Thieves in the Temple.

Penny rants for April 5, 2023.

Anthony DiMaggio at Salon – with help from the Marcon Institute at Lehigh University – has studied the link between white supremacy, “men’s rights,” and anti-abortion/anti-gay/anti-trans sentiment, and finds, sadly, that all of these are inextricably linked. Perhaps not all of them in every single toxic human being – even the batshit insane 25% of the electorate doesn’t buy all of the toxic crap the right peddles, as evidenced by (for example) the fact that a “mere” 11 percent of respondents won’t agree with one out of four given neanderthal viewpoints about women, gays, and trans folk. But we should be careful thinking that gives us an opening anywhere, because all it really means is that some of the rage-addled don’t think very much about, say, gays, not that they actively support equal rights for gays. And, as we know from the Murdoch empire’s recent anti-trans hysteria, someone who’s already addicted to masturbatory rage can have that rage redirected at anyone.

Speaking of the Murdoch empire, Friday was yet another bad day for Fox News, as Dominion won summary judgment on almost every point in their defamation lawsuit against Fox. Now Fox won’t be able to argue in court that they told the truth about Dominion, or that they didn’t falsely accuse Dominion of a crime; they won’t even be able to claim they were “just reporting” what other folks said or were “just expressing an opinion.” The one thing left to determine? Whether Fox had “actual malice,” and I always thought that’d be the tough nut to crack here – what are we going to do, cut Rupert Murdoch open and count rings? “59 rings, that’s a prime number, thus we have found actual malice!” And I guess Fox folks probably avoided saying in texts that they really wanted to destroy Dominion’s reputation, though given what they failed to avoid saying in other texts, I wouldn’t lay money on that. In any case, I hope Dominion cleans their clock. I fear it still won’t be enough payment for all the harm Fox News has caused America.

Around the table: I have seen the future; brother, it is murder.

“Brain-computer interfaces” (or BCIs) might enable soldiers to fight remotely, and might even allow soldiers to “turn off” their fear, but here’s an idea: don’t do any of that! "What might soldiers accomplish if they just weren’t afraid?" is the wrong question to ask, particularly in this era of guerrilla warfare, where hackers will probably win the battle with BCI-enabled soldiers anyway! BCIs have more humane uses (i.e., helping the disabled), and some folks have given the ethics a great deal of thought; if only America had a way of stopping the unethical use of technology, you know, like with laws and such.

An artificial intelligence agent gets good enough at Stratego that it now outranks almost every human on Earth. Machines may not have egos like people do – study any military history and you’ll be amused and/or disgusted by how badly Our Glorious Elites have botched wars just to appease their own egos – but again, how about we don’t leave wars up to machines? I mean, yes, it’s interesting that an AI agent play a game with “imperfect information” so well, but instead of imagining how we could “fight wars better” – again, a dubious notion in the guerrilla warfare era! -- how about we imagine how we can avoid wars better?

Ho hum, right-wingers claim that vaccines kill people with blood clots, naturally by blowing one fact (that the J&J vaccine, accounting for 3% of all vaccine administrations, cause a kind of blood clotting in literally four out of every million doses) way out of proportion, pretending that postmortem blood clots aren’t common, and repeating a whole slew of other debunked claims. Also, too, just because someone dies after getting the vaccine, that doesn’t mean the vaccine killed them. If I shoot a diabetic in the head, no reasonable person would claim he died of diabetes, but right-wingers would make a movie saying exactly that if they thought they could enrage enough people.

Marion County (IN) Superior Court Judge blocks Indiana’s abortion ban – on religious freedom grounds! After all, mainstream Judaism and Islam both authorize it in certain circumstances, so banning abortion more broadly interferes with those folks’ exercise of their First Amendment-guaranteed religious freedom. Will our Supreme Court, with its stated concern for religious freedom, uphold rulings such as these? I kid, of course – nothing matters to the far right wing of our Court except imposing their will on America. Why, I bet they’ll figure out a way to rule that the Jewish/Muslim/other non-Christian women who filed the suit “don’t have standing” to challenge it!

Our Senate has passed the Respect for Marriage Act. The bill they passed wouldn’t compel churches to hold gay weddings, but as long as our government recognizes them, most folks couldn’t care less if churches do. The bill would also repeal the noxious Defense of Marriage Act, confer federal benefits to any gay couple legally married, and force states to recognize marriages legal in other states. However, the bill wouldn’t compel those 35 states that have anti-gay marriage laws on the books – laws those states will enforce if/when our Supreme Court overturns Obergefell v. Hodges – to legalize gay marriage, and that’s a thing that’ll come back to bite us. Verdict: it's progress, but it's not quite justice.

Finally, our Senate has passed a bill that’ll keep railway workers from striking – but also rejected a separate measure that would have given railway workers seven days of paid sick leave, which had (justifiably!) been a sticking point in negotiations. One has to wonder why our House put the seven sick days in a separate bill, one more easily rejected by our Senate, instead of daring right-wing Senators to oppose the whole package because they hate giving workers time off. Sadly, the only answers I can come up with are “cowardice” and “evil," which reduces to "evil" or "evil."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning marriage and Social Security.

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

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which would protect gay and interracial marriage from any more damage our Supreme Court is contemplating. Daily Kos also helps you tell Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to bring up the Respect for Marriage Act for a full Senate vote in the first place. I can see some benefit to waiting until you “have the votes” to hold the vote, but I can see no benefit to waiting forever for recalcitrant Senators who’ll never come around. So sooner or later good Americans will need to see which side their Senators are on, and a vote’s the only way for us to do that.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase Social Security benefits for our seniors, and pay for it by raising taxes on the rich. Turns out a Data for Progress survey has found that 76 percent of Americans support this very program, and Newt Gingrich always said that if 70 percent of Americans want something, they ought to get it. I’m sure he’d have some lame excuse for not doing it, but next time you hear some “liberal” media punditoid argue that ZOMG SOSHUL SECURITIEZ IZ ABOUTZ TO DIEZ WE NEEDZ TO CUTZ TEH BENEFITZ AND PRIVATIZEZ ITZ!!!!!, you can remember that three quarters of Americans want to increase benefits and tax the rich harder to pay for it.

Action: concerning Medicare, mass murder, the war on Yemen, discrimination, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell President Biden to rebate seniors for wrongly-inflated Medicare premiums, and tell your Congressfolk to address gun violence and end the War on Yemen, and tell your Senators to pass the Equality Act and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Social Security Works helps you tell our Biden Administration to give seniors rebates on their inflated Medicare premiums. What happened? Our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) hiked Medicare premiums this year, in anticipation of being forced to cover a bad and expensive Alzheimer's drug -- but then massive popular pressure forced our Administration to cover that drug only for clinical trials, meaning those premium hikes don't need to be there. Hence, our Administration should rebate those premium hikes to actual senior citizens using Medicare. Really, it's pretty simple math, both morally and politically, so let's make sure they do it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to do something effective about gun violence. There will be room, at the end of Moms Rising's long missive, for you to say Congress should a) amend the National Firearms Act so that it covers semi-automatic weapons as well as automatic weapons and b) require gun owners to register guns, get shooting licenses, and buy liability insurance, just like we all have to do with cars. And what a burden that is upon us, I tell you! Seriously, the only "burden" is on those gun corporations that manufacture weapons of mass murder, and we must of course weigh their imaginary "burden" against our actual burden of possibly being shot dead by some rage-addled man at any moment.

Both Daily Kos and the Center for Rights and Dissent help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 87, the War Powers Act resolution aiming to end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. It's well past time for Congress to assert their war-declaring powers and put an end to this madness. One sentence from a Roots Action missive about this matter really hits home for me: "If Yemenis were treated with the value accorded Ukrainians by U.S. media, this war would have ended long ago." Yes, it would have -- millions of Yemeni children have either died from or suffered from malnutrition. So let's get our government to -- finally! -- do the right thing.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Ohio has lately passed a law allowing school officials to inspect children's genitals to make sure they're not trans athletes -- this, from the state that sent Jim Jordan to Congress. But the Equality Act would put a stop to such insanity, by adding "sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity)" as one of the classes of folks you can't discriminate against in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- which would also prevent banks, landlords, and employers from discriminating against gay and trans folks. If our Senators won't stop injustice, what good are they?

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Our Senators worked so hard to obstruct her nomination that it expired at the end of 2021; President Biden dutifully renominated her, and our putative Democratic majority finally worked through all the obstructions to clear her for a vote back in March, but here we are, three months later, waiting for our Senate to put a real internet freedom warrior on our FCC like we deserve. And their excuses for inaction are getting even lamer -- oh, the Fraternal Order of Police doesn't like her? Please. West Virginia and Arizona residents will want to target their Senators especially -- and we should contact our President, too.

Action: concerning methane emissions, Oak Flat, war in Yemen, the Hyde Amendment, and the Equality Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep the methane emissions tax in the Build Back Better Act, pass the Save Oak Flat Act, end our involvement in the war on Yemen, and repeal the Hyde Amendment, and tell your Senators to pass the Equality Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Did you know there was a methane emissions tax in the Build Back Better Act? I didn't! So you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to tax methane emissions in the Build Back Better Act. They'll never see it coming! This would be a tax corporations pay, not people, no matter how much corporate cronies tell you "people will just wind up paying for it." Sure, if corporations want to be even less popular than they are now! And seriously, why would civilized people tolerate "just passing on the cost to the consumer"? Possibly because corporatists have gaslit us into believing we can't do any better than letting corporations have whatever they want! But methane emissions pack a massive climate change punch, and it's well past time for us to punch back -- and taxing methane emissions could end methane leaks, which would leave climate change with fewer teeth.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1884/S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. Oak Flat is an area within the Tonto National Forest in Arizona that just so happens to be sacred to several Native American nations -- but also the site of a planned copper mining project. The two former Arizona Senators Jeff Flake and the late John McCain snuck the Oak Flat copper mine authorization into a 2014 defense authorization bill, since it would never have survived as a stand-alone bill, not least because the corporation operating the project, Resolution Copper, is owned by Rio Tinto, which used to employ Mr. Flake as a lobbyist. If we pass this bill, we can begin to make amends for treating sacred lands like a used dishrag -- unless we're only going to let white people have religion in America, I guess. That seems to be the Republican preference! But they don't get all the say around here.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end our complicity as a nation in the killing of Yemeni civilians. We've been trying, and jackboot lockstep agreement with Saudi Arabia's aims ain't pervasive in Congress anymore -- as evidenced by the Biden Administration's proposed $500 million sale of "arms maintenance," which is further from "arms" than we used to be -- but when you've got the advantage, you don't sit back, you press it. People who try to argue with you about this try to tell you BUT IRANZ IZ TEH WORSEZ!!!!, which sure ain't a way of saying "Saudi Arabia is awesome!" or even "what we're doing in Yemen is sad, but it has to be done." They may be handing us victory with their bad arguments, but we still have to take victory.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the notorious Hyde Amendment, which prevents any taxpayer money from funding abortion. Yeah, I would never want an abortion to happen either if I could help it, but I'm not about to tell someone carrying a fetus with no organs, or a fetus that could kill or maim her once delivered, to stand on principle. Hell, I'm not about to tell someone with one more uterus than I have to stand on such principles! When men can give birth, we'll reopen that conversation. And I know, Joe Manchin actually insisted the Build Back Better Act include the Hyde Amendment, probably just so he could do the helicopter dance in front of us yet again. Nyah nyah I'm the 50th vote! Suck on this, liberals! But he doesn't get all the say around here; we do. And all we have to do is act like it.

Finally, since Monday was Coming Out Day, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. This bill represents a major civil rights boon for gay and transgender folk -- no longer could banks, employers, and landlords discriminate against gay and transgender folk merely because they're gay and transgender, and no longer could states pass "bathroom bills" that do nothing but enrage the easily-enraged and hurt transgender folk. And right-wingers call all that discrimination "religious freedom"! But one more time: you do not have a "religious" right to abridge other folks' rights. Some people act like citing one's "religious" "conscience" is a get-out-of-being-civilized card, but it ain't. A lot folks claiming religious exemptions because they don't want to get a vaccine are about to find this out.

Action: concerning antibiotic abuse, recycling, labor, privacy, equality, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell our FDA to fight antibiotic abuse on factory farms, tell Pennsylvania legislators to stop defunding recycling programs, tell your U.S. Senators to pass the PRO Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, the Equality Act, and the Medicare for All Act. 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 your legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell our FDA to do a better job restricting antibiotic abuse on factory farms. You don't want to live in a world where the next cut could kill you -- I have three cuts on my fingers as we speak -- so you don't want seven of every 10 antibiotics go to, no, not sick people or animals, but nominally healthy animals, and antibiotics all stop working as a result. And our FDA needs to do more than they've thus far proposed -- we clearly can't rely on factory farm veterinarians to voluntarily stand up to their factory farm bosses, for example. Sometimes you have to make people do the right thing.

Penn Environment helps you tell Pennsylvania state legislators not to slash funding for the Commonwealth's Recycling Fund. Hard to believe we have to tell them that, isn't it? But we do -- after all, they've done it four times over the last 12 years, and now some recycling centers won't collect plastic, glass, or paper, even. As a citizen, you do the hard work of separating your refuse so we're not completely surrounded by trash, but PA state legislators can't be bothered to do their part. That's why we get in their grills so they have no choice but to do their part.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. Your right-wing Congressfolk will no doubt respond that of course they believe in protecting workers' rights, but the PRO Act "goes too far." That's BS. How is preventing corporations from forcing workers to attend anti-union meetings "going too far"? How is preventing corporations from retaliating against organizers and whistleblowers "going too far"? How is giving workers (versus their employers) the choice of voting via card check or internet "going too far"? They're not, that's how. So don't believe the hype.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Because we shouldn't let third-party data harvesting corporations sell your private info to law enforcement! Law enforcement is supposed to get warrants to look at that, not just buy it from some corporation! And don't brook any silliness about how "there's no privacy on the internet," because that's loser talk -- we should be able to enjoy the internet and feel safe. That's what America's all about, isn't it?

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. When they say "this bill is an unprecedented assault on religious freedom," ask yourself how denying gays and transgender folks loans and jobs and apartments fulfills anyone's "religious freedom." Here I thought religious freedom was about worshiping (or not!) at the church of your choice, not about forcing your beliefs down other folks' throats. In my experience, religion is a lot more than who you hurt.

Finally, Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. And don't brook any silliness about how "it's too hard" and "it can't be done." You know what was too hard and couldn't be done once? Ending slavery, getting women the vote, raising taxes on the rich, and enacting a minimum wage, among many other things we've done as Americans. And I'm pretty sure that good Americans who get slammed with surprise medical bills don't want to hear about what's too hard and what can't be done. And anyway, the only things worth doing are tough.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, paycheck fairness, saving our Post Office, and war in Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act, and also to confirm President Biden's USPS Board of Governors nominees; and tell our President to stop arming the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators' phone numbers, or use the links in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. You've heard a lot about Republican vote suppression shenanigans lately, but you may not have heard that "blue" states have fairly restrictive voting laws as well! We notice it less, because crazy Republicans tend to lose elections there, but Rhode Island (for example) has a strict Voter ID law, Connecticut doesn't offer any early voting, and New York makes you jump through flaming hoops to change your party registration in advance of a primary. These states have poor folks and folks of color, too; why should we leave them behind?

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. What I was just talking about in re restrictive voting laws in "blue" states? The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act could fix that, as well. The Voting Rights Act singled out Southern states for federal approval of voting rights law changes, but the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would amend the Voting Rights Act so that any state or locality with a record of vote suppression would have to submit their voting law changes for federal pre-clearance. Your Republican Senators may be interested to hear that. I mean, of course they've figured that out (even Tommy Tuberville!), but they'll still be interested to know that their constituents have figured it out.

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Right-wingers have been bleating about TEH MENZ INZ TEH WIMMINZ SPORTZ!!!!, and I feel like I've explained pretty well why that's utter bunkum, but Chris Walker at TruthOut tells us even more: not just that most Americans oppose the anti-transgender laws states have been rushing to pass lately, but that scientists find that trans athletes actually don't get much of an advantage by transitioning. If you thought about it for a minute -- that transitioning to another gender involves a lot of hormonal and musculoskeletal changes -- you'd agree. Of course, Republican politicians are trying to create an electorate that doesn't think about anything even for a minute. But we outnumber them, so we don't have to put up with that.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Our House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act last week, with exactly one Republican voting in favor of it, and I bet you already know that was Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania's 1st. (Nope, not even former Democrat and avowed disciple of "bipartisanship" Jefferson Van Drew of New Jersey's 2nd.) The Paycheck Fairness Act would (among other good works) prevent bosses from firing workers for talking about their pay with their co-workers, which is usually how women find out they're not getting paid as much as men. I guess Republicans will retort that the Paycheck Fairness Act restricts corporations' rights to restrict your speech! Everyone knows our First Amendment protects you from your government, not your boss, but that doesn't mean your boss's right to restrict your speech must be absolute -- particularly when that tramples over your rights as secured by the law. So don't brook that silliness, either.

Common Cause still helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors nominees -- not just because they're good nominees, but because they'll likely fire notorious Postmaster General/aspiring election thief/bad boss Louis DeJoy -- but maybe you should also call Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY), at 202.224.6542 and demand that he actually schedule this vote. President Biden nominated the three individuals well over a month and a half ago, so what's the holdup? You'd hate to think it's because Democrats want to privatize the Post Office, too, but simply want Republicans to get the blame for it. You'd hate to think that, but you also have to consider that. We should let Mr. Schumer know we're thinking that, too.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to stop arming the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. The news hook, of course, is that, contra his promises, our President still plans to approve the sale of "matériel that can be construed to have a defensive purpose," per the New York Times, and though that means fewer guns and bombs, it also means offensive weapons that, well, "can be construed to have a defensive purpose." Yemen is now the second-hungriest nation on the planet per the Global Hunger Index, all to deter Iranian influence there, supposedly, but the Houthi rebels the Saudi/UAE coalition targets are some of the best fighters of al-Qaeda on Earth, and with all the destruction the coalition has unleashed on Yemen, what are the chances good Yemenis actually find Iranian help less attractive now? It's like these wars are supposed to make everything worse. But we don't have to let that happen.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Equality Act, and confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees; also, tell big corporations to stop donating to politicians who restrict voting rights. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below. Good hunting!

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Most folks aren't falling for the ZOMG TEH CHILD MOLESTURZ WILLZ THE VOTEZ!!!!! stupidity, as evidenced by polling finding that two-thirds of Americans support H.R. 1. Newt Gingrich used to say that if 70% of the people want something, they ought to get it, so only a little more education about what's really in the bill -- an end to legislative gerrymandering, automatic and same-day voter registration, 15 days of early voting everywhere, disclosure of campaign donations over $10,000, an end to particularly nefarious forms of racist vote suppression -- should get us over the hump. Even Joe Manchin might hear it then.

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would, as you likely know, plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act by creating a new standard with which our Justice Department could stop vote suppression efforts at the state level (specifically, it would subject any state or locality, not just ones in the South, with a record of vote suppression for extra scrutiny). Why haven't Democrats formally introduced this bill yet, or folded it into the For the People Act? I don't know, but does it matter? What matters is what we want, and what we tell our Congressfolk.

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R> 5, the Equality Act. As we speak, states are mulling or passing bills outlawing transgender students from competing in the sports that match their gender. Of course they know no boys will become girls just to dominate girls' sports and sentence themselves not only to a lifetime of making less money playing sports but ostracization from their buddies, but as David Frum instructs us, it's not about winning, or even fighting, it's about looking like you're fighting. Let's remind them there are more important things in life -- you know, like fighting real discrimination that gay and transgender folks face all the time, like getting shut out by banks and landlords and employers strictly on the basis of sex.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's three USPS Board of Governors nominees, not least so they can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy before he runs our Post Office even further into the ground. His big, bold proposal for getting our Postal Service back on its feet: higher prices and worse service. When I say CEOs are overrated, this is kinda what I mean. Don't let folks say he's just doing what has to be done, because this is America! We don't have to have a Post Office that runs badly! Especially when they're only losing money because Congress mandates that they pre-pay 75 years' worth of benefits! It's a manufactured hostage crisis, again! OK, I've run over my exclamation point quota. Anyway, while you've got your Senators on the phone, you can tell them to pass H.R. 695/S. 145, the USPS Fairness Act, which would repeal that Congressional mandate.

Finally, since we spent a lot of time on voting rights today, Public Citizen helps you tell big corporations to stop donating to politicians who suppress votes. Much more useful, I would say, than merely criticizing them in public, though I don't say that's worthless, precisely. But as many smart people have said, these big corporations gave a lot of money to the politicians who passed laws suppressing the vote. And they've done this dance with us before: they used to say they supported the nefarious American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC) for "economic" reasons, not for Voter ID or Stand Your Ground reasons. It's a load of rubbish. Let's let them know that we know that -- and give them an opening to do better, for once.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, voting rights, discrimination, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell Sen. Manchin you want a much bigger corporate tax hike than he does; tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Equality Act; and tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's three appointments to the USPS Board of Governors. 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 your Senators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

Jesus Mary and Joseph we have to call Sen. Manchin (D?-WV) again, after he said he wouldn't support hiking the corporate tax rate to 28% in the coming infrastructure bill. He said he also spoke for "six or seven other Democrats" (though not "Senators"), but I'd lay money that when I advocate for a 55% corporate tax rate, I speak for a lot more than six or seven other Americans. And does he even watch TV? Even Meet the Press wouldn't shut up about the 55-plus American corporations paying zero dollars in taxes in 2019. So, again, we have to help him put his finger up to the wind, by calling 202.224.3954 and giving him yet another piece of our minds. I hope he's enjoying himself.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. You may have seen ads attacking the For the People Act; though they make less absurd claims than "child molestors voting" and "workers handing out cocaine to voters waiting in line," the difference between them is nothing more than the difference between a mound of dung the flies have found and a mound of dung they haven't found yet. The things the bill would actually do -- automatic and same-day voter registration, campaign finance disclosure, and end to various vote suppression schemes that just-to-happen to target folks of color -- are all quite popular, and Republicans know that, so they're left with telling hysterical lies and hoping Democrats don't change the filibuster.

People for the American Way, Common Cause, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Senators to support the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. You know all these vote suppression bills state legislatures are mulling or passing in over 40 states? The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would stop most of them dead, by requiring pre-clearance of voting law changes for any state or locality that's demonstrated a habit of suppressing votes -- not just certain Southern states, as the Voting Rights Act originally stated. As I've said, voting rights are actually quite popular in America, except with whom, class? Except with sore losers who think they have a "right" to keep winning elections when they show their constituents nothing but the backs of their hands. So let's put a stop to that.

Both the Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. When a Trump-supporting co-worker tried to tell me that the Equality Act would let boys become girls so they can dominate girls' sports -- a story that falls apart under the most cursory scrutiny -- I told him the Equality Act was really about things like preventing landlords and banks from discriminating against customers just because they're gay, and guess what? He agreed that discriminating against gays like that was a bad thing. You have to tell Trump votaries more than once what the Equality Act's really about, but you have the upper hand in every argument you have about the Equality Act because you have the facts. And I insist that counts for something.

Common Cause helps you tell your Senators to confirm three USPS Board of Governors appointees, not just because they're good nominees, but so they can then fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. I gotta say that trying to sabotage our Post Office's efforts to deliver mail-in ballots should get you fired. You know what else should get you fired? Responding to delivery and service problems you created by threatening higher prices and worse service. That's not the kind of bold, entrepreneurial thinking that we celebrate in America, right? Or do we only celebrate thieves anymore? At the risk of being obvious, I can think of one fairly famous historical figure who did not put up with thieves in his house.

Action: concerning voting rights, equal rights, saving our Post Office, and filling out our FCC.

Long story short: Tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Equality Act and to confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees, and tell your President and your Senators to put a fifth Commissioner on our FCC who'll protect internet freedom and expand internet access. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find phone numbers for your Senators -- or use the email/petition tools provided in the paragraphs below.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, now stands before the Senate, and instead of focusing on hysterical Republican rhetoric about it, let's concentrate on what the bill would actually do: it would curtail legislative gerrymandering; it would allow two weeks of early voting in all states; it would force big campaign donors to disclose their donations; it would make automatic and same-day voter registration the law across the land; it would prevent House members from serving on for-profit corporate boards; it would end certain vote suppression tactics like the Interstate Crosscheck database and make it harder for states to remove voters of color from the registration rolls. Do Republicans think gerrymandering, corruption, big campaign spending, and vote suppression are popular? (People for the American Way and Public Citizen provide contact tools.)

The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, once formally introduced in this Congress, would give our government additional tools to ensure that everyone with the right to vote can vote, by plugging the hole our Supreme Court blew open in its Shelby County v. Holder ruling. The Voting Rights Act gave our government the ability to nix changes in election law in nine Southern states; our Supreme Court held, essentially, that this provision now discriminates against Southern states (I know, I know), but our Court also said a provision that didn't discriminate in this manner would pass muster with them. Hence the Voting Rights Advancement Act would subject any state or locality, from any part of America, with a history of vote suppression to the heightened scrutiny the Voting Rights Act intended. (Public Citizen provides a petition supporting the Voting Rights Advancement Act.)

H.R. 5, the Equality Act, is yet another good bill plagued by right-wing hysteria, but again, let's look at what the bill would actually do: it would prevent big corporations from discriminating against folks on the bases of "sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity," which, in practice, would mean landlords couldn't deny apartments to gay couples just because they're gay, banks couldn't deny loans to transgender folks just because they're transgender, and colleges couldn't deny admission to women just because they're women, just as a few for-examples. And yes, transgender folks could use public restrooms without getting beaten up. If right-wingers say it means "the end of religious expression" in America, they should ask themselves why they seem to base "religious expression" wholly on whom you can discriminate against. (People for the American Way provides the petition.)

Our Senators need to confirm President Biden's three outstanding nominees to our U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors, not least so they can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who's just rolled out a plan to "save" our Post Office that relies on higher prices and crappier service. Mr. DeJoy was a corporate executive not too long ago; do people still say big corporate executives know best? I sure hope not -- all they know how to do is redistribute their workers' income upward to themselves. And I know Mitch McConnell stands ready to throw a tantrum and gum up the works on matters like confirming USPS Board of Governors nominees, but seriously, when folks see Republicans demand a precise vote-count just to turn the lights off for the night, how do they think they're going to look? Especially now that folks ain't afraid of Fox News anymore. Progress America provides the petition.

Finally, we need a fifth Commissioner on our Federal Communications Commission; a fifth FCC Commissioner would break all those 2-2 ties that are bound to happen on any important matters now, and a fifth FCC Commissioner who would bring back net neutrality rules and help all good Americans get broadband access would do a great deal of good. We should make our government do good wherever possible, after all -- hey, it's what we demand from ourselves! Now, net neutrality is important, because it gives us more control over our internet experience, but greater broadband access in rural and urban areas is also important, now that so many Americans are going to work and going to school essentially over our internet. So let's get that FCC fully staffed so it can get to work. (Battle for the Net provides the petition.)

Action: now more action-packed than ever!

Summary: tell Georgia legislative leaders to stop suppressing the vote; tell your U.S. Senators to protect stimulus checks from debt collectors, pass the For the People Act, pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act, pass the Equality Act, and get rid of the legislative filibuster. Use the tools in the upper-right corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Congressfolk; phone numbers for Georgia legislative leaders will be provided below. Also, I will provide (when I have them) links for petitions and/or email tools below, if you prefer these to making phone calls.

First things first: in Georgia, SB 202 somehow ballooned from a two-page bill concerned with a minor point about absentee ballots into a 93-page bill a mere hour before the state House met to consider it! SB 202 now aims to limit early voting, make folks produce more ID, and prevent people from giving you a glass of water when you've been in line to vote for eight hours, among other nefarious works. Thus the Georgia legislature signals they know they've lost the argument and they're just trying to jam their will down your throat while they can. Georgia House Speaker David Ralston's phone number is 404.656.5020, while Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan's phone number is 404.656.7872; call them and tell them to stop suppressing the vote in Georgia.

Late last week, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey scuttled legislation protecting our stimulus checks from debt collectors. So why didn't this happen with the last two stimulus checks? Because Sen. Toomey and most other Republicans voted to protect those checks! I wonder what changed between now and then. Sen. Toomey intones that debt collectors have "valid legal claims" (which, like, they didn't the last two times?) and anyway Democrats should have tried to work with Republicans (which, like, waaaaaaaah). You get a stimulus check so you can stimulate the economy, hence the name, and you can't stimulate the economy with it if someone's already taken it from you. So call your Senators and tell them to fix this.

Also up for consideration: H.R. 1, the For the People Act, which you know is a good bill because Republicans tell the most hysterical lies about it! Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, as you know, suggested that H.R. 1 would lead to people giving out cocaine to voters as a bribe! For your reference, cocaine remains a Schedule II drug, meaning it's illegal, meaning that, no, H.R. 1 won't permit people to hand it out to voters in line. And Sen. Ted Cruz (E-TX) said the bill would let child molestors vote, though good luck finding that in the bill! So while you have your Senators on the phone, you can tell them to pass H.R. 1, too. (Also, People for the American Way provides a petition supporting the For the People Act.)

The John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is, somehow, not part of the For the People Act, which could mean Democrats think they'll pass it more easily, but they haven't re-introduced it in this Congress, either. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would make the Voting Rights Act whole again by subjecting, to Justice Department scrutiny, voting rights changes from any state or locality with a record of vote suppression, not just Southern ones (which formed the core of our Supreme Court's objection in its Shelby County v. Holder ruling). So add that to your phone call with your Senators. (Public Citizen also provides a petition supporting the Voting Rights Advancement Act.)

You can also tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Word on the street is that right-wingers are calling their Senators en masse, no doubt with fever dreams of men changing gender just to make far less money playing women's sports and transgender folks raping kids in bathrooms when kids are far more likely to be raped by a relative and not in a bathroom. It'd be nice to counter right-wing hysteria with a more sober recounting of things the Equality Act would end, things like banks refusing to lend to gays and landlords refusing to rent to gays, actual things that actually happen, and which shouldn't happen, even if banks and landlords believe in Jesus very, very hard. (People for the American Way also provides a petition supporting the Equality Act.)

Finally, pursuant to all of the goals described above, you can tell your Senators (this won't be that long a phone call, really!) to end the legislative filibuster. (People for the American Way provides a petition for that, too.) Yes, I can list things the filibuster has saved (the Estate Tax, for one) just as well as anyone else, but the filibuster isn't a break-glass thing anymore, but a tool Republicans flat-out abuse -- except when they want to get something done, like the Gorsuch Supreme Court nomination in 2017! Last week President Biden said he thinks the filibuster should be a talking filibuster, so we're moving our leaders in our direction; that only means we have to keep up the pressure.

OK, so I'm getting more good action alerts these days than ever before, hence I'm packing more action alerts into shorter paragraphs. The summary bit at the beginning wasn't part of that thought process, but I'm glad to come up with it anyway; I think it'll make these action posts a bit more digestible, even as there'll be more to digest.

Around the table: featuring the usual Republican insanity and Democratic weakness.

Spain will trial a four-day, 32-hour work week, possibly as soon as this fall, where workers would make the same amount of money and the government would cover all costs during the first year (though less in the years thereafter). It's safe to say that no one's tried it on this scale, though individual employers report that it works pretty well; recall that John Maynard Keynes thought our ever-rising standards of living would be enabling 15-hour work weeks by now, though he didn't predict the massive income-redistribution-upward scheme of the last 40-plus years, which is what leaves us running to stand still. So of course I wish the Spanish the best in their endeavors.

Alan McLeod at FAIR catches the financial media doing all manner of pearl-clutching at the news that potential Brazilian Presidential candidate Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva has been released from jail. Who would say, out loud, that a politician getting cleared of trumped-up charges is "bad for the markets"? You'd only say something like that if you were an irredeemable asshole, and in this article, they say a lot worse -- plus, they might actually mean Lula will be bad for "US imperial ambitions in Latin America and beyond." Seriously, this may be the most triggering thing I've read in a while -- and I read a lot of triggering stuff.

Ryan Grim at The Intercept describes the formation of the "Woman's Equality Party" (or WEP) in New York state -- a party that seems to exist more to burnish Gov. Andrew Cuomo's (ever-more) suspect feminist credentials than to actually help women win office in New York. I couldn't help but notice, long before paragraph 13, that the WEP is also only one letter off from the Working Families Party (or WFP), and since the WFP is often a thorn in Gov. Cuomo's side -- endorsing Cynthia Nixon in the 2018 Democratic primary after getting seriously burned by Mr. Cuomo in 2014 -- I can't imagine that's an accident.

The COVID relief bill faces its first legal hurdle, if you can call it that, as the state of Ohio sued to block the provision preventing local governments from using federal aid to cut state taxes. I would be surprised to learn states have a constitutional "right" to use federal funds to cut state taxes, but I doubt Ohio politicians filed this suit to make a point or advance a philosophy; rather, I suspect they did it either to beat their chests about how Republican they are or to get ahead of the bill one day becoming unpopular. If it's the latter item, they may be waiting a very long time.

Tennessee historical commission votes to remove bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from state capitol -- and state Republicans promptly propose a law removing all 29 members and replacing them with 12 new ones. Republicans run everything in Tennessee -- which, again, is the natural result of Democrats being weak -- but all any Democrat has to do is ask: why do you fight for the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest? Dude made his fortune in the slave trade and then was the Klan's first Grand Wizard! They sure didn't put his bust in the Capitol because he might have had doubts about his life's work at the end.

Finally, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says he would "talk until I fell over" to prevent the passage of the For the People Act and the Equality Act, though he seems to have some confusion about what those bills would actually do. Anyway, I doubt he'd keep a real filibuster going, and not just because talking until you "fall over" about popular legislation would make you look bad. I doubt it because I think he's soft, just like I think they're all soft. They won't give up their three-martini lunches and big donor dinners to keep a filibuster going; in fact, I think the mere thought of hard work will make them wilt.

Action: concerning free speech, voting rights, the wealth tax, and discrimination.

Kentucky's state legislature aims to take up SB 211, which would, dig this, hand out a jail sentence of up to three months for anyone who "accosts, insults, taunts, or challenges a law enforcement officer with offensive or derisive words," or indulges in "gestures or other physical contact that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response from the perspective of a reasonable and prudent person." Gosh, you'd never know there were assault laws on the books! Also, what a bunch of snowflakes, the people who wrote this bill. They are Sen. Danny Carroll (R-2), whom you may reach at 502.564.8100, ext. 712, and Sen. Michael J. Nemes (R-38), whom you may reach at the same phone number, ext. 662. For a retired police officer, Sen. Carroll sure seems to have quite a thin skin -- apparently he can't spell "your" correctly when under pressure. Maybe he learned that at Donald Trump's knee! Anyway, I'm sick and tired of people who try to turn all free speech they don't like into "violence" and everyone who protests racism into a criminal. I'm so old-fashioned I think we should only treat protestors as criminals if they, you know, do something criminal. Like try to stage a coup to nullify the results of the 2020 election! And Danny Carroll sounds like the kind of guy who'd make excuses for those folks.

Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, whenever that gets introduced again. Yesterday was the 56th anniversary of the day Mr. Lewis nearly got himself beaten to death leading civil rights marchers across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama; not too long thereafter, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which our Supreme Court blew a hole in with its Shelby County v. Holder ruling, which asserted, essentially, that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against certain Southern states by pre-clearing voting law changes from those states. The Voting Rights Advancement Act named for Mr. Lewis would address that assertion by letting our Justice Department pre-clear voting law changes from any state or locality that has demonstrated a record of suppressing votes. And I've listed most of the good things about the For the People Act many times, but the bill would also mandate paper ballots and institute such conditions on "interstate crosscheck"-type systems -- i.e., actually making states match full names and Social Security numbers -- that no enterprising vote suppressor will bother with them. So give your Congressfolk what-for, and don't brook any stupidity.

In other news, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1459/S. 510, the Ultra-millionaire Tax Act. The bill would impose what's commonly knowns as a "wealth tax" by imposing a 2% annual tax on net wealth over $50 million, and that rate would go up to 3% on wealth over $1 billion. (Folks with, say, $1.5 billion in net worth would pay 2% on net worth between $50 million and $1 billion and 3% on that $500 million of wealth over $1 billion. Too many politicians and "liberal" media members pretend not to understand how tax brackets work, which is why I feel compelled to explain it all the time.) The wealth tax could raise as much as $300 billion annually, which in the context of a $4 trillion annual budget is not exactly chump change. And the bill would also invest $100 billion to hire and train IRS workers -- who, as you know, tend to go after little tax avoiders rather than big ones because they don't have the resources to go after the big ones! -- and impose a 40% "exit tax" on rich folks who renounce their citizenship so they can avoid paying taxes here. These would all be good works, but our Congressfolk won't do them, unless we make it impossible for them not to do them. Like civilized people -- not like Trumpholes who think violence is OK if it feels right.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass the H.R. 5, the Equality Act, which our House passed last week. Unlike the COVID relief bill and the For the People Act, the Equality Act actually got three Republican votes! Why, it's a veritable explosion of bipartisanship! Of course, when Republicans refuse to do anything but stoke rage and give corporate welfare to their big donors, no "bipartisanship" is possible, a fact I presume makes Joe Biden sadder than it does me. In any case, don't believe the rubbish about the bill "attacking religious freedoms," because you do not have a "religious" freedom to fire someone because they're gay, or deny a transgender person a loan. Even Justice Gorsuch said the Civil Rights Act prohibits workplace discrimination of gay and transgender folks because, hey, discriminating against them is obviously discriminating against them "on the basis of sex"! So, yeah, don't believe that, and also don't believe the rubbish that passing the Equality Act would "injure women's sports." Anyone who thinks a boy would change into a girl just to get an athletic advantage doesn't know the first thing about boys. Or life.

Action: concerning voting rights, the Equality Act, social media, and the filibuster.

Happy Tuesday, good folks! Now it's time to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. (If you're pressed for time, People for the American Way helps you with the For the People Act, while the ACLU helps you with the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.) The 2020 elections taught us two things: 1) when people are super-organized, they can win elections even in places like Georgia, and 2) Republicans will use their power to prevent people from voting any way they can. As they're trying to do in states like Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Georgia as we speak! These bills would strengthen the Voting Rights Act, force campaigns to disclose their big donors, enact automatic and same-day voter registration across the land, mandate states to use redistricting commissions instead of self-interested legislators, and prevent states from using "address verification forms" to suppress voters of color -- among many other things! The only folks who'd oppose these things are folks afraid of losing a fair fight, and they certainly shouldn't get all the say about everything in America.

While you've got your Senators on the phone, tell them to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The Equality Act would prohibit discrimination on the basis of "sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity" in public places, as well as in the spheres of education, housing, and credit. You may reasonably ask why we need an Equality Act, given Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch's 2020 opinion ruling that Title VII of our Civil Rights Act covers gay and transgender folks. Well, Title VII only concerns employment discrimination -- Justice Gorsuch would be the first to tell you that, despite appearances, you can't just apply it in another area -- and the Equality Act, as I've suggested, covers just about everything else. If you peruse right-wing objections to the Equality Act, you'll find they don't argue against the idea that we should extend civil rights to gay or transgender folks -- they concoct the most absurd stories they can think of, as if the law can predict every conceivable future event, or as if judges don't rule on precisely those matters. Don't brook any of that silliness. Rights are more important than hysterical what-ifs.

Meanwhile, you know about all that land in the Amazon rain forest currently home to indigenous folks? And you know how the Brazilian government (whose President, Jair Bolsonaro, is now the biggest asshole in any government now that Donald Trump is no longer American President) has been seizing their land illegally to sell it off to developers? Now dig this: you can buy these plots of stolen land on Facebook's Marketplace. Because freedom! Naturally Facebook says it's up to the sellers to comply with the law, though one could certainly argue that Facebook is an accomplice to the crime. Interesting, isn't it, how Facebook is never responsible for the evil that happens on its platform? And please understand that by "interesting" I mean "galling." They have just as much right to keep actual criminal activity from happening on their platform as they do to keep Nazis from recruiting angry high school kids on their platform, but they won't, so it's time to wave the Big Stick of Bad PR in their faces again. Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to get its act together and stop letting criminals sell land they don't own on their platform.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Democratic Senators to end the filibuster, Demand Progress still helps you do that. The best argument for keeping the filibuster is the one I used to deploy: the filibuster also saves us from the worst Republicans can do. But that is becoming less and less true! Did the filibuster save us from Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Comey Barrett? No, it did not, because Republicans got rid of it for that purpose, as they will whenever they want to get something even more extreme done! We might as well get rid of it first, and get some good done in the meantime. Yeah, Republicans will one day take complete control of our government again, and we might wish to have the filibuster back, but you know what beat back health care "reform" in 2017? We did, and if we stay in that frame of mind, then we'll win the battles we're supposed to win. And remember: nobody's getting into the voting booth in 2022 saying thank God the Democrats preserved the sanctity of Senate procedure, no matter what the cost to front-line pandemic workers who should be making more than $7.25/hour!

Action: concerning good House bills, genocide in Burma, and carbon regulation in Pennsylvania.

Happy Thursday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. They've been avoiding passing these bills because they would actually do good things for Americans -- like protect voting rights, health care, and internet freedom -- instead of redistribute good Americans' wealth upward to corporate cronies, which is what politicians tend to prefer to do. You know what we prefer to do? Communicate our will until they can't ignore it.

Meanwhile, you may recall that the Burmese army has done its damnedest over the last few years to exterminate the Muslim Rohingya population, resulting in nearly a million Rohingya (i.e., almost all of them) fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh. But S. 1186, the Burma Human Rights and Freedom Act, would do a few things that would improve this situation. The bill would aid humanitarian efforts and reinstate certain trade restrictions, for one, but it would also prevent any taxpayer money from flowing to Burmese security forces until our State Department can certify that the Burmese military are behaving in a more civilized behavior -- admittedly a statement this State Department would rush to certify without evidence if our President decided it might make him look good, but maybe not the next one. The bill would also prevent our government from handing out visas to folks who've committed human rights violations in Burma and sanction any corporations controlled by such folks -- even if our President calls them "very fine people"! Hence the International Campaign for the Rohingya helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight genocide by passing the Burma Human Rights and Freedom Act.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our state legislature is chomping at the bit to prevent our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) from issuing any climate change-related regulations whatsoever! Oh, HB 2025's executive summary says it aims at carbon emissions regulations that impose a carbon tax, a matter about which reasonable people may be ambivalent, but Section 4(a) of the bill clearly prohibits Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection from enacting any climate change-related regulations, whether they come with a carbon tax or not! That is what we call a bait and switch, folks, and you have to wonder why our state legislators felt the need to lie to us. And by "you have to wonder," I mean "because lying is all you got left when you can't win the argument on the merits." There's really no excuse for opposing climate change action now -- no reasonable human being believes it's a hoax, and the only people saying it's a hoax are people who make money saying it's a hoax. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state legislators to protect our planet by rejecting HB 2025.

Action: concerning good works, bad tax policy, and good farm worker policy.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. At least one observer has said that our House passed all these bills so they could give the impression they "did something," without having actually done anything. But if we pressure our Senators to pass these bills, and then pressure our President to sign them, then we've done something, which is the whole point of a democracy.

Meanwhile, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Reps and Senators and demand that they repeal the millionaire tax break Congress slipped into the CARES Act. How does this tax-cut-for-the-rich work? It allows hedge fund managers and real estate speculators -- and why not just describe both occupations as "speculators? -- to avoid taxation by shifting their present-day losses to prior years, which would enable them to refile those years' tax returns and get a big refund check -- and by big, I mean an average of $1.6 million. So how does that $1200 stimulus check look to you now? Repealing the tax break would save at least $170 billion annually, and, perhaps more importantly, would send the message that speculators are not the most important people in America. Maybe people who, you know, actually make good products and provide good services are more important than the folks who make our economy into their version of Draft Kings. They've been saying for years that speculators do really important work, but if you've attended bankster behavior over the years, you know the most important thing they do is teach us how not to be.

Finally, the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell our Congressfolk to protect our farm workers during this pandemic. That means fair wages, paid sick leave, paid family leave, and better worker safety protections, among other things, and don't be the one who says they're just a bunch of illegals anyway, so who cares? People are people regardless of the status of their green card, particularly during a pandemic, which is the moment a great nation rises up and proves its greatness, amirite? And you don't prove your greatness by hair-splitting over whom you help. Besides which, as I keep saying, letting farm workers unionize under the National Labor Relations Act would solve all of these problems -- they could better get the wage and safety protections they deserve, and big corporations couldn't drive wages down by bringing foreign workers in. A lot of our problems have very easy solutions -- if our politicians would but solve them! Of course they don't solve them because their big donors have told them not to. That's why we have to make them solve them.

Action: concerning good House bills, the right to repair, Congressional corruption, and food safety.

It's Wednesday morning, so call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Our Senate will claim it has more important things to do than protect voting rights, equal rights, worker wages, internet freedom, and public lands, but it's bollocksed up that one more important thing (i.e., pandemic policy) it has to do, plus they actually do have time to pass good House bills. We'll need to communicate our will en masse to convince them of that, though, so let's get to it.

Meanwhile, our President is doing his damnedest to keep ventilators from getting where they need to go (i.e., versus where he thinks he can get more votes), but he ain't the only one: ventilator manufacturing corporations act like everything's a big trade secret and so they make it almost prohibitively difficult for hospitals to fix broken ones. It ain't like hospitals don't have people on staff who spend all day fixing machines, either -- a lot of things in a hospital can break, and a lot of very handy people do the work of keeping them going. Hence Color of Change helps you tell ventilator manufacturing corporations to let hospitals fix the ventilators they have, by releasing manuals, schematics, software, and other repair aids. Color of Change reminds us that -- contra what some observers tell us, that our President's votaries are the ones who are really going to suffer from his managerial incompetence/malice -- that COVID-19 has hit communities of color the hardest, and those communities tend to vote against our President. Gosh, if I didn't know better, I'd say he planned it that way. But let's fight for better health care management -- on every front.

In other news, at least four Senators dumped stock they owned right after hearing how bad the coronavirus pandemic was going to get -- and a few of them went out of their way to reassure their constituents that it wasn't going to be so bad! -- but somehow these Senators (of whom Richard Burr of North Carolina is perhaps the most famous now) have not resigned their offices in shame and humiliation. I'm old enough to remember when the scent of corruption was enough to send a Senator to an early retirement! Since our Senators clearly can't be trusted anymore, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban Congressfolk from trading any individual stocks while they serve their constituents in office. Don't brook any silliness about how you can "trust" Congressfolk to know the difference between right and wrong. Obviously we can't! And it's not our job to "trust" our representatives so much as it's our job to ensure they serve us. I mean, you wouldn't want to think they just create crises all the time so they can benefit financially from them, would you?

Finally, our USDA has been granting way too many waivers to big chicken processing corporations so they can speed up their inspection lines even faster! You can imagine the problem: speeding up slaughter lines allows more pus, more blood, more bile, and more pathogens to get by inspectors and get into your chicken parm. When our government allows a corporation to have one federal inspector doing three chickens per second -- or, worse, when our government allows a corporation to self-regulate its own safety inspections! -- well, that's not "relieving corporations of unnecessary regulatory burdens," that's relieving consumers of the healthy meat they expect to buy at the supermarket! Food poisoning, as you know, still makes the news virtually every time it happens; I'm just spitballing here, but that might be because people don't want their food to kill them or their loved ones. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell our USDA to stop making it easier for food processing corporations to make us sick with their meat.

Action: concerning good House bills and better health care policy.

Happy Monday! It's time once again to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. The House has passed a lot of good legislation that would protect voting rights, internet freedom, consumer safety, and working family wages (among many other things!), and the fact that Senate Republicans hate all of that should be immaterial. But it'll only be immaterial if we act.

Meanwhile, if this pandemic has taught us anything, it's taught us that our health care system -- which covers fewer people while still spending more money than just about any other developed nation -- needs an overhaul, and in poll after poll after poll most Americans support overhauling it by expanding Medicare to include all Americans. Now the haters love to tell you that this support falls after folks "realize they'll have to pay more in taxes for it," but that's rubbish from supposition to conclusion, since even right-wing think tanks tell us we'll save money under a Medicare-for-All system, and Sen. Warren's plan for funding Medicare-for-All would literally capture all that money we're currently spending on health care and use it to fund Medicare. And get more bang for our buck, frankly! Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Medicare-for-All legislation. After all, if unemployment goes up to 30%, and most folks get their health insurance through their employer, well, you can see the problem, I trust.

Finally, speaking of that problem, we can, in the short term, reopen Affordable Care Act enrollment to handle all the applications we're going to get anyway, but of course our President has already said he's not doing no way no how, since TEH OBAMACAREZ MUSTZ BE DESTROYEDZ AT ANYZ OF TEH COSTZ!!!!!! I'm pretty sure I have described the level of reasoning behind his decision fairly precisely. 17 million unemployment claims in three weeks is a literally unprecedented event, and that means up to 17 million more uninsured. Yes, the law already allows you to apply for health insurance via the ACA exchanges outside the regular enrollment window if you lose your job, but maybe our government would do better to have a Special Enrollment period, given the sheer number of applications they're about to get? Unless, of course, this Administration wants to fuck everything up. Even if they do, their "will" matter less than ours, and duty is duty, so Daily Kos helps you tell our government to reopen ACA enrollment to handle the coming onslaught of applications.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning good House bills and good coronavirus policy.

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

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

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

Action: concerning good bills and bad leadership.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning privatization, pollution, child care, and equal rights.

You may have heard that the Internet Society (or ISOC) plans to sell the Public Interest Registry (or PIR) -- a database containing the names of all .org domains -- to Ethos Capital, a hedge fund management corporation. That should send off alarms, but the results could be even worse than a hedge fund deliberately mismanaging a database in order to extract its value, or even making prices for .org domains go up-up-up: as Mitch Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in this very useful primer, selling something of public utility to a private corporation raises a buttload of questions. For example, would authoritarian regimes (ahem!) pay off Ethos to help shut down pesky .orgs that detail those regimes' crimes? Would Ethos cut back on domain name management such that some .orgs that provide lifesaving services can't do it anymore? Luckily, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or ICANN) has to approve the sale, hence Save .ORG helps you tell ICANN to reject the proposed sale of .org names to a private corporation.

Meanwhile, our EPA wants to weaken rules that prevent power plants from polluting toxic filth into our clean water, because our Administration hates good regulations with a passion bordering on madness. If our EPA gets its way, we'll have more mercury, more lead, and more arsenic in our water, not to mention more dead animals and higher water bills for good Americans -- all so we can hand out more corporate welfare to the dying coal industry. Seriously, the coal industry is dying -- even Murray Energy declared bankruptcy filed for bankruptcy shortly before Halloween -- and it's dying partly because gas is considerably cheaper and partly because renewable energy is starting to achieve cost parity with coal. As Paul O'Neill might say, it's the genius of civilization. But all this Administration cares about is enriching the few remaining coal executives, and they're willing to be objectively pro-pollution in order to achieve this goal. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our EPA to protect our clean water by scuttling its plans to weaken its own regulations.

In other news, it ain't just health care costs and college costs that have skyrocketed over the years -- it's child care costs, too, with a Freddie Mac study finding those costs going up almost 50% over the last quarter-century, and that means a lot in a world where single parents have to juggle working and parenting and two-parent households typically have two paychecks. You may even know someone who gives over their entire paycheck to child care! But H.R. 1364/S. 568, the Child Care for Working Families Act, would (among other good works!) mandate that child care could never cost more than 7% of a family's income, and would also ensure that poor working families can get good child care. Because they're people, too! And also because when we invest in child care, we invest in our future. That's as true when we invest in the poor, because (regardless of what many right-wingers still think) talent crosses lines of race and class. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to give working families the help they need by passing the Child Care for Working Families Act.

Finally, as you may have heard, the Virginia state legislature passed the Equal Rights Amendment, making it the 38th state to have done so. Of course, the original ERA had an expiration date that has long passed, but H.J.Res. 79 would eliminate that date, which means the Equal Rights Amendment could become the law of the land, as it has always deserved to be. Yes, I know, a few of those original 38 states repealed their passage of the ERA, but playing such games of take-backsies may not even pass Constitutional muster, so People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to support equal rights in America by passing H.J.Res. 79. And yes, I can also imagine our Supreme Court (particularly now that it has two younger fresher right-wingers on it!) saying that passing H.J.Res. 79 with anything less than a two-thirds majority would trample on the will of the Congress that passed it, since some Congressfolk surely wouldn't have voted for the ERA without the expiration date. But one might reasonably wonder why we would be more anxious to scrutinize such matters when women's rights are at stake.

Action: concerning good policy, the war on Yemen, and torture.

The list is back! It's time once again to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And this week we're proud to add H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed the full House on Friday afternoon. Why have all these good bills piled up? Because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (E-KY) won't bring them up for a vote; didn't know we elected Mitch McConnell Dictator-for-Life, did you? So let's tell our Senators to fight for voting rights, equal rights, public lands, internet freedom, and so much more -- and let's stay in their grills until they bend to our will.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that Democrats will abandon efforts to pass a defense spending bill amendment that would end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Sigh. And I bet Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, runs on proposing the amendment, even as he prevents its passage so it can actually do some damn good! And it would do a considerable amount of good -- it would get us out of yet another undeclared war, it would bring more good Yemeni back from the brink of starvation, and it would save more Houthi rebels for the fight against al-Qaeda that they're good at. Sometimes you think we get involved in these messes just so we can make everything worse. Ah, who am I kidding -- of course we're in Yemen to create chaos, just like Iraq! Rep. Smith's office number is 202.225.8901; his Armed Service Committee office number is 202.225.4151. These numbers are courtesy Just Foreign Policy; good luck finding phone numbers at his own House website, because they seem pretty well-hidden.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to release the full 7,000-page torture report to the American people, then Win Without War still helps you do that. There's no "looking forward, not backward" (in Mr. Obama's infamous phrase) when our CIA tortured at least 100 men in "black site" operations, and though Congress has released a 500-page summary of the report, they haven't released the whole enchilada, which hamstrings our effort to ensure this never happens again. The cynical will ask whom among our good Americans will read the full 7,000-page report -- and sadly, too many of our "liberal" media will ask the very same question, though the answer should be that they will read it, and report on its contents and its meaning. That is journalism, after all, and if too many contemporary "journalists" call it a day after they've trolled through Twitter for cruel and obnoxious crap uttered by fools who deserve their anonymity, that doesn't change their obligations to our Republic and our civilization.

Action: concerning voting rights, "free" trade, Social Security, and the Equal Rights Amendment.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Don't worry that it's a long list; your Senators could always have prevented our phone calls by passing the bills! Especially since they're good bills strengthening voting rights, fighting discrimination, raising the minimum wage, protecting good Americans from predatory health insurance corporations, protecting public lands, and insuring internet freedom -- among other good works. And don't worry that our President would veto these bills, because we ought to make him veto them.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that Democrats are almost ready to come to agreement with our President on his USMCA trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, which would replace the nefarious NAFTA, and while the USMCA does represent an improvement as it stands -- it would roll back the notorious investor-state dispute (or ISDS) settlement system with Canada and drastically curtail its use with Mexico -- it could be better, in that it could have better labor and clean air/clean water standards, and in that it doesn't need to sacrifice good Americans' health care before the altar of corporate intellectual property by letting big pharma corporations hold onto their exclusive rights for even longer than they do now. Hence Public Citizen helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them not to pass the USMCA until we can fix its problems. Please add, in your phone call, that you will not give up our gains regarding the ISDS system in exchange for better labor/health care/clean air and clean water standards, because the ISDS system nullifies our laws and outsources our jobs.

In other news, remember when Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) -- in a move which suggests she doesn't think she's in any danger of losing her 2020 re-election bid -- told Iowa residents that what we need to let Congress meet "behind closed doors" to "fix" Social Security? Well, S. 2733, the so-called TRUST Act, would let "rescue committees" meet behind closed doors on any federal program the Treasury Secretary deems necessary, and consider any legislation that comes out of these committees in an "expedited" manner, meaning very little debate and very little opportunity to amend. That should sound to you like a way of doing something very bad very quickly, which is how folks who want to do bad things have to do them these days. Hence Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject "secret" legislation considered "behind closed doors" by rejecting the TRUST Act. If a bill can't stand sunlight, it doesn't deserve to become law, period. And I'm old enough to remember when the Social Security trust fund was supposed to run out in 2016, so let's not let hysteria rule our world, OK?

Finally, you remember that when Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment back in the '70s, they put a deadline on its ratification by the states? Well, H.J.Res. 79 would essentially remove that deadline (by stating that the ERA "shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution whenever ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States"). 35 (of the necessary 38) states ratified the ERA before the original 1979 deadline; two more states have passed the ERA since 2017, with Virginia perhaps mulling the issue once Democrats formally take control of both legislative houses early next year. However, five states also rescinded their ratifications before the 1979 deadline, and our courts haven't concluded whether those states could do that under our Constitution or not -- mainly because the deadline had already passed. How this Supreme Court would resolve these questions we don't yet know, but in the meantime, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight for women's rights by removing the deadline on the original passage of the ERA.

Action: concerning good bills, good labor law, and good agricultural practice.

Let's see how our list is coming! Call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Don't worry that you're putting out your Senators' staffers by asking them to pass a long list of bills they have no intention of passing, because, hey, they're paid to listen to you, and if they don't like getting a long list from you, they can find another job. Hey, they're already well-connected! And, of course, if your Senators don't like it, they can, you know, pass good bills that protect and strengthen things like voting rights, equal rights, public lands, worker wages, and internet freedom.

Our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) has proposed a rule change that would deny graduate school teaching assistants of their right to organize and collectively bargain! What's their rationale behind this -- you know, besides ALWAYZ HURT TEH WURKURZ!!!!!? They're saying that letting TAs organize would "hurt academic freedom"! Always the right wing whines that you Americans will always let self-interest destroy everything, which is, of course, exactly how the right-wing is! And I guess our Administration has not properly considered all the union laborers in the South who vote Republican because at least they're against abortion. The more pertinent issue, of course, is that our institutions of higher learning exploit grad students, and just because they pay to go there doesn't give them a "right" to use them like wet dishrags. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our NLRB to reject its plan to prevent grad students from organizing for better pay and better working conditions.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would help farmers reduce their dependence on chemicals like Dicamba, the notorious Monsanto creation that drifts into neighboring farms and hurts other farmers' crops. They'll complain that they just passed a big Farm Bill in 2018, but I suspect the folks who get cancer because of Dicamba-infused crops over the next five years won't find that very sympathetic. We have totally given over food production in America to large corporations that only care about growing crops more "efficiently," by which they mean "they efficiently deliver unearned income to executives." But we all know ways of doing agriculture better, including rotating a diverse set of crops; big ag won't do that, because it doesn't enable them to spray tons of chemical crap on crops, which is, after all, cheaper than doing it right. But "it's cheaper" shouldn't be the number one reason we do things -- and it should never be the reason we avoid doing the right thing. I know, it sounds quaint.

Action: concerning voting rights, public lands, and immigration.

Monday is list day! So call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Today we add H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act, passed by our House last week, and I'm pleased to see that Moms Rising has provided a contact tool so you can tell Senate Majority Leader McConnell to hold votes on good House-passed bills. Moms Rising adds H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act (which will help out immigrants who moved here as children) and H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act (which would roll back Administration attempts to weaken protections for folks with pre-existing health conditions), and you can add these in your phone call, too. Plus you can add H.R. 1146, H.R. 1644, and H.R. 2513 in the comment section of Moms Rising's contact tool. Seriously, if we do this enough, we can get these bills passed, and we might even give our President pause before he vetoes them.

Meanwhile, our Administration still has this jones for logging and mining in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, so CREDO helps you leave a public comment with our U.S. Forest Service opposing the construction of more roads in the Forest that would allow more logging and mining there. The Tongass, as you probably know, has thousand-year-old trees in it; how many more times in our history will we be able to hold onto thousand-year-old trees, let alone learn the lessons they have to teach us? You may not find that argument persuasive if you think everything exists to be turned into money, as our President does, or if you think everything exists to be ruled over and used by humans, as our Vice-President does. If you're a civilized person, on the other hand, you might actually find it conservative to hold onto some thousand-year-old trees, not to mention the unique wildlife and indigenous humans that also live in the Tongass National Forest. Conservatism isn't all about making some crony money, after all. Or, at least, it shouldn't be.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2415/S. 1243, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. This bill wouldn't get rid of private prisons or punish corporations that import immigrants in order to drive worker wages down, but it would do a lot of positive, necessary, and reasonable things, like force our government to adopt good standards for detention, permit our government to break contracts with private prison corporations that repeatedly violate such standards, and mandate inspections of detainee facilities and investigations of detainee deaths in custody. Show me the person who would oppose such things and I'll show you a flabby thinker who shouldn't get all the say about anything in America. I mean, really, who else would support "no standards for housing detainees" or "holding to private prison contracts even when detainees die" or "sweeping egregious mistakes under the rug"? Because those are the alternatives. And they're not really alternatives -- at least, not to civilized people.

Action: concerning voting rights, law and order, immigration, and endangered species.

Happy Monday, good peoples! You can use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And today, we add the recent House-passed bill H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, which would shine some sunlight on the shell corporations used by banksters, drug kingpins, sex traffickers, tax-evaders, and big campaign donors. With one phone call, you can do something about that, and about voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections. Yes, America is a great country, precisely because of its promise of freedom and justice -- but we must fulfill that promise.

While you've got your phone out, the tools in the upper right corner of this page can also help you find your House Reps' phone numbers, so you can call them and tell them to impeach our President. Why, as I write this, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) is running an ad on Facebook calling the House's impeachment inquiry a "kangaroo court." The House is following rules laid down by Republicans during their impeachment of Mr. Clinton 20 years ago, but attacking the "process" is all you got left when you can't win the argument on the merits. Of course, Mr. McConnell would be one of 100 judges of this impeachment, and it does seem corrupt to attack the "process" of an indictment you'll soon have to try, doesn't it? Let alone raise money for your own re-election over it? It's not quite as offensive as Roger Stone telling us that ZOMG IMPEACHMUNT WILL CAUSEZ TEH CIVIL WARZ!!!!!, but that's not the story you want to take to the Pearly Gates. The story you want to take to the Pearly Gates? How you fought this evil and corrupt President.

In other news, a few big banks still haven't committed to getting out of the whole private-prisons-separating-families business, so Moms Rising helps you tell Citizens Bank, Synovus Bank, First Tennessee Bank, Pinnacle Bank, and Regions, among others, to stop financing private prisons. A large number of well-known banks -- chief among them Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, SunTrust, and PNC -- have pledged to stop financing private prison corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic, which is a big deal, since these banks represent seven out of every eight dollars those two private prison corporations get, and if they can't get financing from big banks, then they'll be hard-pressed to continue operating. Don't be swayed by the right-wing hype that you'd be putting those families in jeopardy by starving the private prison beast of money, because you know what that is, right? A manufactured hostage situation, that's what -- and one our government could rectify simply by doing its own dirty work. And we could fight that more easily.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4348/S. 2491, the PAW and FIN Act, then WildEarth Guardians still helps you do that. The PAW and FIN Act is a clumsy acronym, but don't hold that against it -- the bill would reverse the regulations issued by our Administration that put more endangered and threatened species at risk of annihilation, regulations that force our government to consider the "economic factors" of regulations, which means the money gas and oil drilling corporations would lose if they couldn't drill somewhere. How many times must I tell these pimps! We're not supposed to base all our decisions on whether or not someone loses money! Why, if we did that, we'd have ratified the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" so that foreign investors could overturn our laws whenever they lost money to some clean air or clean water law! And once they drill a species out of existence, it's gone forever -- just like the money they make doing it will, one day, be gone forever. None of this is conservative.

Action: concerning all kinds of corruption.

I know, this Administration's a total crapshow right now, but before we give the proper amount of attention to their drama, please use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Our House already passed all these bills, and our Senate has no business ignoring our will on voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections, respectively. It's a shame we ever have to remind our Congressfolk that the people actually have concerns other than the miserable dramas Our Glorious Elites force upon us day after day, but nobody said our duty as citizens was easy. And they need us more than we need them.

And now, to the drama: you can also use the aforementioned tools on this page to locate your House Reps' phone numbers, so you can tell them to impeach our President; if you're still not entirely sure why you should do that, David Swanson gives us approximately 25 reasons. And yes, our Administration's Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, did actually say that our President withheld foreign aid to the Ukraine so Ukrainian investigators would get dirt on Democrat servers; as for the fact that he tried to walk it back later, well, you can't unring a bell. But worse than that, he said you are stupid if you think there's a problem with that! I'm not sure how else to interpret "I have news for everybody: get over it. There's going to be political influence in foreign policy." If you are proud of your "worldly" cynicism, you probably find this argument persuasive, but if you find a civilization's moral standards worth upholding, and you demand that our politicians be better people than they are, you won't. Cynicism is evil, and evil demands only one response -- a fight to the death.

Finally, in the wake of the news that the next G7 meeting would be held at a property owned by our President, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our President's habit of profiting from his office as part of their impeachment effort. Our President has since changed his mind about holding the next G7 summit there, but I'm old enough to remember when politicians would avoid such corruption merely because it looked bad, and violating our Constitution's emoluments clause actually is bad, and you don't need a polisci degree to see why: when our President decides to hold a world meeting at one of his own properties, he's showing us that he doesn't care so much about us as he does his own pocketbook. Again, it's a shame I have to spell any of this out -- and it's a bigger shame that our President has spelled it out himself by saying, out loud, that he's not supposed to "dislike" the Saudis because, after all, they spend a lot of money at his hotels. But corruption doesn't smell better just because folks laugh about it more than they used to.

Action: concerning civil rights, impeachment, and law and order.

First things first: use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Yeah, I know, there's an impeachment effort going on, and we'll get to that, but our House has already worked to pass good legislation supporting voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections, and your Senators should work to pass this legislation, too. And if our President vetoes all of it, as I'm sure he would, then let him be accountable for it. It comes with the job, after all. Too often we excuse the inaction, or the bad actions, of our leaders. Let's stop doing that.

Meanwhile, you can use the aforementioned tools on this page to find phone numbers for your House Reps, too, so you can call them and tell them to impeach our President for his wrongdoing. Don't call your Senators, though. They're supposed to try the impeachment. It's annoying to hear some of our Senators currently running for President call for impeachment, because that's rather like a judge demanding an indictment. But other Senators get their role wrong, too: Sen. Alexander said last week that though what our President did was "inappropriate," an impeachment proceeding would "only divide the country further." At least Mr. Alexander wasn't Administration crony Roger Stone, who said that impeachment would bring about "a spasm of violence and insurrection in this country like you’ve never seen" and that "a politician who votes for it will be endangering their own life." I don't know about you, but when evil people try to scare me into doing the wrong thing, that only makes me twice as resolved to do the right thing. Which is to call my Rep and tell them to impeach this arrogant, ignorant, unprincipled, sorry excuse for a President.

In a related note, Daily Kos helps you tell our Congressfolk to hold Administration officials who ignore their subpoenas in contempt. Like me, you probably thought the law-and-order issues were pretty cut-and-dried, but apparently not! Apparently if our 46% President believes he can't be touched while in office, or that the impeachment proceeding against him is somehow "illegitimate," he can direct his underlings to defy legal writs to show up in court and testify! Actually, he can't do that, or else anyone could simply refuse to comply with the law, but Democrats in the House seem to be answering his defiance with a shrug, and though you might argue that we could interpret this collective shrug as a shrug of confidence, well, come on, these are Democrats we're talking about -- they're either weak, or they're actively collaborating with evil while merely appearing weak. But that's why we're here: to provide the steel in their spine so they can do the right thing.

Action: concerning banksters, whistleblowers, and abortion.

Another year, another attempt to "reform" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by privatizing them, which would effectively end their efforts to help low-income working families own homes. This idea didn't originate with our President, but he's sure glommed onto it, as he seems to glom on to all bad ideas eventually. Of course, privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would not "modernize" them, unless you have a very low opinion of modernity indeed, and it certainly wouldn't "stop another financial meltdown," because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't cause that meltdown to begin with. Bankster greed and hifalutin financial instruments caused the meltdown, and it'll cause another one -- particularly since hedge fund managers (whom our President supposedly hates, but you don't believe that, because it is to laugh) have grabbed themselves a big chunk of both corporations, and are now hoping to fully add them to their casino economy. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Meanwhile, with whistleblowers all in the news these days, S. 2529, the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act, would (as its title suggests) better protect those whistleblowers who expose corruption in the financial services sector of our economy. The bill would clarify that the protections of our laws extend to whistleblowers in commodities and securities (our Supreme Court apparently being unclear about that), would speed up the processing of whistleblower claims, and would beef up funding to the CFTC Consumer Protection Fund. If we'd had stronger whistleblower protections in 2008, the banksters might not have come so close to completely destroying our economy as they did. It's not beating a dead horse to keep reminding you of the 2008 bankster meltdown, since Congress too often seems to forget it happened. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good American citizens who expose fraud and corruption by passing the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act.

Finally, with an overturning (or, at least, a crippling) of Roe v. Wade within our Supreme Court's grasp, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act. States have been putting up hurdles to women getting abortions since the Republican wave of 2010, but this bill would prevent states from putting up these hurdles, which include forced ultrasounds, unnecessary tests, medically-inaccurate information, third-trimester abortion bans, forcing women to explain why they want the abortion and denying them if the state doesn't find their explanation "good enough," and absurd physical plant requirements for hospitals (this final item coming up before our Supreme Court shortly, in June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee). Like I said yesterday, rights are rights regardless of how legislatures "feel" about them, and no one makes a man write an essay on why he wants a vasectomy before letting him have one, do they?

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, impeachment, and Social Security.

Happy Monday, good peoples! It's time, once again, to call your Senator and tell them to support voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And none of them get to play the well-the-bills-aren't-getting-voted-on card, because they could use the prestige of their offices -- that which remains, at least -- and publicly pressure Mr. McConnell into holding a vote on the bill. Of course, none of them really want to do that, since he's making himself look bad on their behalf, knowing that if he allows a vote on these bills and they all vote against them, they'll look bad. But again: their 13-dimensional chess games don't matter; only our will matters.

After that, you may want to get your House Reps on the phone and demand that they support an impeachment inquiry against our President. I haven't advocated for his impeachment up until now, partly because the President I really wanted impeached (that would be Bush the Lesser) did worse, partly because I didn't want the Russia investigation to distract us from our duties as citizens, and partly because, well, I wanted him to twist in the wind until his own vanity and ignorance buried him. But when a man admits to trying to leverage foreign aid into a foreign investigation of a political opponent, then Congress would be derelict in its duty if they did not impeach. The fact that he's tried to un-admit it in the following days means nothing. Really, though, impeachment is too good for him. Whatever happens to him, one thing must happen: I want our descendants to point to this man and say see this guy? Don't be him. If you're gonna be like him, you deserve to be alone until death.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 860/S. 629, the Social Security 2100 Act, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would accomplish much of what we've been trying to accomplish for years: it would put Social Security on sounder financial footing (not that you should believe any hysteria about the "cost" of "entitlements"!) by expanding the income that can be taxed into the system, and although I think it's actually rather odd to exempt income between $132,900 and $400,000, that's still a big improvement. The bill would also expand benefits to ensure our seniors have a more dignified retirement, and would index future cost-of-living increases to a measure of inflation that would actually reflect the bills seniors face -- and not the stupid "chained CPI," which would assume that if a price rises too high, folks will just switch to something else! Seniors have fixed costs (like medicine) they can't just "switch" their way out of! So let's pass the Social Security 2100 Act and treat our seniors better.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, trade agreements, and surprise hotel fees

It's Monday, which means it's the day we call our Senators and tell them to support voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers. We give Mob Boss Mitch a lot of guff, and justifiably so, for refusing to even hold votes on any of this legislation because he thinks he's the boss of us and he knows better than us, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Democrats might have passed all these bills because they knew they wouldn't pass and it would make them look good without actually accomplishing anything. But their 13-dimensional chess games don't matter; only our will matters.

Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them not to vote on the USMCA trade agreement (a.k.a. "NAFTA 2.0") until our Administration fixes it. Specifically, you'll ask them to ensure our Administration gets rid of the corporate welfare for big pharma and improves the labor/environmental standards, and I think you should also make a point of saying that you want the changes to the investor/state dispute settlement (or ISDS) system either kept or made even better, because the USMCA isn't all bad just because the President who negotiated it is an irredeemable asshole. If they renegotiated the deal to get rid of the corporate welfare and the lax standards but also put back the ISDS system that enables foreign investors to nullify our laws and allows corporations to outsource our jobs, I'd say that's an even worse deal. So be sure you communicate your will precisely to your Congressfolk. They just love "mishearing" you, or telling you their pile of crap is exactly the meatloaf you asked for.

Finally, if you're fed up with surprise fees in your hotel bills -- fees that bleed almost $3 billion a year out of our bank accounts -- then Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4489, the Hotel Advertising Transparency Act of 2019. H.R. 4489 -- per one of its sponsors, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) -- "would require the prices regularly advertised by hotels and online travel agencies to include all mandatory fees that will be charged to a consumer, excluding taxes." Hence they won't be able to hide their "WiFi fees" and their "in-room safe fees" and their "resort fees" and even their "towel fees" (I know, right?) in their "low" prices. Gosh, how long before they start charging "bed fees" and "wall fees" and "floor fees" and "no secret camera behind your mirror fees"? Hotels have largely concocted these hidden fees in response to the pressure of winning in online comparison shopping, which only proves (as if we needed more proof!) that the future ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and war with Iran.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act, well, you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers. Regardless of what they say, it is absolutely your Senators' job to be supporting voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections. Don't be thrown off by Mob Boss Mitch's recent embrace of $250 million in federal funding for secure elections, either. The SAFE act would provide more than that, plus it would mandate paper ballots, which would be a lot better than having our votes simply disappear into the ether. Though some Senators would want them to disappear.

Meanwhile, with ramped-up saber rattling over Iran in the news lately, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure the recent must-pass defense bill explicitly forbids our President from waging war in Iran without Congressional approval. I know, our President fired long-time Iran war-monger John Bolton, and told Lindsey Graham to stop trying to push him into a war he doesn't want, but that's all drama -- our President (who still loves another Iran war-monger, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo) could merely be waiting until Iran does something, or possibly "does something." Don't tolerate the folks who whimper that "we don't want to tie the President's hands" by forcing him to go to Congress for a war declaration as our Constitution requires. How many times must I tell these pimps! Congress is supposed to tie the President's hands in exactly this manner, so that our President doesn't haul us off to war after war after war. This is one of the reasons we broke away from King George III, for Christ's sake!

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and Administration corruption.

Happy Monday, good peoples! You know what comes next: the list of bills we're going to call our Senators and tell them to pass, namely H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And now that H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, has also passed the House, we can add it to this list, and all future lists, until Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell deigns to allow a vote on them. What's he so afraid of? That by allowing a vote he'll let his caucus go on record as opposing voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, internet freedom, secure elections, and public lands? Of course that is something to be afraid of, since all these things are actually quite popular with the American people and don't hurt anyone but already-too-rich CEOs. But if you want to be a Senator, you should have at least some cojones.

Meanwhile, with the news that our government has been putting up military personnel at one of our President's hotels in Scotland at taxpayer expense, and that Vice President Pence stayed at one of our President's hotels several hours away from his actual business in Ireland, Win Without War helps you tell House Speaker Pelosi to support an amendment to the defense authorization bill that would prevent our military from staying at our President's hotels. Time was that anyone in a position to divert taxpayer money to their own properties would at least make some effort at disguising what they're doing, but we live in a truly sick, immoral, and decadent time, when our President simultaneously thumbs his nose at the rule of law and declares that he alone can protect law and order! Some folks applaud his money-making, no doubt thinking of themselves (in Will Rogers's phrase) not as poor folks but as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." But most of us have been so poor for so long now that we don't wink at corruption anymore.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, internet freedom, and secure elections.

It's Monday, so it's time to call your Senators once again and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. You can find your Senators' phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page if you're on a cellphone; and you can find Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell's phone numbers here, though you'll have to scroll down a bit to find them. I mention Mob Boss Mitch, of course, because our House has passed all of these bills, but our Senate hasn't, because Mr. McConnell won't allow any votes on them. Didn't know that was how democracy worked, did you? Anyway, you don't have to tell your Senators why they should pass these bills, unless you really want to -- their staffers are there to take down your will, not argue with you about it. But I'm going to go ahead and describe the bills (and the paltry arguments against them) in some detail, since I haven't in a while, and I want you to get to the phone with the most confidence you can have. If you do, they'll sense that, and if enough of us call them, they'll bend to our will.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, includes a lot of terrific initiatives -- it would allow national automatic voter registration, require disclosure of large campaign contributions, create a public campaign financing system, make Election Day a national holiday, and mandate that states use nonpartisan commissions to draw up districts. All of these things have large support across the ideological spectrum, and their opposites (making it harder to vote or register to vote, letting state legislators carve out Rorschach-blot fiefdoms, letting corporations spend whatever they want to elect their lackeys) don't. What did Mob Boss Mitch have to say about the For the People Act? He called it "a Democrat power grab," which every right-winger in America would call whining if a liberal said something similar. And if a man equates more access to voting with Democrats getting more power, he might want to think about how maybe Republicans aren't convincing enough people to vote for them. That'd be pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps thinking, wouldn't it? So your Senators have no excuse to oppose the For the People Act. That's going to be a theme in the next several paragraphs.

H.R. 5, the Equality Act, would amend the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act (among other laws) to extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folk, who can still get fired, denied housing, and denied credit just because of who they are and whom they love. The objections to the Equality Act are truly ludicrous and, frankly, reminiscent of racist objections to fair housing laws in the 1960s -- haters say they'll be "forced" to hire gay or transgender folk when the truth is the law would force them not to discriminate against them merely because they're gay or transgender, and folks who can't tell the difference between these things may not be cut out for the hard work of civilization. But wait, there's more! Haters pretend employers will be prevented from firing gay or transgender folk for good reasons, which they won't, and that male athletes will get sex changes in droves to compete and dominate in women's sports leagues, which, like, can you see such athletes hanging out with their crew after doing something like that? I mean, duh. The haters are not only wrong, they're stupidly wrong. That's also going to be a theme in the next several paragraphs.

H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, is not a "boon to trial lawyers" as its opponents say, but merely a bill that would give women more tools to fight pay discrimination. The bill would outlaw clauses in employment contracts that prevent workers from talking about their pay, and would prevent retaliation against employees who do talk about their pay -- and these are important, since talking about your pay is usually how you find out you're being shafted. The bill would still allow employers to pay men and women differently based on bona fide factors like, you know, skill levels and qualifications, but would restrict employers' ability to manufacture a "bona fide factor" merely based on salary. You know, of course he's more qualified, I pay him more, QED? The bill would also stiffen penalties for discriminating against women workers. And somehow all those good things get translated into BUT TEH TRIALZ LAWYERZ!!!!! in the right-wing mind, as if the words "trial lawyers" are a magic spell that transforms all bad arguments into good ones. Ranting about "trial lawyers" is just playing team sports, but our real duty as citizens is to do good works.

H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, would raise our minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour gradually over the next six years -- yeah, I made sure to put those last six words there, for all the haters who say IT'S TOO TEH FASTZ!!!!! -- and would increase that minimum wage every year thereafter in accordance with the rise in the median hourly wage, so that maybe we'll never have to hear again how some 70-year-old made $2/hour when they were starting out and what's wrong with kids today? When they made $2/hour, it had the buying power of $12-$15/hour, which is, as you see, higher than our current minimum wage. The bill would also hike the minimum wages for tipped workers and disabled workers gradually and close the gap between these and the regular minimum wage -- because you don't think big corporations will try to convert everyone into a tipped or disabled employee just to avoid paying them more? Dear reader, they will. So don't brook these complaints, or any scare numbers about "jobs lost" that either won't actually happen or would amount to a drop in the bucket of monthly job creation numbers, and certainly wouldn't compare with all the good folks a higher minimum wage would bring out of poverty.

H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, would reverse the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstate the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order which originally encoded the principle of net neutrality in law. Net neutrality, as you know, dictates that internet service-providing corporations should deliver all files to your computer at the same speed and with the same priority -- and this principle alone has made the internet the greatest information-sharing source of all time. But the corporatists at the FCC hated that, because it meant you had the power to determine where you wanted to go on the internet, and corporations had less power to herd you into junk news ghettoes like they do so easily on TV or in print. So don't brook, for example, Justice Kavanaugh's argument that corporations have a First Amendment "right" to restrict whatever internet traffic they like, as if we somehow don't have First Amendment rights to visit whatever website we want! Net neutrality used to be a principle that enjoyed bipartisan support among politicians -- and it still enjoys broad, bipartisan support among regular Americans like ourselves. So, again, our Senators have no excuse not to support this bill.

H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, would mandate voter-verified paper ballots for federal elections. This is a big deal, since (as we just saw in Mississippi) a lot of electronic voting machines don't let you vote for the person for whom you want to vote! Sometimes, when you've been doing something a certain way for hundreds of years, a machine actually can't do it better! Voter-verified paper ballots won't stop unscrupulous politicians from creating boxes of fake ballots, I suppose, but if you want to do that, you have to get a lot of other people to buy in, and only one of them needs to snitch to make your "victory" illegitimate. And you can steal votes a lot more easily with software, particularly when it's developed by some private corporation that'll fire any "snitch" who speaks out about its flaws. The bill would also fund state efforts to update their voting systems, which you know some states "forget" to do in their black and brown neighborhoods. As with H.R. 1, the For the People Act, you have to wonder why Mob Boss Mitch thinks it's just not worth it to make sure everyone can vote. What could he be afraid of?

Speaking of Mob Boss Mitch, he talks a lot these days about "bills we can pass," and acts like taking votes on bills that "can't pass" are a "waste of time." You know that's all rubbish -- even if these bills fail to pass the Senate, forcing your Senators to go on the record against voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, internet freedom, and secure elections is certainly worthwhile. But I want you to really think about Mob Boss Mitch's words, and measure the sheer contempt for the popular will they betray: nothing is worth doing unless a group of Senators pass a bill the President will sign. That's nowhere near the way it should work! How should it work? Absent a legitimate Constitutional concern -- and not just the bogus "concerns" of big donors passed off as "legitimate" concerns -- our Reps and Senators should pass the bills we tell them to pass, and the President should sign the bills we tell him to sign. We cannot rest until we have a system that works this way -- and when we get that system, we cannot rest in our duty to conserve that system for future generations, who will then have to work to keep it. But when we can do that, we'll have the "more perfect union" of which President Lincoln dreamed.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and public lands.

It's a new week, so it's time once again to call your Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Why would your Senators be afraid of bills that support voting rights, civil rights, fair pay, better pay, internet freedom, and secure elections? I mean, these are all popular things. Of course their leader, "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell, won't allow the bills to come to a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." But when we flood our Senators' phone lines with calls demanding votes on these bills, Mitch McConnell's opinion won't mean a damn thing, and his power will disappear. After all, his power isn't rooted in good works, and (despite appearances!) that's the only sustainable power there is.

Meanwhile, with the Amazon rainforest literally on fire as we speak, CREDO helps you tell big private equity corporation BlackRock to stop investing in the Amazon's destruction. How is BlackRock investing in the Amazon's destruction? By putting its money into the logging, mining, and big ag corporations that are deforesting the Amazon -- and thus, not incidentally, injuring the Amazon's ability to sequester the carbon dioxide that causes climate change. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen -- you'd think more big corporations and big investors would respect that simple truth, but the only "truth" they respect is the money that'll do them no good at the Pearly Gates. Still, with the burning Amazon all over the TV news, maybe we can make BlackRock feel the Big Stick of Bad PR. (Hate to pile on -- OK, I really don't -- but BlackRock also invests in the destruction of the indigenous folks who live in and protect the Amazon. How about that -- folks who live in a place are actually invested in protecting it! It's like an actual conservative value or something.)

Finally, H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would delete that section of the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that authorizes oil and gas drilling leases in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve (or ANWR). The New York Times recently reported that our Administration said we'd get about 40 times more money out of drilling in ANWR than we're actually going to get over the next decade, but that's not news to those of us who've been following the issue since Tha Bush Mobb tried to drill the hell out of these public lands, and seriously, what kind of public servant would be persuaded by the promise of a mere one-half of one percent of our annual federal budget, and over 10 years? The kind who only listens to big donors, that's who, and that's who passed that damn tax "reform" in the first place. But we can at least rectify the injury done to our public lands by telling our House Reps to pass H.R. 1146, as the Alaska Wilderness League helps us do.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and sane drug policy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass six good House-passed bills that "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell won't even allow them to vote on, well, you can still call them and demand both that they vote on it and that they pass it. We need to call them, because if we don't, these Senators can always say "well, I didn't hear about it from my constituents," and we should never let them use that excuse -- particularly during the month of August, when they're all in their home states meeting with constituents, at least nominally. You better believe their big donors are trying to get their attention this month! The six bills in question, as you may recall, are H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Anyone who opposes voting rights, civil rights, fair pay, better pay, internet freedom, and secure elections doesn't deserve to be a Senator anyway.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1456/S. 597, the Marijuana Justice Act, would not only remove pot from federal scheduling (which would essentially legalize pot), but would withhold federal funding for prisons in states that haven't legalized it and have arrested a disproportionate number of folks of color for pot-related offenses. The bill would also expunge federal convictions for pot-related offenses and establish a Community Reinvestment Fund to help communities ravaged by the notorious "war on drugs." We spend too much time and money chasing after pot-smokers when they do about as much damage as drunkards do, and you no doubt recall how our effort at banning alcohol went. Of course, we also spend so much time and money chasing after pot-smokers because our government thought it was a great way to oppress civil rights protestors! Don't just take my word for it, though -- take the word of President Nixon's domestic policy guru/Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichmann! Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact saner drug policy by passing the Marijuana Justice Act.

Action: concerning good House bills and a bad Senate bill.

It's Monday, so it's time once again to call our Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. The House passed all these bills, but the Senate won't even vote on them, because Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) won't even hold a vote on any of them. He even calls himself the "Grim Reaper" now! Who but an insane person would be proud of the fact that they refuse to pass legislation promoting voting rights, civil rights, equal pay for women, a higher minimum wage, freedom from corporate interference on the internet, and safe and secure elections? Seriously, let that be your meditation object as you call your Senators. You'd think a few of them would want to go on the record supporting the things I've listed above, but too many of them think of politics as nothing more than team sports -- a profound offense to those of us who call America our team.

In the wake of a mass murder apparently perpetrated by someone who really, really hated immigrants, Republicans have responded swiftly -- with legislation that would further injure immigrants! Yay priorities! S. 1494, the so-called Secure and Protect Act, would (among other nefarious works) impose an unnecessarily high screening standard on potential aslyees, essentially prevent Central American refugees from even getting asylum in the U.S., and deny immigrants due process by subjecting them to abnormally fast "rocket docket" hearings. Naturally, Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called a Committee vote on the bill without even letting Democratic members speak on it, which is what you do when you're really confident in your bill. And aslyees and refugees are actually the least likely people to commit terrorism, because, you know, they're fleeing terrorism in their home countries. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to resist this persistent posturing about immigration by rejecting the so-called Secure and Protect Act.

Action: concerning good bills, soldier pensions, and mass shootings.

That stack of good House-passed bills keeps piling up on Mitch McConnell's desk, and he doesn't care what you think about that, but that's OK, because we don't care what he thinks! Go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act. Mob Boss Mitch ain't the boss of your Senators, after all -- you are. People say I'm naive for thinking we can get Republican Senators to pass bills supporting voting rights, civil rights, internet freedom, better paychecks, and secure elections. But what would they hate even more than passing these bills? Being humiliated and jobless, that's what, and if enough of us speak up, they'll either bow to our will or be humiliated and jobless. Having the better arguments ain't enough -- we also have to deploy them, in force.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court gave our President the green light to appropriate some Defense Department funds for his vanity border wall, and then the Pentagon announced late last week that it would divert almost $225 million in military pension funds toward the wall. Taking from our troops' retirement to keep drama going -- how utterly despicable! I wonder how our President's votaries will explain it away. Perhaps they'll say it's only $224 million, which I'm sure will comfort our retired soldiers as they make ends meet. Or they'll say they're taking a lot more from real defense spending, so shutup or he's cutting money for weapons we don't even use, and that's a good thing -- but neither of these arguments can magically convert taking pension money into a good thing. Our President's phone number is 1.215.456.2011. He doesn't care what you and I think, but he's also sensitive to bad PR, so doing our duty might actually yield a result here.

Finally, on the heels of yet another mass shooting perpetrated by yet another white supremacist asshole, too many of our politicians are offering "thoughts and prayers" again, apparently having completely forgotten the backlash they got over their "thoughts and prayers" last year. Hence Greyroots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to get to work and pass some common-sense gun control legislation for once. Since I oppose very much control of handguns and hunting rifles, I'm going to use Greyroots' contact tool to specify the common-sense legislation I want -- legislation that would amend the National Firearms Act to make it just as hard for folks to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons. And all that bill did was get tommy guns off our streets. Our main job as civilized people is to fix problems without resorting to violence; if we don't commit to that, we'll never have enough weapons for the resulting apocalypse anyway.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, robocalls, copyrights, and immigration.

It's Monday again, so let's call our Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. And this week we add to that list H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, which would (among other good works) mandate paper ballots for federal elections. The House has passed all these bills, but Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell still refuses to hold a vote on any of them. Still, we have a voice, and we believe that secure elections, voting rights, civil rights for gay and transgender folk, paycheck fairness for women, higher wages for working families, and internet freedom for all Americans are all good things that our Senators should support, particularly if they want to remain Senators. You can find tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

Meanwhile, both House and Senate have passed anti-robocall bills, but they didn't pass the same bill, so now House and Senate must conference out a bill that can go to our President, and you know how that can go -- for example, a lot of the worst parts in that 2017 tax "reform" bill somehow found their way into that bill during the House/Senate conference! -- so Consumer Reports helps you tell your Reps and Senators to agree upon the most vigorous anti-robocall bill possible. A conference bill should, for example, ensure that big telecom corporations give you free tools to end all those "spoofed" calls that pretend to be from your bank or our IRS or even your own damn number, and it should also crack down on international scam call rings. Remember: our Reps and Senators would be nothing without us, so they had better do our will here, not some big donor's will. I mean, nobody likes robocalls except scam artists and other people nobody wants to talk to on the phone. Surely Congress can hit a bank-shot layup?

In other news, H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the CASE Act, purports to streamline the process by which folks can redress copyright violations, but that ain't as good as it sounds -- by taking copyright-related claims out of our courts and creating a separate office within the U.S. Copyright Office to evaluate them, the CASE Act will open the floodgates for copyright trolls to slap copyrights on everything they can find so they can harvest settlements from the unsuspecting. If you think you won't be affected because you don't violate copyrights, ask yourself: have you ever shared a meme on Facebook or Twitter? If the answer is "yes," then it will affect you, once folks slap copyrights on everything in sight, knowing they'll get a quick hearing from the U.S. Copyright Office rather than letting the wheels of justice in our courts grind slow. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect us from copyright trolls by rejecting the SAFE Act.

Finally, we've been trying to get Greyhound to stop letting Border Patrol agents on their buses willy-nilly, but they don't care what you think, so the ACLU helps you tell Greyhound's owner, FirstGroup plc, to stop Greyhound from letting Border Patrol agents on their buses unless they have a warrant or are at an actual CBP checkpoint. Of course if CBP or ICE agents have a warrant, or the bus is passing through a CBP checkpoint, agents can get on board and search, but the CBP has been searching buses without warrants and declaring that pretty much anywhere is now a "checkpoint," and they've also taken plenty of folks of color off buses without having any real suspicion that they're undocumented immigrants. Again, Greyhound has demonstrated that it doesn't care about any of that, so we have to alert their owners to what they're doing. In a sane, decent, and moral society I wouldn't ever have to say this, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society I often have to, so I will: law and order don't exist just to give us whatever results we want.

Action: concerning Senate obstruction, our President's tax returns, and protections for working families.

Today's another good day to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. (You can find your Senators' phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page -- or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page.) Why is Mob Boss Mitch blocking them from a Senate vote? Because he doesn't want his members to go on record opposing voting rights, internet freedom, tools for workers to rectify pay gaps, and civil rights for gay and transgender folk. He also doesn't want our President to go on record as opposing these things, once he vetoes the bills. If this all sounds like the opposite of courage to you, well, you're not alone. And if House Democrats don't run thousands of ads in 2020 touting their votes in favor of these bills, that'll be the opposite of courage, too.

Meanwhile, now that the state of New York has passed a bill mandating that the state comply with Congressional requests to turn over tax returns on state residents, CREDO helps you tell House Democrats to actually request our President's tax returns. House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) has been strangely slow in making that request, but that's why we're here: to remind our Congressfolk of our will. And though our President's apologists call this "Presidential harassment" -- a phrase that sure does sound like whining! -- fact is we have plenty of probable cause to start an investigation into his tax returns, beginning with his own refusal to release them and continuing on through New York Times reporting on our President's massive alleged tax fraud. And if we nail him for tax fraud, what will his apologists say? That it's OK for our President to cheat on his taxes? Well, perhaps I shouldn't tempt fate with these fools.

Finally, H.R. 2474/S. 1306, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (or PRO Act), would, as its title suggests, give workers tools with which to organize and collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions. Specifically, the PRO Act would stiffen penalties for employers who interfere with employee organizing efforts (including votes!), and close a lot of current loopholes in our labor laws, which corporations have been driving Mack trucks through lately. You remember how our Supreme Court ruled that Kentucky nurses could be classified as "supervisors" on hysterically flimsy pretexts? Well, the PRO Act would fix that. You remember how FedEx classified all its drivers as "independent contractors" just so they could avoid paying health insurance and also so they could make their drivers pay for their own trucks? The PRO Act would fix that, too. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the PRO Act.

Action: concerning unconstitutional war, Senate obstruction, and working families.

The House plans to vote on amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act today, so now's the time to call your House Reps (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page, if you're viewing it on a computer, or the bottom of this page if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to vote in favor of a) the Khanna amendment that would prevent our President from participating in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and b) the Khanna-Gaetz amendment that would prevent our President from waging war on Iran without Congressional authorization. Just Foreign Policy also advises us not only to tell our Congressfolk to vote in favor of these amendments, but also to tell them to push for a recorded vote. Congressfolk would prefer to pass these amendments "en bloc" via voice vote -- which tells everyone how many folks voted in favor of an amendment but not which way individual Congressfolk voted. But how can we hold our representatives accountable for what they do if we don't know how they vote?

Once you're off the phone with your House Reps, you can call your Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. We've discussed these bills at some length; they would, respectively, protect voting rights more vigorously, extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folks, give working folks more tools to fight pay discrimination, and reinstate the FCC's 2015 pro-net neutrality order as the law of the land. Of course Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell won't bring these House-passed bills up for a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." By his actions, we know that Mr. McConnell believes the American people should not challenge the "right" of Our Glorious Elites to run (and ruin!) everything. If that belief sounds singularly un-American to you, then you would want to reassert your power as an American by communicating your will to your Senators.

Finally, H.R. 2474/S. 1306, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, would (as its title suggests!) enhance workers' ability to protect themselves via collective bargaining on wages and working conditions. Specifically, the bill would make it harder for corporations to reclassify employees as "independent contractors," would clarify the National Labor Relations Act's definition of "supervisor" to prevent corporations from pretending their employees are "supervisors" when they're really not, and would stiffen penalties for many offenses corporations perpetrate against working folk. Right-wingers would complain that working folks don't have a "right" to organize, but these are the same folks who argue that bosses have the right to do whatever they like regardless of whom it hurts, so how much credibility do they have? People for the American Way (among other groups) helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act.