Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning fracking, flooding, and recycling.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: why Russia will lose the war, and other truths.

Ho hum, states are rushing to cut taxes, using money from the American Rescue Plan Act as an excuse, though that money was a one-time expenditure. They'll use any excuse to cut taxes! And remember: when they cut taxes, usually they cut taxes a lot for their cronies and only a little, if any, for regular folks. At least the Nebraska Senate is currently filibustering one of the more nakedly pro-wealthy tax cuts out there. Some of these states have proposed cutting sales taxes, and I approve of that in a general sense, but most of them have not addressed how they're going to raise the resulting shortfall, and every state but Vermont, you may recall, has passed balanced-budget amendments to their constitutions.

Kamil Galeev argues, convincingly I think, that Vladimir Putin will lose his war with Ukraine. Long story short: Russia's more concerned with strutting its stuff than doing the hard work victory would require. Long story somewhat longer: Mr. Putin wanted to basically blitzkrieg the hell out of Ukraine without planning very much for what would happen if that didn't work -- and his blitzkrieg wasn't going to work, since he didn't even plan that well. There's even more to the story -- Russia made its military more efficient until the mid-2010s, when it turned to making its military look more impressive, and Ukraine basically went in the opposite direction. And hate to sound like a broken record, but a lot of this will sound familiar to those who followed our adventure in Iraq closely.

Samuel L. Boyd at The Conversation discusses "Why Translating 'God's Law' to Government Law Isn't Easy." The answer has nothing to do with woke mobs or deep states, of course, and more to do with the fog of passed time: what we, in retrospect, conceive of as "laws," like the Code of Hammurabi and a lot of laws described in the Torah, weren't actually laws -- Hammurabi issued plenty of decrees at odds with his Code, and how many folks during the time of Deuteronomy stoned their kid to death for drinking and rabble-rousing? Not when there was choring to be done on the farm, I bet! In addition, folks may have come up with the concept of a code of law that comes from God, as in Exodus, in order to fight the Kings who oppressed them with their laws. Folks who insist on punishing transgender folks as often as they draw breath won't be swayed by any of these notions, but the folks who would see Leviticus more as a book about universal precautions will. Note well that the latter crowd is considerably larger than the former crowd.

When I read that "Activists push Biden to Expand Renewables for Energy Independence From Russia" -- and entirely reasonable plan we would already have implemented if not for the intransigence of Joe Manchin -- I'd still be happier to read "Americans push Biden to expand renewables," not just because that's generally true of how Americans feel, but also because I'd like us all to think of ourselves as activists, since that's what defending democracy and defending civilization requires. I'd like us all to think of ourselves as activists even though some Americans only discovered their love of activism because they didn't want to wear masks at Costco. I'd also prefer to read that "big energy corporations push Biden to expand renewables," since they're the biggest obstacle to a more renewable energy grid. The article's still very good, though, namely for its lengthy refutation of the notion that fracked natural gas will solve our energy problems. I mean, gosh, you've got sun and wind everywhere.

Our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) finds, after analyzing over 70,000 blood samples, that over 140 million Americans, including a majority of our nation's children, have had COVID through late January. That's way more than official reports give -- Worldometers.info counts a little over 80 million infections total in the United States, which doesn't even mean 80 million people infected -- and it also maps on to The Lancet's finding from January that official sources have way, way underreported COVID infections.

Finally, President Biden delivered his State of the Union address on Tuesday night -- it was a good speech, a little heavy on solutions, if anything -- but Republicans didn't waste any time acting like idiots about it. Sen. Marco Rubio (E-FL) boycotted it because he'd have to take a COVID test beforehand, and because "I only take a test if I'm sick." Why, it's like he hasn't learned after two years that some 40 percent of all COVID infections come without symptoms! I spy something that's going to wind up in Val Demings's campaign ads; she might even call it "Where's Marco?" Meanwhile, Reps. Boebert (Q-CO) and Greene (Q-GA) heckled Mr. Biden while he was talking with a "build the wall" chant; if Democrats have any brains/guts at all, they'll run at least the photo accompanying the story in campaign ads. Ain't nothing an independent voter likes less than a person shouting on TV.

Action: concerning free speech, monopolies, drug prices, pollution, and public lands.

Long story short: tell our government to protect the right to protest, reject a bankster mega-merger, allow generic manufacturing of an anti-prostate cancer drug, ban fracking wastewater use in the Delaware River, and ban oil and gas drilling in or near Chaco Canyon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Color of Change helps you tell our Department of Justice to protect the right to protest in America. States have passed a slew of laws aiming to put protestors in jail -- or worse, allow people running over protestors to get off scot-free like they didn't just murder someone either because they inconvenienced them or because they want to create drama -- so now our federal government needs to act. And just guess how many of these laws states will ever use to convict the coming caravan of whiny truckers! Luckily for us, when those truckers do come, everyone will see them as the whiny, diaper-loaded brats they are. Protesting a mandate for a vaccine that'll save your life! I swear, these people drink rage juice or something. Anyway, states are going after peaceful folks protesting real injustices, and our DOJ needs to stop that.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Federal Reserve and our Comptroller of the Currency to reject a proposed U.S. Bank/Union Bank merger, which will put over $660 billion in assets under control of one corporation. Our government hasn't rejected a bank merger in 15 years, which has contributed to our loss of 70% of our banks in the last 40 years, which has in turn led to banksters monopolizing markets and raising prices for consumers because they can. You know, like how corporations are stoking the 7.5% inflation rate now? Not only that, but when all the banks are big, they don't go to rural and urban areas, leaving their residents at the mercy of payday lenders and pawn shops. And they deserve better, which is why we must stop this merger, and all that are like it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to allow other drug corporations to manufacture a generic version of the noted anti-prostate cancer drug Xtandi. Xtandi pills cost $400 per pill (not per bottle or per thousand, per pill), and for some patients that'll amount to nearly $190,000 annually! Plus we pay five times more for it than folks in other countries, and if you were anticipating that the next phrase was going to be all about how taxpayers paid for 100% of the research that brought forth Xtandi, well, you're right! Generic manufacturers could sell Xtandi for as little as $3 a pill and still make a profit, and President Biden does have legal authority to force generic manufacturing of a drug, said authority coming from the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980. This should be a layup, really, so let's get to it.

Food and Water Action helps you tell our Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to ban fracking waste and use of Delaware River water for fracking. Fracking does use a lot of water, after all, and we've got better uses for it than enriching gas corporations' executives. Yeah, I know, gas is cheaper than most other kinds of energy, but how can we say that's a good thing if we can't drink the water? Go solar and go wind and you might pay more in the short run, but you'll cause less pollution, plus you'll save money in the long run. Our DRBC did ban fracking in the Basin last year, but they did not ban big corporations from drawing water out of the Delaware to go frack somewhere else, and once that water's gone, you don't get it back. And our DRBC's own proposal to keep frackers from taking our water is weak, so let's try to make them do better.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to protect the Chaco Culture National Historical Park from gas and oil drilling. More specifically, you'll ask them to protect Chaco Canyon and the area 10 miles out from it in all directions from gas and oil drilling. We've supported a Chaco Canyon drilling ban because of pollution and because it's holy land to nearby Native populations, but we've got another reason to support it: as drilling and grazing creep ever closer to Chaco Canyon, more and more wildlife flee to the Chaco Canyon area as a refuge, and it's more than a bit cruel to drive wildlife out of an area you drill in and then go drill in the area they've sought refuge. Some would call that the circle of life, but it's not; it's just a circle of money, and money don't last.

Around the table: the Ukraine *still* could be Russia's Iraq! And other truths.

Patrick Cockburn instructs us again that "Putin is Playing a Strong Hand on Ukraine" "as Long as He Doesn't Invade." British and American officials are creating a lot of drama here, but the former Ukrainian defense minister tells us that the 127,000 soldiers along the Ukraine's borders "is not enough for a full-scale offensive." That sounds right, once you consider that the area of the Ukraine is over 600,000 square miles, whereas the area of Iraq is a little over 437,000 square miles, and you recall Gen. Shinseki telling us in February of 2003 that 150,000 troops in Iraq would be nowhere near enough to occupy that nation -- a matter about which he was entirely correct! Further reports from both the Ukraine and France should obliterate British and American drama about the matter once and for all, though I know they won't.

Alex Pareene may not be entirely serious in titling his latest missive "Abolish States," but he does point out a lot of problems with contemporary "states' rights" conservatism If we can even call it conservatism! "States' rights" was always "a fig leaf for Jim Crow and 'massive resistance,'" true, but states also act like the federal government they profess to hate when they restrict the will of local governments. Mr. Pareene gives many examples of this nefarious phenomenon, and you can no doubt think of more; Pennsylvania residents need only remember the state legislature's efforts to stop municipalities from banning fracking during the Tom Corbett era. Why, if I had a dollar for every time I said "now there's conservatism for you!" back then I might be able to quit my day job. Professing a dedication to "federalism," as right-wingers do, doesn't wipe such hypocrisy away, of course; you either believe the smallest body of government should make the most decisions, or you don't. (I do happen to believe that! I also believe it can't happen without a strong federal government restraining wealthy/corporate power.)

When I hear that some QAnon followers can be brought back to the fold of civilization by Wordle, I find it fairly easy to resist glib statements like "you're just replacing one addiction with another," and not just because an addiction to Wordle is far better for you than an addiction to QAnon. I will admit that I've largely failed to apply the great truism of drug addiction treatment -- i.e., that you have to fill a patient's life with nurturing human connections so they don't turn back to drugs -- to folks addicted to various forms of right-wing rage. I still think we need to shame and shun such people, and I also think one person can't single-handedly re-fill someone's life with healthier obsessions, but clearly I need to develop more supple strategies.

I've long wondered why Donald Trump doesn't grab onto Ohio Republican Senate candidate Josh Mandel with both hands, and apparently I'm not the only one. I'd assumed that Mr. Mandel was perhaps too obsequious in his Trump-worship and that it actually put the big man off, but apparently Mr. Trump thinks Mr. Mandel is "a charisma-free weirdo and dork" (not exactly an absurd judgment) and has also talked a lot about Mr. Mandel's sex life (a matter about which Mr. Trump should show more restraint). I'm a little puzzled that Mr. Trump hasn't also called Mr. Mandel a loser -- after all, he ran for Senate in 2012 and lost by six points despite tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions buttressing his run -- but then perhaps he's hedging his bets in case Mr. Mandel emerges as the winner, at which point he'll pretend nothing described in this paragraph happened.

Anthony DiMaggio, writing at Salon, says that his research indicates that Dominion Voting Systems has a "strong case" for defamation against the Fox News Channel. Long story short: Fox News presented evidence-free stories about alleged voter fraud concerning Dominion, refusing to air Dominion's more evidence-based rebuttals, and Fox News viewers believe that voter fraud is rampant to a much larger degree than consumers of any other media outlet, which suggests that Fox's anti-Dominion reporting actually did defame the corporation. That's almost all one would need -- one would still have to prove "actual malice," but even that isn't necessarily about proving intent, but more about proving recklessness in publishing false information. Any Fox News workers write emails protesting that these reports weren't good enough to air? Any Fox News bosses respond that they didn't give a rat's hind quarter? That's the kind of evidence Dominion could win on. (Yes, I know corporate "personhood" is an issue here, but I'm going to go ahead and file that under "goose/gander.")

Finally, GM workers in Mexico vote overwhelmingly for an independent union to bargain collectively on their behalf. An "independent" union, you say? Apparently employer-friendly unions dominate the Mexican labor movement, and you could easily imagine how they might not be working in your best interest, I would think. A 2019 labor reform law requires all union workers to vote on their existing contracts by next May, which provides an opening for workers to get real representation at work; at present, only two dozen union shops have thrown out their union, but the GM plant at Silao is the largest shop to do so to date. I wish them the best of luck -- and I wish all Mexican workers the best of luck in overcoming all their obstacles to justice, so that one day American corporations stop looking to Mexico as a way of depriving Americans of their well-paying jobs.

Action: concerning Congressional corruption, saving our Post Office, climate change, algorithms, and Supreme Court ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, the Postal Service Reform Act, the Future Generations Protection Act, the Algorithmic Accountability Act, and the Supreme Court Ethics 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.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. This bill would prevent Congressfolk from trading almost any stock while in office, which makes sense -- even if your Congressfolk have no oversight power over the financial sector, they probably have oversight power over another economic sector, and folks trade stocks in pretty much any sector. And n.b. Sen. Burr's massive health care stock sell-off not long after he received an early 2020 briefing revealing how bad the COVID pandemic would be -- at the same time he told his constituents not to worry too much about it! And we don't just note hypocrisy here; how many of his constituents stood pat on their portfolios because of his public advice, while he made over $1 million on more inside info?

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act. The "big," "bold" "entrepreneur" Donald Trump installed as Postmaster General thinks the solution to our Postal Service's troubles is, get this, higher prices and worse service! That'll thrill you to death if you're relying on the mail for your insulin! Of course, his true aim is to privatize our Postal Service, so that prices can be even higher and services can be even worse, but he and his CEO buddies can rake in the dough! The Postal Service Reform Act can help stop this, by removing the yoke Congress placed on its back in 2006, the one that requires our Postal Service to prefund retiree benefits almost a century in advance. Our Postal Service is ours, and we gotta take it back.

Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6168, the Future Generations Protection Act. I'm sure a lot of right-wingers would read H.R. 6168 and declare it "radical," but then they call any necessary act "radical," as part of their program of preventing you from doing anything to make our world better, and preventing new electric plants from emitting greenhouse gases, banning fracking on land and offshore, and banning exports of most domestically-produced oil or gas are all pretty good ideas. Take fracking, for example: is clean water or cheap energy more important? The answer's obvious, but this is America, so we don't even need to pick one or the other if we move to solar and wind. The "problem," I guess, is that gas makes executives richer, but that's a bad reason to make big decisions.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6580, the Algorithmic Accountability Act. This bill would direct our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to regulate "automated decision systems" and the like that big corporations use so they can hire fewer workers and so leaders can evade accountability for their decisions. Oh, sorry, said the quiet part out loud again! Seriously, the bill would require our FTC to oversee a wide range of algorithm-made or algorithm-assisted decisions, with hiring, education, energy bills, health care, and financial services being just a few of them. And yes this is within our FTC's purview! Denying someone a loan or rejecting a job application because computer said no are absolutely matters of trade! They're also matters of morality, of course -- at least, to civilized people.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4766/S. 2512, the Supreme Court Ethics Act, which would impose an ethical code of conduct on our nine Supreme Court Justices, currently the only federal judges who are not covered by such a code. We must not have thought we needed it in the past! After all, these were the best of the best! But we don't think that anymore, more than half having been appointed by men obviously unfit to be President. We also don't think that because Justices Thomas and Barrett have failed to recuse themselves from obvious conflicts-of-interest over the past year. And boy, do Supreme Court Justices blow a gasket when you point out things like this to them! They forget that even though they get appointed by our President to lifetime jobs, they still serve the American people.

Action: concerning law and order, climate change, clean water, national forests, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, tell federal agencies to take climate change into account when spending taxpayer money, tell our government to keep radioactive waste off the vaunted Three Rivers, tell our Forest Service to keep logging out of the Tongass National Forest, and tell AT&T to cut off life support for the notorious One America News Network. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

People for the American Way helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Not because it didn't go our way -- that's just right-wing whiners projecting their inadequacies on us! -- but because we all saw how suspicious it was. Imagine being on trial for murder and watching the judge refuse to let lawyers call victims "victims" but allow lawyers to call them "looters." That same judge allowed Mr. Rittenhouse himself to pick which jurors to send home after both sides rested their cases, and the verdict absurdly expanded "self-defense" to include brats bringing killing machines to protests "just in case." The George Zimmerman verdict sucked, but even that made more sense than this! If our Justice Department investigates this absurdity, we might get some justice down the line, and that's worth the effort.

Progress America helps you tell our government to take climate change into account in its procuring decisions. I mean, you'd want them to go the extra mile to keep our planet livable if it were your money, right? Oh, wait: it is your money. Just so happens President Biden has called for this very thing -- but of course they have to take public comments on that first, and the right-wing whine machine is out in force with their comment-bots and paid crisis actors, so we have to speak up, too. No, "paid crisis actors" is entirely an appropriate thing to call right-wing commenters who take money to leave absurd public comments on matters concerning our government. It's not an appropriate thing to call us, of course -- we do good works for free.

MoveOn helps you tell our government to keep fracking wastewater off the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers. Those would be the famous "Three Rivers" that lent their name to the Pittsburgh Pirates' home stadium back in the day. Why keep fracking wastewater off the Three Rivers? Because the good citizens of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia depend on these rivers for clean water, and if a fracking wastewater barge sinks or springs a leak, it'll pollute that clean water so good folks can't drink it or wash with it. Seems pretty simple to me! If your snotty libertarian nephew says where will you put the wastewater then ha ha ha snort, just tell him there are a lot of ways to meet our energy needs that don't require fracking. I mean, c'mon, this is America, the can-do country!

Penn Environment helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to restore protections to the Tongass National Forest so that loggers don't spoil it. The Trump Administration, as you recall, decided to exempt over nine million acres of the Tongass National Forest as it wound down its evil term in office last year, saying that the rule would not cause "major adverse impacts to the recreation, tourism, and fishing industries, while providing benefits to the timber and mining industries, increasing opportunities for community infrastructure, and eliminating unnecessary regulations." Not mentioned: that the thousand-year-old trees of the Tongass trap more carbon than any other area in America. But, hey, as long as timber and mining CEOs get to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home, who cares?

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell AT&T to stop funding the notorious One America News Network. Right-wingers love to talk about "starving the beast," the "beast," in their view, being our government, even though it provides services we need and pay for. Fact is, right-wing media is the beast, and I mean "beast" in the Book of Revelations sense. OANN, like Newsmax, Fox News, and The First, traffics in by far the worst drug in America -- right-wing rage -- and so they're the beast we need to starve. And yeah, I just said right-wing rage is a worse drug than heroin or fentanyl. Heroin and fentanyl destroy lives and families, but right-wing rage destroys civilizations. Take its money away and it'll go down faster than a vampire in a Nevada noon.

Action: concerning racism, pollution, ethics, right-wing news, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell our EPA to fight environmental racism, tell our government to keep fracking wastewater off the Three Rivers, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, tell AT&T to end its financial support for the notorious One America News Network, and tell President Biden to help us save our Postal Service. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to act against big polluting corporations that harm communities of color. Some folks will hear that our EPA actually plans to do something about this and say what more do those people want? But I hear it and say about damn time! And that's because big polluting corporations have been purposely situating their big polluting plants near the neighborhoods where "those people" live for decades. Anyway, the question isn't "when will this inconvenient anti-racism end?" but "does anyone deserve to live in an area that will give them cancer just because they live there?" And the people who would answer "yes" to that question don't get all the say about everything.

MoveOn helps you tell our government to keep fracking wastewater out of the "Three Rivers" (i.e., the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers). Because these rivers provide clean drinking water to the good citizens of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, and having fracking wastewater barges troll up and down these rivers is a recipe for disaster. Thanks to Tha Bush Mobb, big gas drilling corporations don't have to tell anyone what's in their fracking wastewater, but scientists have found all kinds of goodies in it, and by "goodies" I mean "things that destroy your health," like barium, arsenic, benzene, radium, and hydrogen sulfide. Yum! Remember: none of our descendants will sit around a campfire saying "we can't drink the water now, but at least gas was cheap for a while!"

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5720, the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act. The Wall Street Journal, in an article I'm sure they didn't put anywhere near page one, found that judges failed to recuse themselves from lawsuits against corporations in which they or their family had invested over 680 times from 2010 to 2018; I'm sure that's a fairly small percentage of all lawsuits, but 680 times is still 680 times too many, because we expect impartiality from our judges. The Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act would require federal judges to report their stock transactions as they happen -- the law currently requires almost every federal officer but a judge to do that -- and would also mandate that our government publish those disclosures online. That's an improvement, so we should demand it.

Free Press helps you tell AT&T to drop its financial support of the notorious right-wing "news" network One America. I'll let Free Press's latest e-mail missive tell it: "Let’s be clear: OANN would not exist without AT&T’s money and DIRECTV’s national platform." And that's something even OANN executives acknowledge, rather candidly, in fact -- one executive said OANN's value "would be zero" -- and you often get that kind of candidness from folks who are pretty sure their gravy train's never going to end. But OANN's mission -- basically, to be a "news" channel for people who think Fox News has sold out -- wouldn't succeed without a sugar daddy. Does AT&T really want to be known as OANN's sugar daddy? So let's bring out the Big Stick of Bad PR on AT&T. Surely they don't want to be pariahs.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom so the USPS Board of Governors can fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Mr. Bloom seems to be all that's standing in the way of the Board of Governors sacking Mr. DeJoy, and his term actually expired in 2020 (he's been serving in a "hold-over year" since then), so what's the wait? He can't be waiting for the inevitable scandal that'll occur when some good American dies because they can't get their medicine through the mail fast enough because Mr. DeJoy slowed down the mail, because that would be cruel. OK, of course I see the flaw in the above argument, but we're not cruel, so we can always demand that our President act like us when we're at our best. We deserve that much.

Action: concerning Medicare, Guantánamo Bay, vaccines, Arctic drilling, public water, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our government to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, close Guantánamo Bay, prevent big pharma monopolies from stopping worldwide vaccine production, ban Arctic drilling, and stop private corporations from taking water from our public lands, and tell corporations to stop bankrolling the campaigns of Texas state legislators. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Word on the street is that the House Energy and Commerce Committee, currently marking up the Build Back Better Act, actually doesn't have the votes to pass Medicare drug pricing reform. Virtually everyone thinks Medicare should be able to negotiate drug prices -- everyone, that is, except big pharma corporations, who appear to be getting all the say about everything, yet again. This is why independents vote Republican in the midterms -- because Democrats are too scared to offend their big donors and do big things. And in 2022, it'll be worse, because most of the Republicans running will be out-and-out fascists. The three members of the Committee most opposed to Medicare drug pricing reform are Rep. Schrader (D?-OR), Rep. Rice (D?-NY) and Rep. Peters (D?-CA). If you're a constituent of any of these three, please call them and tell them to do the right thing, not least because the alternative is fascists taking Congress. Call them even if you're not a constituent, though. It's that important. And big pharma ain't anyone's "constituent," so any Rep who treats them like one has pretty much forfeited the right to nitpick about whether any of their callers are constituents.

Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center already. He promised he would, so he ought to keep that promise! As you know, Saturday marked the 20-year anniversary of 9.11, which means almost 20 years of pretending the "terrorists" we've held in Guantánamo Bay without charge and without trial were "too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release," in the Obama Administration's immortal words. It was all a lie, and we have done our civilization incalculable damage since 9.11 -- and if right-wing crybabies get their way, as they far too often do, we'll continue to suffer the fruits of that damage for years to come. That makes it all the more urgent that we close this self-inflicted wound on our national honor.

Rethink Trade helps you tell the Biden Administration to use every tool at their disposal to ensure vaccines can be produced and administered worldwide. Because the alternative is COVID-19 mutating and coming back to bite us in the ass again and again -- recall that scientists first spotted the Delta variant, currently slicing its way through red states, in India. At the point of life-or-death, things like "big pharma's intellectual property rights" don't matter a whole lot -- or, at least, they shouldn't. And "every tool at their disposal" means pushing for an intellectual property waiver from the WTO, of course, but it also means using already-existing legal authority to force big pharma corporations to produce vaccines worldwide. Taxpayer money invested in them, after all -- taxpayers like you and I paid for the Moderna vaccine in its entirety, in fact -- so we get a say in how they're used.

The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell our government to stop drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR). Opening up ANWR to oil drilling was a key "achievement" of the Trump Administration, but we all know why we would put "achievement" in quotation marks there -- scientists have long told us we're not getting very much oil out of ANWR, and we know that drilling in the Arctic Ocean presents unique problems, like the near-impossibility of cleaning up the inevitable oil spills in near-freezing water. But you know, the will of the Gwich'in Native Americans who live there, and the Porcupine caribou they depend upon, aren't chopped liver, either. Often, the compassionate thing to do is also the pragmatic thing to do -- but too often, the politicians ignore both in favor of whatever pleases some crony or other. You can fight that by leaving a public comment opposing Arctic drilling.

Environmental Action helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to deny any permit applications to corporations attempting to draw water from our San Bernardino National Forest in California. BlueTriton, formerly Nestlé Waters North America, drew some 58 million gallons of water from Strawberry Creek in the aforementioned San Bernardino National Forest just last year, but at least California wasn't in a state of drought or anything. Oh, wait, they were! And the drought is even worse this year! This, as farmers struggle to water their crops, to the point where they actually use fracking wastewater on them. Hmm, fracking wastewater on crops, private water siphoning -- could it be that preventing the latter could make the former unnecessary? Why, yes, it could -- but only if we speak out in numbers they can't ignore.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop bankrolling the campaigns of Texas's most extreme right-wing legislators. These would be the legislators who passed both SB 1, Texas's notorious anti-voting law, and SB 8, Texas's notorious abortion ban, and if corporations want to do something more than issue PR releases sympathetic to the plight of women, they can, you know, stop bankrolling the campaigns of these politicians. Of course, they may not want to do more than issue sympathetic PR releases, which is why we brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR. (As an aside, don't be too impressed that Salesforce has vowed to relocate any Texas employee who wants to leave because of SB 8. If you're an employee who requests that, your boss has just learned a lot about you, and you're much better off keeping yourself to yourself as much as possible at your job.)

UPDATE. And on cue: Rep. Kathleen Rice (D?-NY) says she cannot support Medicare drug price negotiation because it is "not fiscally responsible." Wondering how saving the taxpayers $84 billion every year is "not fiscally responsible"? Yes, I bet you are, as is any sentient life form on Earth. Her D.C. office number is 202.225.5516. She deserves to lose her re-election bid, and the way Republicans are going, she'll lose it to Zombie Adolf Hitler.

Action: concerning infrastructure, fracking, police, privacy, endangered species, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our FCC to better protect communication infrastructure, tell the DRBC to ban fracking-related activities from the Delaware River Basin, tell President Biden to demilitarize our police, tell our FTC to punish T-Mobile for its latest data breach, tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to do better at saving red wolves, and tell AT&T to stop funding anti-abortion politicians in Texas. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to better protect our communications infrastructure from the effects of climate change. And if that means issuing new regulations that make corporations build better infrastructure, too bad! Where private corporations refuse to do their job, government must step in, and by the looks of New Orleans's power outage, the private corporations that "manage" New Orleans's electricity ain't doing their job: aside from the loss of phone services (many of which are cable-provided now!), 911 calls didn't get answered for over 12 hours after the storm hit, and since AT&T manages that service in New Orleans, you can hang that on AT&T. But you'd rather be able to hang it on your government, since you can better fight them if they screw up. AT&T executives can wipe their asses with hundred-dollar bills, so they're immune to accountability.

Food and Water Action helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) that it should allow no activities related to fracking near the Delaware River. Fracking you can understand, since it would put dangerous chemicals in a river serving citizens of five American states, and indeed the DRBC did ban fracking in the Delaware River watershed last year. But the DRBC might consider letting gas drilling corporations siphon off Delaware River water to use in fracking elsewhere! That's our drinking water, dammit! The DRBC might also decide to let these corporations store or dispose of fracking waste in the Basin, and, again, that's our drinking water, dammit! Calling that a compromise would be like if King Solomon actually split the baby in half, so let's not let that happen.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden to demilitarize our police. Police don't need tanks and grenade launchers to arrest folks and serve warrants -- they "need" them to put down the good Americans who protest police brutality! I mean, if you want to go by how these military weapons actually get used. President Biden pledged to end the 1033 program that lets local police departments buy surplus weapons from our military -- but then, says word on the street, police unions got in his grill about it and made him back down. That means we have to get in his grill and make him keep his promise to us! Folks who whine that vaccine mandates are "Nazism" really ought to take another look at police officers who walk the streets armed like soldiers.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to punish T-Mobile for its latest data breach, which has potentially exposed the birthdate, driver's license number, and Social Security number of 50 million good Americans to identity thieves. Why, you can rig up a fake identity on one or two of those items, let alone three! And this is the fifth big data breach at T-Mobile in just three years, so we can look forward to another round of apologies and we'll-do-betters from T-Mobile executives -- who will then do nothing, because, as I put it earlier, they can wipe their asses with hundred-dollar bills. But, again, where big corporations won't do their job, our government has to step in and do it, hence we call upon our FTC to hold T-Mobile accountable. Our FTC has good people in charge of it now, but we still must communicate our will.

The Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to do better at saving red wolves, one of the most endangered species on Earth, given that there are only nine of them at present, where there were 130 as recently as 15 years ago. Our laws mandate that our Fish & Wildlife Service look for a place for them to live in peace (where they won't get hunted or hunt other species into endangerment), but word on the street is that they've let themselves be hamstrung by a single well-connected property developer into abandoning their lawful duty. Federal judges have twice told our Fish & Wildlife Service to do its job, and yet they act like our laws mandate that single property developers get a veto over the law whenever they like. That's not very law and order of them, so we should stop it.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell AT&T to speak out against the Texas abortion ban and stop funding anti-abortion politicians there. They'll probably stop at doing the first, which is why we're telling them to do both -- PR releases aren't worthless in and of themselves, but they are worthless without action, and they're certainly worthless if AT&T keeps funding the campaigns of the same politicians who enacted the nefarious abortion ban! AT&T will probably retort that they fund those politicians for "economic" reasons, or even that they won't have enough "access" if they don't fund these clowns. But would that be the can-do attitude of the free market? Because it sounds more like "we've got the power and we're not going to use it." But the Big Stick of Bad PR beats any carefully-worded corporate PR release. And we're not afraid to use that.

Action: concerning worker rights, voting rights, monopolies, and clean air and clean water.

Long story short: tell certain Democratic Senators to get behind the PRO Act already, tell Arizona legislators to reject vote-suppression legislation, tell federal regulators to break up big tech corporations, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat Act and the so-called "FRACK Pack" of pro-clean air and clean water 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, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Word on the street is that three Democratic Senators -- Sens. Sinema (D-AZ), Kelly (D-AZ), and Warner (D-VA) -- have thus far avoided co-sponsoring the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, which our House passed and which even Sen. Manchin (D-WV) and Sen. King (I-ME) have recently co-sponsored. You know what that means, right? Phone numbers! You can contact Sen. Kelly at 202.224.2235, Sen. Warner at 202.224.2023 (or 1.877.676.2759 if you're a Virginia resident) and Sen. Sinema at 202.224.4521. The PRO Act would make it much easier for workers to organize to bargain as a unit for better pay and better working conditions, and who could be against that? Besides the executives who make a lot of money denying workers those things, I mean. But they don't get all the say around here.

Progress America helps you tell Arizona's state Senate to reject a state House-passed bill that would kick 200,000 voters off that state's Permanent Early Voting List. Because Republicans would rather you make a request for an early ballot every damn year, because that's harder than getting one mailed automatically! And for whom would that be most hard? Why, people who can't just go where they like when they like, like seniors, poor folks, rural folks, and folks of color! Naturally Republicans can't claim "fraud" as a reason, because they can't find any (no, the so-called Cyber Ninjas ain't gonna find any, either -- though they might create some!), but they do cite "problems," never mind what they are. The "problem" here, as elsewhere, is that Joe Biden won this state, so let's tell Republicans to stop being sore losers.

Demand Progress helps you tell our federal regulators to break up big tech corporations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. It's actually a bad thing that Google's become a verb, or that Facebook has driven social media sites like Tribe and Orkut out of existence, or that Amazon controls about half of all online commerce. And I probably didn't say this well enough at the time, but even though the would-be union organizers did a bad job getting Amazon workers together, Amazon still shouldn't be big enough that it can simply crush the best of those efforts. There's only some utility to saying "you should've worked with the landscape as it was" -- if the landscape is that harsh, we also need to change it.

WildEarth Guardians helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. S. 915 would repeal that section of the 2015 defense appropriations bill that sold the Oak Flat area of Arizona's Tonto National Forest to Resolution Copper, a notorious mining corporation looking to "develop" that land. Resolution's owner, Rio Tinto, just so happened to once employ then-Sen. Jeff Flake, and also donated big bucks to then-Sen. John McCain. So they got their money's worth! Sadly, the San Carlos Apache, to whom the land is sacred, got bupkus. From the Save Oak Flat Act, they'd get a lot more -- and so would we, since the Save Oak Flat Act would also save our clean air and clean water from over a billion tons of toxic crap.

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the "FRACK Pack," a suite of bills that would protect our clean air and clean water from the nefarious practice of hydrofracturing, or "fracking." Think it's an accident "fracking" is a cuss word on the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica? I wouldn't dismiss the connection so easily! The bills would, among other good works, force oil and gas corporations to better dispose of hazardous materials, force disclosure of chemicals used in fracking, and authorize our EPA to regulate fracking wells. And I guess the bills' opponents would say it'll "kill jobs." It won't, but what kind of civilization would we be if we continued to insist that we can't have both jobs and clean air and water? No kind of civilization, that's what -- both in that we'd be uncivilized and we'd likely be nonexistent in a few generations. Let's try to avoid these things, shall we?

Action: concerning taxes, internet access, whistleblowing, and pollution.

Chye-Ching Huang at the New York Times proposes a way for President Biden to fund his dream infrastructure bill: simply restore our IRS's ability to collect the taxes big money earners avoid paying! This is a wonderful idea, and not just because our IRS didn't collect some $570 billion in unpaid taxes in 2019, and may face a "tax gap" of $7.5 trillion over the next decade: frankly, if you owe money to our government, you owe it to the American people, and you shouldn't short your friends and neighbors. But our government has enabled this noxious behavior by pointedly underfunding our IRS. It should be hard to argue against "making big money earners pay the taxes they already owe," but in these times, we have to get One Real True and Great President Joe Manchin on board; his phone number is 202.224.3954. He wants that infrastructure bill "paid for," but every dollar in IRS funding brings back $6 in unpaid taxes, per our Treasury Department, so, hey, this could help us meet his goal of getting that bill "paid for." And, hey, we're all about helping people reach their goals!

With the departure of Ajit Pai, our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) is short one commissioner, meaning it only has four, and it's hard to break ties with four -- and since two Commissioners are Democrats and two are Republicans, you're going to have a lot of ties. It's not such a great time for that, though, since millions of good Americans don't have reliable internet access and have never needed it more -- how many millions of kids are going to school over the internet again? How many folks are trying to sign up online for a vaccine as we speak? How many big telecom corporations are imposing data caps to squeeze more money out of good Americans, again, during a pandemic? Hence both Battle for the Net and Demand Progress help you tell our President to nominate an FCC Commissioner who will support good internet policy, and tell your Senators to confirm said individual. And let's have one who'll help establish a net neutrality policy like the Open Internet Order of 2015; maybe you haven't noticed the loss of net neutrality, but like the proverbial frog in a boiling pot, you're not supposed to notice it until it's too late. So we need a good 5th Commissioner.

Meanwhile, S. 409, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (or CFTC) Fund Management Act, would increase funding for whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing in the bankster sector of our economy; the Dodd-Frank law of 2010 created the whistleblower program, but Congress hasn't effectively funded the program in years, and it's about to run out of money. And S. 409's lead sponsor, Iowa's Chuck Grassley, is a Republican; one Republican and two Democrats join him as co-sponsors, and you'd hate to think our Senate would smother this bill in its crib merely because it's actually bipartisan. Regardless, whistleblowers deserve compensation for the law-breaking they find, and don't think some of those guys are making stuff up just so they can steal money themselves -- whistleblowers can count on getting blacklisted and threatened if they come forward, so the number of "frivolous" whistleblower complaints is not only quite small, but, ah, handled by circumstances. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to help protect whistleblowers by passing the CFTC Fund Management Act.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) has proposed a rule that would cut methane emissions and other pollutants from oil and gas drilling -- a big deal in a big fracking state like Pennsylvania -- but contains a rather important loophole that a lot of frackers will try to drive a Mack truck through: it would excuse "low-producing" wells from the rule. Maybe that seems logical to you: how much can a "low-producing well" pollute, after all? Problem isn't how much one pollutes, but how much they all pollute all together! Turns out more than half of all methane emissions coming from fossil-fuel operations in the Keystone state come from "low-producing" wells, so the proposed rule wouldn't keep as many pollutants out of our air and water as we'd like. And you can just imagine some big drilling operation deciding to evade regulatory scrutiny entirely by drilling only "low-producing" wells! Hey, if I thought of it, you know they have. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our DEP to close the "low-producing well" loophole in its proposal to cut methane emissions.

Around the table: in which we invoke yet more '70s TV sci-fi to describe current events.

Good news, everyone! The Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) has permanently banned fracking in the Delaware River watershed. This is a major victory, and you deserve congratulations if you contacted the DRBC. However, the DRBC also voted to start rulemaking processes for both selling water to frackers elsewhere and importing fracking wastewater from elsewhere, neither of which is a particularly good idea. When I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

Surprise, surprise, a Wall Street Journal analysis finds that energy deregulation in the state of Texas has cost good Texans an extra $28 billion since 2004. Here's the thing about "more competition leading to lower prices": if people simply can't be without electricity, which is where we are as a civilization, then people don't have the bargaining power that more competition would help them use -- especially if governments don't enforce antitrust or collusion laws. At present, Texas has only two electricity providers; that's some "competition," there.

FAIR reminds us that, amid all the coverage of the Perseverance rover giving us brand new pictures of the surface of Mars, our "liberal" media ignored "the Plutonium Bullet We Dodged." Previous Mars probes did fine powering themselves with solar panels, but for some reason we powered Perseverance with Plutonium-238, which would have caused a lot of mayhem if it'd blown up on takeoff, and don't retort that there was only a one-in-100 chance it'd do that, because if it happens, and people die, and you can't drink the water anymore, you won't be telling future generations how unlikely all that was. Wasn't there a Space: 1999 episode about this kind of thing? I kid -- of course there was.

Teaneck, NJ, population 39,776 as of the 2010 Census, has banned its police from using facial recognition technology. Thankfully we only wait until paragraph 2 before hearing that facial recognition technology can't tell black folks apart any better than your Trumphole uncle can. We also learn that Teaneck is just getting around to making its police officers use body cameras, which, no, is not the same thing, not least because we don't use body cameras to identify people so much as we use them to determine if police officers are executing citizens without charge, which should be a much easier matter to determine with a camera.

Upon hearing that "Georgia Dems Take Gambling Hostage Over GOP Voting Bills," all I can say is you go, Georgia Democrats! "Passing a sports gambling bill" is about one-millionth as important as "ensuring everyone can vote," after all. It's a shame this sort of thing will only work on matters like sports betting where state Republicans are divided, but Democrats say they've already identified two more priorities where this might work. Rip the system, that's what I say. And send Chuck Schumer a bottle of whatever you're drinking.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), not running for re-election in 2022, advances the novel theory that Joe Biden will violate an alleged "promise" of "working together" if he doesn't magically produce a COVID relief bill that a single Republican will vote for! Surely he knows that Republicans can continue to manufacture fake outrage over "not being consulted" simply by never voting for anything that might do anyone some good, as they've been doing for the entire McConnell Era. And again: the COVID-19 bill garners supermajority support among regular Americans in polls, meaning it must also garner bipartisan support among Americans. I know liberals are beyond tired of right-wing gaslighting; I can only hope that most other Americans are starting to get tired of that, too.

Action: concerning immigration, voting rights, and fracking.

Change.org helps you tell President-elect Biden to roll back our current Administration's immigrant child separation policy on day one of his Presidency. I've heard that he plans to do just that (and about a hundred other things that our laws let him write Executive Orders about) on day one, but you never know whether politicians will keep their promises, and you certainly never know what infernal 13-dimensional calculus Democrats will use to justify inaction. Best to tell them what to do in numbers they can't deny! Our current Administration's policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the border -- in the name of "deterrence," which suggests a profound ignorance about what immigrants run from -- is a black mark on our nation's soul, which you can tell by right-wing excuses about President Obama's border policies like any of those justify the worse policies enacted thereafter. Certainly we do not need our politicians to do evil in our names, but they'll keep doing just that, unless we act.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell grocery corporation Publix to stop bankrolling vote-suppressing politicians in Florida. Publix runs over 1,250 supermarkets in the South, including over 800 in Florida, where it's also headquartered, and though it claims (because they all do these days!) that it "rejects racism and discrimination of any kind," it also sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to the same right-wing Florida politicians who defanged the 2018 ballot initiative that would have restored voting rights to felons there. These are the politicians who added the condition that ex-felons would have to pay all their fees and fines before getting their voting rights back, which is less "being a stickler for the rule of law" and more "let's find a way to subvert the people's expressed will." If this still seems a little obscure to you, consider how many big corporations dumped the American Legislative Exchange Council over Voter ID and Stand Your Ground. So we use the Big Stick of Bad PR to make Publix's campaign contributions toxic.

Finally, a pair of local fossil fuel corporations want to build a massive port in Gibbstown, NJ, right on the Delaware River, that'll help them export liquefied fracked gas, which they'll receive and process at the port and then send down the River or on highways or trains; anyone else see the multitudinous problems with that? Like sending volatile, polluting fossil fuels down a river or through populated areas on land? And that's not even mentioning the damage fracking does to our air and water before it's on a train or a boat or a truck! The Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) will meet next month to contemplate final approval of this project; the only thing stopping them from such approval so far is our activism against it, and indeed our Army Corps of Engineers and New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection have already issued permits for the project. But we can still beat it, hence Environmental Action helps you tell the DRBC to protect our air and water by rejecting the proposed fracked gas port in Gibbstown.

Around our table: from surprise medical bills to an "October surprise" falling flat.

Why do good Americans keep getting slammed with surprise medical bills, although preventing them is apparently a bipartisan wish? According to this New York Times account of a woman billed over $50,000 to get airlifted to a hospital that could properly treat her life-threatening COVID-19, the answer is banksters had a tantrum over being told to stop screwing people over. Anyway, read the whole story, even though it'll piss you off, because the details are important -- big corporations know where all the loopholes in the law are, and how can we close them if we don't know where they are?

Joshua Cho at FAIR finds that our "liberal" media "Worr(y) About a Fracking Ban's 'Risk' to Democrats -- Not Fracking's Threat to Planet." Just what you need from our "liberal" media: more horserace coverage, and stupid horserace coverage at that -- polling tells us that regular Americans simply wouldn't run through a wall to keep hydrofracturing. If they were, Heidi Heidtkamp would still be the junior Senator from North Dakota, and John Hickenlooper would be having a lot less trouble burying Cory Gardner in Colorado's Senate race this year.

Tina Nguyen at Politico warns us that some Republicans are starting to court QAnon conspiracy nuts. This may be our next Tea Party, folks -- and if Democrats get all the power back and spend two years pretending their hands are tied as they have a habit of doing, then we'll see a crap-ton of QAnon Reps take back the House for Republicans in 2022. The good news? All Democrats need do to stop this unconscionable stupidity is do the job the people elect them to do. If it seems like they're not taking that advice, I'll be happy to repeat it until they do.

Folks who think Hunter Biden's alleged corruption should kill Joe Biden's Presidential campaign really should get a load of the checkered career of Eric Branstad, son of six-term (!) Iowa Governor and until lately Ambassador to China Terry Branstad, because his story also has nepotism, substance abuse, and making a crap-ton of money under suspicious circumstances. And to those who'd say that's not a good analogy because Eric Branstad isn't the son of our President, I would first direct them to better contemplate the palpable corruption of our President's daughter and son-in-law, and second direct them to stop being pedants.

Ho hum, our President asserts that Joe Biden must be "corrupt as hell" to "live() in these beautiful houses all over the place" on a politician's salary. Set aside that two houses ain't exactly "houses all over the place" -- again, our President is like a man covered in shit complaining about everyone else's body odor. Also, too, the they-didn't-send-their-best-wishes-when-I-got-sick complaint had sure better sound like whining to everyone with listening skills by now.

Finally, numerous analysts have, in recent days, cast reasonable doubt on the New York Post's "smoking gun" story alleging Hunter Biden's corruption. It sure doesn't help that the Delaware computer repair-store owner can't get his damn story straight. And in the words of one former U.S. Attorney, "(w)hat are the chances that an anonymous person abandons a laptop that contains evidence about the very same conspiracy theory" our President's cronies have been flogging all this time? Call it drama, call it junk news, just don't call it a reason to re-elect our President.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. They're good bills that would reduce poverty, discrimination, and vote suppression, among other evils, and your Senators have no excuse for sitting on them. They'll keep sitting, though, if we stay silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Chaco Canyon, the quality of mercy, and working families.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, then you can still 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. I know, it's been weeks since the House passed that bill, and all kinds of other things are happening right now, but guess what? No law or social more compels you to attend only one thing at a time, and to the exclusion of all other things! Our Glorious Elites pretend only one thing at a time could possibly matter to anyone, but we're still seeing over 20,000 cases of coronavirus every day, and a crapload of good Americans will still need unemployment benefits after the end of July, and we still need to fund a Post Office past the end of September, and states and localities still deserve assistance thanks to all the reduced revenues of this recession, and at least one big tax-cut-for-the-rich still deserves repeal and oblivion, and another round of increased stimulus checks for all of us sure wouldn't hurt, so get on the stick and communicate your will to your Senators before they imagine you've forgotten all about the hard work they still need to do.

Meanwhile, our Interior Secretary has actually extended a comment period concerning opening up the Greater Chaco Region of New Mexico to even more fracking. And you know what that means! It means he didn't get enough pro-pollution comments from the fracking lobby! I mean, this Administration never wants to hear more from the American people, since good Americans generally oppose all the things this Administration does! Even the 2017 tax "reform" suffered from so much opposition from the people that they could barely pass the damn thing! And that cost Democrats exactly nothing in the 2018 midterm elections -- this, after Our Glorious Elites have been saying for years that opposing "tax cuts" is "political poison"! But I digress. Food and Water Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to halt its plans to drill for gas in the Greater Chaco Region. Why? Well, not just because drilling tends to pollute our air and water (and, of course, drillers will pay less in royalties to us because that's how our 46% President wants it!) -- the Greater Chaco Region also includes land sacred to the Navajo. Our Administration cares so much about religion -- just not when it's Native American religion!

In other news, Willie Simmons committed a $9 robbery back in the 1980s -- and has served 37 years for it! How did this happen? Mr. Simmons had three other offenses (all nonviolent, naturally) on his record, and thus got a life sentence under Alabama's "habitual offender" law. I don't need to tell you that Mr. Simmons served our country in the Army or that drug addiction may have figured in his "crime spree" -- I need only reiterate, with the italics hammer, that he's serving a life sentence for stealing nine freaking dollars. If you know any supposed devil's-advocates who'll say if you can't do the time don't do the crime or he should've gotten a lawyer to help with his appeals, just ask them: is it fair to give someone life in prison for stealing nine dollars? Any answer other than "no" -- and that most definitely includes "no, but" -- deserves no further engagement; just let your little Glaucon go with God, because God might be their only friend at the end of the line. In the meantime, let's try to do some damn justice and tell Alabama Gov. Ivey to commute Mr. Simmons's sentence, as Change.org helps you do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Walmart to give its workers a seat on its corporate board, then United for Respect still helps you do that. Because why the hell not? Are other CEOs the only people who know anything about running a corporation? Actually, given how badly so many corporations do at anything other than redistributing worker income upward to executives, I suspect most CEOs know just about nothing about running a corporation! And, in my lengthy experience as a worker bee, I've found that the people who actually do the work know more about how to do the work than the folks who bloviate all day about "the challenges ahead," which are always challenges for you, not for them! In any case, Walmart's situation is unique, and not just because it smashes any unionization effort with a frightening malice -- Walmart has been making a crap-ton of profits during this pandemic, but its executives have been dragging their feet ensuring their workers are safe at a store where it's almost impossible to socially-distance. So let's help our sisters and brothers help themselves! That's what a conservative would do, right?

Action: concerning anti-Semitism, corporate welfare, and endangered species.

You may have heard that a group of racists have begun compiling a "list" of Jewish critics on the Telegram chat platform. You may not have heard that this project was apparently too racist for both 4chan and Twitter! The compilers claim they don't intend any violence, but of course they haven't explained what other purpose the list could have -- it couldn't be a mere attempt to alert folks about who their critics are, because it only has Jews on it; gosh, you'd think fighting a World War over this crap would have given contemporary folks more instruction. But nobody said winning and securing victories over evil was easy, so Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell Telegram to take down the anti-Semitic list. Again, this is a public list, and Telegram's own terms of service indicate they're a lot tougher on public utterances than private ones, and again, our First Amendment does not protect terroristic threats (and what else could this public list of Jews be?).

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 1100 -- which supporters call the "Energize PA Legislative Package," but detractors call the "Ethane Cracker Welfare" bill -- would indeed give corporate welfare handouts to manufacturers of petrochemicals and fertilizers. They act like not paying taxes on your expenses isn't enough! Does HB 1100, in its purported effort to "energize" our power grid, include any tax breaks for solar, wind, or geothermal corporations? Of course not -- it's almost like the reactionary state legislature only cares about handing out welfare to corporations that pollute more. Not to pile on, but ethane crackers (which are "petrochemical," after all) generally turn fracked gas into single-use plastic, and nobody thinks we really need more of that clogging up our land and water. Hence both Penn Environment and Food and Water Watch help you tell your state Senators to fight pollution and corporate welfare by rejecting HB 1100.

Finally, in the wake of our Administration's regulatory changes designed to gut the Endangered Species Act, H.R. 4348/S. 2491, the Protect America's Wildlife and Fish in Need Conservation (or PAW and FIN) Act, may give us yet another clumsy legislative acronym, but it would essentially nullify these recent changes, and prevent any other Administration from using "economic factors" to decide how it's going to enforce the Endangered Species Act. You know, there really aren't that many people who complain about "burdensome" regulations; mostly CEOs complain about it, because it forces them to spend some of that money they'd earmarked for gilding the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. They don't put it like that, of course -- they say it's a "burden on small businesses," as if "small businesses" go around killing endangered species with drilling projects! The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect endangered species by passing the PAW and FIN Act.

Action: concerning privacy, clean water, and worker rights.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass real reforms defending consumer privacy from big tech corporations. Sadly, the reason we need legislation to accomplish this (and I really wish journalists would mention it a bit more!) is that Congress passed one of its notorious "resolutions of disapproval" repealing FCC privacy rules which would have (among other good works!) forced big corporations to allow consumers to opt in to letting corporations sell their data, rather than forcing consumers to opt out. But big tech corporations like Facebook have been earning themselves a lot of bad PR for their inability/unwillingness to protect their customers' private data (and for employing Nixonian tactics against their critics) -- and corporations like Facebook monopolize their fields, so our government has to step in and curb their power, whether they want to or not. Concentrated power: it's evil everywhere!

Meanwhile, as you may know, the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) proposed banning fracking in the basin of the Delaware River earlier this year, which is good, but also proposed letting corporations dump fracking wastewater in the Basin and draw Basin water out to frack with! Welcome to yet another King-Solomon-actually-splitting-the-baby-in-half "compromise"! I mean, the whole point of banning fracking is to keep pollution out of our water, so if you go ahead and allow fracking-based pollution in water nearly 15 million good Americans drink and wash with, you've kinda missed the point. Still, Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf has one of four votes on the DRBC, so Food and Water Watch helps you tell Gov. Wolf to support a fracking ban with considerably more teeth. Remember, folks: the money you make from polluting water quickly goes away, but clean water lasts forever -- if we maintain it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) not to repeal its "joint-employer standard," then the Economic Policy Institute still helps you do that. Big chain corporations have long claimed that their workers' "real" employer was the particular franchise where they worked; thus workers would have had to redress grievances over pay and scheduling and such with the franchise. Of course any fool can see that's absurd, since franchises obey (or cope with) orders from the top, so the NLRB created a joint-employer standard to help workers redress grievances with their real bosses. Now that Republicans dominate the board, they're trying to scuttle the standard. But don't believe the hype that TEH STANDURDZ HURTZ TEH SMALL BIZNIZZIZ!!!! Your local McDonald's ain't a "small business." Obviously.

Action: concerning immigration, education, and clean water.

What else can we do do to hinder our President from turning America into a land without due process? Well, consider that you may be invested in a pension fund that invests in private prison corporations -- including the ones in which our President would detain immigrant families seeking asylum "indefinitely." But don't flagellate yourself about "how I benefit from the harm done to others," not just because that's what our President and his votaries would like you to do, but also because even if you are "part of the problem" -- any problem! -- nothing on Earth prevents you from also being part of the solution. That is the promise of America. And pension funds hate the Big Stick of Bad PR just like every other corporation on Earth, so Sum of Us helps you tell your pension fund to divest from the private prison corporations that our government would use to detain immigrants indefinitely.

Meanwhile, Michigan's state Board of Education aims to scrub its social studies curriculum of almost any mentions of civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, or climate change. Oh, and it wouldn't talk of "core democratic values," either, because, get this, it sounded too partisan. All together now: waaaaaaaaaah! One of the big names behind the new "standards" is state Senator Patrick Colbeck -- can I mention he's a Republican, or would that be too partisan? -- who just so happens to be running for Governor. A guy who can't stand the notion that America has screwed up and yet has striven to do better shouldn't be running for village idiot, let alone Governor. (Also, too, he thinks the KKK didn't start out as a racist organization.) Hence Jeff Gaynor of Ann Arbor, MI has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Michigan state Board of Education to scuttle its plan to right-wash history in its K-12 social studies curriculum.

Finally, the Pennsylvania state legislature is mulling SB 1189, which would, get this, reclassify the Delaware River Basin Commission's (or DRBC's) fracking ban in the Basin as a taking of property, meaning the DRBC would have to buy out all the landowners with gas shale underneath their property in order to enforce the ban! If you noticed that the simple act of banning fracking in an area doesn't actually "take" anyone's property, and that good Pennsylvanians (possibly including yourself!) have already made their will known by commenting on the DRBC's fracking ban, you're not alone. Fracking puts dangerous chemicals into our drinking water, and momentarily cheaper energy is, frankly, too high a price to pay for losing our clean water (and thus the bedrock of decent health care!) forever. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to support our will and our right to clean water by rejecting SB 1189.

Action: wind power, prisoner rights, and Arctic drilling.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission lets gas drilling corporations conduct hydrofracturing (a.k.a. "fracking") on public lands, but thinks wind power is too dangerous to wildlife to allow onto public lands! Because of all the wind turbines that go rampaging through the forest, no doubt! Seriously, the Game Commission should really have said all that out loud before doing it. Fracking involves, among other things, leaking methane into the air, poisoning our air and water with carcinogens, and building pipelines that carve up land and run the too-high risk of spilling more poisons; what about that isn't dangerous to wildlife? Wind turbines, on the other hand, carve up rather little of the ground if you do it right, and fossil fuel corporations kill far more birds than wind power does. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell the Pennsylvania Game Commission to end its double standard for wind power development on public lands.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 2520, the Inmate Calling Technical Corrections Act. What would S. 2520 do? It would stop phone service corporations from extorting absurdly-high phone rates from the families of prisoners. And why should we care? Because prisoners who can stay in contact with their families go back to jail less often, because judges don't sentence prisoners to absurdly-high phone call rates, because families shouldn't be punished with those high rates either, and also, you know, because we're not cruel bastards. Speaking of which, our current FCC Chair apparently thinks the problem can be solved by stuffing burner phones into dead cats and throwing them over prison walls -- even though the very same corporations that "provide" phone "service" in prisons also provide prisons with cell-phone jamming devices! So let's speak out, not merely to treat prisoners and their families more humanely, but to better ensure this Administration's just humiliation.

Finally, as you may know, the Republican tax "reform" bill opens up the Arctic Refuge to drilling, even though we've been saying for years that the small amount of oil we'd get out of the Arctic Refuge doesn't outweigh the damage we'd do to clean air and water. Luckily, the Interior Department has to go through many public comment periods before anyone can drill in the Arctic, and though this Administration will try to go through those public comment periods as quickly as they can, so that fewer good Americans comment on the matter, they still have to go adhere to the process, because law and order. Hence the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell Interior Secretary Zinke to reject new drilling leases in the Arctic Refuge. He doesn't care what you think -- unless you've got some free trips or a $150,000 door you can give him, amirite? -- but, as always, it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want.

Action: war-making, "free" trade, and clean water.

The good news? Congress might actually repeal the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF), just like we've been telling them to do for years. The bad news? Congress wants to replace it with an even worse one. S.J.Res. 59 would actually broaden the President's ability to start new wars against new "enemies" without a Constitutionally-mandated declaration of war from Congress, and would only let Congress reject these new wars after they begin -- you know, when most Congressfolk would be too cowardly to do that! Don't believe the hype that we must not ever "hamstring the President's ability to respond," because that is precisely the point of giving war-making power to Congress. Hence the Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject yet another unconstitutional AUMF that enables the President to wage war at will.

Meanwhile, multinational corporation Cooke Aquaculture has lately threatened to use the "investor-state dispute settlement" system in NAFTA to try to nullify a Washington state law against the open-sea net-pen fish farming it just so happens to practice! And this story gets so, so much better: Cooke lost hundreds of thousands of Atlantic salmon into the open sea (thus causing havoc in local ecosystems!) when its Cypress Island net-pen farm collapsed last summer, then lied to the state about the causes of the collapse and how many fish it lost! So, of course, when you've done so bad a job that the state has already revoked more than half of your net-pen leases, naturally you try to use NAFTA to get taxpayer-funded corporate welfare. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell Cooke Aquaculture to abandon its efforts to use NAFTA to punish the good citizens of Washington state.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 1088 would actually roll back regulations that protect clean water for the good citizens of the commonwealth, by (among other things!) allowing fracking corporations to keep their toxic chemicals completely secret, exempting corporations from the responsibility of supplying folks with clean water when they pollute the water table, and letting drillers build their wells closer to your home and to your rivers and streams. I'm sure they'll also tell you that relaxing regulations on the smaller drilling wells is a way of right-sizing regulations for small businesses, which I'm sure you'll totally agree with once you're able to set your brown tap water on fire. Seriously, SB 1088 is a giant pile of fecal matter, and Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to protect good Pennsylvanians' clean water by rejecting SB 1088.

Action: discrimination, overtime pay, and methane emissions.

Another day, another "bathroom bill," this time in Tennessee, where it's passed out of one House committee (though not the full state House) and will get consideration in a Senate committee starting today. HB 2620 would force the state of Tennessee -- and thus the good taxpayers of Tennessee -- to pay all legal fees whenever a school district in the state decides to adopt a policy that would force transgender students to go to the restroom of their gender-at-birth. Surely its authors know that transgender students who sue against these kinds of policies under Title IX will win, and will likely win sizable settlements, so I must conclude that the legislature intends to cut off the nose of the taxpayer to spite the legislature's face. Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee state reps to reject that state's latest "bathroom bill."

Meanwhile, H.R. 4505/S. 2177, the Restoring Overtime Pay Act, would undo the damage caused by court rulings (or a lack of thoroughness on the part of the Obama Administration, if you prefer) nullifying the Labor Department's 2016 overtime pay hike, by mandating that the Department of Labor raise its overtime pay threshold to the approximate point the Obama Administration originally raised the threshold, or about $48,000 annually. Thus folks making less than that would get paid time-and-a-half starting with their ninth hour in a working day or their 41st hour in a working week. The bill would also automatically update the threshold every three years, based on new income data. So a number of good government groups help you tell your Congressfolk to support better overtime pay for American workers by supporting the Restoring Overtime Pay Act.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to cap methane emissions from existing gas fracking wells. Gov. Wolf has gone the full Obama route on regulating the methane emissions that not only pollute our air and pack a bigger climate-change punch than coal, but help deprive good Pennsylvanians of the royalties they could earn from that energy source -- by capping emissions from new fracking wells, but not the thousands and thousands of old ones. Don't the old ones pollute worse? But that is, of course, a typical Democrat attempt at a cutting-the-baby-in-half "compromise," with an industry that doesn't care about anything but delivering money to its executives. And we have a few decades of data now to suggest that when you pander to big corporations, they just demand more. So let's stop compromising on clean air, since it clearly doesn't even buy us any time.

Action: fighting fracking and trophy hunting of endangered species.

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

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

Action: internet freedom, nuclear weapons, and fracking on public lands.

Stop the FCC still helps you tell your Reps and Senators to pass a "resolution of disapproval" reversing the FCC's recent anti-net neutrality order. It hasn't been hard finding 50 Senators who oppose the FCC's effort to put corporations, not you, in charge of your internet experience, but finding the 51st has been a bit tough; Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) has criticized President Trump for failing to discuss net neutrality in his State of the Union address, but hasn't committed to being that 51st vote yet, and I can't say why he's dithering. Meanwhile, in the House, Republicans have a bigger majority, so the road to passage there will be tougher. But not impossible! Not in a world where most Republican voters agree that the FCC should keep corporations from censoring web content, blocking and throttling websites, and giving preferential treatment to corporations that pay for it. Congress only needs do the will of the voters, which, not coincidentally, is their job, regardless of their personal ideology.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has released a Nuclear Posture Review that -- surprise, surprise! -- says we ought to spend nearly $60 billion annually over the next 30 years making new nuclear bombs. Recall that the ideal purpose of nuclear weapons is deterrence -- at least, that's what we have supposed for the last 70 years or so -- and we might well presume that having enough weapons to destroy the world several hundred times over is enough weaponry for that task. Folks say we shouldn't be building new nukes like this with a vicious, racist, sexist, self-absorbed manchild in the White House, but of course we should be just as careful of psychopaths who can do a much more passable impression of a sane person, because, up until now, that's been a good enough reason to give a President fewer nukes to play with. So the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Trump nuclear weapons plan.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the state legislature is trying its damnedest to expose yet more state forests to fracking. After all, what's more popular than polluting our clean water with carcinogens just so gas drilling CEOs can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes? Of course, it's not just water pollution, it's also air pollution, and it's also methane venting on public lands, which packs a climate change punch many, many times worse than coal emissions do, and which also represent money the Pennsylvania taxpayer could be making off methane just floating away into the ether. Gov. Wolf imposed a moratorium on new fracking leases not long after taking office a few years back, but that hasn't stopped gas drilling corporations from trying to grab everything. It's enough to make you think only an outright ban would work! But for now, Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Senators to reject efforts to open up even more public lands to fracking.

Around the table: from actual bipartisanship in Florida to continued stupidity from Trumpholes.

Here's some welcome news: a Florida state Senate committee votes unanimously to advance a Republican-sponsored bill to ban fracking. That bill still has to go before the whole Senate, and then before the whole Assembly, and then get signed by the Governor, but the 10-0 margin doesn't bode so well for the fracking corporations that stand against it, and it's nice to see Republicans asserting that sitting on gigantic clean water reserves means you ought to keep them safe for future generations.

Uh oh: FEMA hired a private contractor to deliver 30 million meals for Puerto Rico, and she delivered some 50,000. The salient details -- she "is adept at navigating the federal contracting system," and has five cancelled federal contracts in her past -- tell us this is not a uniquely Trumpian problem. Except, of course, that he promised us he'd get the best people. And you'd think it'd dawn on someone in government that if you want a job done right, you best do it yourself, right-wing whining about TEH NANNY STATEZ!!!! be damned.

Pennsylvania legislator aims to impeach the five state Supreme Court justices who tossed the state's Congressional district map, apparently because waaaaaaaah! He'd need two-thirds of the state Senate and a majority of the state Assembly to do the deed, but the legislature's Republican leaders sound more interested in pursuing other dead ends, namely continued lawsuits. But if the U.S. Supreme Court won't block it, and the state Supreme Court issued the ruling, who does that leave to hear the suits?

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt spreads more of his "skepticism" about climate change around, actually saying "humans have most flourished during times of...(w)arming trends." He fixates on the word "warm," like it's all about Los Angeles being different from Edmonton, when the problem is faster temperature changes disrupting agriculture, higher sea levels obliterating coastlines, once-in-a-lifetime hurricanes every few months, and the like. And this whole what-should-the-temperature-be-in-2100-huh-don't-know-do-you silliness (for the record, scientists say it really, really shouldn't get any warmer than it is now) is straw-man reasoning at its most obnoxious.

Finally, speaking of obnoxious, what would Trump votaries say upon learning that Dear Leader got the idea for a massive military parade down the streets of Washington, D.C. from the Bastille Day parade in Paris? After all, 15 years ago Trump votaries were all calling France America's Oldest Enemy when they wouldn't go along with Tha Bush Mobb's Iraq adventure. I kid, of course -- as Mr. Nietschze suggested years ago, what memory would make you remember, pride would let you forget.

Around the table: concerning campaign finance, corporate welfare, tax "reform," and approaching rural Americans.

A Tampa Bay Times/WTSP-TV/TEGNA investigation finds dozens of "zombie campaigns" still spending money years after their candidates stop running for office. The culprits range from infamous Florida Republican Mark Foley still charging his campaign for $450 lunches 11 years after leaving Congress in disgrace and Democrat Robin Tallon, Jr. somehow spending large amounts of campaign money 25 years after leaving Congress all the way to folks I've long respected, like the late Rep. Steven LaTourette (R-OH), whose campaign spent over $4,500 in Ohio State football tix three years after he retired, and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), whose dormant Presidential campaign paid his daughter over $16,000 between 2015 and 2017. And at least eight campaigns spent money after their candidates died -- which means that Mr. Trump's 2020 re-election campaign will almost certainly survive us all.

In a related note, the Center for Media and Democracy informs us that ALEC's new national chair, a North Carolina state rep named Jason Saine, has spent nearly $20,000 in campaign funds on new suits. Mr. Saine says he needs his suits specially-tailored because he's "short and fat" (his words), and, sadly, his donors probably accept that reasoning, since they're getting what they're paying for -- a "representative" whose "conservatism" consists entirely of serving big corporations (pre-empting local anti-fracking laws, now there's small-government conservatism for you!) or stoking rage in the already rage-addled (limiting free speech on campus, because what's more "small government" than telling people what they can't say?)

EPI researchers inform us that the data proving that giving Amazon tax incentives corporate welfare to build another headquarters in a particular county "just isn't there." Or, more precisely, the data proving that Amazon job creation won't be offset by local job losses caused by Amazon (which, you know, closes down Mom-and-Pop stores with a vengeance!) just isn't there. You'd think states and localities would realize they have Amazon by the short-hairs, since Amazon has to build warehouses just to keep up its super-fast order fulfillment and shipping, but then again, they serve mammon, not you and I. (In a related note, Amazon's insistence that unemployment has gone down 4.8% "on average" in counties it's built in over the last five years isn't that impressive, considering that the national unemployment rate has gone down almost 4% during that time, while the U6 unemployment rate -- which adds in folks who've given up on the job search and part-timers who want to work full-time -- has gone down over six points during that time.)

Now this is truly remarkable: Paul Ryan proudly twittered that a public school employee was getting an extra $1.50 per paycheck thanks to the Trump tax "reform," and that would take care of her Costco membership for an entire year! Most folks aren't going to notice an extra buck-fifty a week, of course, and you may recall that Sen. McConnell (R-KY) slammed President Obama's Making Work Pay tax cut for only giving folks a piddling $7 extra a week. Meanwhile, the average one-percenter, per the Tax Policy Center, will get an extra $980 weekly from the tax "reform." I guess if Mr. Ryan ever had to count the cost of anything, ever, he'd have known to keep his mouth shut. And if a buck-fifty is the boon coming to most Americans from tax "reform," Republicans might actually be in trouble this November.

Finally, Ivy Brashear at Yes! magazine explains "Why Rural America Isn't a Lost Cause for Progressive Ideas." Short answer to title question: people hate what the politicians they've got have done to them, so why not pitch real hopes and dreams to them? How to do it: meet with rural folks on their turf, talk straight to them, and talk about their problems first and then describe how liberal ideas can solve them. You know what I'd add? Don't tell them the economy's changing and they all have to learn how to write computer code to keep up -- not just because they've got plenty of mainstream Democrats in their ear telling them to do that, but because it doesn't remind them that they have the power, and the right, to bend the world in their direction a bit.

Action: poisonous pesticides, and national parks.

Knowing that Arkansas is dominated by Republicans only makes it more heartening that their state government has fought Monsanto's dicamba, a herbicide scientists link to shortness of breath, muscle weakness, and vomiting -- but it's only banned dicamba use during the warmest parts of the year, since dicamba aerosolizes (and makes people sick) far more efficiently in warmer air. Hence Penn PIRG helps you thank the government of Arkansas for its partial ban of dicamba and encourage them to make their ban year-round. Should I bother mentioning that Monsanto manufactured dicamba for use on its own genetically-engineered crops? Yes, I should bother mentioning it again -- especially since Monsanto will no doubt tell you they do what they do to increase yields or end hunger, two goals that seem much too big for them to comprehend. I mean, making money off crops, they get, but doing so in a way that doesn't hurt people they're not anywhere near as good with. It sure is a good thing we're here to help them with that.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration's drill-everywhere-fuck-the-consequences plan continues unabated, as they now plan to sell fossil fuel drilling leases near Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. You may remember stopping fracking in Chaco Canyon back at the end of the Obama years, but, as they say, that was then and this is now, and "now" means nothing so much as big fossil fuel executives making as much money as humanly possible right away. That's Donald Trump for you, though -- he doesn't care about anyone but big boss-men like himself. Naturally, the Chaco park holds thousand-year-old artifacts from the Ancient Pueblo civilization, and good folks belonging to today's Pueblo nation find the area sacred, but again, "religious freedom" only means something to Trumpholes when you're a boss trying to deny women birth control. So CREDO helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to reject proposed fossil fuel leases near the Chaco park. After all, oil and gas are temporary, but history is forever.

Around the table: what stands in the way of a Democratic wave, and other lessons.

If you're already gushing at the possibility of a Democrat victory in the coming midterms, Ari Berman at Rolling Stone cautions that Republican-held states have devised a lot of nefarious ways of suppressing the vote. Mainly Mr. Berman concentrates on Wisconsin, once the home of great American public servants like Bob LaFollette and William Proxmire, but now a right-wing swamp of extreme gerrymandering, vote suppression, and dark money political contributions. But here's a ray of hope: maybe the Supreme Court heard about 2011 Republican lawmakers saying "ignore the public comments" while mulling the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?

Here's another corrective to your enthusiasm: Ryan Grim and Lee Fang at The Intercept describe how actual populists in U.S. House races have to run against the Democratic establishment before they can run against (beatable) Republican incumbents. You'd think Pennsylvania state Democrat poobahs, in particular, would have far less credibility after their lousy showing in 2016 (seriously, who could possibly care about getting Katie McGinty's endorsement?), but they're still around, saying Democrats have to appeal to Republican moderates who will never vote for them rather than the left-leaning and left-behind economic populists who otherwise wouldn't vote for anyone. What's the definition of insanity again?

Bill McKibben at The Nation presents "Three Strategies to Get to a Fossil-Free America," wryly adding that "none of them rely on Washington to do anything useful." Here they are: getting states and localities to move to renewable power; blocking new fossil-fuel projects like gas and oil pipelines and fracking wells; and stop the flow of bank money to fossil-fuel projects. I laughed out loud at the part where folks actually installed fields of solar panels on Keystone XL's path.

In a peripherally-related note, The Straight Dope describes the phenomenon of the "fatberg," or the massive, dense blob of cooking oil and other waste that tends to block off sewer lines. The biggest culprit in the creation of the "fatberg" isn't that turkey grease you dumped down the sink (though it doesn't help!), but the massive amount of used cooking oil restaurants dump into sewers. Sadly, the only idea advanced to stop the fatberg -- converting cooking oil into energy -- is over a decade old already, and some enterprising small-town or big-city mayor should already have made it the great work for which they'll always be remembered.

Finally, Araz Hachadourian at Yes! magazine describes the "time bank," where good Americans who might be short on cash trade hours of services instead. Folks might swap mowing the lawn for a good food dish, for example -- and no money changes hands. Some 500 of these banks exist across America, and I suppose today's "conservatives" would decry them as TEH SOSHULIZM!!!!, even though they consist of people signing and fulfilling contracts with each other without the assistance of some governmental body, which would ordinarly sound like something after a conservative's own heart.

Action: tax "reform," clean budgeting, and fracking.

Yeah, I know, the Senate passed their tax "reform" plan at about 2 am on Saturday morning, but we still don't have to take it -- House and Senate must still reconcile their almost equally noxious versions of tax "reform," while figuring out how to fund our government by the end of this week and extending the Children's Health Insurance Program they let lapse over two months ago. So you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page -- or the bottom of this page, if you're looking at it on a cellphone -- to find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers to tell them we still do not want a tax "reform" plan that hikes taxes on working families and cuts taxes for corporations and rich folks. Hey, they're bald enough to keep repeating the lie that "the tax cuts help middle-class families," so we can keep repeating the simple truth that it raises taxes for working families and cuts taxes for corporations and rich folks. The same folks who nearly destroyed our economy in 2008! And now Congress wants to give them even more tax cuts! How disgusting. But not as disgusting as if we just sat back and took it.

Meanwhile, as we noted above, Congress also has to pass a continuing resolution by Friday, or risk a government shutdown, and since a government shutdown means, among other things, national parks closing and seniors not getting their Social Security checks, government shutdowns are, well, rather like playing with fire, politically. Of course, President Trump has mused out loud (again) that a government shutdown might help him politically, and the government shutdown of 2013, the one in which President Obama finally stopped letting Republicans kick sand in his face, did little (if anything) to stem the pro-Republican tide in the following year's midterms. Still, Republicans are doing a little cock-swinging, now that the Senate passed that awful tax "reform" plan, and they'd like to stock their next continuing resolution with all kinds of poison pills that would roll back clean air and clean water protections, help corporations hide all their campaign spending, and (of course!) defunding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a clean budget bill without any of the legislative riders that would otherwise wither in daylight .

Finally, the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) released a draft proposal in re fracking in the Delaware River Basin, and though this draft proposal goes further than previous proposals did, they don't go far enough. Certainly, they don't go as far as the fracking moratorium passed in the 2012 state budget, because the latest draft allows gas drilling corporations to withdraw nearly 10 million gallons of water per well drilled from the Delaware River, and it would also allow those corporations to store fracking wastewater near or dump wastewater into the Delaware, and that wastewater tends to have a lot of nasty carcinogens that drillers have gone some length to hide. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell the DRBC to enact a much stronger fracking ban, one that would prevent any fracking in or dumping near the Delaware River. Right-wingers -- you know, the folks who call themselves "conservative" without earning it -- love to say we don't have "conclusive evidence" of fracking's dangers, but we have more than enough evidence to oppose it. And anyway, wouldn't it be conservative to ensure something's safe before doing it?

Action: concerning monopolies, credit, clean water, and fair redistricting.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Justice to reject the proposed AT&T/Time Warner merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. AT&T wouldn't be buying Time Warner's cable TV apparatus -- Charter bought that last year, after Comcast bid for it and then withdrew their bid under massive popular pressure. AT&T would be buying Time Warner's entertainment and news holdings, including CNN, HBO, and Warner Brothers, and while a pedant would tell us that AT&T's business is in delivering content and Time Warner's business is in producing content and therefore there's no monopoly possible, we of course know better, particularly if we recall that blocking such mergers if their "effect...may be substantially to lessen competition" has legal precedent in American law. We also know better, I'd hope, to think that an AT&T/Time Warner merger would "create jobs." Our opponents rarely say it anymore, which is an indication that most Americans do know better.

Meanwhile, CREDO also helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1816, the Freedom from Equifax Exploitation Act, which would give consumers more tools to fight data breaches. The FREE Act (hey, at least it's not a completely tortured acronym) would require credit reporting corporations to provide credit freezes for free, would block corporations from selling your personal information when you have a freeze on your account, and would mandate an additional free credit check for those folks who used their annual free credit check before the Equifax breach. The bill would also refund folks who wound up paying for a credit freeze after the Equifax breach became known; a lot of people, I suspect, panicked and paid for credit freezes, which smells of the kind of corporate exploitation that too many folks call "the free market in action." But conservatives who extolled the virtues of the "free market" in the Reagan years didn't approve of such exploitation, and neither should we.

In other news, the Bureau of Land Management, scarcely two years after enacting regulations that protect clean water from hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. "fracking") on public lands, now wants to repeal those rules, which, like, sigh. Fracking didn't suddenly become safe over the last two years; so what do you suppose happened? Oh, right -- we elected a President who literally doesn't care about anything but money. Oh, and we also elected a President who seeks to completely erase President Obama from American history by undoing all of his works, even those (like the BLM's fracking rules) that didn't go nearly as far as we wanted, but went further toward protecting us than before. But there's no reason for good Americans to be held hostage to President Trump's insatiable thirst for drama; hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to protect us from pollution by abandoning its effort to repeal the fracking regulations it passed in 2015.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislator to pass HB 722/SB 22, which would create an independent commission that would redraw legislative districts more fairly then self-interested legislators tend to do, then Fair Districts PA still helps you do that. HB 722/SB 22, as you recall, has actual bipartisan support in the state legislature, but the relevant committee heads are sitting on the bill and refusing to hold hearings on it, despite their popularity (and despite the feedback they're getting from their constituents). This is America, though, so they can be so ignorant of the popular will for only so long, and now wouldn't be a bad time to start pressuring our legislators again, if for no other reason than that the relevant committee heads can get pressured by their colleagues as well as their constituents. It's a shame it's come to that, but I'm not too proud to use the whatever levers of power are available to me as a citizen.

Action: clean water, and auto emissions.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Delaware River Basin Commission will vote Thursday on whether to move forward on banning fracking outright in the Delaware Valley, so Penn Environment helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to vote for a fracking ban. Currently the DRBC has enacted a moratorium on fracking in the area, which isn't bad, but the DRBC can, in theory, lift the moratorium at any time -- like, at a time when the gas drilling industry has bought enough politicians to get whatever it pleases whenever it pleases. A permanent ban in would be harder to reverse, particularly since the Delaware River provides drinking water to 15 million good folks, and because gas drilling corporations have polluted the water in other parts of the state -- to the degree that's been hard to establish, that's only because our federal government has allowed fracking corporations to keep their chemicals secret since 2005. Without clean water, we ain't got health. So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA not to weaken auto emissions standards that not only cut pollution but lower gas prices, then Penn Environment also helps you do that. Anytime someone tries to whine about the hardships of automakers having to make their cars more fuel-efficient, just remind them that cleaner air and cheaper gas are things that help everyone, and maybe big corporations shouldn't get all the damn say about everything. We do live in interesting times, when corporations are more naked about their intentions than ever before -- during Tha Bush Mobb years, they at least tried to seem concerned about matters that affect everyone. Now you hear it from our government, and you hear it from big auto corporations -- the former doesn't want to make corporations do stuff, while the latter doesn't want to be made to do stuff, so no cleaner air and cheaper gas for you. Of course, Trumpholes don't get to ignore the popular will just because they run federal agencies. So let's make it impossible for the EPA to ignore us.

Action: health care, pollution, and food labeling.

You've likely heard by now that a group of "centrist" Congressfolk have come up with ideas for health care reforms to write into a bill. Headline: their ideas are mostly bad. Of course I'd like Congress to continue funding Affordable Care Act subsidies, but not at the price of applying the employer mandate only to corporations with 500 or more employees, versus corporations with 50 or more employees. The right constantly tries to see exactly how big they can make a corporation and still call it a "small business," but does 499 employees sound like a Mom and Pop store to you? They also want to get rid of the medical device tax and want to mess around with the pre-existing conditions ban, in the name of "innovation." You can't call a pile of dung meatloaf and then congratulate yourself for "innovating" on the definition of meatloaf. And why should I care that these ideas have ever received "bipartisan support"? I don't care about "bipartisan" ideas; I only care about good ideas, and these ain't those. Tools are in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to help you call your Reps and Senators.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania state Senators have used a bill originally dealing with internet sales, HB 542, as a vehicle to gut clean air and clean water regulation in the Commonwealth! HB 542, in its relatively uncontroversial form, passed the House with a staggering majority back in May, but the Senate amended it thereafter to include a slew of pro-pollution amendments and then passed it by a far, far narrower margin. Hence the bill going back to the House now opens the door to privatizing the whole permitting process for gas and oil drilling, while also creating a legislature-appointed board that can veto clean air and clean water regulations and automatically approve drilling permits after 45 days. The bill also creates a fracking tax like the one the majority of Pennsylvanians have wanted for years, but again, why should we accept a slew of bad initiatives just to get one good one? That, folks, is called hostage-taking, and we Americans don't do hostage situations. Of course, having been so radically altered, HB 542 has to go back to the state House for approval, so both Penn Environment and Food and Water Watch help you tell your Pennsylvania House Reps to reject HB 542 when it comes back around.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FDA to finalize its food labeling rules, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The FDA finalized food labeling rules for menus from restaurants, supermarkets, convenience stores, and movie theatres, and the rules require menus to give information about calories, sugar, fat, and salt. But delay, delay, delay is the Trump Administration way, so the FDA has mooted delaying the rules until 2018, presumably so it can collect more comments from corporate types about how oppressive it is for them to tell people how fatty their burgers are or how sugary their soft drinks are. I'm a compulsive food label reader myself, and I've seen the positive changes in my life once I decided that maybe a proper serving of pasta was better than just eating with my eyes. But I'm not the only one -- a lot of folks make better dietary choices, even when eating out, once they're supplied with good information. Of course, a venal fool like President Trump -- for whom sensation is everything and thinking about the future is for "losers" -- probably doesn't understand that very well, and reflexively anti-government Republicans will do little but enable him. But we don't have to enable him.

Action: "free" trade, free speech, and EPA funding.

CREDO helps you tell our U.S. Trade Representative to put people first, not corporations, when he renegotiates the North American Free Trade Agreement. CREDO presents an impressively detailed list of demands: an "open and transparent" negotiation, the elimination of the "investor-state tribunals" that allow corporations to nullify our laws and exact tribute from taxpayers, strong environmental and labor standards, strong product safety standards for imports, and strong protections for citizens against higher drug prices. Who could possibly oppose these things? Why, no one, of course -- which is why "free" trade votaries try to distract you with irrelevancies like "booga booga China" and "polls say everyone likes trade" and "OK, we hear your complaints, just let us have this trade deal and we'll listen next time." That's mostly stuff corporate Democrats say, but don't be lulled into complacency by the presence of President Trump, because he appointed a lot of "free" traders to his cabinet, and because, you know, duty is duty.

Meanwhile, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 1697/S. 620, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act. I've held that past attempts at the state level to zero out government funding for groups associated with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (or BDS) movement are odious, but not unconstitutional -- you have a right to free speech, but you don't have a "right" to collect money from your fellow taxpayers. The Israel Anti-Boycott Act goes further than that, though -- it prohibits any American citizen "engaged in interstate or foreign commerce" from "requesting the imposition of any boycott by a foreign country against a country which is friendly to the United States" or "supporting any boycott fostered or imposed by an international organization, or requesting imposition of any such boycott, against Israel." That sounds an awful lot like our government telling us what to do and what to think, so let's not put up with that.

Finally, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose proposed Trump budget cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, and also to expand EPA funding so it can do the job the people have commanded it to do. Our government's failure to properly fund the EPA's mandate to keep our air, water, and land clean has been a problem almost since its inception under President Nixon, and you may be surprised to learn that even a few far-right Republicans aren't necessarily that anxious to cut EPA funding further: "There's not that much in the EPA, for crying out loud," says Rep. Simpson of Idaho. Now, if we get EPA funding up to the point where it actually can inspect fracking wells, for example, I bet Rep. Simpson reverts right back to complaining about how the EPA "oppresses small businesses" and "kills jobs," though nobody wants the EPA to be 20 percent of our federal budget. More than 0.22% (that's 22 one-hundredths of one percent, not "22 percent," "liberal" media) of our federal budget would be nice, though.

Action: big corporate mergers, conservation funding, and clean water.

Demand Progress helps you tell the Justice Department to block the proposed AT&T/Time-Warner merger. Our government hasn't really cared about curbing monopoly power in America for many decades now, but our duty remains our duty. And don't sit back and wait for President Trump to stop the merger, because he likely said he would just because it was what you wanted to hear. Certainly don't let right-wingers harangue you that AT&T is big in cellphones and Time-Warner is big in entertainment so this deal won't make them a monopoly in either one, because in a world where entertainment can be delivered easily over cellphones, that doesn't mean very much, and if AT&T can get you to watch Time-Warner content (which includes HBO and TBS) on their phones (a lot more likely in a post-net neutrality world), they'll get even more power. And, as with the proposed Amazon-Whole Foods merger, we should stop corporations from leveraging their monopoly power in one area to get a foothold in another.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the reactionary Pennsylvania state legislature not only aims to slash conservation funding, but hand over the resulting "savings" to big oil and gas drilling corporations! If that isn't government picking winners and losers, I don't know what is -- and, no, "government funding state parks and waterways" isn't "picking winners and losers," but is government doing the people's will, since people generally approve of state parks and clean water more than they approve of corporate welfare. Hence Penn Environment helps you remind your Pennsylvania state legislator that conservation funding is more important than another round of handouts for corporations. Among the very successful programs on the chopping block: the Farmland Preservation Fund, which keeps farmland from morphing into strip malls and parking lots. Strip malls and parking lots aren't inherently evil, of course, but fertile land is far more valuable and durable.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunties to tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to keep banning fracking locally, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. The DRBC imposed a fracking moratorium in the Delaware Valley some seven years ago, but now they're mulling the matter again; one wonders what changed in the meantime, since fracking hasn't become less toxic, nor have folks evolved beyond the need for clean water. Wait, now I remember: Donald Trump got elected President, and wants to drill for everything everywhere, and damn the cost to regular folks (even those who delivered Pennsylvania to a Republican for the first time since 1988!). You can't convince large numbers of people that allowing more gas drilling pollution in their drinking water helps them, but you still need either strong opposition from Democrat politicians or strong opposition from the people to defeat such evil. We're not getting the first item, so you know what to do.

Action: health care, Medicare drug prices, and clean water.

Sen. McConnell (E-KY) has postponed voting on the latest iteration of the Senate health care "reform" bill, ostensibly because Sen. McCain (R-AZ) just had surgery, but call your Senators anyway and tell them to reject this bill, too. Why? Certainly because it injures Medicaid just as much as it did before, but also because it would do a brand new injury to Obamacare exchange users by allowing health insurance corporations sell a crappy, high-deductible plan as long as they sell Obamacare-compliant plans as well. Not only does that allow insurers to evade the pre-existing conditions ban in their crappy, high-deductible plans, it siphons off most of the healthy people from the good plans, which means sicker people will use the good plans, which will make the good plans more expensive. The new Senate bill excises three (but not all) of the tax major-cuts-for-the-rich, but don't celebrate: if the Senate passes this bill, the House's bill will still have all those tax cuts in it, and guess what'll happen next? The reconciliation bill will have all those tax-cuts-for-the-rich in it. I mean, I'm no oracle, and I know they'll do that. So let's stop them.

Meanwhile, Sen. Sanders (I-VT) says he'll wait until after this whole Senate health care "reform" bill is over and done with before he introduces a single-payer health care bill, but no power in the universe constrains us from expressing our will about health care issues, so Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices. Medicare has only had a prescription drug program since 2003, and one of the prices of creating it was that Medicare could not negotiate for better drug prices with big pharmaceutical corporations, you know, because that was "big government" or something. You won't be persuaded by that argument, of course, if you think of "big government" as our government, nor will you be persuaded if you think lower drug prices for seniors is a better goal than inflated salaries for big pharma CEOs, which is basically the choice here. Oh, and don't count on President Trump's "leadership" on this matter; he thinks Medicare is the biggest price-fixer on the market, despite its complete inability to negotiate drug prices! That's why you never count on "Presidential leadership" -- and you only count on your leadership.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to keep banning fracking in the Delaware River area. The Delaware River still provides drinking water to 15 million Americans, so fouling it up with carcinogenic fracking chemicals would be a bad idea. Don't let right-wingers browbeat you with their ZOMG WE NEEDZ TO GET OFF TEH FOREIGN OILZ!!!!!, because if we get ourselves off foreign oil but can't drink our own damn water, then we've played the game wrong. Also, there are other ways to get yourself off foreign oil -- solar and wind power, for example. And certainly don't let right-wingers drone on about the cost to small businesses and the higher energy bills, because, again, our descendents won't be sitting around a fire telling each other that even though no one can drink the water now, it sure was a good thing that electricity bills were a little cheaper! If that's even true, of course -- I mean, really, between "lower electricity bills for regular folks" and "more unearned money for executives so they're better able to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home," the latter is the more likely outcome.

Action: methane emissions, clean water, and advertising on Breitbart.

Word on the street is that this is the week the Senate finally brings H.J.Res. 36/S.J.Res. 11 to the floor; this is the notorious "resolution of disapproval" that would repeal the Bureau of Land Management's rules curbing methane emissions on public lands. What on Earth could a reasonable person have against the notion that we should have less pollution on public lands? Nothing -- this resolution is the work of lazy Congresspeople doing the bidding of lazy oil and gas drilling CEOs who prefer wasting methane in their operations to getting their act together the way we'd expect a messy child to get his act together. But I continue to insist, at the risk of tilting at windmills, that they don't get all the say around here, so the Environmental Defense Fund helps you call your Senators and tell them to protect public lands from pollution by rejecting H.J.Res. 36/S.J.Res. 11. Remember: it's not just the climate change punch methane packs, and it's not just the waste of usable methane -- it's the cheating of good Americans out of royalties for extracting usable methane from public lands. Doesn't Congress care about protecting good Americans' money?

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell four Northeastern Governors and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to permanently ban natural gas drilling in the Delaware River Basin." To think that you see drinking water catch on fire near fracking wells and you hear about gas drilling corporations trucking bottled water into towns where they've operated and some right-wingers still have the nerve to respond TEH NO ONEZ HAS EVER SUEDZ OVER TEH FRACKINGZ!!!!! Which, of course, isn't true, but Jesus Mary and Joseph must we wait for a lawsuit to be filed before we protect our water? And must we ignore the carcinogens scientists (including EPA scientists!) have already found in water tables near fracking areas, despite the gas industry's exemption from reporting the chemicals they use that the Clean Water Act would otherwise mandate? Must we ignore the moratorium the Delaware River Basin Commission imposed in 2010, or how quickly Pennsylvania's area state legislators moved to keep fracking out of the Delaware Valley in 2012, or the statewide ban imposed in New York last year? If we don't have clean water, we don't have health. It's that simple. And it's why our local leaders need to act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to break ties with the far-right, Trump-enabling, white nationalist-enabling "news" site Breitbart, then CREDO helps you do that, too. More than a thousand advertisers have stopped running ads on Breitbart over the last few months, no doubt because you helped pressure them, but Amazon, strangely enough, has kept running ads there, and it's not like Mr. Bezos is a BFF of President Trump, either. And it's also not like Amazon needs to reach these eyeballs there, either -- if you want to reach white nationalists, after all, you can find them in other ways, since white nationalists are, after all, human beings, and thus presumably have interests other than white nationalism (and it'd be better for them if we reached them through those other interests, too!). But more to the point: approximately half of all money spent on the internet moves through Amazon at some point or other, so why does the behemoth need to coddle the little monster? This, particularly when Amazon's own policy toward discriminatory ads is pretty tough. You'd hate to think Mr. Bezos was hedging his bets.

Around the table: corporate welfare, local control, job creation, executive pay, federal spokeshackery, and Medicaid expansion.

You gotta love a headline that goes "Corporate Incentives Cost U.S. $45 Billion in 2015, Don’t Really Work." Not just because it's true, but because it reminds us that one does get tired pointing out the obvious -- and it's perfectly OK to let on that you're tired of pointing out the obvious! Feelings are never wrong, after all. Though if a 33-state, 26-year database helps validate your feelings, you take it.

Two Pennsylvania towns ban fracking wastewater injection within their borders -- and the Pennsylvania DEP sues them. And conservatives all over America rally to the side of Grant and Highland townships, celebrating their flexing of local power! Well, conservatives, maybe -- but the reactionaries who call themselves conservative are of course complaining about every local town picking and choosing which laws it wants to follow. Of course, they said similar things about Rosa Parks.

Maddie Oatman at Mother Jones asks why President Trump is so obsessed with bringing back coal jobs, and ignoring the growth of wind power all over the Midwest. Seems commonsensical, dontcha think? The wind and the sun are everywhere, even in depressed areas of the country left behind by corporatism and "free" trade. Of course, we know Mr. Trump ignores this phenemonon: he's just aping his votaries who think renewable energy is something only liberals like, and thus something to be despised as if it were Satan himself. Look at them balls swing!

From the "My God Right-Wingers Never Stop Whining" file: the acting SEC Chair has delayed implementation of a Dodd-Frank CEO-to-worker pay-ratio rule, citing the "unanticipated compliance difficulties" corporations are suddenly having. It took the SEC almost seven years to write this rule, and these are our boldest and brightest entrepreneurs -- the TV always says so! -- but still they find reporting executive-to-worker pay ratios "onerous"? And they want us to feel sorry for them? Let them cry into thousand-dollar bills.

Trump Administration spokeshack Sean Spicer calls ProPublica a "left-wing blog" in dismissing its reporting about Mr. Trump's newfound (and undisclosed) ability to draw money at will from businesses in his trust -- and ProPublica responds with 15 tweets taking him down. I'd have just left it at number four myself, but I understand their frustration. One can only hope that Mr. Spicer becomes more like Scott McClellan and Tony Snow, who couldn't hide their disgust at shilling for Tha Bush Mobb after a while, than Ari Fleischer and Dana Perino, who happily peddled Bush Mobb swill.

Finally, some bad news: the Kansas state House fails to override Gov. Brownback's veto of the legislature's Medicaid expansion bill by a mere three votes. The final tally was 81 to 44; two legislators who voted against the expansion voted for the override, but also vice versa, and I would hate to think this was all theatre for the benefit of "moderate" Republicans. And remember when you read that "opponents of expansion questioned whether Kansas could afford it" that these folks all voted for the tax-cuts-for-the-rich that put them in this mess.

Action: health care, war in Syria, public water, and fracking.

The House plans to vote on Obamacare repeal today, so use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're viewing this page on a smartphone) to call your Reps and tell them to reject the legislation. We have plenty of reasons to oppose it, chief among them that it repeals the Medicare-funding tax imposed by the Affordable Care Act on high incomes -- which means that, yes, Republicans are trying to steal money from Medicare in order to give handouts to their wealthy donors. It would not be "uncivil" to put it like that, since it is, in fact, true. Obamacare repeal would also deprive over 20 million Americans of their health insurance and replace the individual mandate with a 30 percent premium hike for people who've had gaps in their health insurance -- which means that instead of paying your government a fine for not having had health insurance, you'll be paying health insurance corporations that fine. All praise the "free" market!

Meanwhile, H.R. 1473, the Prohibit Expansion of U.S. Combat Troops into Syria Act, would, as its title suggests, prevent our President from "establishing or maintaining any presence of members of the United States Armed Forces or private security contractors on the ground of Syria, unless the purpose of such presence is limited solely to rescuing or protecting members of the United States Armed Forces from imminent danger," except in case of the need "to protect, rescue, or remove United States personnel." That's right, it's another succinct anti-war bill from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA)! And H.R. 1473 doesn't actually prevent the President from, you know, going old school and actually requesting a declaration of war from Congress like the Constitution demands. It does, however, prevent the President from using the 2001 AUMF as an excuse to send soldiers off to die wherever he likes, which is also a pressing matter. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help put a stop to endless warmongering by supporting H.R. 1473.

In other news, the Nestlé corporation is doing its damndest to execute "water grabs" all over America -- where they pay a municipality a piddling sum to siphon off its citizens' public water so they can bottle it and make a shamefully huge profit -- but we are fighting back against these water grabs wherever we can. Even in Michigan, where Republicans have a stranglehold on state government, we've managed to stall their efforts to steal water from the town of Evart. But the Premier of British Columbia, has backed away from promises to review that province's water rate schedule "for industrial users" (i.e., corporations like Nestlé) -- promises she made only last year, after heavy action from the citizenry, of course. She faces the good voters of British Columbia again in less than six months, so help her do the right thing, but letting Sum of Us help you tell Premier Clark to keep Nestlé from stealing British Columbia's water. Especially given all the drought that's afflicted that province over the last few years!

Finally, Philadelphia residents take note: SEPTA still plans to build a fracked natural gas plant in the northern part of the city; perhaps not coincidentally, North Philly is the area of the city most neglected by the municipal government over the years. So perhaps they don't care if "those people" have dirtier air, since they already have the dirtiest air in the city. Why does no one think of building a renewable energy plant in economically-distressed areas? I mean, the gas'll be gone one day -- and will do plenty of damage in the meantime! -- but the sun and the win will always return. Now, the SEPTA board voted to pass this proposal months ago, but got caught not giving the public the legally-required amount of notice (I wonder why not!) and thus have to redo the vote. And Philadelphia's Mayor, Jim Kenney, can still veto the plan. You can call him at 855.969.5216 to tell him to veto the SEPTA fracked gas plan, and thus protect good North Philly residents from (even more) air pollution.

Around the table: everything old is new again, again.

So you've seen all those headlines about the "Confederate flag-waving couple" who got 33 years in prison? Adam Johnson at FAIR reminds us -- as "liberal" media headlines somehow don't! -- that they were also waving a shotgun at black folks. Which might explain the longer sentence a little better! Personal to the folks who say ONLY READINGZ TEH HEADLINEZ IZ TEH STUPIDZ!!!!: you're telling me you read every single story for which you see a headline?

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) pushes natural gas as a climate change solution at townhall meetings. Methane emissions, as you know, are a fairly persistent side effect of fracking, and pack a climate change punch much larger than even coal emissions, and I just can't imagine how Mr. Cassidy will vote on H.J.Res. 36, the "resolution of disapproval" that would nullify BLM rules limiting methane emissions from gas drilling on public lands.

Ho hum, the IRS is hemorrhaging experienced criminal investigators, though tax cheats still work around the clock. One could reasonably ask whether the IRS investigates too many cases that aren't directly related to tax fraud, but the main culprit here, of course, is Republican budget-cutting and Republican-engineered dramas about IRS investigation of right-wing groups. If you want to get all "law and order," you should maybe start with the tax cheats that steal from all of us.

President Trump's new National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, apparently rather dislikes using the term "radical Islamic terrorism," unlike his boss and millions of whining right-wingers. Because, he says, being a terrorist is "un-Islamic," rather like it's also un-Christian and un-any other religion you can name. And how many times must I tell these pimps! Demanding that everyone use the term "radical Islamic terrorism" is the very soul of political correctness!

Finally, about the President's address to Congress Tuesday night: let's not give the man so much credit for deciding that pretending you care is a better stratagem than constantly acting like a prick -- and let's also consider whether this "Presidential" persona will merely enable his votaries to label his prick-nature "fake news." And, really, Donald Trump telling someone else to cut it out with the "trivial fights"? That's Bush Mobb-level chutzpah, right there.

Action: fighting discrimination and fracking.

Elections, as we know, have consequences, and here's one of them: the crowd who thinks they should have the "religious liberty" to discriminate against people they're scared of getting cooties from are now in charge of the Executive and Legislative branches of our government. President Trump reportedly readied yet another of his infamous Executive Orders, one that would permit federal contractors to discriminate in hiring, in benefits, and in public services on the basis of their supposed "religious beliefs"; supposedly Mr. Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband, both gay rights supporters, talked him out of it, but Americans United for the Separation of Church and State helps you tell Mr. Trump anyway to reject any plans to let Americans use "religious beliefs" as an excuse to discriminate against gays, women, and others. But Congressidiots are readying the so-called First Amendment Defense Act for reintroduction, which would let anyone discriminate against anyone else based on their "religious beliefs." And our opponents constantly claim we're oppressing them by not letting them do so! What whiners! Folks can have any religious belief they like, and can't be put in jail merely for having them -- but acting upon them in such a way that deprives other folks of their rights is evil. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the First Amendment Defense Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to permanently ban fracking in the area of the Delaware River Basin. The Delaware River Basin, as you might imagine, provides drinking water to some 15 million good Americans across four states (Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York), and fracking in the Basin would pretty much destroy that; there's a reason, after all, that the area's state Republican Senators made sure to slip a gas-drilling moratorium into the state budget back in 2012. The Commission doesn't derive its authority from the Pennsylvania legislature, of course, but from all four of the aforementioned states and our federal government; they've imposed a temporary moratorium on fracking in the Basin, but we need to make that permanent. And if you really want to indulge in some force message multiplication, find friends and neighbors who hunt and fish and get them to tell the DRBC to protect the Delaware River Basin forever. If they organize, right-wing politicians may shrink -- we just saw this happen with Rep. Chaffetz's sudden withdrawal of H.R. 621 (which would have enabled the selling of millions of acres of public land) after outdoor recreationalists joined the fight against it.

Around the table: in which federal employees take hits -- and get back up.

President-elect Trump orders all politically-appointed ambassadors to leave their posts before Inauguration Day. Typically Presidents grant extensions to these ambassadors to transition more easily to private life, but I'm also pretty sure these ambassadors are of some use to their successors; now they're not, and they may not get replaced for a few months, all so that Mr. Trump can continue the Republicans' obsession with Mr. Obama. Remember this the next time terrorists attack.

House revives "Holman rule," which could allow individual lawmakers to lower a particular federal employee's salary down to $1. Which will not be abused for political reasons at all! After all, didn't Mr. Trump's transition team just get caught trying to make up a blacklist of Energy Department scientists working on climate change? And woe betide you if you actually pursue a voter caging allegation under an Attorney General like Jeff Sessions, or a report of water poisoning near a fracking well under an EPA Administrator like Scott Pruitt, or a lead on some well-connected doctor defrauding Medicare under an HHS Secretary like Tom Price.

Telecom corporation files suit against the FCC's recently-finalized privacy rules -- hoping to be able to gut net neutrality rules in the process. Their angle is clever, I suppose -- that "edge providers" (like Facebook and Netflix) get regulated by the FTC while the FCC regulates internet service providers as a "common carrier," but it sounds like they're arguing that symmetry always equals fairness, which anyone who thinks about it knows isn't true. The good news? The big telecoms' efforts will take time, and if the newly Trumped-up FCC acts in haste -- which they will! -- they'll almost certainly run afoul of the courts, just as Tha Bush Mobb's FCC did. Oh, almost forgot: why are corporations so anti-privacy again? Not because they care about how easy it is for you to buy stuff -- because they care about how easy it could be for them to make money off you buying stuff!

Drew Altman at the New York Times describes "The Health Care Plan Trump Voters Really Want." I don't know why they would get all the say about everything, comprising only 46% of the electorate, but their concerns are, guess what, pretty much like everyone else's -- they hate high premiums and surprise bills, they find health insurance way too complex, and they often admire Medicaid from afar (though they also resent the people who get it). They also generally dislike the ideas Republicans come up with to "replace" the Affordable Care Act (it warmed my heart to hear them call HSAs and the like "not insurance"!), but here's the bad news: they all have faith in Donald Trump to fix it. They'd be much better off having faith in themselves and calling their representatives to tell them what they think, which I'd be happy to help them do.

Finally, the U.S. Postal Service has decided to stop permitting Staples stores to provide USPS services, The article plays up the role of unions in this battle, but the result actually shows what good Americans can accomplish if they stop waiting for politicians to fix stuff. It also suggests, yet again, that privatizing essential government services (and by "essential," in this case, I also mean "constitutionally-mandated") doesn't improve those services, as a May 2016 Inspector General Audit found. So good job, Americans -- and, ah, get ready for when Republicans try to destroy the USPS again.

Action: the REINS Act, and Mr. Trump's Cabinet of Horrors.

Republicans newly flush with power are salivating at the prospect of finally passing the REINS Act, which would require Congress to approve all new rules the Executive branch issues within 70 days of those rules' finalization -- and if Congress simply doesn't act, which you know from long experience is something they're very good at, that kills the regulation. Clean air and clean water rules, net neutrality regulations, protections from financial predators -- all these would die if the REINS Act were to pass, which would leave we-the-people with polluted air and water, a corporate-controlled and hyper-sensationalized internet, and poverty at the hands of banksters and scam artists. I'll take no guff about TEH PRESIDENTZ IZ TEH OUT OF TEH CONTROLZ WITHZ TEH REGULASHUNZ!!!! After all, Congress has already empowered the Executive branch to issue regulations that would (at least nominally!) achieve legislative ends, so they've had their say. When do we get our say? Right now, as Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the REINS Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to block corporatists and banksters from serving in Donald Trump's Objectively Pro-Pollution cabinet, Food and Water Watch still helps you do that. Specifically, Food and Water Watch lists the following cabinet nominees as uniquely unfit to serve the public: Rex Tillerson at State, Scott Pruitt at EPA, Rick Perry at Energy, Andrew Puzder at Labor, Ryan Zinke at Interior, and Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. You'll see a lot of things you don't like on their CVs: professional climate change denialism, taking campaign contributions from corporate polluters, conflicts of interest with said polluters, and opposition to basic worker rights like the right not to get crippled by your job. You might even be surprised to learn that Mr. Sessions, perhaps better known for his career-long hostility to civil rights, also went out of his way to protect frackers from Clean Water Act exemptions! It's like a real live Legion of Doom, without the colorful costumes -- and without the reassurance that Superman will and save us. So we'll just have to be Superman.

Action: "Muslim registries," and wastewater dumping.

You may have heard that The Intercept asked nine big tech corporations whether it would help a Trump Administration build a "Muslim registry" of American citizens who practice Islam (or who come from Islamic nations), and only Twitter, at first, said no. After some public pressure, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook also said they'd have nothing to do with such a thing, and you could either bemoan the cowardice of big corporations in the face of evil or find it reassuring that public pressure about standing up to evil still works -- or both! In any case, several big tech corporations still remain silent about the matter; of course, Tha Bush Mobb already tried a Muslim registry (albeit of foreign men who traveled to and from the United States), and that didn't result in even one terror-related conviction -- but it did disrupt Muslim communities with the threat of detainment and deportation, which is exactly the kind of thing that leads other sympathetic Muslims to become terrorists. Why, it's almost like that's the whole idea. Hence both Color of Change and CREDO help you tell big tech corporations to refuse to help build a "Muslim registry."

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Obama Administration to ban corporate dumping of fracking wastewater into our oceans, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. Yes, frackers can dump their wastewater into our oceans! And I guess they think that's OK since no one's drinking the ocean water -- except that, well, one day, if San Diego and Israel (among others) can continue their good work in ocean water desalination, we may in fact be drinking ocean water one day, and in the meantime, plenty of marine species are completely defenseless against the poison coming into their habitat. If you find that last item too tree-huggy for your taste, consider that among those completely defenseless marine species are plenty of species that human beings eat, and a lot of those species (particularly shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico) still haven't recovered from various other ecological disasters. Also, too, people like to go to the ocean to swim in it, like we've been doing since time immemorial, and why would nominal conservatives sacrifice our ancient impulses to ephemeral corporate profit?

Action: internet freedom, water pollution, and the Great Barrier Reef.

Mr. Trump has professed to "drain the swamp," meaning getting rid of the influence of the corporate special interests that warp our democracy -- but he's stacked his tech transition team with corporate lobbyists who hate net neutrality and love corporate money, which sure seems like an odd way to drain the swamp. Mr. Trump has characterized net neutrality as yet another Big Gummint program run amok, but it's nothing of the kind -- the FCC's net neutrality rules protect us from corporations that would tell us where to go and what to do on the internet. People who assume that all government intervention is evil tend not to understand that government regulations can actually promote freedom, but I'm starting to think that talking to such people is a waste of my time. Anyway, Free Press helps you tell the Trump transition team to get rid of the corporate lobbyists who oppose the internet freedoms for which we've fought. Mr. Trump promotes the "freedom" of corporate executives to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, but I think by now we all know that's not really freedom. Net neutrality is.

Meanwhile, the EPA infamously concluded not too long ago that hydraulic fracturing (more commonly known as "fracking," which must be a source of endless amusement to fans of the 2002-era Battlestar Galactica series) has "no widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States." The gas drillers of course did a Jeff George victory lap about the report, but failed to note that the report did tabulate numerous examples of water contamination from fracking, and couldn't tabulate more such examples only because gas drillers enjoy special exemptions from chemical disclosure rules in the Clean Water Act! If you'll forgive another sports metaphor, that's a little like watching only 76ers basketball when Joel Embiid has the night off and concluding from these that he's had no impact on the team. The EPA's report (which, to be fair, does represent a small step forward from previous EPA reports on the matter) has met with fairly relentless and trenchant criticism, including criticism from its own Science Advisory Board. Hence CREDO helps you tell the EPA to retract its fracking report.

Finally, the Australian government may be shorn of that utter embarrassment of a Prime Minster, Tony Abbott, but still plans (despite many reversals) to fund a massive coal-digging complex right next to the Great Barrier Reef, to the tune of $680,000 for each new job created, and that sure doesn't mean each coal worker will make $680,000, no, sir! It means, by the sound of it, that it's just another attempt to shovel taxpayer money into some cronies' pockets. Australia gets a lot of sunshine; think maybe it could spend a bit more taxpayer money on solar power, which good Australians would almost certainly prefer? In the meantime, digging for coal mostly means more pollution of the Great Barrier Reef, already cooking too hot due to climate change, and more pollution means losing the biological diversity that makes the Reef unique. So Avaaz helps you tell the Australian government to abandon plans to mine for coal near the Great Barrier Reef. Protecting what's unique about past and present from industrial development that will provide only ephemeral benefits -- why, that sounds awfully conservative.

Action: Jeff Sessions, free speech, and conservation.

Donald Trump almost certainly won't nominate anyone to the Executive branch who's any good, but his nomination of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions for Attorney General deserves special opposition. The Artist Formerly Known as Jefferson Beauregard Sessions was once upon a time a President Reagan appointee to the federal bench, but couldn't get confirmed by a Republican-held Senate because of, well, all the bad stuff that came out about him then -- calling a black prosecutor "boy" (which he's denied), saying he thought the Klan was OK until he learned they smoked pot (he said he was joking), calling the NAACP "Communist" and "un-American" (he said he "meant no harm"). Later, of course, he went after black political activists for voter fraud without a leg to stand on, which tells you all about how he'd approach vote suppression and racial injustice as Attorney General. Both the ACLU and Color of Change help you tell the Senate Judiciary Committee to oppose the nomination of Jeff Sessions to the post of Attorney General. After all, they've refused to consider Presidential nominees (cough Merrick Garland cough) for so, so much less.

Meanwhile, Sign for Good helps you tell Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg to stop censoring those who use Facebook to document human rights violations. Specifically, you'll ask Mr. Zuckerberg to make its censorship policies clear and accessible to all users, provide a platform upon which decisions about censorship can be appealed, undergo an independent audit of equality and human rights outcomes resulting from its policies, and refuse to disclose customer data to third parties unlawfully. You may remember how quickly Facebook turned off Korryn Gaines's account, at police request, as she was livestreaming the confrontation with police that would ultimately result in her death, but other protestors and journalists have reported censorship by and on Facebook lately. It's a shame, because Facebook has been a force for good over the years, and can be even more so. Personal to alleged "law-and-order" types who think all this freedom puts cops in danger: what do you really have to fear from more sunlight upon police actions in America?

Finally, we have until December 20 to tell the Bureau of Land Management to protect the Greater Chaco region of New Mexico from fracking on public lands, which WildEarth Guardians helps you do. You might well be saying there's just no use doing this sort of thing, because Mr. Trump is just going to overturn it all the minute he gets a chance. But don't think like that, for two reasons: one, fighting for freedom (like the freedom not to have your water and your air and your sacred lands polluted by frackers) is always the right thing to do, under any circumstances, and two, federal agencies generally have to take comments from the public before changing regulations, so if we can get BLM to protect the Greater Chaco region now, it'll take Mr. Trump some time to undo it -- absent new authority from Congress to override regulations as he sees fit, without public comment. I wouldn't put it past Republicans to try that! But would it really look good for Congress if they tried to stamp out public involvement in regulations?

Action: lymphedema treatment, corporate welfare, and electric charging stations.

H.R. 1608/S. 2373, the Lymphedema Treatment Act, would address a condition that afflicts some two out of five women who survive breast cancer (as well as millions of others). When lymph nodes get damaged or removed during breast cancer surgery, the resulting lymphatic fluid blockages cause painful swelling in the arm. The best way to control the swelling is to use compression, but Medicare doesn't currently cover the cost of compression supplies; the Lymphedema Treatment Act would rectify that. Over half of all House Reps currently co-sponsor H.R. 1608, while S. 2373 has almost 30 sponsors in the Senate; both bills have significant Republican support as well, meaning this is an actually bipartisan bill, and you hardly ever see that anymore -- normally you only see harmful bills the media calls "bipartisan." Anyway, Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Lymphedema Treatment Act. Why tell Medicare to cover it? Because once Medicare starts covering it, other health insurers will follow suit. For as long as we can keep Paul Ryan's grubby mitts off Medicare, at least.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf deserves our thanks for vetoing a recent bill that would have put even more hurdles in front of state environmental regulators -- but not so much for proposing taking public funds away from a renewable energy program and using it to give grants to gas drilling corporations to finish pipeline projects. Yet that's what the Pipeline Investment Program would do, and though Gov. Wolf bills it as a program that would connect hospitals and schools to natural gas, it sounds less like a job-creation or energy-independence program than a make-corporate-executives-even-richer program. And the thing about fossil fuel pipelines is that they tend to break and leak toxic crap into our water tables; if you have a job in the fracking industry but can't drink the water, you haven't come out ahead, and whatever money this program would save now would be lost later in sharply-rising health care costs coming from the polluted water. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell Gov. Wolf to abandon his pipeline promotion plan and invest in real, renewable energy independence instead.

Finally, the Justice Department's settlement with Volkswagen (over its emissions fraud) directs some $2.7 billion dollars to the states for "environmental remediation," i.e., reducing the harm that Volkswagen caused by building cars that polluted more than Volkswagen said they did. And 15% of that money can go to building out electric charging stations all over the country. Folks who want electric cars may not be buying electric cars because they can hardly find a place to charge them, unless they run a cord from their home, but when charging stations become more common, consumers will more likely buy electric cars. Hence USPIRG hellps you tell state agencies to use the appropriate amount of settlement funds to build electric charging stations on highways. Some people still love telling you that supporting electric cars is dumb, because electricity often comes from fossil fuels like coal. But it doesn't always come from fossil fuels, and solar power has come way down in price over the last decade -- and cars running on gasoline only get their energy from fossil fuels. Never let the haters get you down.

Action: free speech in Turkey, and fracking wastewater dumping in the ocean.

Amnesty International helps you tell the Turkish government to repeal laws mandating jail time for things like "insulting the Turkist state." The latest news hook is the impending trial (the latest over over 100!) of Turkish lawyer/journalist Eren Keskin for criticizing the military's killing of a 12-year-old boy; you'd think criticizing that would be a no-brainer, but in Turkey, apparently, the government actually prefers citizens with no brains. Turkey, of course, has a long and storied history of imprisoning journalists for criticizing the government, and that's only gotten worse lately, as an apparent failed coup (or dare I say false flag operation? Now, see, in America I can say that!) has spurred Turkish President Erdogan to be even more repressive than he's been in the past. And of course Ms. Keskin has a long history of speaking out for justice, particularly for Turkey's Kurdish minority -- you know, the same folks who have been fighting back pretty well against ISIS? Sometimes we forget the rest of the world does not have a First Amendment protecting its citizens from being put in jail by their governments merely for speaking out. Still, the Big Stick of Bad PR is not to be trifled with, even by the aspiring Sultan-with-absolute-power of Turkey.

Meanwhile, Environmental Action helps you tell President Obama to ban dumping fracking wastewater into our oceans. The Bureau of Ocean Management now allows this practice, even though fracking wastewater typically contains many toxins and carcinogens, like lead, benzene, and chromium-6. If you're not concerned about the cleanliness of ocean water because no one drinks it, consider two things: one, that San Diego's effort to desalinate ocean water is actually going pretty well, and two, that other creatures live in the oceans, creatures who will suffer because of the crap we're dumping in their habitats, and that we depend on a lot of those creatures in some way, whether for food (and the industries that make them into food) or for controlling other predatory species in the ocean. Consider, also, that we've done a pretty bad job predicting the harm our pollution has done so far. And finally, consider that the only reason we're not moving more quickly to a renewable energy grid, as Ralph Nader has said, is because no one can own the sun or the wind. You'd think owning the technology to convert sunlight and wind into energy would be enough, but some people can never get enough. However, a civilized society ensures those people don't get all the say about everything.