action: tax "reform," and endangered species.

President Trump seems awfully anxious to get past health care "reform" and on to tax "reform," and you can see why. The Affordable Care Act went to such labyrinthine lengths to preserve corporate health insurance that no one who might have fought for it could say, simply and directly, what they were fighting for, but now Republican "reforms" have been, if anything, more labyrinthine -- plus millions of good Americans have now benefitted from Obamacare and thus have something tangible to defend. Getting the rich more undeserved tax cuts should be easier, since most folks hate paying taxes, and since folks often find the things taxes pay for to be intangible. But I think folks are getting wiser about all that, and the Tax Policy Center makes the whole matter pretty simple, by showing how big Mr. Trump's tax cuts would be for the very rich ($900,000!) and how tiny they'd be for poorer working families ($40), a message so simple you could turn it into a 30-second ad. So that should help you call your Senators and tell them to reject more tax-cuts-for-the-rich.

Meanwhile, I still have two action alerts relating to Congressional efforts to gut the Endangered Species Act: the first, from Penn Environment, helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 717, the so-called Listing Reform Act, which would force our government to jump through all kinds of flaming hoops before listing a species as endangered, and the second, from Environmental Action, helps you writing a letter-to-the-editor opposing H.R. 2134/S. 935, the so-called Endangered Species Management Self-Determination Act, which would give our government a mere five years to rehabilitate an endangered species enough to delist them. Both bills follow the right-wing playbook of messing with anything our government does well -- and rehabilitating 98 percent of all the species ever listed as endangered is pretty darn good! They also follow the right-wing playbook of invoking "reform" and "self-determination" when they really mean "letting oil and gas drillers do whatever they like."

Action: "free" trade, and endangered species.

President Trump may have withdrawn the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" and notified Congress of his intention to renegotiate NAFTA, but don't congratulate him too much for these things -- Mr. Trump, after all, decided not to try to get rid of the most odious part of NAFTA and other "free" trade deals, the "investor-state tribunal" that allows corporations to nullify our laws and extract tribute from the taxpayer. Also, Mr. Trump's own Commerce Secretary told a corporatist crowd that he'd start renegotiating NAFTA by adding in some of the only-slightly-less-odious parts of the TPP, like its extension of drug monopolies. You'd think any renegotiation of NAFTA would begin by putting workers' interests at its center, since that's pretty much what Mr. Trump said he'd do, so Sign for Good helps you tell the U.S. Trade Rep to make sure any NAFTA renegotiation puts workers in all three countries first. These interests include getting rid of "investor-state tribunals," requiring imports to meet strong American safety standards, protecting Buy American and Buy Local rules, and restricting monopolies on drug patents. Think they want to do any of that? Of course not. But let's make them known as opponents of the popular will, if it comes to that.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the Department of the Interior to reverse its planned delisting of the Yellowstone grizzly bear as an endangered species. Interior plans to protect grizzlies inside the Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and near Glacier National Park, but would rescind protections for hundreds of grizzlies in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. Some of these will now fall prey to trophy hunters, whom I'm pretty sure wouldn't face a grizzly bear without a big gun. Didn't know trophy hunters got so much say about everything, did you? Particularly after more than 600,000 public comments to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service prevented delisting last year? We do have many more grizzlies than we did 40-plus years ago, but not nearly as many as we used to, and grizzlies have lost nearly 10% of their numbers since 2014, so they still face challenges. And folks who complain about having to work to protect the grizzly for yet more years are clearly out of touch with the whole idea that anything worth doing is hard, takes time, and should be done right. You might think these are conservative values. And then you might wonder why so few of today's "conservatives" seem to hold them.

Action: selling arms to Saudi Arabia nay, crippling the Endangered Species Act nay, and drilling in ANWR nay.

If you've missed previous action alerts helping you tell Congress to stop President Trump's weapons "deal" with Saudi Arabia, then the Action Network still helps you do that. Also, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you write a letter-to-the-editor to your local media outlets condemning the President's Saudi arms deal. Letters-to-the-editor may sound quaint, but Congressfolk do pay attention to them, and one should communicate one's will to one's representatives in as many ways as possible. Our opposition to the $100 billion-plus arms deal goes well beyond Saudi Arabia's ongoing war on Yemen, a war which has left millions of Yemenis on the brink of starvation, though that war has injured the very same Yemeni rebels (the Houthis) who have been among the most effective fighters against ISIS in the region. Saudi Arabia tortures its political protestors and outlaws protest and beats up protestors. And if we're so strapped for allies in the region that we have to turn to this government, why do we still call ourselves America?

Meanwhile, H.R. 2134/S. 935, the so-called Endangered Species Management Self-Determination Act, would (among other things!) end protections for endangered species a mere five years after their listing. The bald eagle, you may know, needed 40 years of ESA protection to get off the list; one could merely ask one's Congressperson do you really want to mess with the bald eagle? I suppose the bill's supporters will claim they're merely forcing our government to "do the job more efficiently," but saving an endangered species is not necessarily something you put on a stopwatch -- you either do it right, however long it takes, or you fail, and then that species is gone forever. You would be quite right, of course, to suspect that this bill's authors merely intend to open up as much land to oil and gas drillers as possible, so as to keep that sweet campaign cash coming. Hence Environmental Action helps you write a letter-to-the-editor of your local publication demanding that Congress reject the Endangered Species Management Self-Determination Act.

Finally, we have so, so many reasons to oppose the Trump "Hard Power" budget, and we're going to get into more of those reasons tomorrow, but the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling out of the budget. The love of money, as the Bible teaches us, is the root of all evil, and Donald Trump has let the love of money write his entire budget -- any spending that might actually help someone make ends meet is out, while any spending that might make some crony or other richer is in. And make no mistake, drilling in the ANWR refuge will do nothing except make some oil drilling CEO richer -- no, it will not "reduce our dependence on foreign oil," since most scientists think there's not very much oil there to begin with. And it doesn't represent a blow against Big Gummint -- after all, keeping that region relatively free from pollution is a good thing. Government can do good things, when it listens to its owners, the people. And when it doesn't, you don't just destroy it -- you just speak out more.

Action: health care, and endangered species.

Republicans are making noises about giving Obamacare repeal another go, but why should we wait for that? Why should we let them dictate what we talk about in America, what solutions we pursue in America? Why shouldn't we, for example, use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find our Reps' and Senators' phone numbers, so we can call them and tell them to support single-payer, Medicare-for-All health insurance? Single-payer is the clear preference of the American people in poll after poll, and the handful of people who call it "socialism" a) are wrong, and b) don't get all the say around here. I say they're wrong to call it socialism because in a single-payer system, doctors and hospitals remain private; they simply deal with one payer (i.e., our government), rather than deal with multiple payers (i.e., multiple private health insurance corporations and public organs like Medicaid and Medicare). Remember, also: our government belongs to us, and Republicans talk about it like it's some foreign thing over which we have no control in the hope that we'll actually believe we have no control. Their hope is vain.

Meanwhile, WildEarth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to gut the Endangered Species Act. Particularly in the name of "reform," which is how they always do it -- I mean, no Congressperson is going to get up before the cameras and the crowds to say we need to gut the Endangered Species Act! No, they'll say they need to reform it, and suggest that it's supposed to (for example) let mining corporations and oil and gas drilling corporations and logging corporations befoul whatever they like. The ESA already accommodates such corporations enough, and if the grizzly bear goes extinct, it'll be gone forever -- no Jurassic Park-style preservation-in-amber will bring it back. And then when some fossil fuel corporation makes fuel out of their habitat, that fuel will soon be used up and gone forever, too -- except that we'll still be dealing with the emissions it created. That sounds like a lose-lose-lose proposition to me, though perhaps not to some CEO. Luckily, Americans are, by and large, far more concerned about what we pass on to our descendants than our Congressfolk are, so we just have to get them in line.

Action: a slew of anti-science and pro-pollution bills, plus an ivory trade ban.

The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee still mulls H.R. 1430, the so-called Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act of 2017, and H.R. 1431, the so-called EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act of 2017. These bills would force the EPA to ignore peer review of research and would demand that all the EPA's science be "reproducible," though science coming from environmental disasters isn't reproducible, and "reproducible" science isn't automatically good science (since you can, for example, "reproduce" a bad study). But Nick Stockton at Wired reminds us that H.R. 1430 would allot a mere $1 million to comply with its aims -- which surely won't be enough to defend against an onslaught of corporate challenges! -- while H.R. 1431 would put corporate types on the EPA's Science Advisory Board, which smells of like corruption and corporate welfare. So you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to oppose these bills.

Meanwhile, if you missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the unholy trinity of bills that would cripple anti-bankster and anti-pollution regulations in America -- the REINS Act, the Midnight Rules Relief Act, and the so-called Regulatory Accountability Act -- you can still call them, or you can use this petition provided by Sign for Good. We always fight uphill when we defend regulations, partly because the right has pummeled their rhetorical hostage crisis ("don't regulate corporate behavior, or these jobs get it!") so hard it seems mainstream -- this, though regulations actually create jobs for the people who help achieve compliance with them, as you know. But it's also an uphill fight because folks don't really miss regulations until something bad happens in their neck of the woods. So it'd be perfectly all right to remind your Senators that tainted food recalls, burst pipelines, chemical explosions, and gas drilling accidents always make the news.

Meanwhile, Avaaz alerts us that more and more elephants come into this world without tusks, or with substantially smaller ones, to avoid the pain and death that comes with ivory poaching. Admittedly this has actually been happening for decades, yet we're less likely to see a world without elephant tusks by the end of our lives than a world without elephants, which scarcely bears contemplating if you've ever observed them mourn their dead or turn tree branches into flyswatters. And we don't build bridges and planes and cars with ivory -- we mainly make religious carvings with it, and though many folks around the world think fake ivory is sacrilegious, I'm more of the mind that God cares less about whether your Blessed Virgin statue is real ivory than about, you know, doing good works. Speaking of which, the world's largest importer of ivory, China, has pledged to ban its trade, so Avaaz helps you tell European nations to follow suit and ban ivory trading.

Action: free speech, clean air, whistleblower protections, and endangered species.

Hoo boy: the Arizona state Senate passes SB 1142, which would, get this, allow the state to seize the assets of anyone who plans or participates in a protest that could turn violent. Asset forfeiture is an unconstitutional blot on our nation's soul already, and it shouldn't be difficult to imagine how an agent provocateur, or a group of them, could make a peaceful protest go south right quick. But if you aren't being violent at a protest, why should we allow the state punish you? SB 1142's supporters want you to think that anyone who protests Mr. Trump is a paid provocateur -- a profound insult to our patriotism, and you're free to remind them of that! But folks who whine that we've-gotta-do-something-anything also expose themselves as weaklings. And if they don't like protests, maybe they should stop giving the people the back of their hand. SB 1142 goes to the state House now; state House Speaker J.D. Mesnard's phone number is 1.602.926-4481, and Majority Leader John M. Allen's number is 1.602.926.4916. You want more phone numbers? Here they are. Give 'em hell.

H.J.Res. 36, the "resolution of disapproval" that would roll back the Obama Administration's rules curbing methane emissions on public lands, passed the House, but still awaits Senate approval. If you're scratching your head wondering why anyone would think more methane emissions on public lands would be a goodthing, well, you're not alone. Methane emissions, as you know, pack a bigger climate-change punch than even coal emissions do, and "flaring" them on public lands not only pollutes those lands, but it represents energy that could be captured and used, and it represents royalties from capturing that energy and using it that the public could be earning. Since it is, you know, our land. But that's our Republican party -- objectively pro-pollution, objectively pro-wasting natural resources, objectively pro-wasting taxpayer money, as long as these things distribute more of your money upward to their big donors. So, yeah, H.J.Res. 36 warrants a phone call to your Senators today.

Meanwhile, Republicans aren't content with just unleashing more pollution -- they're also aiming to gut the Securities and Exchange Commission's whistleblower program, which has, over the last few years, recovered billions of dollars -- taxpayer dollars, I might add -- from fraud artists. If you're scratching your head wondering why anyone would want to make it harder to catch corporate criminals -- well, actually, you've already figured out that it explains itself. Any big campaign donor -- especially in an age that not only doesn't reward work but seems to hold contempt for work -- might be a corporate criminal, and we can't have any sunlight shining on that, or else some of these Congressfolk might actually lose their jobs. Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell Congress and the President that to reject any attempt to gut SEC whistleblower protections. After all, Congress may pretend it didn't happen, but we all remember that banksters crashed our economy in 2008, and though they feel no shame over that, we're not about to let it happen again.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to gut the Endangered Species Act, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. Now that we have a bill (H.R. 717, the so-called Listing Reform Act, always they burn down your house and call it "reform"!), we can guess at the specific aims of Endangered Species Act destruction: H.R. 717 would mandate that government agencies count the financial costs of protecting endangered species, and would even let more unscrupulous government agencies (uh, like the ones we have now!) put "lost" oil and gas profits or "lost" local tax revenue ahead of any other consideration! Because that's the civilization they want -- one that makes every decision not just based on money, but based on short-term gains. That all doesn't sound very conservative, does it? I mean, wouldn't an actual conservative would insist on taking the long view? Of course, our President and our Congress aren't conservatives -- they're reactionaries. But reactionaries don't get all the say. Not in my America.

Action: "right to work," the Endangered Species Act, and FBI harassment of protestors.

Bad news, folks: H.R. 785, the National Right to Work (sic) Act, would amend the National Labor Relations Act and the Railway Labor Act to permit workers to refrain from paying dues to their union -- while still receiving the benefits of being in a union. H.R. 785 would thus hamper unions' ability to actually bargain for better pay and working conditions and redress grievances with employers. Folks love to say why should I be compelled to pay for something, apparently unaware that they pay for a lot of things with their taxes for which they'd otherwise choose not to pay -- like the Iraq War, for instance. And I have never argued for a check-off box with which I can simply "choose not to pay" for things I don't like, because I understand that I have representatives for that. But President Trump's spokeshack, Sean Spicer, has indicted that he'd like to see a "right-to-work" bill passed because it would be in "the best interest of job creators." Sadly, when he said "job creators," he didn't mean you, though you, with your buying power, are the greatest job creators in the history of the planet -- he meant the executives who bend over backwards to destroy jobs so they can redistribute worker income upward to themselves. I think H.R. 785 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators.

Meanwhile, the Senate has begun to hold hearings on how best to destroy the Endangered Species Act. Of course, they don't call it that, because if they said "we want to destroy the Endangered Species Act," they'd be very unpopular and might risk losing re-election even in heavily-gerrymandered districts, so they say they're "modernizing" the Act. But tell them you'd like to "modernize" the Constitution and see how they react! Too often we hear from ESA opponents that it just costs too much money to save species from oblivion; where do we begin describing what's wrong with that? By reminding folks that a whole lot of good works in America cost money? By comparing ESA enforcement with, oh, just to pull an example out of the air, the cost of the B-35 fighter jet that Lockheed has tried to get combat-ready for literally a quarter of a century? By asking "costs whom," and invariably coming up with the answer "corporate executives"? By reminding folks that America is the can-do country and whining about the cost of being civilized isn't very American? Really, there are so, so many places to begin. I think the Endangered Species Act also deserves a phone call to your Reps and Senators.

Finally, the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force has apparently been questioning Standing Rock protestors, which of course was not at all intended to intimidate the Water Protectors, not at all! Hence the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell your Senators to question FBI Somehow-Still-Director James Comey about the questioning of peaceful protestors. You'd think the JTTF would have more to do than find folks protesting our government and pretend like they're terrorists, but apparently they don't, for they've also apparently harassed Keystone pipeline protestors, Black Lives Matter protestors, School of the Americas Watch protestors, Occupy Wall Street protestors, and Tea Party protestors. OK, I made up that last one -- seriously, Tea Partiers? They're certainly no threat to the status quo! -- but they've messed around with the others. It's enough to make you think our government wants terrorists to strike, so they can use that as a pretext to harass all those good Americans who risk their lives and livelihoods in order to make us a more perfect union.

Action: worker safety, and gold mining in national parks.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell Nestlé and British American Tobacco to commit to making their foreign factories safer, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. You recall, of course, the fire that burned down the Tampaco Foils plant in Bangladesh back in early September; the fire took over a day and a half to put out and killed 39 workers, making it the worst fire at a Bangladeshi factory since the infamous Rana Plaza fire of 2013. Sadly, someone could have inspected the boiler beforehand and prevented the whole thing -- I mean, boilers don't go up just like that! The aforementioned Rana Plaza fire led to the creation of a massive compact among garment-manufacturing corporations concerning factory safety in Bangladesh, but that concern hasn't spread to other factories like Tampoco Foils, which need it just as much. Why petition Nestlé and British American Tobacco? Because they have goods made at Tampaco Foils, and they can put pressure on the factory's owners to do the right thing. They sure don't want to get hit with the Big Stick of Bad PR, after all.

Meanwhile, two multinational mining corporations want to go right up to the edge of Yellowstone National Park and mine for gold. Like we're all in Deadwood or something! Yellowstone is not only America's first national park, it's home to endangered species like lynx and grizzly bears. And mining for gold isn't even as efficient or useful as drilling for gas or oil -- to make just one gold ring, you'd have to move 20 tons of soil and rock. Think that won't destroy a lot of natural habitats, and put vulnerable populations of wildlife at risk? I wouldn't want to hear a whole lot of who-cares-it's-just-bears guff -- would we discard our values because they're-just-Bangladeshi-factory-workers, I wonder? And mining for gold isn't just a profoundly wasteful economic activity, it's a profoundly wasteful spiritual activity -- if you're the kind of person who's more impressed by a rare and shiny object than, say, the fruits of our works as a civilization, I'm not sure I'd want to know you. So PennEnvironment helps you tell the Obama Administration to stop gold mining on public lands.

Action: bankster campaign contributions, and wildlife protection.

Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf resigned last week, foregoing millions of dollars in salary, after Congressfolk from both political parties slammed him for enabling massive fraud on his watch. Sounds an awful lot like progress, doesn't it? We should celebrate progress wherever we find it, of course, but we should also celebrate appropriately: Wells Fargo has been a major contributor to over 150 Congressfolk during this election cycle -- as well as to the Republican National Committee and Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who, as fate would have it, received her nomination at the Wells Fargo Center -- and precisely zero Congressfolk have returned their campaign contributions since the scandal broke. That sure does sound like a mixed message, doesn't it? How many of these Congressfolk, once pressed, will utter something truly moronic, like former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's flatugasm back in 2007 that big campaign donations actually free him to do more good? Let's find out! Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to return any campaign contributions Wells Fargo has made to them.

Meanwhile, Indian and Bangladeshi public agencies have joined together to build a coal-fueled power plant a mere 10 miles from a UNESCO world heritage site, the Sunderbans, home to the world's largest mangrove forest and the wildlife that depend on it, including more than 100 endangered Bengal Tigers. But it turns out the Indian and Bangladeshi governments are only putting up about 30 percent of the money for it -- with the rest coming from JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Crédit Agricole and other world banks. And, just like that, you see an opportunity to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against the project, so Avaaz helps you tell banks planning to invest in the Rampal Power Station to withdraw their investment. This could work -- JP Morgan's own policy forbids it from harming World Heritage Sites like the Sunderbans, and the other two banks named above have pulled out of similar projects after public pushback. And if some fool asks you why we should worry about tigers going extinct, you can ask why we should worry about the absence of a coal-fired power plant. Trigger warning: you may learn that the answer is only about money.

Action: anti-science legislation, harassment of protestors, and antibiotic abuse.

Congress has a number of appropriations bills to pass, as you know, and Congress would like nothing better than to use the threat of a government shutdown to ram through all sorts of legislative riders that wouldn't stand the light of day if they tried to pass them on their own -- legislative riders that would hamper the EPA's ability to enforce the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, for example. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject anti-science legislative riders in upcoming budget bills. Your average right-wing Congressperson -- who will generally be smart enough not to say that they oppose pro-science protections because they tend to cost their big donors money -- will probably hang their head unctuously and declare that we just don't have the money to protect folks from pollution. At that point, you're perfectly free to ask, "do we have endless money to take care of the intractable health care problems that pollution causes?" Of course, their big donors won't bear the cost of those problems -- but we will.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell the Department of Justice to investigate allegations of police harassing, and retaliating against, folks who film and otherwise monitor their behavior. You probably already know that, try as they might, police officers can't simply tell you to stop running your smartphone camera in their general direction, because that violates your First Amendment rights. Still, if you use your smartphone camera to document police misconduct, they might try some stuff, like taking your camera from you and/or sending a handful of armed officers to arrest you for unpaid traffic tickets, and that just adds to the list of stuff you have to fight -- and discourages others from speaking out. But just as television blew the lid off the Vietnam War by showing its horrors, the age of smartphones has put police brutality out front-and-center. It's not that the good old days were better; it's that the good old days covered up better. But this genie ain't going back in this bottle, and police officers are public servants who should not get special protections (like protection from their own misconduct) while they're serving the public.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell McDonald's to get antibiotic-raised beef, poultry, and pork out of its supply chains, and thus out of its meals. It'd be easy to say, oh, to hell with them, they're McDonald's, fast food shouldn't even exist, but that would be letting the perfect murder the good -- we live in a world where plenty of people eat at McDonald's every day, and since we're not likely to observe the disappearance of fast food in our lifetimes, we might as well agitate for better behavior from fast food purveyors. And McDonald's, like the other fast food corporations, has shown itself to be responsive to the Big Stick of Bad PR, which we wield here for very good reason: overuse of antibiotics in feed animals makes bacteria more resistant, until we find ourselves in a "post-antibiotic world," where the slightest cut can be deadly -- just like it was in the old days! Surely even the most reactionary individual doesn't want a return to such "innocence," and surely even the most corporatist individual can see the limits of just letting food producing corporations do exactly as they please.

Action: public corruption, and endangered species.

Demand Progress helps you tell the Department of Justice to investigate Donald Trump for bribery, relating to his donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2013 right around the time she was deciding whether to investigate Trump University. You all know the timeline by now: Ms. Bondi's office began investigating Trump University and the Trump Institute for fraud in late 2013; then she made a phone call to Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump donated $25,000 to her PAC -- and then Ms. Bondi's office dropped the Trump investigation. Is it likely that Ms. Bondi and Mr. Trump actually discussed a quid pro quo arrangement on the phone? No, it is not. Is the timing still so suspicious you'd feel like a schmuck if you didn't investigate such a charge involving the man who said not long ago that when you give money to politicians, "they do whatever the hell you want them to do"? Yes, it is. Do not be the one to protest that such an investigation would be unprecedented, as if Donald Trump himself hasn't been unprecedented in all kinds of bad ways -- and, ah, as if Hillary Clinton hadn't just been investigated for her emails.

Meanwhile, Casey Jones of Atlantic Beach, FL, has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the city of Atlantic Beach to require beachfront homeowners to turn their lights off at night during sea turtles' hatching periods. I'm sure that sounds a bit obscure, so here's some background: baby sea turtles hatch at night on land, and then instinctively head toward the moon, thus making it to their natural home in the ocean, but if baby sea turtles see a light on in someone's window, they head toward that instead, and then they won't make the ocean, and get eaten by predators on land (like crabs). All five species of sea turtles indigenous to Florida are endangered, and they hatch from May to October. Such ordinances protecting sea turtles have already passed on two neighboring beaches in Florida (Jacksonville Beach and Neptune Beach, so it's not crazy to assume it can be done. Of course, those homeowners inclined to throw a don't-tread-on-me tantrum every time they don't get their way won't be impressed with any of these arguments. But they don't get all the say about everything in America.

Action: transparency in elections, and fishery management.

Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a couple of bills that would help restore freedom and transparency to our elections. S. 6, the We the People Act, would combine the efforts of previous Congressional bills that would have forced disclosure of campaign contributions and slowed the revolving door between Wall Street banksters and our government; S.J.Res. 5 would amend the Constitution so we could reverse the deleterious effects of recent Supreme Court decisions vastly increasing the amount of money that flows into our elections; S. 1538, the Fair Elections Now Act, would institute a public campaign finance system for federal elections whereby small donations could be matched with federal funds; and S. 1659, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, would force Justice Department pre-clearance of voting rights law changes in states or localities which have demonstrated a clear pattern of vote suppression. Who could possibly oppose these things? Congressfolk who worship only at the altar of mammon, that's who -- and sadly, that's most of them. But they want to be good people, so we should speak out and try to help them be good people.

Meanwhile, Congress has the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in its sights. Why? Because the Magnuson-Stevens Act manages U.S. fisheries very well, keeping fish populations from collapse, rejuvenating some species, and reducing "unintended bycatch" (when fishing concerns accidentally catch fish they don't actually intend to catch). You can see where this is going, right? Some Congressfolk, it's true, want to destroy anything about our government that actually works well and works on behalf of the American people, but many more Congressfolk have more mundane aims in mind -- reducing protections for fish opens up waters for the big agricultural and fossil fuel corporations who'd like to "save money" by polluting fish habitats. But well-maintained fishing populations also means a well-running fishing industry -- and jobs for people who work in it -- whereas gutting those protections only means that CEOs redistribute more worker wealth upward to themselves. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to gut fishery conservation laws.

Action: government spying, and endangered species.

CREDO helps you tell the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to investigate FBI and DHS surveillance of political organizations and activists. Recent news reports inform us that FBI and DHS personnel have visited certain folks in Cleveland, just to, you know, ask them what they might be up to during the Republican National Convention. Of course, you remember this sort of thing, and worse, happening frequently during the run up to the Iraq war and the Occupations of 2011, to name two examples. And Congress, of course, cares little about such oversight, since they'd only be performing it on behalf of their bosses, the American people, and not some big corporate donor who can ensure their re-election -- in fact, the Orlando tragedy has made Congress antsy to conduct more surveillance on the people. Of course, the preferences of Congress are only meaningful because they say they are -- they are not meaningful because they reflect the values of a civilized society, for example, unless they actually reflect those values, which they won't, unless we speak up en masse.

Meanwhile, American Rivers helps you tell the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation to improve their projects on the lower Yellowstone River so that the pallid sturgeon can survive. The pallid sturgeon has been swimming around for over 75 million years, but scientists tell us that fewer than 150 pallid sturgeon are still alive, and that no wild-born pallid sturgeon has reproduced in many, many decades. (Keep the Viagra-for-fish jokes sheathed, please. And I do mean sheathed.) Perhaps not coincidentally, we've been building dams on the Yellowstone for decades, with very little regard for the wild animals already living there, and that's dramatically reduced fish populations. If you're inclined to declare that the pallid sturgeon must be one of Donald Trump's "little three-inch fishes" that supposedly cause all the drought in California, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) consider whether wiping out a species is ever really a good idea. Once a species is gone, no Jurassic Park-style shenanigans can ever bring it back.

Action: lead poisoning, elephant endangerment, and poultry processing workers.

H.R. 4879/S. 2776, the TEST for Lead Act, would require public schools to test their water -- water used for drinking, washing, or food prep -- for lead contamination; schools built before 1996 would have to test for lead at least twice a year, while schools built after that would have to test for lead once. You will not be surprised to learn that the home base for both House and Senate sponsors of the TEST for Lead Act (Rep. Payne and Sen. Booker, both Democrats of New Jersey) is the city of Newark, where some 30 K-12 schools have been cited by both city and state officials as contaminated sites, most if not all of them containing high levels of lead. This, when any level of lead causes brain damage which kids aren't just going to be able to shake off. Hence Jamani Montague has created a petition at DIY Roots Action which helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the TEST for Lead Act, and thus protect children's health. Lead contamination in water has been in the news for months on end, thanks to the ongoing (and entirely avoidable!) ordeal in Flint, MI, but our leaders have done nothing about it; passing the TEST for Lead Act would, at least, improve upon that sorry record.

Meanwhile, the European Union has lately signaled its opposition to a global ban on ivory trading, despite the fact that elephants are in danger of disappearing from Africa within a quarter-century, at the rate they're being killed for their tusks. That rate, by the way, is "about every 15 minutes," or almost 100 per day -- so no wonder Tanzania and Mozambique, for example, have lost more than half of their elephants just since 2009. World leaders will go to the Convention on International Trade in International Species (or CITES) conference in Johannesburg this fall to discuss what, exactly, should be done. A better question might be: what, exactly, does ivory do? Does it power the world's electric grid? Does it feed the world's hungry? And even if it did those things, we would still, as a civilization, be obligated to manage such resources in a way that doesn't lead to an animal's extinction, certainly out of self-interest if nothing else. But killing all the world's elephants for trinkets, whether trinkets of religious significance or not, is unconscionable. Hence Avaaz helps you tell world leaders to help the plight of elephants worldwide by giving them the most vigorous legal protections available to them, including a ban on the global trade of ivory.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big ag corporations to treat their poultry processing workers with significantly more respect and dignity, then Add Up still helps you do that. Previous action alerts have helped you tell the Department of Labor to enforce fair labor standards for workers at these corporations, but it's time to go to the corporations themselves, and let them know that the Big Stick of Bad PR can be inflicted upon them. These corporations deny workers breaks to the point that workers have told Oxfam that they drink less water (never a good idea when you're doing hard work!) and even worn diapers to work so they don't lose their jobs. Should anyone be wearing adult diapers to work, if they don't actually need them? And if we don't stamp this meanness out right quick, any of us could very well find ourselves denied bathroom breaks at our jobs. It's not like working in a poultry processing plant is easy, you know -- workers denied breaks will sooner or later become very frustrated workers, and they may even take out their frustrations on the animals they're working on, which is another thing we don't tolerate as a civilized society.

Action: Guantánamo Bay detainment, endangered species, and school meal nutrition.

The ACLU helps you tell our government to free Mohamedou Ould Slahi from Guantánamo Bay posthaste. Our government has detained Mr. Slahi at Guantánamo since 2002; you suppose they found anything to charge him with during that time, spanning four different Presidential terms? No, they have not -- despite being beaten, isolated, and sexually assaulted, among other offenses, which, again, testifies to how little good torture does. (Please do not be the pimp who says YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT INTELLIGENCE HE GAVE THEM THAT THWARTED ANOTHER TERRORIST ATTACK HA HA HA HA DIRTY HIPPIE! Believe me, if Tha Bush Mobb had done any of that, Fox News would have televised the circle jerk they had afterward.) You may recall Mr. Slahi as the man who wrote a 500-page memoir, by hand, about his treatment at Guantánamo (got a few hours? Read it, minus some 2,500 U.S. government-mandated redactions, here); he had, back in the day, fought alongside mujahideen against the Communists in Afghanistan, then became disgusted when the mujahideen started shooting each other once the Communists fell. I suppose that's why we detained him. But that doesn't make it right. It doesn't even make it not evil.

Meanwhile, some Congressfolk have slipped attacks on the Endangered Species Act into the National Defense Authorization Act. Naturally they couldn't gut the Act merely by introducing stand-alone bills, even when they put words like "reform" into those bills, so they're putting their nefarious works into must-pass legislation. Trouble is, of course, that blocking defense authorization bills because you don't like one or two things in them is no longer unprecedented -- Republicans, you may recall, filibustered a defense authorization bill back in 2010 merely because it had a don't-ask-don't-tell repeal in it, happy to risk being called "weak on defense" if it meant hating on gays a little bit. President Obama has already threatened to veto the House's version of the NDAA, and the House didn't pass the bill with enough votes to override a veto. Let Congress try to convince America that people who don't like anti-endangered species bills equal "weak" people; that won't fly even with "liberal" media help. Still, Congress needs to hear from us about this, so Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to block any attacks on endangered species in the defense authorization bill.

Finally, the House Education and Workforce Committee has passed H.R. 5003, the so-called Improving Child Nutrition and Education Act, and the full House may take it up soon. H.R. 5003 would cut funding for school meals for poorer students, would roll back nutrition standards for a la carte school meals, and would allow states who whine about how hard the standards are to achieve to lower federal standards for all other states -- all of which means more junk food and less fruit and vegetables. Funny that nominal "conservatives" would complain about letting the lowest-scoring kid in math class dictate the syllabus, but would think that's OK when states underperform other states in getting nutritious food to their children. How does any of this "improve" nutrition, or education? Does Congress think dealing with diabetes and childhood obesity builds character? Here's what's better for kids: eating healthy and being healthy, so they can take on the actual challenges of childhood and education and actually build character. The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 5003 and pass real school meal reauthorization legislation.

Action: protecting endangered species, and stopping the revolving door between Congress and lobbying firms.

Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk and your President to protect the Endangered Species Act from attacks against it. That may seem odd, since Congress itself has been conducting most of these attacks, but they're supposed to do our will, and I can find no evidence that the American people desire that endangered species should be allowed to go extinct, merely so that fossil fuel corporations can churn up the land further. Of course our Congressfolk don't put it like that: they either pretend they really, really like the Endangered Species Act as they're trying to gut it, or they pick the most obscure endangered species you can think of (never the Bald Eagle, which the ESA has of course rescued from annihilation as of 2007) and try to make you choose between that and cheap energy. Of course you know what that is, right? That's hostage-taking, and we don't do hostage-taking in America. When our leaders present us with such narrow choices, we tell them: find another way. Because that is the American way.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1959, which would permanently ban Congressfolk from ever becoming lobbyists after they leave office, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. "Public service should be for the public good," the lastest Demand Progress email missive tells me, "not an audition for a lavish lifestyle as a corporate lobbyist." Yes, if Congressfolk know they can make bajillions of dollars merely by pleasing the kind of people who might pay them out the wazoo when they leave Congress, then yes, they'll serve their actual constituents much less than their duty demands, if at all. And of course one can do tremendous harm by moving from public servant to well-paid lobbyist who prevents the public from getting more out of their public servants. And S. 1959's ban would not violate those Congresspersons' First Amendment rights, because the First Amendment guarantees your right to redress your grievances -- not the grievances of those who pay you more than you ever made in Congress.

Action: Keystone XL, sustainable food, and endangered species.

TransCanada, the corporation aiming to build the Keystone XL pipeline, has asked the Obama Administration to suspend its process for evaluating TransCanada's application for permits. So TransCanada can bone up on pipe safety? Sadly, no: TransCanada cites Nebraska's latest route review process as the reason -- and I'm all for Nebraska taking its time approving the pipeline's route, since that's a big chunk of heartland drinking water that's going to go down if the pipeline bursts there -- but more likely TransCanada is afraid the Obama Administration will deny their application, and if he suspends the process, they'll take their chances that a new President not named Sanders will be more likely to approve it. (Secretary Clinton has said she opposes the pipeline, but that's now -- we'll see what she does if she wins.) You have to wonder if the bottoming out of crude oil prices all over the planet might have something to do with it, too. In any case, now is the time to put more pressure on President Obama to reject the pipeline, which bothFriends of the Earth and the Sierra Club both help you do.

Meanwhile, the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell Darden Restaurants to do more to support the well-being of civilized people by better promoting local agriculture, sustainable food production, and higher wages for its workers. Why Darden Restaurants? Because it's the biggest-grossing casual dining corporation in America -- as it should be, if it owns Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, and the Capital Grille, among many others! -- and if you can get the biggest operation to change its ways, other operations will follow suit. And Darden should be hungry for some good PR, given the bath they took not too long ago about their CEO making over 1,900 times what his lowest-paid tipped employee makes. Asking Darden to do a lot of different things (all things, I reiterate, that will bring them good publicity) increases the possibility they'll do any one of them. If I had to pick one, I'd say pay their workers better, but if they depended less on factory farms, or upped their veggie portions, or bought more food from local and regional producers, well, those are all victories, too.

Finally, our Congressfolk still aim to kill the Endangered Species Act, because protecting endangered species interferes with Congressfolk's goal of selling off public land to their mining and drilling cronies. To think that some of these folks are so "pure" that they don't even get any kind of kickback for that -- they really believe that selling off public lands to make their donors richer is moral and just and requires no additional compensation! And I normally admire purism! I guess I prefer my purism uncorrupted by mammon. In any case, having explained why politicians try to kill the Endangered Species Act, I should explain why we defend it. Yes, killing off an entire population of a species, forever, is immoral, but it's also bad for us -- when a species's numbers starts to dwindle, that's an alarm that something's wrong with the ecosystem upon which they depend, and we depend on those ecosystems, too, no matter how remote they are. So Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect endangered species, and in so doing also protect us.

Action: the blockade of Gaza, the Endangered Species Act, and more humane work scheduling.

After last year's war between Israel and Gaza, thousands of Palestinian children still sleep in rubble, still face bombings at their schools, and still can't get health care because all the clinics got blown up, all because Israel still maintains its seven-years-and-counting blockade of Gaza and basic rebuilding materials can't get in, to the point where Oxfam thinks it could take a century to rebuild Gaza at its current rate. Don't be one of those who think Israel should do just anything to defend itself -- sometimes the things you do to defend yourself wind up making you more insecure, and forcing a neighboring population to live in utter squalor is one of those things. Hence Avaaz helps you tell Israel to lift its blockade of Gaza. No need to remind me that Palestinian politicians have been shuffling their feet on rebuilding their own land -- lifting the blockade would give Israel the moral upper hand for once, and if politicians in Palestine are too cynical to take the help they'll get as a result, sunlight will surely find them.

Meanwhile, the last year has seen numerous attacks on the Endangered Species Act, whether through "reform" legislation, attempts to defund, or premature delisting of animals. Why? So that Congressfolk's big donors (whom they no doubt consider their true constituencies) can drill for gas and oil and mine for coal and cut down forests for wood with no regard for the species already living there or for what we'll be leaving for future generations. Oh, sure, they talk about "protecting the environment," but we know them by their actions, and when they try to make the regulatory process more convoluted, or give regulators the option of just ignoring scientific research, then we know their hearts. They also talk about "jobs," but the Endangered Species Act creates jobs -- highly-skilled jobs, in fact, for folks who plan to save species and implement those plans. And while gas and oil and coal and wood exist to be made into things, but habitats and species are forever. The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell Congress to stop endangering the Endangered Species Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 5159/S. 2642, the Schedules That Work Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. Far too many lower-wage working folks get schedules that make no damn sense, and they too often don't get their work schedules with very much advance notice, so they can't plan their child care, schooling, or whatever second job they need to help pay the bills. Folks who worry that passing this bill will result in ZOMG TEH EMPLOYEEZ GETZ WHATEVER THEY WANTZ THE COMPANEEZ BE DAMNEDZ!!!!! should consider that the bill specifically allows employers to deny unlawful employee requests. Also, union employees with contracts that cover scheduling practices would be exempt from the act. And higher-paid employees more commonly called "talent" by their (pretentious as hell!) bosses should attend the fact that the Schedules That Work Act covers time spent on-call as well, since, as Robert Reich told us last week, a lot of bosses seem to think workers should be ready to work at any moment, like they got nothing else going on. Of course, people do have lives beyond their jobs, whether they're called "talent" or not.

Action: "free" trade, the Endangered Species Act, and fairness for pregnant workers.

Word on the street is that the pro-"free" trade caucus in Congress is getting closer to getting the votes it needs to pass the "fast-track" bill the Senate passed a few weeks ago. See? Congress can-so get things done, if those things are horrible things. Just so happens that Tom Tomorrow, who writes the marvelous This Modern World cartoon, has (as is his wondrous habit) summarized everything wrong with TPP fast-tracking in a mere six panels. "They don't have specific objections to the trade agreement they're forbidden by law from discussing specifically" would be hilarious, if I were less spiritually-advanced (or maybe more spiritually-advanced, I can't decide). Of course, Our Glorious Elites attack us without disclosing the rules they've written, like making it illegal to keep the TPP a secret (which sure has deterred Wikileaks, I notice!) or preventing our members of Congress from taking any notes about the TPP when they go in to read it. What do they have to hide, you wonder? Public Citizen, Food and Water Watch, Sum of Us, CREDO, and the Union of Concerned Scientists all help you tell your House Rep to oppose "free" trade "fast-tracking," while CREDO helps you call House Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and tell her to declare her opposition to "fast-track," if indeed she does oppose it. She voted against it back in 1998, and doesn't seem to be whipping votes for it this time, but we should pressure her to do more.

Meanwhile, Congress also seeks to lay waste to the Endangered Species Act -- but should it be a cautionary tale that Rep. Richard Pombo tried that in 2005, only to lose re-election in his heavily Republican district in 2006? The only caution we should take is this: politicians who want to get rid of the Endangered Species Act won't come out and say so; they'll say they want to "reform" it, mainly by making the regulatory process more convoluted and giving politicians the option of just ignoring scientists whenever they want to let their cronies seize a plot of land so they can turn it into a money-making graveyard. Politicians love to add more hurdles to a regulatory process and then turn to you and say "see? The regulatory process doesn't work!" It's a little like an arsonist demonstrating that housing just doesn't work by setting your house on fire. At least half a dozen bills that would in some way cripple the Endangered Species Act have already been introduced in this Congress, so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop screwing around with the Endangered Species Act.

Finally, H.R. 2654, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, has been reintroduced in the House, and both the National Women's Law Center and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to support it. H.R. 2654 would prevent employers from refusing to make reasonable workplace accommodations for pregnant employees unless the employer can prove it would significantly impact the business's operation; the bill would also prevent employers from denying employment strictly on the basis of pregnancy, retaliating against employees who become pregnant, requiring pregnant employees to take unnecessary leaves, or shunting pregnant workers off to other functions as a punishment for getting pregnant. I mean, we know corporations are basically anti-family -- since having a family interferes with the corporation's bottomless hunger for money -- but as civilized people we know we should not be making it harder for people to get pregnant, and we shouldn't be making it harder for them to keep their jobs, either. So let's be civilized, and too bad if being "civilized" is the opposite of being corporate.

Action: rape in India, endangered species, and voting rights.

First things first. Raping girls is apparently a thing in India -- it happens about every 22 minutes and seems to have the state's unofficial sanction (as many folks have come forward to describe police indifference to tales of disappearing girls), and maybe it has the state's official sanction, too: a minister from India's ruling party has lately said of rape that "sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong." Such steadfastness in the face of evil! But India's new Prime Minister got elected on a putatively pro-business platform, and perhaps he'll respond to a world that refuses to visit India as a tourist destination until India stops tolerating rape. Hence Avaaz helps you tell India you'll be withholding your vacation dollars until it adopts some common sense reforms that will prevent women and girls from being treated like receptacles for rage. These reforms include: better public education for women without discrimination, more comprehensive public services for victims of sexual violence, amending laws to ensure that violence against woman gets punished, and equal pay for equal work. We've seen American right-wingers proffer excuses opposing similar initiatives in America, and we'll get worse from Indian right-wingers. But who cares what rage-filled fools think?

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club notes that right-wingers in the House have introduced a slew of bills supposedly designed to "reform" the Endangered Species Act, but which would actually deform the Endangered Species Act. At least the House has numbered them consecutively for our convenience -- H.R. 4315, H.R. 4316, H.R. 4317, and H.R. 4318, all passed out of committee but yet to be considered by the full House. The corporate forces that would gut the ESA like to tell us how much money it costs the economy -- money in drilling and logging and so forth. What they really mean, of course, is that the ESA costs corporate CEOs money, thus preventing them from gilding the plumbing in their seventh vacation home. But hiring people to plan how to save endangered species and then implement those plans actually creates jobs and creates income and supports economies. And while logging and drilling bring environmental hazards that hike up health care costs for everyone nearby, endangered species often contribute a lot to local ecosystems -- they keep predators from overrunning areas, to name one matter governments will spend money to deal with sooner or later. So the Sierra Club helps you tell Congress to reject these anti-environmental bills.

Finally, as you know, H.R. 3899, the Voting Rights Amendment Act, would undo the damage the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder by replacing the formula the Court found wanting (singling out specific states and municipalities for heightened federal scrutiny) with a formula that would allow the VRA to scrutinize states and municipalities that have previously been caught committing serial voting rights violations. Yet H.R. 3899 has not advanced in the House, though its lead sponsor, James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, is a Republican, and nine other Republicans have signed on as co-sponsors. H.R. 3899 has 15 Democratic co-sponsors, making this bill as bipartisan a bill as this Congress is likely to put out. So has the House Republican majority decided to give the Tea Party all the say about everything again? Or have they applied the Hastert Rule, indicating they won't bring a bill up for a vote unless it's supported by "a majority of the majority"? The correct answer to both questions is: who gives a flip what they want? A vast majority of Americans oppose taking away folks' voting rights. So USAction helps you tell your House Rep to demand a House vote for voting rights.

Action: the Endangered Species Act faces endangerment, and Domino's CEO wants silly money.

S. 1731, the so-called Endangered Species Management Self-Determination Act, is so bad that Scientific American editorialized against it in their April issue. S. 1731 would make it a lot harder to get help for endangered species by requiring that a state governor sign off on any new listing, by preventing citizens from petitioning to get species listed (some "self-determination"!), and by mandating that the "best scientific and commercial data" must include "any scientific evidence made available by any state agency," never mind how good said evidence is. And here you thought right-wingers were all about streamlining bureaucracy! SciAm also reminds us why folks shouldn't assume that the Endangered Species Act doesn't revive endangered species quickly enough -- an endangered species generally takes decades to rebound, and yet S. 1731 would automatically de-list an endangered species after a mere five years! I think S. 1731 merits a phone call to your Senators. They'll never see it coming.

Meanwhile, Domino's Pizza plans to hike its CEO's pay to $9 million annually. If that doesn't sound like a lot of money, consider that $9 million is approximately 480 times what Domino's lowest-paid worker makes in a year. (The national average ratio of CEO-to-lowest-paid-worker pay? Around 300:1 -- so Domino's wouldn't even clear that low bar.) The good news? Domino's shareholders are apparently contemplating a revolt over the matter. The bad news? The mutual funds that also invest in Domino's are contemplating strangling any such revolt in its crib. This is why I don't like mutual funds -- because you, the investor, have less control over your money. Still, mutual funds are susceptible to bad PR, and they're certainly susceptible to the will of the good folks who invest with them, so Sum of Us helps you tell Vanguard, Fidelity, and iShares to help stop absurd CEO pay packages. Remember that shareholder resolutions don't need to win to succeed -- they need only be large enough to put a scare in the corporation's executives.