Thieves in the Temple.

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.

Action: two alerts about clean water.

Good folks have been resisting pipelines all over America this year, and for good reason -- pipelines sure do seem to break an awful lot, and when they do, they foul the land and groundwater for miles around. And so it goes with the Sabal Trail Pipeline, which would transport natural gas (including fracked gas) from Alabama through southwestern Georgia and then through a 300-plus mile area of Florida that provides drinking water to 10 million good folks. You may ask well, what should we do about our energy independence? We should build out more solar and wind infrastructure, that's what -- sun and wind ain't going anywhere, and they're also not going to belch out poison into our drinking water. And beware the right-wing low-energy-prices-über-alles crowd, too -- when you can't drink the water coming out of your tap, your low prices will mean nothing. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell Florida Gov. Rick Scott to stop the building of the Sabal Trail Pipeline. That may be a hopeless cause, as Gov. Scott has invested at least $100,000 with two of the corporations building the pipeline. Still, he may be receptive to the idea that furthering his political career may require him to avoid the appearance of corruption in this matter.

Meanwhile, Breast Cancer Action helps you tell two big citrus-growing corporations, Bee Sweet Citrus and Wonderful Citrus, to stop using oil wastewater to irrigate their crops. Both are, of course, California-based corporations, and many growers there have responded to the drought by using oil wastewater as irrigation, though using oil wastewater is, to say the least, not proven to be safe. In fact, upwards of one test of oil irrigation water found the chemical benzene in it; benzene is a carcinogen and, according to the EPA, the safe level of benzene in drinking water is precisely zero parts per billion -- in other words, like lead, there's literally no amount of benzene that we could reasonable consider safe. So what should California do to make sure there's enough clean water to use to irrigate its crops and sustain an industry that provides America with half its fruits and vegetables? It could end fracking, for one, and pursue the sort of water desalination techniques the city of San Diego has done well with. But certainly, using polluted water ain't the way to sustain an industry, or feed a nation.

Action: promoting transparency, health, and competition.

By now you know that Charlotte, NC Police Chief Kerr Putney has released some of the body- and dash-cam coverage recorded during the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, also executed by police, apparently, for being black in America. What he's released is damning enough -- revealing that Mr. Scott had a book, not a gun, on him, both of these items apparently looking exactly the same in the "heat of the moment" -- but come Saturday, he won't have to release any more of it, because the notorious North Carolina law (is there any other kind these days?) HB 972, prohibiting the public from seeing any dash- or body-cam coverage, goes into effect. Hence Color of Change helps you tell the Department of Justice to withhold federal grant money from North Carolina as long as HB 972 remains on the books. The DOJ is well within its rights to do so, and states don't have a right to demand and receive federal assistance. If states need more money, they could always raise taxes on the rich and corporations, though the right-wingers who run things in North Carolina want to have it both ways. But they don't get all the say about everything in America.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Green Actions helps you tell the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to reject the proposed PennEast pipeline. The PennEast pipeline would transport natural gas over a hundred miles from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, but it would transport it through the Delaware River Watershed, which not only provides drinking water for millions of citizens, but also provides fishing and swimming activities -- plus, you know, other animals live there. Who do not deserve to die en masse just because some corporation wants to ship natural gas all around the place. Naturally, the proposed route would also dig up a good part of the Watershed, which all by itself endangers clean water, clean air, recreation, and wildlife, before we contemplate the spectre of a pipeline leak. Also, too, this'll be fracked gas, which means that in addition to possibly polluting the water in the Delaware River Watershed, it'll definitely pollute the water wherever it's fracked from. And that's the sort of thing we should be discouraging, not encouraging -- until gas drilling corporations can do it without poisoning our air and water. They probably think they can't, but that's not the American can-do spirit, is it?

Finally, you may have heard that Hewlett-Packard has just activated a "feature" in its OfficeJet Pro printers that prevents them from working with any ink cartridges other than brand-spanking-new HP printer cartridges. Which, as you no doubt know, cost an actual crapload of money, particularly if you're printing in color. You probably also know that third-party and recycled ink cartridges actually cost a lot less money -- if your printer doesn't simply shut down and refuse to work with them, that is. Now, here's the point where right-wingers would say it's their printer and they should be allowed to do whatever they want -- which would confuse you, if you also thought right-wingers supported competition. HP's move destroys any chance any fledgling business would have at giving the customer a better deal for their ink -- and if HP is afraid they won't be able to make money off their printers without charging an arm and a leg for their ink, then they're doing capitalism wrong. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell HP to stop forcing customers to use only expensive HP printer cartridges.

Around the table: with stories concerning "free" trade, fracking, education, voting, and free speech.

"Liberal" media coverage of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" continues to disappoint. Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches the New York Times not only pulling the same shenanigans as before -- they "report" majorities of Americans supporting "free" trade by playing shell games with the terms "free trade," "trade," and "trade agreements" -- but also cherry-picked the numbers from a cited study in order to make it seem like more Americans like "free" trade. Recall that the only thing threatening the passage of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" has been public opinion -- most politicians want it, most "liberal" media outlets want it, but the owners of government, the people, generally do not, or we wouldn't be hearing bad arguments from the best of our media outlets (and, of course, racist booga-booga about China from the worst).

The EPA plans to keep allowing offshore oil and gas drilling corporations to dump unlimited amounts of fracking wastewater in the Gulf of Mexico. You may recall that a very widely-covered oil spill occurred in that Gulf just six years ago, and at least one agency says the EPA's draft proposals violates the Clean Water Act. The proposal does mandate that offshore fracking outlets keep an inventory (which regulators may review at any time) of fracking chemicals, which could puncture the cult of secrecy surrounding fracking chemicals as a result of the 2005 energy bill keeping them confidential -- if the EPA enforces it. You think Donald Trump's EPA will enforce it? Of course not -- it's not YUGE or BYOOTIFUL enough.

The Department of Education strips the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (or ACICS) of its authority to accredit for-profit colleges. A welcome development, even if the ACICS showed signs of getting its act together in recent months, but of course I still don't understand why our government doesn't do all the accrediting itself on our behalf. Because Big Gummint is always wrong? What of our government? No use arguing that government doing the work puts bureaucrats between us and our goal, when private accreditation ensures another layer of bureaucrats between us and our goal -- a layer far less accountable to the people, of course, like that was the idea or something.

ProPublica looks at how various early voting regimes encourage (or fail to encourage) turnout. Key findings: in-person absentee voting and same-day registration seem to boost minority turnout the most (no wonder North Carolina tried to do away with them!), and voting by mail tends to boost turnout the first time it's used but not much thereafter (which doesn't discredit it, since a small boost in turnout following a large boost in turnout still represents an improvement). The jury's out on automatic voter registration, obviously, since only five states have it, and none have run it in an election yet.

Finally, Rob Boston at the Wall of Separation blog reminds us that arguing with street preachers doesn't actually violate their First Amendment rights. Which should come as no surprise, of course -- we should know already that the First Amendment doesn't flow in one direction at a time, and that the First Amendment shields you from your government, not other people exercising their First Amendment rights. But we should take every opportunity to smash the notion that criticism equals oppression, a notion I hear mostly from the right these days.

Action: poisoned workers, purity tests, and the Grand Canyon.

You may have heard that over 200 workers at Samsung's display and computer chip factories in South Korea have contracted serious illnesses, including lymphoma, leukemia, lupus, and multiple sclerosis, and 76 of them had died; most of these workers, contrary to what you might expect, were in their twenties and thirties, and were, in the words of one retired worker, "uninformed kids from the countryside" that Samsung used like they were "disposable cups." You may not have heard that Samsung did not disclose the harmful chemicals to which these workers were all exposed, out of a concern for protecting trade secrets. You recall that gas drilling corporations also use the trade-secret rationale to justify refusing to disclose the chemicals they pump into your drinking and bathing water; it's getting to the point where we can safely assume that when a corporation says "trade secret," it really means "I'm not telling you because I'm doing you harm." So Sum of Us helps you tell Samsung to compensate the families of workers who died in their factories.

Meanwhile, both houses of the California state legislature have passed AB 2844, a bill which would force all businesses and non-profits contracting with the state to declare that they do not have a policy of boycotting a "sovereign nation." If that sounds a bit obscure, consider that Israel is a sovereign nation, and that the BDS movement (boycott, divest, sanctions) aims to change Israel's policies toward Palestine by refraining from investing in, or using the products of, those corporations that contract with Israel. I don't think bills like AB 2844 violate the First Amendment -- no entity has a right to government contracts, and really, in my view, governments should be performing, not outsourcing, the tasks that the people have given them via legislation and taxes -- but I do think AB 2844 will be almost prohibitively difficult to enforce, and states shouldn't use purity tests to hand out contracts. AB 2844 now goes to Gov. Brown, historically tight-lipped about signing controversial bills, and Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell Gov. Brown to veto the anti-BDS bill, AB 2844.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell President Obama to designate the Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument, and thus protect the Grand Canyon from uranium mining forever. The Grand Canyon has been a national park for almost a century, but mining corporations want to dig up the area around the Canyon for uranium, which would, as you might expect, pollute the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to seven Western states. Mr. Obama's previous Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar (lately appointed by Hillary Clinton to run her transition team), rather unexpectedly imposed a uranium-mining moratorium on the Grand Canyon area, but that's going to expire one day, and designating the area as a national monument would prevent uranium mining there forever. A lot of good folks probably already think the Grand Canyon is a national monument because, hello, have you seen that thing? But a national treasure and a National Monument are two entirely different things. If Mr. Obama is so concerned about his legacy, he can forget all about the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" and designate the Grand Canyon area a national monument.

Action: drug monopolies, methane pollution, and overtime pay.

You've probably heard that the price of an EpiPen -- a drug that has saved the lives of many folks who'd otherwise die from anaphylactic shock -- has increased somewhere between 400 and 600 percent since the drug corporation Mylan acquired it from Merck some nine years ago. You might think Mylan must have made some pretty tremendous improvements to the EpiPen in order to justify that price hike -- especially since inflation has gone up a mere 16 percent during that time! -- but sadly, nothing's changed about the EpiPen but the price, and more and more folks who need it (food allergies being as common as they are) have to choose between that and paying the bills. The "free market" crowd is more than happy to tell us that this is the price we must pay for innovation and safety, but no one should have a monopoly on a life-saving drug, and no one should be allowed to charge extortionate prices for it. Would it be piling on to mention that Mylan's CEO's salary has gone up even more than EpiPen's price has? Both Moms Rising and MoveOn help you tell Mylan to cut the price of the EpiPen to a more reasonable level.

Meanwhile, the Department of the Interior has been hard at work updating standards for oil and gas pollution on public lands -- including methane, which we're going to see a lot more of in the future -- for the first time in 30 years (can you think of any technological developments that have happened over that time?). Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell Interior to mandate the most vigorous oil and gas pollution limits possible. It's bad enough that any oil and gas drilling goes on in public lands, but it we must have it, we need to protect public lands from air and water pollution. And methane, in particular, not only makes our smog problem worse (which then makes our asthma problem worse), but it exacerbates climate change at least 60 times worse than coal pollution does. Oil and gas drillers will pretend that you have to choose between befouling the planet and "cheap energy," but the only choice we need to make is between befouling the planet and CEOs getting filthy rich. And it's funny how when they talk to us, they pretend the methane mitigation industry simply doesn't exist.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to mess with the Obama Administration's new overtime rules, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The Obama Administration's rules, as you know, would force employers to pay time-and-a-half for overtime to all workers making less than $47,476; that floor is more than double the current floor of $23,660. Of course, the Obama Administration has already compromised on this matter, since it originally proposed setting the floor closer to $60,000 annually -- but that's not enough for some people, who want to delay implementation of the rules because it's too much too quick. Two problems with that: first, employers had it the way they wanted it for decades, so their complaints now sound like whining. Second, this overtime rule is supposed to shake things up -- the whole concept of time-and-a-half is supposed to induce employers to see the folly of overpaying their current workers and hire more workers instead. It doesn't help our civilization coddle corporations, but hey, we've all got to make sacrifices.

Around the table: the power of structural racism, and other ominous tales.

Terrence Heath at the OurFuture blog explores the influence of "structural racism" in the Freddie Gray murder. Folks who think structural racism doesn't exist, well, first off, have never talked to a real estate agent, and second off, don't know their history -- not just the part where a modern-day police sergeant tells a reluctant subordinate to "make up" a reason to stop a few black men, but the part where our government, all the way back in 1937, literally redlined which neighborhoods would get federal subsidies and which wouldn't, and guess which ones didn't. (Spoiler alert: those would be the neighborhoods with residents like Cab Calloway, Thurgood Marshall, and Billie Holliday.)

Weren't we worrying, not too long ago, that Hillary Clinton's choice of transition team head would be telling-and-not-in-a-good-way? Well, now we're here, with the news that former Senator and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar will head the Clinton transition team. Ken Salazar is not exactly Bernie Sanders, as you know -- he was pretty good at keeping the uranium miners out of the Grand Canyon, but otherwise he's a pro-fracking, pro-Keystone "free" trader, and he'll likely steer a Clinton Administration (if there is one, of course!) toward folks like himself. Now, that doesn't mean we just throw our hands up and go home -- it means we understand the obstacles we must hurdle. This is one of them. And our duty is unchanged.

The incomparable Jim Naureckas at FAIR catches the New York Times extolling "American power" in training Honduran cops to help reduce violence -- without mentioning that you have all this violence in Honduras in the first place because a right-wing regime overthrew a democratically-elected (but inconveniently liberal) President back in 2009 while our State Department got all Hamlet about the precise definition of "coup." When the Honduran government is the biggest murderer in Honduras, it's hard not to achieve a murder reduction at some point -- "ah, listen, fellas, could you maybe stack the bodies in the soccer field two-deep this month instead of three-deep? Bad press, you know? K thanks bye" -- and I can't help but think that the Times has come out with this article to answer the agitation by good Americans against our government's continued funding of Honduran police.

Uh oh: former Indiana Senator/current Senate candidate Evan Bayh now faces questions about his residency in Indiana, after CNN reports that he's usually used his Washington, D.C. address to buy homes, donate to candidates, and get fishing licenses. Residency issues felled Richard Lugar in 2012 after 36 years in the Senate, and though Mr. Lugar's issues were more pronounced, Mr. Lugar was also more popular -- but then Mr. Bayh has been sitting on over $10 million in campaign funds for six years. I still wish an actual populist, rather than a fake "moderate," would prove that a liberal populist is exactly the fellow who can win in a red state like Indiana. You know, like Byron Dorgan did in North Dakota for three terms.

Finally, you might have heard that Michael Moore told Bill Maher a few weeks back that he thought Donald Trump would win the Presidency, but after the last few, ah, difficult weeks Mr. Moore now believes Mr. Trump doesn't really want to be President and may now be actively sabotaging his campaign. He says it was all a negotiating ploy to extract more money from NBC, home of The Apprentice, and sadly that's far from implausible. He even says Mr. Trump would rather drop out than be a "loser," but that ship has pretty much sailed. Of course I still fear that Mr. Trump will win, because candidates who can present themselves as "outsiders" will always have an advantage over candidates who can't.

Action: regulating banksters, and keeping oil wastewater off crops.

H.R. 5592/S. 3118, the Derivatives Oversight and Taxpayer Protection Act, would (among other things) stiffen penalties for law-breaking derivatives traders, bring more derivative trading under the regulatory umbrella, and put more of the consequences of risky trading upon traders, not taxpayers. Dodd-Frank does force more sunshine onto derivatives trading, but given that derivative trading helped crash our economy in 2008, we could use a bit more. A "derivative" literally derives its value from another contract -- mostly, it describes a "bet" on how the price of a particular commodity will go up or down in the future. It's rather like gambling, and, as you know, gambling isn't a good way of making money: unless you're in on a certain fix -- which is, of course, illegal and immoral -- "betting" on (for example) fluctuations in the price of corn remains largely a crapshoot, regardless of how much preparation you've done. And unlike, say, fantasy football, when a derivative goes bad, we all feel the effects. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support more transparency for high-risk trading.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell California Gov. Jerry Brown to stop farmers and big ag corporations from irrigating their crops with oil wastewater, then CREDO still helps you do that. California surely suffers from drought (and not from smothering regulations involving Donald Trump's "three-inch fish"), but that doesn't make oil wastewater on crops -- which sooner or later will become your food -- a solution. I'm sure some right-wingers will squeal well, you can't prove the wastewater is bad! To which I would respond: what, exactly, about the phrase "oil wastewater" exudes confidence in its safety? Right-wingers constantly point at dung and say you should go ahead and taste it because it might be meatloaf. The only thing we don't know about oil wastewater is exactly how concentrated its carcinogens and toxins are. Of course, I'm not just about avoiding catastrophe -- I'm also about solutions. And, in that spirit, I would suggest that using water for farming instead of fracking would help California (and its agricultural industry) cope much better with the drought.

Around the table: that crazy Republican convention, and other sorrows.

Joan Walsh at The Nation reminds us that there was plenty of ugliness at the first night of the Republican National Convention without focusing on apparent plagiarism in Melania Trump's speech. Why, it's almost like the Trump camp came up with the plagiarism idea to distract us from everything else! Of course, we've lived through this already -- every time George W. Bush said something dumb as President, we got distracted from the real evil his Mobb was doing at that particular moment. (But memo to Chris Christie, who said Mrs. Trump's was "93 percent different" from Ms. Obama's 2008 speech: should I be impressed if he showed me his home and declared that he did not steal 93 percent of the items therein?)

Surprise, surprise, local and federal law enforcement officials went undercover to try to disrupt a major anti-fracking rally in Colorado two months ago, and that the Bureau of Land Management reimbursed local police for their efforts. Dear NSA agent reading my emails: want to know why they do these things? Because they don't want to drink poisoned water. Also, they don't want to live on a hothouse planet. Seems to me this is exactly why we asked Congress to investigate government spying on activists not too many days ago. Hate to pile on, but doesn't infiltrating grassroots organizations take money away from, you know, managing public lands?

In a peripherally-related development, New Zealand is contemplating granting personhood rights to the Whanganui River, only a few years after granting personhood rights to the Te Urewera national park. The arrangement essentially means that anyone bringing suit on the park's behalf can prove harm to the park, rather than a particular person, but I also spy a way not just of avoiding the hard work of shepherding public lands, but a way of avoiding paying to maintain public lands, too. And call me old-fashioned, but I don't think rivers are people, either -- even if they are far more natural than corporations.

HHS report finds a lot of 21st century innovations subverting the privacy protections offered by HIPAA. HIPAA, after all, only applies to the data your health provider and health insurer (and their partners) maintain, but the corporations that made the apps or wearables with which you count steps taken and calories burned? HIPAA's authors didn't anticipate that, and I guess I can't blame them. Of course, this is why we need a functioning Congress -- civilization demands constant maintenance.

Finally, America's Greatest Advice Columnist, Dan Savage, unloads on a questioner who queries him about voting for a third-party candidate. The crux of his argument: "Here's how you (create a viable third party in America): you run people not just for fucking president every four fucking years....Where are the Green Party candidates for city councils? For county councils? For state legislatures? For state assessor? For state insurance commissioner? For governor? For fucking dogcatcher? I would be SO willing to vote for Green Party candidates who are starting at the bottom." Slurs against America's Greatest Citizen Ralph Nader notwithstanding, he's got a point. And if you're thinking third parties have a lot of uphill climbing to viability -- and they do, especially here in Pennsylvania -- remember, also, that third parties have two big things going for them: the Democratic and Republican parties, perhaps the most hated political parties in American history.

Action: protesting Israel, and clean water.

You may recall that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order that directs all state entities to divest from organizations that support the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement against Israel. As I said last week, he has the right to do that -- just as we have the right to tell him not to do that, as Jewish Voice for Peace helps you do. Mr. Cuomo's executive order denounces "boycott-related tactics that are used to threaten the sovereignty and security of allies and trade partners of the United States," but how does BDS threaten Israel's sovereignty? His statement essentially equates Israel's occupation of Palestine with its sovereignty, as if without the occupation, Israel literally wouldn't exist. And I don't think boycotts, divestments, and sanctions -- all non-violent methods of protest and pressure -- "threatens" Israel's security, but rather show the way to increase Israeli security. No one argues that Palestinians do not injure Israel; but only a fool argues that occupying Palestine makes Israel more secure.

Meanwhile, several California water districts are still allowing agricultural concerns to use oil wastewater to irrigate their crops. I know there's a drought going on in California (which means I know at least one more thing than Donald Trump does), but this is a desperate way to combat it -- even if the wastewater gets "treated" before being used on crops, that's a lot of carcinogens and other toxins to get rid of, and the state of California hasn't tested the wastewater to ensure it's safe, not just to people who eat food produced in California (which includes, like, almost everyone), but also to the workers who handle the food before it goes to market. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell the government of California to ban the use of oil wastewater on crops. What should California do instead, you ask? Well, San Diego is doing good work purifying sewage into drinkable water. Or maybe California could stop fracking, since that diverts far more water from good Californians than some "three-inch fish" will ever do.

Action: clean water, and humane treatment of animals.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell the EPA to fix what went wrong with their now-infamous fracking study. What's that, you say? That if the ultra-liberal EPA says fracking's impact upon drinking water tables is not at all "widespread" or "systemic," it must be OK? Well, don't do a victory lap yet: our laws can't compel oil and gas drillers to share information about the chemicals they use (it's a "trade secret," which our government apparently feels is more important than our right not to drink cancerous crap), and hence had to rely on those corporations to give information voluntarily, which -- surprise, surprise! -- they didn't do. And for all its flaws, the study documented more evidence of drinking water contamination than the last EPA study on the subject during Tha Bush Mobb's first term, just not enough to call such contamination "widespread" and "systemic" -- and a majority of panel members on the EPA's own Scientific Advisory Board, composed of industry figures as well as scientists, have said the EPA needs to revise that conclusion. And they should, because cleaning up drinking water contaminated by fracking is, I'm told, frightfully expensive.

Meanwhile, did you know that American pig farmers often send their pigs to Hawaii to be slaughtered? Apparently, this is cheaper than feeding them at home (pig feed is apparently quite expensive), and it also allows certain big agricultural concerns to label the resulting pork "Hawaiian-made" even if the pigs started out in North Dakota. But one of the main reasons this is cheaper is that pigs get overstuffed into a poorly-ventilated ship for five days, and during that time they walk around surrounded by puke, feces, urine, and other dead pigs -- at least until the very-likely-overworked-and-underpaid livestock attendants get around to throwing the carcasses overboard. If, as Mahatma Gandhi once said, “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” well, I'd have to say we need to become a more perfect union in that regard. It doesn't matter that those pigs will soon be bacon or pork chops -- you don't treat a feed animal badly merely to save money, because that's mammon-worship, which is evil. Hence Change.org helps you tell shipping corporation Matson to stop shipping pigs off to Hawaii for slaughter.

Action: refugees, voter registration, and methane pollution.

Just when you thought the refugee-bashing had stopped, along comes South Carolina bill S. 997, which passed the state Senate a few weeks back and now awaits action by the state House. S. 997 would create that dreaded "refugee registry" contemplated by Donald Trump not long ago, and would mandate state law enforcement officials to "confirm" that refugees placed in South Carolina "do not pose a public safety risk" and then report back to the state legislature about that matter. As if vetting by the FBI, DHS, and the State Department weren't enough! I doubt S. 997 proves South Carolina legislators really care about preventing risks to safety and security -- refugees already get upwards of 18 months of vetting by our federal government, and they have perpetrated exactly zero terrorist attacks in American history. The fact that refugees are generally running from terrorism in their home country might have something to do with that. The ACLU helps you tell South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to veto S. 997, and thus prevent the state from persecuting refugees.

Meanwhile, three states now automatically register people to vote at the moment they get drivers' licenses. Now you may well ask: didn't the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 require voter registration at the same time you got a driver's license? Actually, no -- that law required states to allow you to opt in to voter registration at the DMV, whereas the laws lately passed in Oregon, California, and West Virginia require you to opt out if you don't want to register to vote while you're at the DMV. Voter registration was, once upon a time, a way to get more people to vote (and, not insignificantly, a way to avoid rioting when voters got turned away on Election Day), but now it's become more of a hindrance to voting than a help. And no it doesn't "cause voter fraud," particularly when you actually need more paperwork to get a driver's license. (The three aforementioned state laws keep traditional voter registration available.) Hence Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to support automatic voter registration.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to leave a public comment on the Bureau of Land Management's proposed rules limiting methane emissions from gas drilling projects on public lands, then the Environmental Defense Fund still helps you do that. This is your last chance to comment on this matter, though, because the deadline for comments is tomorrow. The BLM rules address venting, flaring, and leaks, and really, who would justify deliberately allowing methane gas into the air, or burning off gas to put more toxins into the air, or, you know, having leaky equipment? No reasonable person would, that's who. Of course, the unreasonable go to some lengths to appear reasonable, by complaining about Big Gummint interference (as if your government doesn't belong to you!) and hurting small businesses (which would suffer more from pollution than from increased utility bills) and suchlike. But if we don't have clean water to drink or clean air to breathe, we'll be in no position to celebrate the pristine purity of anyone's ideology.

Action: fracking regulations, "free" trade, and Verizon strikers.

The Pennsylvania state Department of Environmental Protection has worked, for five years, on stronger oil and gas drilling regulations that would force corporations to cut their air and water pollution. But five years is, apparently, not long enough for oil and gas corporations, who have apparently prompted state politicians to attack the DEP's work. As if the whole point of democracy were to give big corporations all the say about everything! The DEP's new standards would, among other things, ban those huge open-air pits that frackers use to store wastewater -- that's right, the same pits that leech into your drinking water and occasionally catch fire and pump toxins into the air. Yeah, what a hardship it would be for these corporations to have to stop doing that. Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to support the DEP's efforts to keep gas and oil waste from negatively impacting our health. We deserve more from our democracy, after all, than the back of some corporation's hand.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to reject the Trans-Pacific "Partnership", then the Sierra Club helps you do that. The Sierra Club reminds us that the "investor-state tribunals" found in the TPP and other "free" trade pacts will directly result in your tax money going into the pockets of big corporate CEOs -- like the CEOs of TransCanada. TransCanada, as you recall, wanted to build the Keystone XL pipeline in America, but after the Obama Administration rejected it, TransCanada decided to sue, in a NAFTA-created tribunal, for $15 billion. If they win, that means $100 leaves your pocket (given about 150 million American taxpayers) and magically reappears in their pockets! Income redistribution! Remember, also, that Congress's stated wariness about passing the TPP before Election Day is a bald lie -- they will try to ram it down our throats the very next day. And we need to be ready for that. The best way to get ready for that now is to tell them no repeatedly until they get it.

Finally, Verizon workers are still on strike for better working conditions, so National People's Action helps you tell Verizon's CEO, Lowell McAdam, to agree to a fair contract that secures well-paying jobs for its workers. Certainly some will ask: why are they on strike? it's not like they're fast food workers or anything! Well, for one thing, they've been working a contract since last August, so they've actually demonstrated tremendous restraint in waiting until last week to strike. And Verizon has made roughly $13 billion in profits annually since 2013 -- and, contra what Mr. McAdam said last week, pays around 12% of that in taxes to America annually -- but still flogs the zombie line that it must "cut costs" (i.e., worker pay, benefits, and job security) in order to "keep up with a changing marketplace." Apparently the marketplace changes, like, every minute of every day, which is kinda hard to believe in a country with only four major phone carriers. And here you thought our entrepreneurs were our boldest and brightest.

Action: fighting bigotry, banksters, and outsourcing.

North Carolina and Mississippi may have enacted "bathroom bills" -- the kind that force transgendered students to go to the bathroom of their birth gender, rather than the gender they are now -- but Tennessee's bathroom bills, HB 2414 and SB 2387, have had a tough time moving through their respective houses. We shouldn't be complacent -- you'll recall how long it took Pennsylvania's notorious fracking bill to work through the state legislature back in 2012, until legislators essentially passed it when they thought no one was looking -- but organized popular will has held the bill at bay so far. And Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam hasn't said whether he'll sign a bathroom bill if it reaches his desk, and just because he's a Republican doesn't mean he'll sign it -- when earlier this year Georgia Gov. Deal and South Dakota Gov. Daugaard, both Republicans, vetoed similar legislation. Still, the Tennessee Equality Project helps you remind Gov. Haslam to veto any discriminatory bathroom bills that might reach his desk.

Meanwhile, the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill passed in 2010, and though it wasn't everything we wanted, it's not going to be much of anything if Executive branch agencies don't finish writing the rules and regulations Dodd-Frank mandates -- rules that would limit obscene executive bonuses, financial speculation in food markets, and deceptive marketing of toxic securities, to name three examples. Of course, as you may have heard, there's a Presidential election this year, which means the next President might not even bother finishing up the work Dodd-Frank has begun. Some folks would like you to think that means it's time to throw up your hands and walk away, but in fact the opposite is true -- the fact that we're seven months (!) away from a Presidential election means it's even more important that the relevant federal agencies need to finish the work they're mandated to do. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our government to finish implementing Dodd-Frank by the end of 2016.

Finally, Mondeléz, the corporation that owns Nabisco, has sent layoff notices to over 250 workers in its Chicago plant, so that it can move to Mexico, where the labor is cheaper and rather less well-protected than in America (though Our Glorious Elites are trying to change that!). As you may recall, Mondeléz CEO Irene Rosenfeld made $21 million last year, but still asked the Chicago workers to take a massive cut in pay and benefits. And you won't be surprised to learn that Nabisco has taken tens of millions of dollars in corporate welfare handouts from city and state over the years, most in the form of tax cuts. The lesson? When a corporation threatens to pull out of a city if it doesn't get handouts from the taxpayer, it'll just keep threatening to pull out if it doesn't get more and more handouts from the taxpayer -- and that's no guarantee it won't pull out anyway! That's what we call a hostage situation. But we're not hostages, so Jobs with Justice helps you tell Mondeléz to save decent-paying jobs here in America.

Around the table: the real relationship between Barack Obama and banksters, and other horrible truths.

Part two of Chris Hedges's Days of Revolt interview with economist Michael Hudson covers, at length, how much dirty work the Obama Administration has done on the banksters' behalf. Among their ill deeds: stopping any effort at mortgage write-downs, funneling trillions of dollars to banksters instead of writing down debt, preventing the IMF from writing down Greek debt, and worst of all, pretending to understand the people's needs and desires and then "delivering" them to his real constituents, the banksters. I sure do feel a lot better about not voting for him twice.

Mississippi's state legislature passes the mother of all "religious liberty" bills. You name it, this bill does it: clerks won't have to issue marriage licenses to gays, businesses can fire people for being gay or transgendered, adoption agencies won't have to place children with couples they think are having premarital sex, doctors won't have to counsel anyone who offends their "religious" sensibilities, and, well, you get the picture. And whereas Indiana and North Carolina suffered corporate backlash for their pro-discrimination bills, I don't presume the home state of Jr. Food Mart, C Spire Wireless, and MCI-surely-you-remember-them will feel that sort of pain. Southerners like talking about secession all the time; how about we start talking expulsion?

Dan Fischer writes a lengthy report at Counterpunch regarding the reflexively pro-gas drilling policies of Connecticut's Governor, Democrat Dannel Malloy. Connecticut doesn't even have shale gas to drill, but the Malloy Administration has funded plenty of pipeline projects -- including one a mere 105 feet from the Indian Point nuclear power plant, which is rather like putting a bomb right next to another bomb -- and fracked-gas power plants that suspiciously sit in low-income neighborhoods of color. Attend well the lies Gov. Malloy employs to justify what are essentially kickbacks to large contributors, beginning in the "Cooking the Climate" section. Spoiler alert: they're the same lies Republicans tell to accomplish the same ends.

Obama Administration pardon attorney resigns, claiming that President Obama isn't "following through" on promises to grant early releases to low-level federal drug offenders serving long sentences. The main problem? So many petitioners (wouldn't you be one, if you were in that situation?), and not enough workers to process them, just like with every other government agency since the early 1980s. Racism also rears its ugly head, as white petitioners are four times more likely to get early releases than people of color. Maybe this is why Barack Obama gets no love from right-wingers -- even when he outdoes Republicans at withholding mercy, it's obviously because the whole process is farkakte.

Finally, the Engage! blog describes a sort of extended Milgram's experiment which finds that "agreeable, conscientous" people are more likely to follow orders most of us would find evil (like delivering electric shocks to an innocent person) while "more contrarian, less agreeable" folks would more likely refuse to follow such orders. "The irony is that a personality disposition normally seen as antisocial -- disagreeableness -- may actually be linked to 'pro-social' behavior," says one observer, but that's likely no surprise to you if, like me, you think real compromise can't happen between people who won't stand their ground, and that being "agreeable" is worthless unless you're willing to be disagreeable.

Action: worker safety, corporate tax avoidance, and methane emissions.

Over a year and a half ago, President Obama's Department of Labor issued a Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order, which would require federal contractors to report their worker safety records to our government before they can receive any federal contracts. And of course, a few corporations are fighting it tooth and nail anyway, because -- oh, I don't know why they do what they do. Greed? Fear of death? Hatred of Obama? Of course, if it were your money our government was spending, you'd want to know how it was being spent, right? Oh, wait: it is your money. So no matter how much corporations complain about Big Gummint and paperwork, keep in mind that they aim to keep their records concerning workplace injuries and deaths secret from you. What could they be afraid of? The Center for Media and Democracy helps you tell President Obama and the Office of Management and Budget to implement the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order with a quickness and a fierceness.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to use Treasury Department authority to stop corporations from evading taxes by pretending to be foreign corporations. The big pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer, which hopes to become Irish by merging with Allergan, is only the latest name in a long progression of American corporations that merge with foreign corporations and "become" "foreign," and it would permanently evade some $35 billion in taxes on almost $150 billion in earnings already stashed offshore, and that would mean that small businesses and working families pay more and more in taxes to make up for the shortfall, and that would also mean local, state, and federal governments continuing to cut services that all of us need because of said shortfall. This, even though Pfizer's own profits are up by 50% since 2011 -- to a large degree because Pfizer has jacked up prices on its big name drugs Viagra and Lipitor, and also to a large degree because our government has given Pfizer tax handouts like they're candy. Like these famous philosophers, you must ask: how much is enough?

Finally, the Bureau of Land Management has proposed new regulations (I'm going to say the word, even if it makes some people flinch!) that would crack down on venting and flaring methane emissions at fracking sites, and the Sierra Club helps you tell the BLM to finalize the most vigorous anti-methane standards possible. You already know why: fracking doesn't just pollute our drinking water, but it allows methane into the atmosphere, and methane is a considerably more, ah, efficient deliverer of carbon emissions than coal. I mean, if it were your land these gas drillers were fracking on, you'd be pretty concerned about the resulting pollution, right? I kid, of course -- it is your land, just as it's your air they're polluting either by ventilating methane from underground or burning it. (If, like me, you're not thrilled to also tell the BLM to end all fossil fuel leasing on public lands, feel free to excise the last two sentences from the Sierra Club's text. The rest of it will do the job well enough.)

Action: retirement advice, clean water, and keeping kids out of jail.

As you know, the Department of Labor lately issued rules mandating retirement account advisers (including pension advisers) to adhere to a "fiduciary responsibility" standard -- meaning they have to put their clients' needs ahead of their own. But two House bills (H.R. 4294 and H.R. 4293) would nullify these standards, and H.R. 4294 and H.R. 4293 would also amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, respectively, to codify old exemptions to the fiduciary responsibility standard and carve out new ones -- meaning that certain retirement advisers would continue to get to put their own mammon-worship ahead of your secure retirement, and thus our Congress encourages corruption. Sadly, both these bills have the sheen of bipartianship, with five Democratic co-sponsors each, but good Americans don't care about bipartisan government; we care about good government. So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject these fake retirement advice "reform" bills.

Meanwhile, Stanford University scientists have found that gas drillers practicing hydrofracturing (better known as "fracking") are directly injecting chemicals into shallow freshwater aquifers. You may recall that the "liberal" media flogged the EPA's 2015 report as "proof" that fracking was perfectly safe to drinking water and that folks who said otherwise were just alarmist or extremist, but the 2015 report actually found more evidence of water contamination (if not "widespread" contamination) than in past reports, and also admitted the constraints of its research (i.e., that the law allows frackers to keep their chemicals a "trade secret," and gas drilling corporations wouldn't cooperate with the EPA) -- and we should not really construe that as a thumbs-up for fracking. Word on the street is that the EPA's peer review board has expressed dissatisfaction with the 2015 report, so Penn Environment helps you tell the EPA to start over again and conduct a more thorough review of the threats to clean water, and to health, posed by fracking.

Finally, a Change.org petition helps you tell the Governor of Michigan to release Devontae Sanford. I didn't have to know that Mr. Sanford is serving 39 years in prison for a quadruple-murder to which someone else has since confessed -- I needed only know that Mr. Sanford is developmentally disabled and was only 14 at the time of the crime, meaning that even if he did kill four people, his predicament begged better care from the adults in his life, not hard time. And that was before I learned that the police questioned him without his parents or an attorney present -- and that he later said he only confessed because police promised him he could go home if he did. It sure seems like a lot of adults failed Mr. Sanford. And I'll suffer no guff about how we have to "teach kids responsibility" by putting them in prison. The time to "teach kids responsibility" is well before that, and if we as a culture are failing at that task, the solution isn't to send kids off to where we don't have to deal with them anymore. The solution is to stop failing.

Action: better working conditions for garment workers in Cambodia, open licensing of federal education materials in America, and methane emission regulation in Pennsylvania.

14 garment-worker unions in Cambodia are campaigning for better pay and working conditions, and the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell major corporate retailers like WalMart, H&M, Gap, and Levi Strauss to pressure the Cambodian government to raise wages for Cambodian workers. Cambodian garment workers work up to 14 hours daily, with inadequate breaks, making the clothes you get relatively cheaply at major retailers, and these workers make $128 monthly. And if you're a Cambodian worker peacefully protesting these working conditions, you run the risk of getting shot to death by Cambodian police, as five protestors did a few years ago. The unions have demanded a $177/month minimum wage -- that doesn't seem like a lot of money to us, obviously, but a dollar goes a little farther in Cambodia than it does here, though perhaps not far enough for good Cambodians to shop at a WalMart, for example. Still, progress is progress, even when it's slow. And to those who whine that more money for Cambodian workers means they'll pay more at WalMart: is it ever moral to pay people in dung pellets?

Meanwhile, the Department of Education is mulling rules requiring open licensing for all Department-funded education content. This is, actually, a big deal -- no other federal agency makes its grant-funded materials so freely available to the taxpayers who have funded it, and students and educators could access federally-funded material without jumping through more hoops (as I've said, they've already paid for these materials with their taxes). Best of all, open licensing would permit a level of oversight by the American people over education materials that we haven't enjoyed until now. People who "worry" that open licensing will give an "unfair advantage" to public education over private education should consider, again, that public education belongs to all the people, so all the people should be able to oversee it. Who has a problem with oversight, again? People with something to hide, that's who. The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell the Department of Education to permit open licensing of Department-funded education materials.

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to direct the state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to crack down on methane emissions from oil and gas drillers. Pennsylvania is second among American states in producing natural gas from shale, and that also means, sadly, that Pennsylvania is near the forefront of American states not just in air and water polluted from fracking, but also from methane emissions. If you've heard that natural gas is better to our climate than coal or oil, don't believe it -- methane packs a climate change punch some 80 times larger than coal production does, and the more gas drilling we do, the worse climate change will be. Yes, there is an entire industry (the methane mitigation industry) devoted to remediating the problem, but you still have to get the gas drillers to care about the problem, and my experience with big corporations over the last few decades is that the people who run them don't care about problems they have to spend money to fix. This is one reason we need governments of the people, for the people, and by the people -- to restrain the behavior of big corporations.

Action: campaign finance disclosure, and methane emissions.

Nearly six years after the Supreme Court ruled (in Citizens United v. FEC) that corporations have "the rights of personhood" and thus the right to make campaign donations with very few limits, what has President Obama done, besides urge Congress to fix it? Nothing. And he can issue an Executive Order mandating that all federal contractors disclose their campaign donations (which they're by definition using our money to do!), and he can tell the SEC to protect shareholders by forcing all publicly-traded corporations to do the same. Neither of these would be unprecedented -- Republicans have already thrown hissy fits over the much milder executive orders Mr. Obama has issued, and you may recall that in 2014 the FCC was trying to find some way, any way, to pretend they were issuing strong net neutrality rules without actually issuing strong net neutrality rules, until President Obama told America exactly what he preferred the FCC to do. So a broad coalition of good-government groups help you tell President Obama to fight big money in political campaigns for-real for-real. (The Peace Team, formerly the People's E-mail Network, helps you do the same.)

Meanwhile, the EPA is still taking public comments about its proposed methane emissions standards, and the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to issue the strongest methane regulations possible. Methane is, sadly, a ubiquitous by-product of fracking, and when folks tell you that fracking won't contribute as much to climate change as, say, coal production will, they're leaving out the fact that methane is actually a considerably more efficient deliverer of carbon emissions into our air than coal production, and an entire industry (the methane mitigation industry) has now arisen to contain the leakage of methane from fracking operations. Some would call that "job creation," but at the point one says that, one could call any disaster a "job-creation opportunity" at that point, and that would justify doing anything. The whole point of being civilized is that you choose to do some things and not others, and that the mass of knowledge and experience that civilization offers can guide you into choosing well. But justifying any old disaster as an "opportunity"? That's cynical, and therefore evil.

Action: government spying, energy efficiency, methane regulation, and "banning the box."

Word on the street is that the U.S. Senate will vote on S. 754, the Cybersecurity Information Security Act, today, so Stopcyberspying.com helps you call your Senators and tell them to reject S. 754. You no doubt know why they should reject this bill -- it would make it much, much easier for big telecom corporations to hand over all your private data to the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA, regardless of whether you've actually done anything wrong or are the actual target of an actual investigation, and would also do nothing to address real cybersecurity issues, like encryption, malware, and bad network management. And the bill would also -- because big telecom corporations are so vital to American civilization that they must be protected from the consequences of their bad actions! -- grant broad immunity to those corporations that violate your rights in sharing your data. Even worse, though, the bill's own main sponsor, Richard Burr of North Carolina, has actually admitted that S. 754 won't actually prevent cyberattacks, but merely "limit the damage" afterward. That's not security, folks. This anti-freedom bill must die.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the state Senate plans to vote, as early as today, on SB 805, which would slash funding to Act 129 energy efficiency programs. How? By allowing the Commonwealth's biggest energy gobblers to opt out of funding the program. Why, that's like allowing the country's biggest income earners to pay less in taxes than everyone else! Everyone who pays an electric bill in Pennsylvania has to pay a fee dedicated to Act 129 energy efficiency programs, so under SB 805, most good Pennsylvanians will still have to pay the fee, but the fattest cats won't. It must be because state politics aren't all that sexy, or "fees" aren't all that sexy, that politicians get away with such mess, because pretty much everyone favors more efficient energy production. And note to the "sun tax" crowd: letting the biggest energy users off the hook for paying into a system that benefits all of us is the very definition of a "free rider." The Sierra Club helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Senator to reject the anti-energy efficiency, anti-civilization, pro-fat cat bill SB 805.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA to enact the most vigorous methane pollution regulations possible, then the League of Conservation Voters still helps you do that. What's the trouble with methane? Methane is a far more efficient carrier of global warming emissions than coal emissions, and we're doing more and more fracking in America, and fracking isn't just a source of the chemical pollutants that get in our water tables and make our water unsafe to drink, wash with, or bathe in -- it's also a source of methane emissions, and the methane emissions problem with gas drilling is bad enough that a whole industry (the methane mitigation industry) now exists to deal with it. Right-wingers might call that job creation, but we don't need to cause (or enable) screw-ups just to create jobs. In fact, if folks are free from the kinds of pollution that makes them less healthy, they'll be free to create the kinds of jobs a truly sane, moral, and healthy civilization creates. Why not bring about that better world? Because fossil fuel corporations don't like it?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to issue an executive order mandating that federal employers and contractors stop asking job applicants about their criminal records, then Color of Change still helps you do that. This is better known as the "Ban the Box" campaign, because often in job applications you have to check a box if you've been convicted of a crime; banning the box doesn't prevent employers from doing background checks later, but it does give the applicant more of an opportunity to put forward their qualifications and aptitudes. See, that's what it's about -- giving folks trying to put their past behind them more opportunity. It's pointedly not about hamstringing employers' ability to find the people they want to hire, but it would help both sides if folks previously convicted of crimes can put their best foot forward. And folks who can't get work after they get out of jail often land right back in jail, which does not speak well of a society that aims to rehabilitate prisoners. Getting our government to "ban the box" is a step toward that goal.

Action: worker safety, hydropower, and fracking.

The International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell clothing corporation H&M to make the safety renovations that would help prevent further mass deaths of Bangladeshi workers in factory fires. Why? Because, apparently, H&M has been dragging its feet on those renovations, even though H&M committed to them. As your mama taught you, you should really do the things you commit to doing in life, even if you don't really want to do them, or if you perceive that they'll cost you money. I know the pressures of modern life just as well as everyone else -- it's all rush, rush, rush to do the things that make you money, and we cut corners because we get away with it so often. But we haven't properly learned, as a civilization, that the 999 times you get away with doing things like putting factory workers in unsafe buildings are never worth the one time your factory burns down and hundreds of people die. We had better learn it, though, or we're all going to hell. Telling H&M to fulfill their commitment to save lives is the one small thing we're going to do right now to help avoid that catastrophe.

Meanwhile, H.R. 8, the North American Energy Security and Infrastructure Act, would allow hydropower corporations (like those that build dams) to ignore their obligations to keep water clean and avoid injuring wild habitats. Dams get 50-year licenses, and those of us who aren't going to live another 50 years know quite acutely that once you fail to license a dam so that it complies with changing environmental conditions and more vigorous building standards, you're stuck with it for a very long time. And H.R. 8 would also place state duties in federal hands and federal duties in state hands wherever doing so would help corporate interests avoid acting like the better stewards of fish, wildlife, and clean water we'd otherwise want them to be. All so certain politicians can appear to support renewable power -- which hydropower certainly is (Alaska ranks first among American states in renewable energy production because of hydropower), but you don't let it kill animals and pollute clean water. Hence American Rivers helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 8 and protect clean water and wildlife.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to ban fracking on public lands, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. In signing, you'd ask your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1902, the Protect Our Public Lands Act, which would simply prohibit hydraulic fracturing on public lands leased to private drilling corporations. As it stands now, assessments that we can reliably keep fracking from poisoning clean water supplies are unduly optimistic -- especially since a 2005 energy bill allowed frackers to avoid disclosing the chemicals they use in their operations. The EPA's recent report, largely mischaracterized in the "liberal" media as a decisive declaration about fracking's safety, did not actually research the subject rigorously enough, largely due to a lack of cooperation from drillers, and did find incidents of water contamination from fracking. And how are "trade secrets," once revealed to our government and not to a corporation's competitors, no longer secret? We have laws against government officials revealing trade secrets, after all. It's enough to make you think gas drilling concerns want to keep something else a secret.