Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: the usual -- insane Republicans, weak Democrats.

Surprise, surprise, right-wingers are cherrypicking to argue that Georgia's new voting law is no more restrictive than Colorado's, leaving out little details like that Colorado votes almost entirely by mail and thus doesn't necessarily need more days of early voting, plus you have to ask for a mail ballot in Georgia, whereas in Colorado you just get one. You know what else right-wingers leave out? That Georgia's new law empowers its legislature to interfere far more in the vote counting than they did before -- and, as you may know, Republicans dominate the Georgia legislature. Gosh, I wonder what they'll do if we see an even bigger Democratic wave in Georgia in 2022?

Ho hum, fossil fuel corporations soaked up over $8 billion in corporate welfare from last year's CARES Act, but cut almost 60,000 jobs. Stick a pin in that for the next time someone squeals that we tax corporations so much that they can't create jobs. The reason they don't create jobs is that we don't tax them enough -- faced with the threat of real taxation, they'll spend their money on paying workers and building stuff, and faced with real regulation, they'll stop gobbling up existing properties just to deduct the mortgage interest. Not to pile on, but big fossil fuel corporations already get over $4 billion in corporate welfare annually.

Reactionary Missouri state legislature tries to thwart a Medicaid expansion, despite the fact that the state's voters amended their constitution in order to expand it. I doubt the state legislature will succeed in their efforts once the courts step in, but then that's not the point, is it? As David Frum instructed us recently, the point is to look like you're fighting, not win, or fight well, or even actually fight. And the rageheads will keep eating it up. And there are a lot of rageheads in Missouri. (Though, as an aside, maybe Lucas Kunce can neutralize them in the 2022 U.S. Senate race.)

New Mexico becomes America's second state (after Colorado) to ban qualified immunity for police officers, meaning folks wronged by police brutality (and other misconduct) can now sue and earn restitution. Folks who respond but how can cops do their jobs now should at least ask themselves why police officers need to be protected from accountability in order to "do their job." And if they find our justice system "skewed" in favor of the accused, they should remember that this is the way our Founders wanted it, and if they ever face a state trying to railroad them, they'll appreciate that a bit more.

"Some" Democrats worry that any tax-hike-on-the-rich in an infrastructure bill will "backfire" on them with the suburban voters who used to vote Republican. My advice to them is this: don't be weak and stupid! The tax "cuts" of 2017 didn't drive them into Republican arms in 2018, after all, and (as the article helpfully points out, I was beginning to think I was the only one who remembered) Barack Obama explicitly said, numerous times, that he wanted to raise taxes on the rich in 2012, and still won re-election. I often think Democratic politicos don't really understand voters, and this "worrying" sure doesn't convince me otherwise.

Finally, Kevin Williamson at the National Review -- another right-winger who thinks we should have fewer and allegedly "better" voters -- compares passing laws that help more people vote to loosening standards so we can have more doctors, but Jesus Mary and Joseph you have a right to vote, but you don't have a "right" to be a doctor. And if you're that worried about stupid people voting, you might as well just wear a sign saying "I can't persuade people to do the right thing." And maybe you ought to wonder why that is. Personally, I've found most people to be fairly intelligent and persuadable. Maybe that's because I expect more from them.

Action: concerning health care, immigration, fossil fuel funding, D.C. statehood, paycheck fairness, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare for All Act, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, the D.C. Admission Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act -- and tell them to reject the so-called Fair Access to Banking Act and revoke permits for the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. As Paul Craig Roberts, the father of Reaganomics, said many years ago, when the private sector screws up this badly (high prices, bad service, surprise bills, etc.) then our government has to step in. And Medicare works pretty damn well for our elderly, despite the fact that it's basically a high-risk pool which should constantly fail. Think how much better Medicare would work with all these healthy people in it! (How to pay for it? Easy: assess an employer-side payroll tax at about the amount they're already paying for private health insurance. They act like it just can't be done because they don't have the will to do it. Luckily, we do.)

Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2222, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act. What makes a great nation? Treating all people with the dignity and respect they deserve, and much as right-wingers want you to believe that everyone who wants to come here is a murdering raping drug-dealer, most of the folks who want to come here are a) good people and b) running from actual murdering raping drug-dealers. So H.R. 2222 would repeal mandatory detention for immigrants, prohibit solitary confinement, end our government's use of private prisons they refuse to hold to account, and ensuring all detainees get a hearing before an immigration judge. It really is well past time our government acted as civilized as we do.

Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject S. 563, the so-called Fair Access to Banking Act. The bill would compel big banking corporations to fund the fossil fuel corporations they've avoided funding for the last couple of years, under popular pressure, of course. Ain't it just like a Republican to loudly insist that the "free" market is always right until it hits big fossil fuel donors? And then they make the "free" market do what they want! How conservative of them! And they've got some nerve talking about banks "discriminating" against fossil fuel corporations. Major anti-discrimination legislation (the Equality Act) stands before them and all they do is tell hysterical lies about it.

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 51/S. 51, the D.C. Admission Act. You know the arguments against D.C. statehood suck when Mob Boss Mitch calls statehood for D.C. "pure socialism." What does that even mean? (And how does it differ from "impure socialism"?) Statehood would actually increase Washington, D.C.'s independence -- it could get vaccine supplies a lot more easily, which is a big deal these days, and it could create its own National Guard, which it sure could have used on January 6! Don't brook any silliness about how "the Founders didn't want D.C. to be a state," lest we use that argument against Idaho, which achieved statehood in 1890, long after all the Founders were dead.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Because women deserve to make as much as men for the same work, dammit! Why do people resist this idea? (OK, I know why, but all the reasons are stupid.) Despite the Equal Pay Act of 1963, women still don't make a dollar for every dollar a man makes for doing the same work, but the Paycheck Fairness Act would make it easier for women to find out their bosses are paying them too little and then do something about it. And when Republicans tell you this bill will "just help out the trial lawyers," tell them we'd need fewer trial lawyers if bosses didn't try to get away with wage theft.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to introduce and pass legislation that would revoke all permits for Enbridge's notorious Line 3 pipeline. Line 3 would carry almost a million barrels of tar sands oil daily from southwestern Canada under the Mississippi River to northern Wisconsin. Does running an oil pipeline under the Mississippi sound like a good idea to you? Particularly when you recall that an Endbridge pipeline rupture in 2010 polluted some 40 square miles of the Kalamazoo watershed? Fuel burns once, but clean water is forever -- if we work to keep it.

Action: concerning tyranny, double-dealing, diplomacy, Social Security, pollution, and corruption.

Long story short: tell big corporations to divest from Myanmar's military, tell France to reject an Arctic drilling scheme, tell President Biden to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, fire two notorious Social Security Administrators, regulate "forever chemicals" in our drinking water, and support international sanctions against Erik Prince for plotting to overthrow the government of Libya. Lots to digest, I know, but you can accomplish all of these aims easily by using the email and petition links in the following paragraphs.

Are there bigger armed whiners than Myanmar's military? They didn't like the election results, so they overthrew the government -- no, they really overthrew the government, plus if you protest this coup, they murder you. They want us to see them as big and strong and tough but I will always see them bawling, in diapers, stomping their feet. Sadly, they don't act in a vacuum, because big fossil fuel corporations like Chevron and Total support the government of Myanmar to the tune of over $1 billion annually, which motherlode now goes to the military, since it now controls the government. Gosh, what ever should these corporations do? I kid, of course -- they should stop sending money to the illegitimate bunch of crybabies now calling themselves the government of Myanmar. Sum of Us provides the petition.

Hey, speaking of Total: they want to drill for gas in the Arctic ocean, and what's more, France's President, Emmanuel Macron, has been criticizing the project in public while green-lighting it in private! Yikes, I hope he doesn't wonder why he loses his next election in about a year! You know what people hate even more than being told they have to stay indoors? When politicians say one thing and do another! Even in these post-modern times, the eternal verities still hold! Naturally, this Arctic drilling project will both unleash yet more pollution and threaten the lives of indigenous folks, but if we all bring the Big Stick of Bad PR, we can strangle this thing in its crib. Sum of Us provides this petition, also.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to get back into the Iran nuclear deal the Obama Administration negotiated in 2015 (uh, during which he was Vice President), then both Win Without War and Daily Kos still help you do that. Why? Because it was working before Donald Trump trashed it, and it can work again. Does it seem like Iran's asking for more this time? Doesn't mean they should get it, and doesn't mean they're going to get it! It's like the world doesn't understand what "negotiation" is. Granted, that could be at least partly because Tha Bush Mobb demanded that Iran accept all their demands "before negotiations can begin." But surely we don't need to behold ourselves to any Republican orthodoxy. (President Biden's phone number, as you may recall, is 202.456.1111; you can call him about Iran and the next three items, if you like.)

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fire Andrew Saul and David Black from our Social Security Administration. Why? Because they're trying to destroy Social Security from within, that's why! Because Donald Trump put them there to do just that! Always they deliberately sabotage our government and then say see? Government doesn't work! Like we're all not watching or something. Messrs. Saul and Black did eventually release that data our IRS needed to get stimulus checks out to seniors, but they only did that because we wielded the Big Stick of Bad PR against them. Maybe we should get some people in our government who don't need to be browbeaten into doing the right thing. We deserve it, after all.

Consumer Reports helps you tell President Biden to regulate the notorious plastic chemical PFAS, a chemical found in far too many things that doesn't break down very easily in our bodies or in our air and water (hence the moniker "forever chemicals"). Why not tell our Congressfolk to pass a law getting rid of PFAS, an act even these notorious Congressfolk have warmed toward in the past? Because our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) already has the authority, under the Clean Water Act, to regulate PFAS chemicals, and the EPA works for us. We don't even need to get all George Carlin ("you're a public servant -- go get me a glass of water!") on them. They can just make sure the glasses of water we get ourselves don't have so many toxins in them.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to support international sanctions against former Blackwater/Xe CEO Erik Prince. Not for bilking our government out of all that money being private contractors in Iraq, or for overseeing the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007, or for being Betsy DeVos's brother -- just for offering to give weapons and mercenaries to a would-be dictator seeking to overthrow the government of Libya, in violation of international law (which does-so matter, despite right-wingers' notions that it shouldn't). America's gotten in enough trouble for doing that, but having private citizens do it would be so, so much worse. We can make our government account to us, but we'll have a harder time making Erik Prince account to us -- unless we enlist our government to help us in that aim.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, the right to organize, paid sick leave, and the global gag rule.

Have you heard that Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) told an oil corporation executive, to his face, that he shouldn't lie to her that oil and gas corporations don't get special treatment in our federal tax code? More of our Congressfolk should do that! And they should also do as Rep. Porter did, and list the precise benefits big fossil fuel drillers get from our tax code! Just so happens Rep. Porter has introduced H.R. 1517, the Ending Taxpayer Welfare for Oil and Gas Companies Act, which would (among other good works!) raise royalty rates paid back to the taxpayer by the fossil fuel corporations when they drill on public lands. Too many right-wingers get away with saying we have to lower these royalty rates "to create jobs," but what they're really saying is that we have to bilk the taxpayer out of money we deserve "to create jobs" -- only so the executives can pocket the extra money and not create the jobs! H.R. 1517 merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators today. They'll never see it coming, and we know how well they do with things they don't see coming.

Meanwhile, H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act, passed the House earlier this week, not long after Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) exhorted his Republican colleagues to "stop talking about Dr. Seuss, and start working with us on behalf of the American workers," a statement that's as good a springboard to a Senate campaign as any. Only five House Republicans voted in favor of the PRO Act, and you can name four of them (Alaska's Don Young, I'll admit, was a mild surprise), and that doesn't bode well for its passage in the Senate, where Republicans will be able to filibuster the bill. If we make them talk through their filibuster, of course, they might wind up embarrassing themselves! And please understand by "might," I mean "will." So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Senators to help out American workers by passing the PRO Act. The PRO Act will help workers like those brave Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, AL, organize for better pay and better working conditions, and why shouldn't we help them do that? Because prices might go up a few pennies? Gosh, don't be that person.

In other news, we should celebrate the passage of the American Rescue Plan, but good Americans still don't have paid sick leave and paid family leave, unless, of course, they belong to a union, and their union bargained and won those things -- or if another employer tried to forestall unionization by granting those things to their workers pre-emptively! Seriously, some bosses do treat their workers well out of the goodness of their hearts, but they're rarer than a T-206 Honus Wagner card, so I wouldn't lay money on that happening if I were you. And, hello! There's a pandemic happening, which increases everyone's need for paid sick leave, to take care of both themselves and their families! Hence Moms Rising helps you tell our government we need a national paid sick leave program, post-haste. We're about the only rich country on Earth that doesn't have one, and that's nothing to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. They're going to say there's "no money" to do that, what with this $1.9 trillion bill we just passed, but they're full of soup -- CEOs still make millions of dollars, and corporations make billions in profits, so the politicians can do it if they just have the will.

Finally, H.R. 656/S. 142, the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (or HER) Act, would prevent our President from keeping taxpayer aid out of the hands of foreign non-governmental organizations (or NGOs) just because they provide abortion -- if abortion is legal in the United States and legal in the nation(s) the NGOs operate. This is what the "global gag rule" is all about; Republican Presidents institute it early in their terms, while Democratic Presidents rescind it early in theirs. But shouldn't the taxpayer get a say over where their money goes? right-wingers ask. Strange how they never asked that question when Tha Bush Mobb was using my taxpayer money to attack Iraq against my express wishes! But this is why we have representative government -- if every taxpayer had veto power over every spending initiative, nothing would get done, and even worse, we would never learn how to live together in a community or a civilization. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote women's health and freedom by passing the Global HER Act.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning public lands, right-wing media, racism in health care, and saving our Post Office.

Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell President Biden to stop leasing and permitting for coal operations on our public lands. President Biden has lately put a stop to oil and gas drilling on public lands, but he's strangely left coal out, possibly calculating that he can't lose a single vote in a state like Pennsylvania in 2024, but possibly also calculating that coal, as an industry, is going south and doesn't need another punch in the face right now. But I would say building out renewable energy operations on public lands would be a smarter political move, as well as a smarter move generally. If coal corporations are crashing one by one, they hardly represent a threat to the political order, though their displaced workers might. But we can retrain them to rebuild a renewable energy infrastructure a whole lot more easily than we can "teach them to code." Construction and coding are different skills, after all. And if you really want to "build back better," you also have to build back smarter.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Fox News. I'd tell them to stop advertising on Newsmax and OANN, too, but Sum of Us must smell blood in the water. Fox News, as you know, faces a $2.7 billion defamation/disparagement lawsuit from Smartmatic over some of their nefarious "election fraud" claims, a lawsuit that seems to have made right-wing news organs a little less obnoxious generally. Now you may be tempted to say haven't they suffered enough? But the answer is no, they have not suffered enough. From calling Iraq War opponents traitors to fearmongering over immigrants to whining about the deficit to whining about regulations to demanding jackboot lockstep support for police who kill black folks without a trial or even a charge to carrying Donald Trump's water for four years, Fox News has done incalculable damage to our civilization, and the only just punishment for their evil works is annihilation. Advertisers finally pulling out in large numbers might, at last, help us begin that necessary work.

In other news, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 666, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act. The bill would create a National Center for Racism and a Law Enforcement Violence Prevention Program at our Centers for Disease Control; the latter program would operate within our CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. If your right-wing friends and neighbors protest ZOMG TEH BUREAUCRACIEZ MULTIPLIEZ!!!!!, remind them that corporations have bureaucracies, too, and maybe a bureaucracy dedicated to researching (and ultimately helping to prevent) the health care burdens we all know folks of color bear in America, and the unique amount of violence done to folks of color by our police isn't such a bad bureaucracy after all. Folks of color are less likely to be paid well, less likely to have health insurance, and more likely to live near a landfill, so we ought to do something about that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to appoint four decent human beings to our United States Postal Service's Board of Governors -- four decent human beings who might then decide to do the only decent thing and fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy -- then MoveOn still helps you do that. Just about every American who gets mail (i.e., every American) can testify, using only their own recent experiences, that he's not doing a good job, but I expect the right-wing media will whine that he's being "targeted" (or "hunted"!) by nefarious forces like us, even though we're really not "nefarious" -- we just want our Post Office to run well, as our Constitution guarantees. If I had a dollar for every lousy boss I've ever had I might not have to work another day, and I suspect most Americans (again, from sad experience) are at least as good at telling a good boss from a bad one as I am. But we certainly shouldn't tolerate bad leadership from our Post Office.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, COVID vaccines, and pollution.

You've been hearing for weeks now that our Congressfolk are "negotiating" a COVID stimulus bill, that some want to include stimulus checks and some don't, that some want to get it done before the end of 2020 and some don't, but, really, all they have to do to get good Americans the relief we deserve is pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, so go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to do that. The HEROES Act would fund COVID testing and tracing, states and localities suffering from lost tax revenues, and our Post Office, plus it would repeal that notorious tax-cut-for-the-rich they snuck into the CARES Act and would cut working Americans another stimulus check (a bigger one than the CARES Act did). Really, if you want your Senators to pass the HEROES Act, best thing to do is to say the HEROES Act will cut us bigger checks than anything you're proposing now. And don't get caught up in thinking we have to do something now, because that's how they get you to settle for less than you deserve. You deserve the HEROES Act -- at the very least!

Meanwhile, Pfizer's new COVID vaccine stands to make them a crap-ton of money, but a big reason for that is it's damn expensive -- it sold 100 million doses (which would inoculate 50 million people) to our government at $20/dose, and maybe that doesn't sound like a lot, but let's see what it charges retail, and remember that in a lot of the world, folks don't make $20 a day, and they do have other things to buy besides a COVID vaccine. Like, you know, food and shelter. Astra-Zeneca, which is a bit behind Pfizer and Moderna in putting a decent COVID vaccine together, has already pledged to sell its vaccine in lower-income nations at a massive discount. You'd think Pfizer would do the same, having just raked in $2 billion from our government and more from others, but apparently not, hence Sum of Us helps you tell Pfizer to (guess what) put people over profits and supply their vaccine to lower-income countries for less money. It's really for all of us -- if richer nations get everyone vaccinated but poorer nations don't, then we haven't really beaten COVID, have we?

Finally, the big banks say they won't fund oil or gas drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, but our Office of the Comptroller of the Currency aims to put a stop to that: they've proposed a rule that would force banks to fund customers (like fossil fuel drilling corporations) solely on the basis of those customer's "individual risk," and not some "categorical exclusion," like, you know, whether the project will promote pollution. Some folks have called banks' refusal to fund fossil fuel drilling "discrimination," and others have even compared it to redlining. Compare, if you can, "refusing to fund a big fossil fuel project" with "not letting black folks move into your neighborhood." You can't. Our politicians love "free" markets right up to the point it stops working to their liking -- or, more precisely, their big donors' liking. And they also think good folks wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR is "terrorism." Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Office of the Comptroller to reject this wrong-headed plan to force banks to fund fossil fuel projects.

Action: concerning vaccines, pollution, and "conversion therapy."

The Hero Action Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to make any COVID-19 vaccine free for all Americans. Not just because life is precious, but because the more people get immunized, the quicker we'll kill this disease, and the big pharma corporations shouldn't worry -- I'm sure this isn't the last time we'll need a COVID vaccine. But, you know, Pfizer took a few hundred million Euros to make its vaccine, and Moderna only spent American taxpayer money on theirs, so we should, in fact, get to say what happens with these vaccines. One might respond that these corporations only made those vaccines so they could make money -- and given how little interest big corporations have ever shown in an ebola vaccine, one might be right. But civilized people cannot reasonably put money at the core of every single public welfare decision. That's what our government has done for decades now, and we need to change that.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf to reject the proposed Gibbstown, NJ natural gas export terminal. Mr. Wolf, as Governor, sits on the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) and has the authority to stop this project, which would receive liquefied natural gas transported over rail and truck from Wyalusing, PA and send it overseas, which sure is a strange way of promoting energy independence. Of course, it's also a bad way of promoting "a new energy future" -- a better way would be to go all-in on renewable energy sources, because even though (as Ralph Nader used to say) you can't own the sun, you can own the infrastructure that converts it into electricity. But shipping 3.5 million gallons of liquified gas every single day is an accident waiting to happen, and that accident will pollute our land, our air, and our clean water. So we know what we have to do.

Finally, Change.org provides two petitions which help you protect gay and/or transgender kids: one helps you tell Alabama legislators to reject HB 1, which would actually make it illegal to give health care services to transgender children, while the other helps you tell Pennsylvania legislators to pass HB 1293, which would ban "conversion therapy" there. It's pretty simple: the science tells us that "tough love" for transgender kids (which is what HB 1 supporters obviously prefer) only makes their anxiety, depression, and suicidal wishes much worse, and the science also tells us that "conversion therapy" (which HB 1293 would ban) isn't therapy, or even science. Hate to pile on, but Alabama does worse than most American states in providing mental health care to children to begin with, and "conversion therapy" includes such "therapies" as naked touching, re-enacting sexual abuse, and shock therapy, and why would civilized folks allow these things to happen?

Action: concerning good House bills, election ethics, and drilling on public lands.

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Remember: don't get discouraged, because that's how they want you to feel. Indeed, the only reason they have the power they do is because so many Americans are discouraged. But when we fight through our discouragement, and we act, we make good things happen.

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell our Senate Ethics Committee to investigate Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for allegedly trying to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to throw out legally-cast votes in that state. Joe Biden won Georgia by a slim margin, as you know, but Sen. Graham sure seems to have done his part to contribute to all the tall tales about "voter fraud." How did Jaime Harrison raise $100 million and still lose to Mr. Graham by 10 points, huh? Should we take that result as evidence of actual voter fraud in South Carolina? Of course not (we should take it as evidence that Mr. Harrison wasn't such a good candidate!), so let's not imagine that any result we don't like must be "fraud," certainly not without evidence, which Mr. Graham has not provided. Our soon-to-be-ex-President sure does turn everything he touches to dung, doesn't he? Mr. Graham, once upon a time, was the first Senator to condemn the abuses at Abu Ghraib, but now he sucks up to a man he derided not too long ago.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President-elect Biden to keep his promise to ban fossil fuel drilling on public lands, then Wild Earth Guardians still helps you do that. Yes, Mr. Biden did promise to ban fracking and oil drilling on public lands, though not private lands; I suppose he could work around his promise by selling off as much public land as he can to oil and gas drilling corporations, but we'll deal with that if it comes to that. And certainly we should concentrate on renewable energy production, not fossil fuel production that pollutes our air and water. I would advocate that our government get back into the utility business by creating renewable energy utilities that can compete with the privately-held utilities that won't do what's necessary to fight pollution and climate change. Maybe Joe Biden doesn't want to do that; certainly Mitch McConnell doesn't want to do that. But when we make our will unmistakable, it doesn't matter what the politicians want. So let's get to it.

Action: concerning police brutality, media consolidation, and Arctic drilling.

A new Administration comes to power in January, so Grassroots Law helps you tell the Biden-Harris team to do everything they can to stop racist police brutality. Grassroots Law has a good list of demands, and these include reopening police brutality cases left unsolved, ending the 1033 program that sends military weapons to police departments, repeal the Muslim ban and family separation policies, and getting more public defenders and civil rights attorneys involved in our Justice Department's work. A Biden-Harris Administration can accomplish most of this through executive order, without running to Great and Bounteous Real American President Mitch McConnell (or his trusty sidekick, Saint Joe Manchin of the Golden Age of Bipartisanship) for permission. And though Biden-Harris ran on most of this stuff, you know they really don't want to do it if they don't have to. But that's why we make them have to.

Meanwhile, FCC Chair Ajit Pai, who isn't very long for his job, plans to waive media ownership rules so that Fox can gobble up even more properties in the lucrative New York City media market, where Fox already owns two TV stations and the New York Post. And our FCC will only take public comments on this plan until next Friday, December 4, which is what they all do when they know the public will hate what they do. Media consolidation is one of the few issues in America where liberals and conservatives actually agree (i.e., in that they all hate it), so naturally the nominally "conservative" Mr. Pai would do the exact opposite! There's a lesson in there, somewhere. Until they learn it, Free Press helps you tell our FCC not to give out any more corporate welfare handouts to Fox. Fox will probably tell you it just can't compete with Newsmax, OANN, etc. without more handouts, but if it can't compete with those clowns, it deserves to die.

Finally, just about every big banking corporation in America has declared that it won't fund any drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) -- except for Bank of America. Sigh. Of course it's Bank of America! And it'll only take one well-funded (as far as we know!) bankster to ruin a stretch of public land the size of South Carolina. (No, really. Alaska is a really, really big place; people don't get how big it is.) And drilling for oil and gas in ANWR will not only ruin land home to the Gwich'in people and unique species of animals, it won't get us anywhere near as much oil as ANWR drilling proponents would like you to think. And once that oil's burned, and all that money gets spent, there really will be nothing left -- unless we fight to keep what's really important. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell Bank of America to abandon plans to fund Arctic drilling.

Around the table: in which we are reminded what we must do to "push Biden left."

Kevin A. Young at TruthOut instructs us that "To Push Biden Left, We Must Build Movements to Challenge His Corporate Backers." The article draws from Mr. Young's book, Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It; historical examples include the civil rights movement boycotting local businesses in the '60s (which prompted them to pressure politicians), while more recent examples include all the massive civil disobedience (and pressuring of investors) that have stopped a lot of fossil fuel projects cold. Conclusion: "the best way to get better electoral outcomes is, ironically, to build strong non-electoral movements." Certainly we'll do better better donating to union strike funds than to center-right Democratic candidates like Amy McGrath who'll just light your money on fire while losing big.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Amazon uses Pinkerton operatives to spy on their workers. Which proves, yet again, that giving corporations more money doesn't magically cause them to "create jobs," but it just gives them more money to light on fire desperately trying to keep their workers from organizing for better pay and better working conditions. (Also, too, Pinkerton? Like we're all in an episode of Deadwood or Boardwalk Empire!)

Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker talks with Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy, who claims that our soon-to-be-ex-President's "voter fraud" lies are actually good for his channel. This Isaac Chotiner fellow is damn good at his job -- his interrogation of Mr. Ruddy is almost as good as his interrogation of that COVID "contrarian" from March. I can only add that Mr. Ruddy's claim that Newsmax gets "one million people per minute" is a pretty useless statistic if the million people who are watching Newsmax the next minute are, as I suspect, the same damn people. Why, I might even call it a scare number.

Can it possibly be true that our soon-to-be-ex-President really thinks his lawyers arguing so badly before numerous federal courts are "fools" who "are making him look bad"? I mean, that ship has long sailed, has it not? But when you realize that he thinks laws are for us "little people" and he also thinks any fecal argument can be polished into gold if you just inject more money and more red-faced yelling into it, you can sort of see how he can blame everyone but yourself. You may have more trouble seeing how people who call themselves conservative still give their devotion to a man who always chooses chaos over order.

Finally, Carl Bernstein, who helped take down Richard Nixon with his Watergate reporting at the Washington Post, says that no less than 21 Republican Senators have "repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for" our soon-to-be-ex-President, though only a few have expressed that "extreme contempt" publicly. Out of those 21 Senators, I see 12 up for re-election in 2022; I sincerely hope Democrats don't try to ratfuck those races by pointing out these Senators' infidelity to Dear Leader, because that wouldn't be very civil of them, now, would it? (Sadly, I fear I have just explained exactly why Democrats would never do such a thing.)

Around the table: in which our soon-to-be-ex-President can't stop embarrassing himself.

No, our Army did not "seize" a server from a German corporation in Frankfurt that switched enough votes to "throw" the election. Forget that our Army has denied the story, or that the corporation in question is Spanish and doesn't have a server (or an office!) in Frankfurt and that 97% of American counties don't even use their product -- you should know it's all rubbish when the Congressdolt promoting the story says things like "I don't know the truth" and "(t)here are some that believe," let alone that he uses the passive voice ("there was a German tweet" -- Jesus Mary and Joseph he's not even confident enough in his own lies to say "a German tweeted"). But I guess when you see a big map of America on the TV showing our soon-to-be-ex-President "winning" California, you don't have to think anymore.

Ryan Grim at The Intercept reminds us that "Joe Biden Doesn’t Need the Senate to Boost the Economy and Tackle Climate Change." As President, Mr. Biden can a) wipe out $50,000 of student debt, which could free up some $400 per debtor per month to stimulate our economy; b) prevent corporations from designating their workers as "managers" willy-nilly, which would enable more of those workers to collect overtime pay; c) taking pot off Schedule I, which would stimulate a lot of pot-growing businesses around the nation; and d) use the Financial Stability Oversight Council (created by the Dodd-Frank bank reform bill) to stop investment in fossil fuels. And of course, how much of this he'll actually do isn't just up to him: it's also up to us.

I'm generally pleased to see our "liberal" media noting, as our soon-to-be-ex-President formally requests a recount in Georgia, that Georgia just did a damn recount. Perhaps he's thinking that since he cut into Mr. Biden's lead by 1,500 votes during the last recount, he'll win Georgia if he can just get them to do nine more recounts! It sure is a good thing he's laser-focused on his own election loss, rather than something like everyone and their grandmother getting COVID-19.

Don't trouble yourself over the "backlash" against Tucker Carlson's criticism of Sidney Powell's fever-dream "stolen election" narrative that has so far failed in nearly every one of over three dozen court cases. When right-wingers "fight," it's always drama, and bad drama at that. Tucker Carlson will be back in right-wingers' good graces even if OAN, for example, takes over from Fox News as "the" place for right-wingers to run and hide from facts and good arguments. (Also, too, when Rush Limbaugh's spokeshack asks about "the 'evidence' the election was fair," he's displaying an ignorance of how our legal system works -- the burden of proof is always on the folks who accuse unfairness, for reasons we're seeing play out in those aforementioned three dozen court cases -- and I'm sure this display is solely for show.)

Speaking of our Administration's repeated failures in court, District Judge Matthew Brann's dismissal of our soon-to-be-ex-President's complaint aiming to keep Pennsylvania from certifying election results reads rather like a father trying his damnedest to be extremely patient with a toddler having a tantrum. Dig the part where Judge Brann says he's not listening to another damn "amended" filing because it's just going to be the same damn filing! OK, I'm paraphrasing, but Judge Brann's opinion does read rather like Judge Jones's 2005 decision preventing the Dover school district from teaching "intelligent design" in science classes. Either one could have typed "how dare you waste my time with your frivolous lawsuit" over and over for 35 pages and you still would've gotten the jist.

Finally, when you hear our soon-to-be-ex-President whining on Twitter that Mr. Biden is trying to put together a Cabinet "so quickly" "when my investigators have found hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes," you, again, have to wonder why his legal team hasn't shown evidence of "hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes" to judges in, again, over three dozen lawsuits. And please understand that by "you have to wonder why" I mean "pimp ain't got no damn evidence, that's why."

Action: concerning the HEROES Act and drilling on public lands.

Today's a good day to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. Why is today a goodday? Because President-elect Biden said on Monday, at a press conference I would otherwise have ignored, that "Congress should come together and pass a COVID relief package like the HEROES Act that the House passed six months ago." Not even "a COVID relief package like the HEROES Act the House passed two months ago," but the much better one, passed back in May. That's a signal, folks! The May version of the HEROES Act spent more money, to be sure, but that's what you do when your economy's in trouble, you can print your own money, and your government won't fall anytime soon -- and not to beat a dead horse, but our government could also tax the rich a lot harder and not have as much debt. And we do need the May HEROES Act, not just because it'd fund testing and tracing, but because it'd help out states and localities that can't just print their own money (or even go into debt to dig out of trouble!).

Meanwhile, Food and Water Watch helps you tell President-elect Biden to ban all fossil fuel extraction on public lands, which would fulfill one of his campaign promises. Wait, you've heard that Joe Biden wouldn't ban fracking? Well, he wouldn't ban fracking on private land, but said he would on public lands, like our national parks and wilderness areas. You'd think we wouldn't be drilling there now, but we are, and not only are we doing that, we're failing to collect the royalties we deserve as taxpayers. I mean, it's not a "job-creation" strategy to make oil and gas drilling corporations pay a pittance to drill on public lands, it's a "take food out of good Americans' mouths" strategy, since those royalties would pay for services we all need. Best in any case to tax the rich a lot harder and keep fossil fuel drillers from polluting our public lands, which are ours, after all.

Finally, our soon-to-be-ex-President, seeing the writing on the wall, is rushing to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) to oil drilling. Now that's a hell of a legacy to take to the pearly gates! Yes, Lord, I did ensure that oil drillers polluted a pristine area so that oil executives could make even more money! No, that's really why he's doing it -- it's not for "jobs," and anyway why wouldn't our government create jobs by building out renewable energy infrastructure, so that the workers who helped build it and thus reduced pollution and helped avoid the more calamitous aspects of climate change can tell future generations I helped do that? Because our soon-to-be-ex-President doesn't care about the future and doesn't care about anything but bosses making more money, that's why. The rest of us can tell our Department of Interior to reject lease sales in the Arctic, as the Alaska Wilderness League helps you do.

Around the table: in which we contemplate, again, what "law and order" *should* look like.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy runs down some of the tax-related ballot initiatives from the 2020 election. Successes? Arizona voted to raise taxes on the rich to fund education and Louisiana voted to hike taxes on oil corporations through more realistic tax assessments. Failures? Illinois voters rejected a tax hike on richer folks, and California voters rejected better property tax assessments likely leading to higher property taxes and thus better education funding, both showing us that their reputation as liberal states is somewhat unearned. These results remind us, again, that we need to better persuade more economically-minded voters to vote for their own interests -- an effort mainstream Democrats won't help, with their arrogant belief that "just teaching everyone to write code" will solve all our problems.

Another big pharma corporation, Moderna, reports excellent results on its Phase 3 clinical trials. It's easier to store than Pfizer's vaccine (though that doesn't mean it's easy to store!), but Moderna only plans to offer 20 million doses in the U.S., which means, again, that the poor won't get it. These aren't the only two vaccines in progress, though, and the more corporations come forward with good news about their vaccines, the more like a conspiracy nut our President will sound when he whines that THEYZ DELAYEDZ TEH NEWZES TO PREVENTZ MYZ GLORIOUSEZ VICTORIEZ!!!!! (If you're the winner he claims to be, of course, you should overcome whatever anyone does to you pretty easily.)

Uh oh: Pfizer's CEO apparently dumped over $5 million in stock on the very day his corporation gave us the good news in re its COVID vaccine. I mean, I might have held onto that stock if the vaccine is as good as Pfizer says it is -- unless he knows something we don't! Which, of course, would be information he wouldn't be allowed to trade on! I'm old enough to remember when the appearance of immorality would be enough to stop someone from doing something immoral, but please, right-wingers, tell us again how immorality is all about birth control and gay marriage and transgender folk.

Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito sure did work up a lather in his speech before the Federalist Society last week, and his right-wing defenders can't say well nothing he said should come as a surprise to anyone who's attended his rulings, since they've always said their judges don't impose their worldviews on their rulings! I kid, of course -- right-wingers will say whatever they think will shut you up. Could this rant against gay marriage and mask-wearing and the "right" to trample on other people's rights as long as you invoke God's name be a sign that he's getting tired of it all and might retire? He is 71, after all, and maybe he won't want to wait until 2024.

Here's a surprising announcement: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer revokes a permit allowing Canadian corporation Enbridge's Line 5 fossil fuel pipelines to run underneath the straits connecting two of our Great Lakes, citing "persistent and incurable violations" by Enbridge. Now that's what law and order looks like -- if people think of law and order in terms of "protecting one-fifth of the world's fresh water" rather than "shooting unarmed black folks in the street when they brandish a cellphone," then my work on Earth will be done. And to those who would whine BUTZ WHEREZ WILLZ TEH ENURGEEZ COMEZ FROMZ!!!!, I'd say, hey, this is America, the can-do country, so just do it.

Finally, some other good news: U.S. District Court Judge invalidates our Department of Homeland Security's suspension of new Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) applications, on the grounds that current acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf "was not lawfully serving as Acting Secretary of Homeland Security under the HSA (Homeland Security Act) when he issued the Wolf Memorandum." The judge also wrote that "(t)he court wishes the Government well in trying to find its way out of this self-made thicket," which is judgespeak for "how dare you waste my valuable time." (Though this may explain how Mr. Wolf found the "courage" to refuse to fire DHS's cybersecurity chief at our President's behest -- if Mr. Wolf is in his job illegally in the first place, then literally nothing he does means anything anyway.)

Action: concerning immigration, voting rights, and fracking.

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

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

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

Action: concerning violence against protestors, renewable energy, and public water.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: good Nigerian citizens raise their voices in protest of their government's violence against them, only to be met with more violence. While our President must be saying if only that could be me!, sane, moral, and decent people say there ain't nothing a protestor can do that warrants being shot to death on the street or disappeared into a labyrinthine court system. (And when your right-wing friends and neighbors whine BUT TEH LOOTERZ!!!!, you can remind them that a lot of these looters are agents provocateurs like the gas-masked Nazi wannabe who hammered away at the Minneapolis AutoZone.) Naturally the Nigerian government, having studied how bigger countries do it, calls their gang of thugs the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, because who supports robbery? Typical of tyrants, to pretend they're doing it for you when they're doing it to you. Thus CAPPA helps you tell international criminal courts to investigate the violence Nigeria commits against its people.

Meanwhile, the fifth anniversary of the biggest gas blowout in American history, at SoCalGas's Aliso Canyon storage facility in Los Angeles, just passed -- well, the fifth anniversary of its beginning, at least, since SoCal didn't finally plug the leak until almost four months later, meaning good Californians were breathing in all those toxins all that time. California suffers worse droughts and wildfires every year, while still producing two-thirds of our country's fruits and nuts and another third of our country's vegetables, so why does California push more gas production? "Cheap fuel," I guess, but it ain't cheap if you'll have no food, water, or earth in the foreseeable future. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell California to phase out of fossil fuels and shift toward renewables. And don't tolerate the retorts that "you see more solar panels in Cali than anywhere else" -- the big utility corporations, which make most of Cali's power, won't shift to renewable energy unless we make them.

Finally, notorious public water-mongering corporation Nestlé plans to sell all its North American bottled water operations, which means the Big Stick of Bad PR has worked! But it also means we need to make the Big Stick of Bad PR work against whichever corporation (or corporations!) buy up Nestlé's water operations -- which may include Coke and/or Pepsi -- so Sum of Us helps you tell Nestlé and/or whichever corporations buy up its water operations to give back the public water that really belongs to good folks in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, California, and Ontario. I've said it before and I'll say it again: bottled water is a scam, and in those rare places bottled water is cleaner than public water -- like, say, Flint -- then local governments need to improve their public water delivery systems, not sell them to private corporations that'll jack up the price of water so good folks can't afford it. Clean water is the cornerstone of health care on this planet -- but only if we can keep it.

Action: concerning good House bills, internet privacy, and methane emissions.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yeah, our Senate only wants to put another right-wing stooge on our Supreme Court, and we'll get to that, but we still must remind them of their duty to do right by us.

Meanwhile, if you're wary of how much personal data big tech corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple collect from you, and you should be wary, then Consumer Reports helps you tell your legislators and regulators to do a much better job protecting our personal data. You'll recall that our FCC actually issued pretty good regulations that protected consumer privacy on the internet, but the last Congress couldn't crap all over that effort fast enough, moving quickly to repeal those regulations via the notorious "resolution of disapproval" process. The Consumer Reports petition asks that consumers get more control over their personal data, that corporations be more transparent about their use of that data, and that corporations don't get monopoly control over our internet. Our FCC may not be able to issue new regulations about the matter (yet another unfortunate aspect of the "resolution of disapproval" process), but nothing prevents our Congressfolk from passing bills about the matter. Well, nothing but their own cowardice or avarice, but what else is new?

Finally, our EPA just rolled back Obama-era regulations preventing big oil and gas drilling corporations from leaking methane into the air, and this rollback offends on so many levels -- it causes more pollution, it makes climate change worse, it wastes usable energy, and it deprives good Americans of royalties when it occurs on public lands. But, hey, some bossman somewhere gets to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, so it's another round of "screw the people" for this Administration. And you know how right-wingers always say they'll just pass the costs of regulations on to the little guy? Well, the "little guy" winds up bearing the costs of methane emissions in all the ways described in the first sentence -- we lose royalties, we pay more for health care because of pollution, and we eventually don't get a livable planet to inhabit because methane emissions pack a much, much higher climate change punch than even coal emissions. That never makes it into the right's "cost-benefit analysis"; as I've said, they only care about the "cost" or "benefit" to executive paychecks. Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to do whatever it takes to roll back yet another Administration rollback.

Action: concerning good House bills, bad methane regulations, and bad corporate acquisitions.

Happy Tuesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Do I "keep saying the same thing"? Yes, I do, if what I keep saying is the right thing. Let our Senators listen to anyone but their big donors for once, and then I'll count the colors in my garden. Until then, it's hammertime.

Meanwhile, our Administration has formally weakened methane emission regulations, by repealing requirements that oil and gas corporations install the technology that would detect and repair methane leaks. Ugh, one more time: methane packs a much bigger climate-change punch than even coal emissions, leaked methane is a waste of usable energy, and leaked methane also deprives the taxpayer of royalties if said leaking occurs on public lands. But what's all that pollution and waste and lost revenue next to gas drilling corporation executives being able to gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes? Seriously, that's all our Administration's new rule does: hand out welfare to corporations and rich people. Like everything else they do! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to block this Administration's new methane emissions rule. Congress would have to accomplish this by passing a "resolution of disapproval," and you may be tempted to wait until a new President and a new Senate come into office, but I wouldn't count on that, and anyway, our duty is always to do the right thing right now.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to block the proposed sale of DNA-collecting corporation Ancestry to big private equity corporation Blackstone, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Hopefully I've identified the problem with the proposed sale by identifying what each of these corporations does -- it's bad enough that big corporations get their grubby hands so deep in your investments, so you certainly would not want their grubby hands in your private information, and your DNA is as private as it gets. And I do not accept the notion that "you give your DNA to someone to help figure out where you came from and you take your chances." Why must it be like that? Because the internet's a big place? Because the "free" market is sacred? I'm so old-fashioned I only think doing what's right is sacred, and letting big corporations buy your DNA info is wrong. And I've never believed the internet is "too big to civilize," no matter how much Our Glorious Elites want you to believe it. And I always choose civilization over chaos.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, our Post Office, Arctic drilling, and corporate welfare.

Happy Monday, good Americans! Now would be a good time to call your Senators (whose phone numbers you can find using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page, or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and H.R. 8015, the Delivering for America Act. At this writing, 122 days have passed since our House passed the HEROES Act, even though the HEROES Act would do everything a decent COVID-19 relief bill should do, like fund testing and tracing, extend enhanced unemployment benefits, and issue another round of stimulus checks. But, alas, Republicans hold our Senate, and the only thing Mob Boss Mitch McConnell knows how to do is stamp his foot and say no. The Delivering for America Act, which would roll back the changes our Postmaster General made to wreck our Post Office, has been awaiting a Senate vote for a somewhat shorter length of time, but this is no less shameful, considering the 2020 election could be at stake. So keep calling your Senators, because shame is all that'll get them to act. No, it works; I've seen it work before.

Meanwhile, opening ANWR to oil drilling was one of the "accomplishments" of the 2017 tax "reform," and our President has lately announced plans to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR). But bad politicians have been trying to open up ANWR to oil drilling corporations for decades, and at this writing five of America's six largest banks have said they won't fund any drilling efforts there. Whether that's because drilling on public lands is rather unpopular or because the big banks know there won't be enough oil in ANWR to justify the effort, I couldn't say. I can say, however, that the notorious Bank of America is the big bank that has not said they won't fund drilling efforts in ANWR, hence the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell Bank of America to reject the funding of Arctic oil drilling projects. Not just for the caribou or for the Gwich'in people, but also for the waste of effort -- it's just not worth destroying ANWR just so a few oil corporation executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Believe me, that's all that's going to come from ANWR drilling. Well, that and pollution and disruption of ancestral homelands.

Finally, H.R. 7781, the End Polluter Welfare Act, would increase royalties for drilling on public lands, prevent our government from offering "royalty relief" to big drilling corporations, repeal liability limits when oil and gas drillers pollute our lands, end new federally-funded fossil fuel research, stop internationally-sourced funding from going to fossil fuel projects in America, and get rid of a bunch of "tax incentives" toward fossil fuel development -- among many, many other things. Seriously, giving fossil fuel corporations welfare handouts would be a little like giving the New York Yankees extra money every year so that they can "stay competitive." Fossil fuel subsidies currently outstrip renewable subsidies by about 2 to 1; this, when renewable energy actually needs taxpayer help precisely because the fossil fuel corporations are so big they can stamp out alternatives. And if you've attended the fact that our West Coast is presently on fire, you know we need those alternatives post-haste. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support sane energy policy by passing the End Polluter Welfare Act.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, clean water, law and order, and corporate welfare.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your U.S. Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. The HEROES Act is actual good stimulus legislation that would help fund states and localities, fund contact tracing so we can get a better handle on this pandemic, expand tax credits for working families (and repeal a massive corporate welfare handout for hedge fund managers), fund our Post Office so it can continue to do the good work it does which could very well include delivering your votes on Election Day, extend enhanced unemployment benefits for the tens of millions of Americans who will likely still need it after it expires at the end of next month, and provide bigger stimulus checks for good Americans making less than six figures. What is the reason for not passing this bill? It sure ain't THE DEFICITZ!!!!!, because our President proved with his 2017 tax "reform" that he can blow up deficits quite well, thank you very much. And that was before the corporate welfare-laden CARES Act passed! So let's spend our money on some good things for once.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that Consumer Reports found an awful lot of arsenic in Whole Foods-manufactured bottled water brand Starkey Spring Water -- it almost had the federal limit of 10 parts of arsenic per billion, and if you're saying, "well, it's still under the limit," remember that a) getting just under the federal limit for some poison or other is no reason to high-five oneself and b) all the other bottled water brands Consumer Reports tested finished with fewer than three parts per billion. Of course, any bottled water testing high for arsenic is quite ironic, since the big corporations have been telling us for years that bottled water is "healthier" than tap water; that the biggest health food chain in the nation sells it is just gravy. Now, I'd rather bottled water didn't exist at all, but if we must have it, it really shouldn't make us sick. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell Whole Foods (and its parent corporation, Amazon) to protect its customers and stop selling Starkey Spring Water.

In other news, Moms Rising helps you tell your Mayors and Governors to help break the "school to prison pipeline" by getting police officers out of our public schools. As I've said, we use police officers as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization -- we put cops in schools before we put counselors in schools; we put cops in schools before we put social workers in schools; hell, we put cops in schools before we put nurses in schools! And no police officer, no matter how great, can wear that many hats. The science instructs us that schools with actual professionals like the three I listed above not only have fewer disciplinary incidents and suspend and expel their students less; they also show higher academic achievement and higher graduation rates, both of which you kinda want from a school. Not for nothing, but the kids in these schools also have less fear that a police officer will pre-judge you based on school and harass you repeatedly when you get out of school. So let's do the right thing, both for kids and for cops.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6707/S. 3611, the Resources for Workforce Investments, Not Drilling (or ReWIND) Act, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. The ReWIND Act would impose a moratorium on new gas and oil leasing (and drilling permits), prevent any banks that fed at the CARES Act trough from embarking upon new fossil fuel-related investments for the next two years, and ban our President from hoarding unneeded oil at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The bill would also roll back our President's recent drilling royalty cuts; these cuts mean the American people get less money from big fossil fuel corporations in exchange for the privilege of drilling on public lands. Our President casts this as a way of "stimulating the economy," but you'd be more accurate describing it as "corporate welfare" -- or, more pungently but no less precisely, as "our President taking food out of our mouths." Too harsh? Too bad: the truth is always harsh, though it always leaves us as better people.

Action: concerning good pandemic legislation, medical supplies, stock trading, and drilling royalties.

The House passed H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, last Friday night, but the Republican-held Senate has described the bill as "dead on arrival," even though (as a pair of ITEP analyses instructs us) the HEROES Act is a lot more like a good pandemic relief bill than the CARES Act. The HEROES Act provides help for states and localities, extends unemployment insurance, expands the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC), funds our Post Office through an election during which they'll be quite busy, repeals a particularly noxious tax-cut-for-the-rich, and expands direct payments to Americans making less than six figures. So now would be a good time to call your Senators and demand they pass the HEROES Act -- not least so that we render irrelevant Republican "priorities" like a payroll tax-cut-for-the-rich and "blanket immunity" for corporations that open too early. Senators should only find their constituents' will relevant, but let's not give them the excuse that we never communicated that will.

Meanwhile, we've all seen how our President likes to hijack medical supplies, to the point where hospitals have marked trucks containing medical supplies as food trucks so the feds wouldn't take them. But now comes S. 3627, the Medical Supply Transparency and Delivery Act, which would help bring an end to this Wild West state of affairs by requiring our government to coordinate requests for medical supplies from states and localities, establish fair pricing for these supplies, and communicate with states and localities a whole hell of a lot better than they've been doing. Don't suppose we shouldn't leave such matters to our federal government, particularly this one, but COVID-19 doesn't respect state boundaries, as all those too-early-reopening red states are finding out as we speak, amirite? So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to help get medical supplies where they're needed by passing the Medical Supply Transparency and Delivery Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. We've long heard that our leaders don't need to follow the rules because they can be trusted to do the right thing, but that's un-American, if I may be blunt -- our duty as Americans demands that we never "trust" our leaders, but always hold them to the high standards that come with their leadership positions! Of course, with our current President apparently running a months-long seminar in How Not to Lead, I guess it's easy to see how we got confused. But with the FBI now formally investigating Sen. Burr's massive stock dump after he received a briefing on how bad COVID-19 was about to be, and with too many other members of Congress (roll call! Kelly Loeffler! James Inhofe! Dianne Feinstein! Donna Shalala!) under public scrutiny for doing similar things, we should now have enough evidence that we can't trust our leaders to place our interests above their own.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Interior Secretary to stop cutting the royalties that oil and gas corporations must pay to drill on public lands, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. One fine day -- preferably after we support renewable energy much better than we currently do -- we won't allow any pollution on public lands! But until then, they shouldn't pay less to the taxpayer (i.e., you) for the privilege! That's right, when gas and oil corporations get to drill on the land that belongs to the American people, they have to pay the American people for the privilege -- which means if our government rolls back drilling royalties, they are taking food out of your mouth. No, I think that's a perfectly valid way of seeing it -- your money pays for the services you need and deserve, and when you have less money (as you would, if our Administration continues to get its way on this matter), you get fewer services or worse services. And you're an American! So you don't have to put up with that.

Action: concerning better pandemic relief legislation and better energy policy.

H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, would provide another $3 trillion in pandemic relief, and it would do a lot more good than the CARES Act did, since it would provide $500 billion in state and local assistance and $200 billion to front-line essential workers, extend unemployment benefits and student loan debt relief, fund more COVID-19 testing and tracing, give additional help to farmers and low-income renters, bolster both our Post Office and our election security, and provide another round of direct payments to Americans ($1,200 each, for up to five household members). And yet it could be better! So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Paycheck Guarantee Act in the bill, so that good Americans making up to $100,000 annually can continue to get paid and keep their health insurance coverage even after they've been laid off. And since Senate Republicans have already said they won't vote on it, you can call your Senators and tell them they should pass it. They'll never see it coming.

Of course, Senate Republicans have fixated on blanket immunity against lawsuits for corporations as pandemic "relief," though that won't resonate with a lot of good Americans, who are more likely to be a plaintiff than a defendant. Really, only a few Americans get their shorts in a bunch over TEH FRIVOLOUX LAWSUITZ!!!! But all Republicans can think about, in the middle of a pandemic that's put over 30 million good Americans out of work, is protecting big corporations from their own wrongdoing, particularly if they reopen before state/local/federal guidelines say they can. And this ain't about corporations losing lawsuits and going under -- they've got enough well-paid lawyers and it's already hard to prove wrongdoing because the Founders designed our justice system to protect the innocent. No, this is all about the hassle of fighting lawsuits, since politicians seem to care more about a rich man's hassle than a poor man's misery. But People for the American Way help you tell your Congressfolk to reject "blanket immunity" for corporations. (Alternately, you could add this to the end of your phone call to your Senators.)

Finally, this pandemic continues to show us the necessity of having clean air and a livable planet -- or so I would hope! So the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to put funding for renewable energy ahead of funding for fossil fuels, for once. Your Tea Party uncle might tell you that things like the Green New Deal are a way of sending us back to the 1800s -- you know, those halcyon days when everyone powered their washing machines and flat-screen TVs with solar panels and wind turbines! But most folks, across the political spectrum, think renewable energy will improve on our current system and promote self-reliance. And your average renewable energy setup will cause a lot less pollution than burning coal, gas, and oil does, which means cleaner air, which means more breathable air, which means less asthma and lung disease, which means fewer good Americans placed at the mercy of a COVID-19 pandemic. It also means less spending on health care -- which means renewable energy isn't just the environmentally-conscious option but also the fiscally-responsible option. How odd that more "moderate" politicians don't talk this way.

Action: concerning unemployment, energy policy, public water, and factory farms.

One of the few good things to come out of the CARES Act was an expansion of unemployment benefits; now guess what our government wants to get rid of ASAP? The benefits expire at the end of July, but given the jones so many of our elected leaders have to "reopen" the economy, we could be back in the middle of an unflattened curve by then. And some of them say it's OK if some folks die if we "reopen" the economy faster! Apparently they do not know the definition of "mammon-worship" anymore. But over 30 million folks are out of work, the official U3 unemployment rate is over 14% (and the real U6 unemployment rate, which also counts the discouraged and underemployed, is almost 23%), and not that many Americans will be rushing into Best Buy even if they all open up tomorrow, so I think we should be prudent and prepare for the likelihood that workers will be unemployed past July. Also, too, when the answer to every question is GOVERNMENT SHOULDZ DO TEH NOTHINGZ!!!!, it's well past time to look at the man in the mirror. The Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the unemployment insurance boost past its original expiration date.

Meanwhile, too many politicians want future pandemic relief legislation to include corporate welfare handouts for big oil and gas corporations, and our Administration has rolled back oil and gas royalty rates on public lands even though that's our damn money! But along comes H.R. 6707/S. 3611, the Resources for Workforce Investments, Not Drilling (or ReWIND) Act, which would keep big fossil fuel corporations from taking funds meant for working families and small businesses, roll back our President's drilling royalty cuts, block new gas and oil leases, and stop banksters from taking over any oil or gas corporations in trouble. The bill would also prevent our Administration from overstocking oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, since seizing resources and directing them to where they're not needed seems to be a pattern with this President. And if right-wingers respond by whining about the bill's "Democrat priorities," they run the risk of suggesting that preventing corruption and mismanagement is only a "Democrat priority." So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner energy policy by passing the ReWIND Act.

In other news, Nestlé plans to siphon off yet another source of public water at pennies a gallon, in order to make absurdly more expensive and not significantly more convenient bottled water -- this time at Ginnie Springs in northwestern Florida, and this though Ginnie Springs is dangerously low, and largely from overpumping. As it happens, the Suwannee River Water Management District has already heeded the thousands of public comments it received on this matter, and has thus denied Nestlé any new permits -- but Nestlé, of course, is taking the matter to court, because, as we know, corporations never ever file frivolous lawsuits! Only injured people ever do that, with the help of mustache-twirling trial lawyers! That's what right-wingers say, anyway. But big corporations don't need to take public water in order to make bottled water; rather, our state, local, and federal governments need to manage water effectively on our behalf and with the tax dollars we pay them. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell Nestlé to abandon its plans to drain Ginnie Springs merely for mammon.

Finally, H.R. 6718/S. 3221, the Farm System Reform Act, would not only ban new factory farms and the expansion of current ones, but would phase out current factory farms over the next 20 years. Factory farms aren't a more efficient way of delivering meat to consumers than small family farms: they're just a more efficient way of clogging up public waters with animal manure, and a more efficient way of redistributing income upward to executives. And they're also a more efficient way of making antibiotics useless, since some seven out of every 10 antibiotics in America still go to nominally healthy feed animals, so they produce more meat and so they better endure the squalid conditions of their imprisonment. To those who would still cite "high food prices" as a reason not to end this sordid state of affairs, we need but ask: how did Americans ever get enough to eat before factory farms came along? We did it through saner farming policy, of course, and not "big ag corporations know best" policy. So Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support better agricultural policy by passing the Farm System Reform Act.

Action: concerning internet freedom, worker safety, and conservation in Pennsylvania.

Battle for the Net helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate the net neutrality rules it repealed back in 2017. Why now? Because with more Americans working from home and more schoolkids taking classes at home, we are seeing, in real time, why we need our FCC to force internet service providers to treat all of its network traffic with equal importance. FCC Chair Ajit Pai says he's watching to make sure big telecom corporations don't just kick people off, but thanks to his own ideological predilections, he has absolutely no power to make big telecoms treat us all well! He can only beg! And begging big corporations to do the right thing sure is a great look for our government, which exists, after all, to serve us -- better to make big corporations do the right thing, and then punish them if they don't! Because if history has taught us anything, it's taught us that big corporations won't do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do -- but we get much better results if we make them do the right thing.

Meanwhile, you may not know that our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) uses private contractors to staff its call centers! And you may not know that one of them -- a corporation called Maximus, operating a CDC call center in Hattiesburg, MS -- trained 70 newly-hired employees without following physical distancing rules, and surprise, surprise! At least one got infected. And then Maximus didn't provide protecting equipment to its employees, or allow enough of them to work from home though "call center operator" seems like an obvious work-from-home job! I'd call all that irony, except for the nagging sense that irony should be subtler than that. Hence Good Jobs Nation helps you tell CDC Director Robert Redfield to ensure that all workers who answer calls for the CDC be able to keep themselves safe during this pandemic. Not for nothing, but Mr. Redfield could do that a whole lot more easily if our government didn't keep outsourcing vital services to private corporations. Our government's supposed to work for us, after all.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Commonwealth's reactionary state legislature continues taking a reaper's scythe to any government program that might actually benefit people, now with HB 1822,which aims to slash the Environmental Stewardship Fund, the Conservation District Fund, and the Keystone Recreation, Park, and Conservation Fund, and if that seems like "too many funds" to you, consider how much money our state gives away in corporate welfare to gas and coal, and consider how often legislators slash funding for good conservation programs over the years just so they can one day argue "hey, let's get rid of it, no one'll miss it." You'll miss the clean air, clean water, and parks to go hiking, fishing, and hunting in, I can guarantee you that! So let's not be like the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water who doesn't realize he's cooked until it's too late. HB 1822 has already passed the House but awaits a Senate vote, hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senator to protect conservation funding by rejecting HB 1822.

Action: concerning paid family leave, student loan debt, and mountaintop coal mining.

As Congress contemplates further pandemic-related legislation, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a national (and permanent) paid sick leave policy. Previous coronavirus-related legislation gave workers two weeks of paid sick leave if they got the coronavirus, but what of future pandemics, and what of the illnesses we pass through all the time? Tens of millions of good Americans go to work sick because they can't afford not to, and with a pandemic raging, we can't afford to have sick people working! If you're still of the mind that "real workers don't need paid sick leave," consider more carefully the economic benefits of paid sick leave! That's right, they're real, and you can measure them -- like reduced costs for employers in not having to train new employees all the time, and reduced costs of health care when folks actually taking care of themselves instead of going to work sick and infecting everyone else. And speaking of infecting everyone else, you can even measure how well paid sick leave keeps flu rates down. Even after this pandemic is done with us, we'll still need paid sick leave.

Wanna know what else Congress ought to do if they're serious about "stimulating" the economy? They ought to cancel all student loan debt, as Daily Kos helps you tell them to do. Now wait a minute, you might be saying, we don't want to give people the idea they can just run up a lot of debt and we won't make them pay it, do we? We don't, but that's not the impression cancelling student debt would give, in reality -- cancelling student debt would more likely give people the idea that colleges and banks were gouging them in the first place. 46 million good Americans have student loan payments, and they owe, between them, over $1 trillion, and paying that, plus all the interest, is a far bigger drag on the economy than most folks realize. Well, most folks who don't have student loan debt, anyway -- I'm pretty sure the good folks who put off buying houses and starting families because they still have six figures of debt understand the problem all too well. And it's about time our Congressfolk did, too.

Finally, coal is losing to gas and renewable energy and no amount of corporate welfare from our government can stop that, but they're plugging ahead anyway, planning to open East Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau, which, while not federally-protected land per se, is the largest hardwood forest on the planet, and (like many of our public lands) home to clean air, clean water, and gorgeous vistas that all Americans enjoy. But hey, some coal corporation CEO needs to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, so oh well! Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our government to reject its plan to ruin yet more of our public lands for the greater glory of coal CEOs. You know, I've just realized that I haven't said this anywhere near enough: when our government gives welfare handouts to crony corporations, you're paying for that, with your taxpayer money. Usually I hear "they're taking your money and giving it to people who don't need it" as cover for some unexamined racism; is it too much to ask that we hear it as part of a thorough examination of corporate power?

Action: concerning Social Security, pollution, and immigration.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to "scrap the cap" on income that can be taxed into Social Security. The occasion? Folks making a mere $1 million annually have already hit that income cap (about $137,700) as of yesterday, and won't be paying any more money into Social Security this year. Of course, H.R. 860/S. 269, the Social Security 2100 Act, would tax income above $400,000 as well as income below $137,700, and I wonder why that bill has to have a "donut hole" of funding. Of course I have advocated for the bill's passage, and will again, but we now have an opportunity to communicate our will that all income get taxed into the Social Security system, and thus fund benefit increases now and trust fund shortfalls in the future. We worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and we deserve to enjoy it when we retire, so don't let weakling politicians fearmonger you about it, or tell you that it's just not "possible" to demand better stewardship of it. By demanding what we want, and fighting for it, we always widen the palette of the possible.

You know how our Administration always says regulations hurt businesses with all their rules and stuff? Well, now, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) wants to scuttle rules that require corporations to demonstrate that they're financially able to clean up after their own accidents -- their oil spills, their gas leaks, their coal ash pit leaks, you know. I don't have to explain, I trust, the necessity of making sure big corporations clean up their own messes -- hey, nobody but me cleans up my messes! -- and I'm sure you can also see that this proposal amounts to corporate welfare for the coal industry in particular, an industry about to die at the hands of cheap natural gas and cheaper renewable energy sources. And of course you can also see who's going to pay to clean up their messes if they don't -- we are. You want to be an enabler of bad corporate behavior when they befoul our air and water? If not, let Public Citizen help you tell our EPA to reject its own plan to weaken accountability for polluting corporations.

Finally, our President plans to divert another $3.8 billion of defense spending toward the building of his vanity border wall -- you know the one? The one that a reciprocating saw can cut through, the one a halfway decent climber can scale, the one that an inopportune flood could cause to fall if you don't keep gates open, the one a stiff wind can knock over? I hope we still have historians who will note these ironies -- if, indeed, ironies are what they are! Is it ironic, really, that a drama king who prances and preens about immigration can't actually build a wall that can stand on its own? Do we expect better from drama kings? Do we call it ironic merely because we think so well of our country? We should keep thinking well of our country, of course, and keeping it a country of which we think well means fighting the evils our President perpetrates, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to defund our President's vanity border wall. Seriously, "national emergency" my ass.

Action: concerning endless war-making, predatory lenders, and climate change.

As the Afghanistan War enters its 19th (!) year, it's well past time for Congress to investigate the sheer folly of this effort, hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate the Afghanistan Papers, which describe how our government has been lying and BSing its way through this war for almost two decades. The Washington Post, as you may recall, obtained the "Afghanistan Papers" through a Freedom of Information Act (or FOIA) request, and published them in early December; the papers expose government officials declaring the war unwinnable in virtually every conceivable sense but plugging on with the disaster anyway, apparently adhering to the belief that the only thing worse than doing wrong is admitting you're wrong. You may wonder why we're bothering to get Congress in on this. Why, because it's their job -- as it has been all these years! -- and we must always tell them to do their job. And saying we-can't-win-but-let's-lie-about-it-rather-than-change-it is one thing in a memo you don't intend to ever see the light of day, but it's another thing entirely under oath, before the people's representatives. At least, it should be -- and we should make it be.

Meanwhile, banks used to evade state interest rate caps by "partnering" with out-of-state banks that don't face interest rate caps, but our Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) cracked down on them during Tha Bush Mobb years, of all times. But guess what? Times are changing back! With an Administration determined to destroy every regulation that might help good Americans suffer a little less, at least two banks -- FinWise (of Utah) and Republic Bank (of Kentucky) -- have restarted the notorious "rent-a-bank" scheme that lets them offer loans with interest as high as 160% to good Americans facing emergencies, thus assuring that they'll be trapped in a pit of debt for years to come. Nice work if you can get it! But, as I've said, this is already illegal, so the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our FDIC to crack down on banks gaming the system to trap vulnerable folks in usurious loans. No use telling me "this isn't the job of government," not unless you want me to call you objectively pro-financial predator. We should be using terms like these a lot more; maybe they'll help bring shame back to our civilization.

Finally, if you've been attending the wildfires in Australia, you know climate change ain't no "Chinese hoax," as our President put it long ago, and you know we have a lot of work to do to counter its effects -- mainly, move from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Legislation supporting renewable energy is one way to do that, but it's not the only way -- another way is to get private corporations to divest from fossil fuels. We've told banks to divest from fossil fuels, and they've started to get the message, but we also have to get state pension funds out of fossil fuels, so Daily Kos helps you tell your state governors and legislators to get state pension funds to divest from fossil fuel corporations. Our opponents will tell us that we would be "hurting pensioners" if we did that, but you recognize that as a rhetorical hostage crisis by now, and besides, pension funds are kind of in the driver's seat here -- corporations want their business, after all! Maybe state pension funds should act like they're in charge, then?

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning war on Iran, actually rehabilitating prisoners, and sane energy policy.

As you know, the House passed a War Powers resolution last week aimed at keeping our President from launching any more military attacks on Iran -- and now word on the street is that it has the votes to pass in the Senate as well. But don't get complacent! The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you call your Senators and tell them to restrain our President's war-happy ways. Yes, our President can veto this resolution, but let's make him do that! And let's not get caught up in exactly how many Republicans will vote the right way this time, not after Sen. Tillis (R-NC) made all that noise about voting for the resolution of disapproval aiming to overturn our President's "national emergency" declaration and then voted against it. Let's also not get caught up in which Republicans (cough Rand Paul cough!) will vote for this resolution precisely because our President will veto it. The whole point of America is not to sit around the TV and game out outcomes like this is Draft Kings or something -- the whole point of America is that citizens must act.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell American county sheriffs to stop eliminating in-person visits between prisoners and their families. Sheriffs like to tell you we don't have the staff (and here you thought privatization would have solved that!) and we're afraid they'll pass drugs to each other (actual translation: we'll find out how many of our staff are peddling drugs) and, perhaps most importantly, we've got this fancy new video service that lets prisoners essentially Face-Time their loved ones at exorbitant expense! When big telecom corporations offer monetary incentives to use their service, you're right to suspect all their excuses, and when you recall that real live contact from family helps prisoners stay out of jail once their sentence is over a lot more than "video conferencing" does, you'll suspect all their excuses even more. I must say when private prisons claim they just can't have real live family visits, they're not exactly conjuring up the Genius of the Free Market. Where's their can-do spirit?

Finally, you no doubt know by now that Australia is on freaking fire -- so much so that normally recalcitrant koala bears will come gulp down any bottled water you bring to them! -- and yet they're still trying to build coal mines there, most notably in central Queensland, where German chemical corporation Siemens plans to provide rail signaling equipment for the proposed Adani coal mine. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Siemens to end its involvement in the Adani coal project. Here you would add your voice to the voices of climate activists in Germany who've been striking every Friday for months; they've been wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR effectively enough that Siemens's CEO has sounded a bit rueful about his involvement in the Adani project -- but he could be jiving us, you know. And yet, if he really is counting on another coal project to get him his 19th vacation home, he should remember that cheap gas is killing coal, and the falling cost of renewables sure ain't helping, either. We can help him get with the times by telling him to abandon coal mining in a burning country.

Action: concerning religious freedom, health care, and pollution.

Avaaz helps you tell big pension fund corporations to divest from China's long-term effort to oppress its Muslim Uyghur population. What do the big pension funds have to do with the Uyghurs? They invest in big tech corporations that provide China with surveillance tools including (sigh) facial recognition software and DNA testing. And what do the Chinese do to the Uyghurs? Oh, you know, imprison them in internment camps, ahem, re-education camps, and inflict torture, rape, forced sterilization, and forced labor, among other things, all as part of a "people's war on terror," a phrase I hope dies a horrible and humiliating death one day. Investing in anything China does is dicey enough -- China's government is really the worst of capitalism and the worst of Communism rolled up into one monstrous entity -- but investing in detainment of citizens for religious reasons should make pension funds run away in horror. And they will, if enough of us speak out -- and if we can help cut off this money-flow, China will have a tougher time keeping them going, and we will save lives.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4996, the Helping Medicaid Offer Maternity Services (or Helping MOMS) Act, would give states the option to offer one year of post-birth Medicaid coverage to both mother and child; the bill has 11 Democratic House sponsors and 8 Republican ones, which might make it actually bipartisan! Of course Medicare-for-All would make this problem moot, but this bill will still do a lot of folks a lot of good, and if a few Republicans get re-elected because they're able to tout their support for expanding health care coverage for poor mothers and children -- and doing so effectively, too, since most health complications relating to pregnancy occur within the first 100 days after childbirth -- that's not too high a price to pay for progress. Of course, a state could just say no and say 60 days of coverage (which current law mandates) is just fine, and if state-level politicians want to run on denying health care to poor mothers and children, I say let 'em. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand health care to poor mothers and children by passing the Helping MOMS Act.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the state Assembly still plans to take up the notorious SB 790, which would commit all manner of foul deeds against our clean air and clean water, even though we've told them many times to reject the bill, so Penn Environment helps you tell your state Assemblyfolks to protect our air and water by rejecting SB 790. SB 790 would, among other nefarious acts, prevent localities from protecting themselves from gas and oil drillers (now there's small-government conservatism for you!), let oil and gas corporations replace any water they pollute with unsafe drinking water, weaken state standards for reporting oil and gas spills, and allow the state to spray drilling wastewater on state roads to keep dust down. They're not trying to help corporations pollute because of "burdensome regulations" -- they're trying to help them pollute because they care more about big donors than their bosses, i.e., you. That only means we have to remind them, again and again and again if we have to.

Action: concerning payday lenders, pollution, and food safety.

CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to crack down on payday lenders. Part of the crackdown you would ask for would be a 15% cap on interest rates, and that would be a major reform -- and not even one that's "never been tried," either! After all, our soldiers already get this protection from the law, and they surely do deserve it (and are especially vulnerable to payday lenders), but so do we all. Of course, our Administration, flush in campaign contributions from payday lenders, has glommed on to this extremely unpopular sector of the economy just like they glommed on to the extremely small and entirely corporate anti-net neutrality crowd. Sometimes it's like they're trying to screw everything up, and sadly our "liberal" media won't ask our President a simple question: why does he think payday lenders need more welfare handouts from our government? Maybe they're afraid the answer will be rock stupid, but that's all the more reason we need to hear it. In the meantime, let's communicate our superior wisdom to our Congressfolk.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: despite the enduring unpopularity of pollution, and the enduring popularity of clean water, Pennsylvania legislators are actually trying to pass SB 790, even though it would let oil and gas corporations replace water they've ruined with unsafe water, even though it would let the state pre-empt local and municipal ordinances aimed at protecting clean water (now there's some small-government conservatism for you!), and even though it would let municipalities spray drilling wastewater on roads to keep dust down (that's a zombie that never seems to die no matter how many headshots it gets!). These corporate welfare proponents like to say it's a choice between creating jobs and creating no jobs, but you know what we call that, right? A manufactured hostage situation ("put up with corporate welfare handouts, or you'll all be out of work!"), and as Americans we should never tolerate that. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state assemblyfolk to protect us from pollution by rejecting SB 790.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation giving our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) the power to investigate food poisoning outbreaks -- you know, like the fifth E.coli outbreak in Romaine lettuce of the past two years -- then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. The bill in question would be S. 2958, the Expanded Food Safety Investigation Act, which would, in its own words, give our FDA the "authority to conduct microbial sampling on concentrated animal feeding operations as necessary to facilitate a foodborne illness outbreak investigation, determine the root cause of an outbreak of foodborne illness, or address other public health needs." You might better know the "concentrated animal feeding operation," or CAFO, as a factory farm, and you likely know that factory farms are justifiably prime suspects in food poisoning outbreaks. And small farmers don't run factory farms, so don't let anyone tell you this bill is "anti-small farmer" without asking them if they're pro-food poisoning.

Around the table: concerning our economy, our public lands and water, and several far more trifling matters.

Your right-wing uncle telling you about wages going up under our President? Well, Dean Baker reminds us that state minimum wage hikes and our Federal Reserve's low interest rates are actually driving recent wage increases. You know that high minimum wages cause wage hikes at the low end, but you may not know that low interest rates have helped drive unemployment down -- and Mr. Baker says that "low rates of unemployment give workers the bargaining power necessary to secure real wage gains." Naturally our President says minimum wages should be lower, though, admittedly, he also thinks interest rates should be lower. But low interest rates have been Fed orthodoxy since 2008, so we can safety say he deserves very little (if any!) of the credit for what gains we're making in this economy.

If you've been following Nestlé's attempts to gobble up as much public water as it can and then sell it as bottled water at an absurdly high profit, you'll be interested to hear that the Michigan state court of appeals has ruled that Osceola Township can block Nestlé from expanding its bottled-water operation within town limits, because bottled water is most emphatically not an "essential public service" or a "public water supply." I was a little surprised that any legal eagles at Nestlé would make such ludicrous claims -- even as part of a see-what-sticks effort -- until I learned that a lower Michigan court had approved them, and I note that the court of appeals also said that a bottled water operation might be "essential" in a place with no water, which I'm pretty sure could be stretched by some judicial activist to mean any of the many areas of desert in America.

Big pharma executives tell OHSU researchers that prices for MS drugs go up so damn much go up purely for profit-making reasons. Also, you can only gouge patients in America, since (to quote one exec) "(i)n the rest of the world, prices decline with duration in the marketplace," and prices never go down because then people would think "we're less effective, (that) we think less of our product." You do hear the quiet part out loud more than you used to even 10 years ago, when it seemed (to me, at least!) we heard the quiet part out loud all the time. Maybe big pharma execs are tired of pretending they're anything but thieves, not that I expect their behavior to change.

From the "How Do They Always Find Someone Even Worse?" file: Interior Secretary David Bernhardt wants to reduce fees oil and gas drilling corporations pay to drill in shallow Gulf of Mexico waters. It's not just the stench of an Interior Secretary lowering fees on corporations for which he used to lobby, or the horror that we could have another Spillageddon in the Gulf like we had in 2010 -- it's the fact that these are our waters and we, the public, deserve to make more money if our government is going to be so foolish as to allow more drilling in the Gulf. It's like they have literally no idea that they're supposed to serve the American people.

U.S. House Rep. Steve Watkins (R-KS) apparently listed a UPS store as his official residence, which just so happens to have had the effect of allowing him to vote in a different Topeka City Council district than the one in which he otherwise would have voted. Has the Fox News Channel "accidentally" identified him as a Democrat yet? After all, ONLY TEH LIBRULZ COMMITZ TEH VOTER FRAUDZ!!!!!

Finally, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has suspended her campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, citing a lack of money to keep campaigning. I don't actually think it's correct to say that "she struggled to define a clear rationale for her candidacy" -- actually, I think she was completely successful in "defin(ing) a clear rationale for her candidacy," since that rationale was "I'm here to trick the liberals into thinking I'm going to run this country the way they'd want me to when I'm really going to run it however my big donors tell me to." If I'm right, then it's heartening that Democratic voters have rejected that rationale, at least as far it manifested in her -- and almost two months before the Iowa caucuses, no less!

UPDATE. An alert reader pointed out that I'd gotten our President's position on interest rate cuts entirely wrong; I've corrected the first paragraph above as a result.

Action: concerning war in Syria, pregnant workers, and fossil fuel advertising.

Rep. Gabbard (D-HI) has introduced H.Con.Res. 70, which invokes the War Powers Act and Article I, Section 8 of our Constitution to force our Administration to remove our soldiers from Syria unless and until Congress passes a resolution authorizing war there, so Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell House Speaker Pelosi to give H.Con.Res. 70, a.k.a. the "Syrian War Powers Resolution," a clean floor vote. You'll recall that the last House Speaker, Paul Ryan, prevented the Yemen War Powers Resolution from coming to a vote by attaching an amendment to the freaking Farm Bill that prevented a vote on it! I'd call that clever, if I didn't insist on cleverness being, you know, not evil. But if enough of us speak out, we can overcome the noise of defense contractors and lobbyists and haters. And by the way, passing H.Con.Res. 70 wouldn't "let the Kurds die" per se -- rather, it would force Congress to authorize military action that would help the Kurds, which is how our Constitution and the War Powers Act want us to do it.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, is back, and though it is actually already illegal for bosses to discriminate against their pregnant workers, the law also doesn't punish these bosses enough. But this bill would force bosses to make "reasonable accommodations" to their pregnant employees -- recall that word "reasonable," so that you're ready when right-wingers start making up shit about what this bill would allow -- and would also prevent bosses from forcing pregnant workers to accept unnecessary workplace accommodations. The bill would also prevent bosses from simply refusing to hire pregnant workers merely because they don't want to make these accommodations -- I mention that, of course, to forestall right-wing whining that ZOMG WE WILLZ BE FORCEDZ ONLY TO HIREZ TEH PREGGURZ!!!!! Ah, but I kid -- I know just as well as you do that literally nothing forestalls right-wing whining anymore, certainly not shame. In any case, CREDO helps you tell your House Rep to fight discrimination by passing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell big media outlets not to take any more fossil fuel corporation advertising. No, this is not a "free speech" issue -- partly because free speech is for real people, not corporate "people," and partly because buying ads is more a money issue. But it's not a "free speech" issue mainly because our First Amendment does not guarantee you the right to advertise on big media outlets, and certainly "free speech" isn't an issue of who can pay for more of it -- once a right can be bought, it ain't a right anymore, is it? It's a privilege. And gosh, you don't need TV ads to tell you where to buy gas or how to power your house, so the point of fossil fuel advertising must be something else -- like advertising how "green" they are, when they're really not. Generally, as civilized people, we should be reducing the amount of useless information broadcast on media outlets. I know how square that sounds, but nobody said the work of civilization is sexy -- only that it is necessary.

Action: concerning methane emissions, pollution fines, forced child labor, and the Grand Canyon.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject its own plan to roll back methane emissions limits, then the Environmental Defense Fund still helps you do that. Literally no one but gas drilling corporations want to prevent gas drilling corporations from venting methane into the atmosphere! Not only does methane pack a bigger climate change punch than coal emissions, not only has an entire methane-mitigation industry risen up around the problem, not only is methane a totally usable energy source, but when gas drilling corporations leak methane off public lands, they're depriving we-the-people of royalties we deserve for even allowing them to drill on our lands. I guess it's something that Congress couldn't nullify the EPA's previous methane limits (thanks to the late Sen. McCain's anger about an unrelated subject) and that the courts have struck down previous attempts to gut the limits, but I won't be happy until we slap this Administration down and it stops getting up. We deserve better from those who work for us, after all.

Meanwhile, you know all about inflation, right? The thing that right-wingers forget about whenever they talk about how $2/hour was good enough for them in 1969, never mind that $2 in 1969 dollars is worth about $14 in 2019 dollars? Well, fines for big polluters in Pennsylvania have remained pretty much stagnant over the last 50 years, which means that what might have been a big bite in 1969 is a slap on the wrist in 2019, so Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislators to pass HB 1752, which would increase fines corporations pay for befouling our air and water. Don't let the haters talk about the cost to small businesses, because small businesses ain't the ones polluting. And if you confront them with that, and they respond that big corporations will pass on the costs of the fines to small businesses, ask them if they approve of such behavior, and if they say no (which they'll likely say whether they mean it or not!), ask them why they don't do something about it. After all, this is America, where we do something about big problems, right?

In other news, CREDO helps you tell chocolate manufacturing corporations Hershey, Mars, Nestlé to root the child labor out of its supply chain. Yes, kids still work in cocoa farms so you can have your Nestlé Crunch bar -- a mere 20 years after these chocolate makers pledged to stop using cocoa if children harvested it! -- and they don't do it because they like it, or because they're trying to learn a trade; they do it because they're forced to do it. Please do not tolerate the fool who says I did child labor and it didn't hurt me! The kids who've died doing hard labor don't get to testify about how child labor ruined them, and besides, folks who'd say I did child labor and it didn't hurt me are probably lying to themselves about how much hurt it did them. Nobody just walks away from slavery and torture, after all. And, to answer a common and banal objection: slipping your 12-year-old nephew a ten-spot for reformatting your hard drive doesn't mean we should tolerate forced child labor so we can get M&Ms more cheaply -- not if we want to call ourselves civilized.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. The Grand Canyon has become something of a political football over the last few years, as uranium mining corporations want to befoul both the Canyon and the Colorado River that made it, and I can't understand why any sane and reasonable person would want to spoil the Grand Canyon or pollute the Colorado River, which gives drinking water to nearly 40 million Americans. Note I said "sane and reasonable" there -- folks who'd want to mine for uranium there are not sane and reasonable, as far as I'm concerned. Gosh, aren't there any other ways to make money in America? I mean, come on, best and brightest and boldest entrepreneurs, stop with all the pollution already and go to work. That's what your forebears did, and they helped create the greatest middle class ever. Our current entrepreneurial class just wants to make that middle class their debt slaves.

Action: concerning immigration, corporate welfare, financial predators, and corporate "personhood."

CREDO helps you tell Google to fire former Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) poobah Miles Taylor. Mr. Taylor used to be Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's Chief of Staff, so it's not like he's some low-level bureaucrat who might have been sabotaging the evil efforts of our President to implement his Muslim ban and family separation policies, and now that Ms. Nielsen has left the Administration, he's found a soft landing at Google as "head of national security policy engagement," which sure sounds cush to me. I can already hear right-wingers squealing ZOMG DOESN'TZ HE HAVEZ TEH RIGHTZ TO WORKZ!!!!! Sure he has the right to go find a job, if anyone will hire him, but he doesn't have a "right" to a highly-paid BS job at Google. (His job title has more than three words, so I feel pretty safe in calling it a BS job.) And we, as a civilization, have a profound duty to shame and shun those who hurt us; giving them cush jobs ain't shaming and shunning. I say this as someone who still thinks anyone who worked for Tha Bush Mobb should be too ashamed to show their face in public.

Meanwhile, our President likes to make a show of caring about infrastructure-building in America, so he's angling to funnel your taxpayer dollars to a complex in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio that would turn fracked natural gas into plastics. Sigh. It's like they can never choose right; this is a world where renewable energies are attaining parity in production costs with fossil fuels generally, where fossil fuel corporations are going belly-up left and right (even Robert Murray's coal corporation filed for bankruptcy the other day!) despite Republicans controlling one House of Congress or the other for the last decade. You know what that makes this project, right? That's right, corporate welfare -- for why should our government invest in established technologies that aren't viable either economically or environmentally? Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the Great Appalachian Corporate Welfare Handout. Remember, we have to tell them, because politicians basically like corporate welfare, even though the people don't.

In other news, H.R. 4724/S. 2640, the Students Not Profits Act, would limit for-profit colleges' access to federal funding unless they can verify that they actually provide their students with an education; I'd have called the bill the "Students Before Profits Act" myself, since I don't believe in giving right-wingers any reason to squeal about SOSHULIZM!!!!, but this bill will protect more students from predatory for-profit colleges like Corinthian, and the bill won't put trade schools out of business, as I'm sure right-wingers will claim, but merely make sure those schools actually do the thing they exist to do. Our last Administration did far too much hand-wringing over how to deal with these for-profit schools that do nothing but redistribute wealth from students to executives; this Administration, of course, openly enables such schools, even violating the law to do so. So we desperately need to start developing a more healthy skepticism about such schools. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our students from financial predators by passing the Students Not Profits Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 48, which would amend our Constitution to nullify the doctrine of corporate "personhood" and thus allow us to regulate campaign finance reform again, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. You know, the best argument I've heard against campaign finance reform (admittedly "best" isn't a high bar to clear here, since the other arguments are such horsedoodle!) is that you need money to run a good campaign. But that statement pointedly does not explain why that money must be unlimited; more money doesn't lead to better arguments, obviously, but you can make lousy arguments seem more "normal" simply because you have the money to repeat them endlessly. Of course, we also know that money is not speech -- money is property, and we have a long legal tradition of keeping property from destroying our civilization, if we would but use it.

Action: concerning immigration, mandatory minimums, and fossil fuels.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Defense's Inspector General to investigate the militarization of our Southern border. When you hear that our Administration has deployed armed soldiers at our Southern border, you might reasonably ask: are we at war with someone? Our President would no doubt answer "yes," being a member of Our Glorious Elites, and therefore someone who uses the word "war" to mean all kinds of things it does not mean. But we are not at war with Mexico, and U.S. law actually forbids our government from using soldiers to enforce domestic laws. We don't use soldiers to enforce domestic laws because we don't want to become a tinpot dictatorship where people are afraid to be free. I suspect our DoD IG (Inspectors General still display a large amount of independence) will come to the same conclusion we have. But only if we speak out. After all, saying nothing and hoping for the best doesn't work.

Meanwhile, even though our Pennsylvania state Supreme Court overturned mandatory minimums many years ago, word on the street is that our state legislature wants to bring them back, in a four-pack of bills, HB 726, HB 1850, HB 1851, and HB 1852, that would target offenses committed with firearms. I understand that people want to "do something" about guns these days, but this is doing the wrong thing -- we should let judges do their job and decide case-by-case whether possession of a firearm really merits a longer sentence. I've been saying for a while now that we should make it just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons, and I'd rather support that solution than another set of mandatory minimums that wind up slamming folks of color harder and costing the taxpayer more money -- and feeding into the prison-privatization machine, too. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject more mandatory minimum sentences.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell big media corporations to stop taking advertisements from fossil fuel corporations and their flunkies. Sound harsh? Consider the simple fact that you already know whatever you need to know about fossil fuels -- you know what fuel your car needs and whether your house takes oil heat or gas heat and whether your stove takes electric or gas, for example -- and fossil fuel advertisements typically therefore extol the virtues of particular fossil fuel corporations; is it really too much to ask that ads give us information we can actually use? It's not particularly of issue that such ads tend to lie about fossil fuel corporations' commitment to renewable energy and about the real effects of pollution and climate change, but ads disguised as "news stories" or "opinion pieces"? They're a big deal, and any media outlet worth its salt would reject them out of hand. They don't do it now because they're corrupt, but that's why we're here: to show them a way out of corruption.

Action: concerning pollution, corruption, and conversion "therapy."

Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 790, which purports to "update" the Oil and Gas Act, would actually do a lot of foul things we've already been fighting for years. The bill would pre-empt certain local ordinances regarding land development -- which the state Supreme Court found unconstitutional when Act 13 pre-empted local anti-fracking ordinances -- and it would eliminate requirements to report smaller spills, which sounds like "right-sizing regulations" until you consider that you won't think it's a "small" spill if 200 gallons of oil befouls your drinking water. And if this bill passes, oil and gas corporations will get to befoul your drinking water and then "replace" it with water that doesn't meet the standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act! That's like letting your kid put dirty socks in his clean drawer, and dirty socks ain't anywhere near as bad as polluted drinking water! So the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state legislators to protect our drinking water for-real for-real by rejecting SB 790.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject our President's nomination of Aurelia Skipwith as the new head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. You can probably already guess at Ms. Skipwith's pedigree -- currently a deputy in the department and (sigh) a long-time Monsanto employee, plus she's the one who requested a review of rules preventing hunters from using cruel and heartless methods to kill animals, like using donuts to lure them out, or shooting mother bears in their dens in front of their cubs. Like that needed any damn review! You won't be surprised to learn that her confirmation process is not going so well -- she's provided incomplete answers to Senators' question, plus she appears to have given our President a campaign donation in excess of $5,000 just a few days after her nomination! I'm old enough to remember when elected officials would do their best to avoid the appearance of a quid pro quo. I guess those are "the old days" now.

Finally, H.R. 3570/S. 2008, the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act, would make it illegal to sell "conversion therapy" to LGBTQ folks or to claim that such therapy will convert them from gay folks into straight ones, reduce their attraction to folks of the same gender, or is harmless. Because it's not harmless! Conversion therapy often involves forced re-enactment of past sexual abuses and "exercises" involving nudity and intimate touching; does that sound "harmless" to you? It actually sounds more like some satirist's version of what "converting gays" would be like! I'm sure the right will whine that banning conversion therapy offends their right to act on their "religious" "conscience." And you know what? Our First Amendment does protect folks who merely try to persuade gays not to be gay -- but it doesn't protect any "right" to make money off that act or force "therapy" on them. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect LGBTQ folks from conversion "therapy" snake oil salesmen by passing the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: featuring the horrible truth about "free" trade.

Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the state of Colorado violated the U.S. Constitution when it replaced three electors who planned not to vote for Hillary Clinton, though she won the state's popular vote. I think they ruled correctly -- and that's why we need to get rid of the Electoral College! I'm a little surprised and ashamed that it hadn't occurred to me until today that our President could win re-election regardless of his share of the popular vote, if enough electors simply buck the will of their state's electorate. If Democrats were more street-smart, they'd make the Electoral College a big campaign issue. They're not, of course, so they won't.

The incomparable Dean Baker reminds us that, contra what our President says, "China Did Not Trick the U.S. -- Trade Negotiators Served Corporate Interests." "Both Republican and Democratic administrations signed trade deals that made it easy to manufacture goods in China and other countries, and then export them back to the United States," he writes, meaning corporations could take advantage of "low-cost labor there" and "low-cost supply chains" so they could destroy their competitors and make a mint. Thus "the trade deficit was the result of their efforts to increase their profits," and American working families "lost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007." In other words, the trade deficit with China is a feature of American policy, not a bug. The fact that it gives our President opportunity to grandstand about foreigners "taking advantage" of America is just icing on the cake, and our corporate overlords are nowhere near as upset about such grandstanding as they'd like you to think.

Department of Energy study finds the price of building wind farms lower than the price of building a natural gas plant. And natural gas was the "cheap" fossil fuel! Some caveats apply -- renewable energy tax credits might disappear, for one -- but note well that if our President calls all of this TEH FAKE NEWZ!!!! that his own Department of Energy said it. He does appoint "the best people" to his government, right? (But as much as he rants about "piles of dead birds," I'm sure he'll also tout the fact that three states that now get 30% of their power from wind -- Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma -- all voted for him in 2016. Why? Because while you're trying to make sense of his chaos, he just makes more chaos. And yes, I could have written that sentence about George W. Bush in 2004, too.)

Rutgers University study finds that roughly one out of every thousand black men will die during an encounter with police. Sadly, right-wingers will twist this around to SEE YOU ARE TOO TEH SAFEZ 99.9% DON'T DIEZ!!!!!, without telling you that black men and boys are 2.5 times more likely to die during police contacts than white men and boys. They'll also probably twist this around to say black men and boys are five times more likely to kill themselves than get killed by police, without mentioning, that, hello, nobody should worry about whether the next time they talk to a cop will be their last.

Finally, our President claims that Jews who vote Democrat exhibit "either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty." Presumably he means "disloyalty" to Israel, but suggesting you're disloyal to a foreign country if you oppose our President or his party is no less offensive than suggesting you're disloyal to this one. And, ah, could it be that Jewish voters went harder for Democratic Congressional candidates in 2018 than they did for Hillary Clinton in 2016 at least in part because more of them fear they'll be killed by the very same white supremacists our President has emboldened? Anyway, no President should conflate himself with our country and call his opponents "disloyal." This is a grown man acting like this.

Action: concerning Social Security, methane emissions, and working families.

You know how we've been talking about expanding Social Security, so that we can get ahead of talk from Our Glorious Elites about cutting "entitlements"? Well, H.R. 860/S. 229, the Social Security 2100 Act, would do just that, by actually increasing benefit amounts, increasing the amount of Social Security benefits retirees can enjoy tax-free, and creating a Consumer Price Index that accurately reflects seniors' economic trials. You know, rather than using "Chained CPI," which assumes that if something becomes too expensive, folks just switch to something cheaper. Can you imagine seniors "just switching" to cheaper drugs? No, you can't. Social Security has helped hundreds of millions of Americans live a more dignified retirement, free of poverty and want, and this is despite 40 years of politicians and their corporate paymasters trying to wreck the program and advancing every problem they've created as a reason to cut the program. So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our retirements by passing the Social Security 2100 Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2711, the Methane Waste Prevention Act, would require gas drilling corporations to capture 99 percent of the methane gas that escapes from their operations within five years. H.R. 2711 would also require gas drillers to flare (or burn) that minuscule amount of methane gas they fail to trap, and would require our government to set standards for gas drilling equipment so that it doesn't leak methane gas. Methane leakage is, as you know, a byproduct of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), and it tends to trap far more carbon emissions in our atmosphere than even coal does. And methane is also, you know, usable fuel which does us not one bit of good if it's floating around in our atmosphere. Don't abide any whining about how all this is so hard and will cost gas drilling corporations money; their money isn't more important than our air and our climate. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our clean air and help slow the advance of climate change by passing the Methane Waste Prevention Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject our President's nomination of Eugene Scalia to be our next Secretary of Labor, then CREDO still helps you do that. We don't oppose him because he's the late Justice Scalia's son, but because, well, of his entire career helping big corporations run roughshod over working people; the Wall Street Journal called Mr. Scalia one of the banksters' "go-to guys for challenging financial regulations," which doens't exactly speak to his love of working people, as does his work helping WalMart overturn a Maryland law which would have mandated that WalMart contribute something-anything to their workers' health insurance. Mr. Scalia also seems to have a unique animus against ergonomic safety regulations, which you'd only find sympathetic if you haven't noticed that technology has created more desk jockeys than hard hats over the years. He even lamented that such regulations would force businesses to "hire more workers," to which the only reasonable response would be: we can only hope!

Action: concerning social media and Arctic drilling.

CREDO helps you tell big tech corporations Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to ban white nationalist and other hate groups from their platforms. And again, it's not a matter of "free speech no matter how noxious": our First Amendment guarantees that folks can't be put in prison for the mere fact of their noxious speech, but it does not guarantee a platform for your noxious speech, let alone a living. And let's also bury the suggestion that we merely oppose speech "we don't like" -- nobody should like it when far-right assholes cheer another racist for carrying out a mass murder! Big tech corporations (Facebook especially) act like it's so hard to keep assholes from ruining their platforms, but it really isn't -- they could stop valuing executive salaries like they're the only thing worth preserving in civilization and break off some of that money to hire more people to monitor speech on their platforms. For such powerful people, our big tech CEOs sure do act helpless an awful lot. And we shouldn't tolerate such weakness.

Meanwhile, our Department of Interior plans to push ahead with oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) this year, but Environmental Action helps you tell our Secretary of the Interior not to allow drilling in the Refuge. We call it a "refuge," after all, because we'd like some part of the old world to keep going, uninterrupted by the churning of the new one. Of course, the folks in charge of our government now, though they call themselves "conservative," don't value the past except insofar as they can convert it into money for some crony or other. And that's all we'll get by drilling in ANWR, scientists having found that we're not going to extract very much oil from the area. There is something truly noxious about converting wild places into nothing more lasting than money, which always gets spent and always cries out for replacement. Of course, such noxiousness is our President's calling card. Might we at least convert his bad example into a warning for future generations?

Action: concerning Social Security, renewable energy, and Presidential bad behavior.

2020 is coming, which means more fearmongering from the Koch brothers and their like-minded ilk about "runaway" "entitlements," and which likely also means that our President will go back on his promise not to touch Social Security because of TEH DEFICITZ!!!! he made worse with his tax cuts for the rich (probably not until after re-election, though). And it also means that the "liberal" media outlets that supposedly hate our President will be considerably more blunt then he about the "need" to cut "entitlements." So let's head them off, by telling our Congressfolk that we must expand Social Security, not cut it, as Social Security Works helps you do. The haters keep trying to sound "reasonable" and "serious" about cutting Social Security, and they keep failing -- but only because we stand up to them. We worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and when we retire, we deserve to enjoy it. So don't let the haters and their scare numbers take it from us.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend funding for clean energy programs. Would it be crass to mention to them that they take big campaign donations from the fossil fuel corporations they still subsidize even though they don't really need it? No, it would not be crass. Would it be crass to mention that we just had the hottest June in recorded history and massive heat waves devastating the country in July, and that using more renewable energy and less fossil fuel energy would help us suffer less of that? Would it be crass to mention the increased health care costs from dirty air and dirty water caused by pollution from fossil fuels (and, ah, not from renewables)? The answers are, in order, "no" and "no." And though renewable energy has grown tremendously across America over the years, it still only provides about 10% of our electricity, and it still needs support from our government -- which really means support from us, the taxpayers. We should get the livable future we pay for, right?

Elyse Marin has begun a petition on Color of Change which helps you tell the Anschutz Entertainment Group (or AEG) to stop hosting our President's rallies. That's right, it's time for the Big Stick of Bad PR again -- if you're a corporate sponsor giving stadium space to our President so he can have his little Nuremberg rallies where his votaries all squeal "lock her up" and "send her back" and other noxious crap, then you deserve to be pointed out and shamed until you change your behavior. I know there are still folks who are so proud of their cynicism that they'll say well how do you say no to the President, huh? Gosh, 54% of the electorate said no to him on Election Day 2016 (though, as you know, he's not a man who takes "no" very easily!), and anyway, saying no to our President is part of our birthright as Americans, a lesson I bet meant a lot more to the cynics when Barack Obama was President. Is it too much to ask that no big arena in America enable our President's obnoxious behavior?

Around the table: concerning some of the difficulties we face in pushing the Overton Window leftward.

I sympathize with Alan MacLeod's frustration that "To Media, No Democrat Can Possibly Be Right-Wing" -- after all, it wasn't that long ago that Georgia Democratic Sen. Richard Russell helped found the Conservative Coalition, and that the American Conservative Union ranked the late Georgia Democratic Rep. Larry McDonald behind only Ron Paul as the most conservative House Rep. But I will say it's nice to finally hear our media call folks like Nancy Pelosi "center-left" instead of pretend (as they did for almost two decades!) that no one in America could possibly be further left than she. This is yet another reason I'm glad Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib are in Congress -- and in America.

In a peripherally-related note, the incomparable Duncan Black, a.k.a. Atrios, answers the vexing question "Why Don't Democratic Senate Candidates in Purple States Support Popular Things" (like a higher minimum wage), and he answers it better than anyone else I've heard. Races in purple states, he says, "are generally going to be tough/close races, but the calculation is not 'boy if I support a higher minimum wage then the voters will get mad.' The calculation is 'boy if I support a higher minimum wage then the voters will like that, BUT the Chamber of Commerce types will dump a bunch of money into the race to oppose me and run ads calling me a child molester (or highlighting something else that might be unpopular about me).'" All of that is true, but it also demands a counterpunch from the candidate like "how about that -- I support a minimum wage hike and suddenly my opponents are lying about me! Don't let them take you hostage!"

Dino Grandoni at the Washington Post explains, with the help of a perhaps too-understated headline, how our "EPA's New 'No Surprises' Inspection Policy Has Some Critics Worried." You remember from school how all your surprise quizzes didn't really count if you didn't do well on them? You don't? Of course you don't! It boggles the mind how Republicans can claim to be the "party of personal responsibility" but also ensure that polluters won't have to put up with surprise inspections which is often the only way to catch polluters. Of course, for our President's votaries, "personal responsibility" is only for black people -- "belonging to the club" is what matters to them, and that's what no-surprise-inspections signifies to them. If Democrats had any courage, they'd run attack ads on this basis, and make the moral argument I've described, but you already know what the chances of that are.

In a peripherally-related note, our President opines that wind power "doesn't work" without taxpayer help. Given the price parity wind has achieved with fossil fuels in many parts of our nation, I rather suspect it would work without subsidies, but gauging whether wind power would work without subsidies now really isn't the point -- we're supposed to subsidize good technologies that need more research and more time to develop. Also, too, oil and gas get about the same amount of subsidies annually as wind power, so if our President "(doesn't) want to be subsidizing things that don't need to be subsidized," where's his enthusiasm for ending that slab of corporate welfare? And if he's so hot to stop handing out taxpayer money to energy sources that "don't work," where's his enthusiasm for ending handouts for nuclear power, which has lost money for a much longer period of time? (I notice he didn't tell other heads of state about the "piles and piles of dead birds" no one finds at the base of windmills. Clearly he saves those stories for us rubes.)

Defense contractor apparently leaves voice mail message threatening Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) over her introduction of a bill that would force public schools to ensure all their students are properly-vaccinated. Read the transcript of this phone call in its entirety, and you'll marvel at the continued existence of folks who have clearly never contemplated the benefits of deep breathing. And remember, folks: "I’m gonna kill your ass if you do that bill, I swear" is a terroristic threat, and therefore not protected by our First Amendment! I hope Rep. Wilson responds to this threat by fighting harder for this bill.

Finally, the New York Times reminds us that "Using Race for Gain" is an "Old Tactic" for our President. Yes, his settlement of that 1970s investigation into his apparent refusal to rent to black folks and his emptiest-wagon trumpeting of the "guilt" of the Central Park Five leapt to mind even before I got to paragraph nine. If you accept that race-baiting is a pattern with our President, as I do, then of course you regard reports that he "didn't...fully underst(and) what he was doing when he unleashed last week's racist tweetstorm as utter bullshit. And worse, as drama.

Action: concerning debt in Puerto Rico, cruel immigration policy, and drilling in ANWR.

You recall that Hurricane Maria slammed Puerto Rico so hard that Congress needed to pass more disaster relief legislation to help it out, right? And you also recall that Puerto Rico was deeply in debt to begin with, and Congressional legislation passed under President Obama basically enabled banksters to keep scavenging the Puerto Rico economy? Crap like this wouldn't happen if Puerto Rico were a state, let me tell you! But H.R. 2526/S. 1312, the U.S. Territorial Relief Act of 2019, would wipe out Puerto Rico's debt and compensate debt-holders up to $15 billion -- even the hedge funds that swooped in like vultures, though they'd have to waive manager's fees, and I bet some of them find that so offensive they won't take the compensation. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out struggling U.S. territories wipe out their debt. And if you think that's "rewarding bad behavior," just slap yourself. Why should I bang my head against a wall?

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell our Administration to stop abusing immigrant children. I know it's hard to keep up with this ongoing humanitarian crisis our Administration has forced upon us, but long story short, our Administration still separates families at the border, still sets up these families (including their children) for human rights abuses, and no longer even provides legal services or recreational activities for these children, which sure will stop right-wingers from going on the TV and telling us that forced detention is like summer camp, right? I kid, of course -- right-wingers don't let the truth stop them! And though I know this Administration does not give one rat's hind quarter what you and I think -- not just about their inhumanity, not just about the political calculation that's gone into it, but also their who-are-you-to-tell-us-what-to-do attitude -- our duty to tell them what we think remains.

Finally, H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would prevent our government from handing out oil and gas drilling leases in the Coastal Plain of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) -- which sure is timely, since our Administration has apparently already told oil executives that leases in this area "will happen in 2019." Previous attempts to lease ANWR have failed, even in Republican-dominated governments, and H.R. 1146 currently has 180 co-sponsors, but let's not get complacent -- no, not even because we have the better argument (drilling in ANWR won't release all that much oil, but it will adversely affect caribou and Native American populations), because H.R. 1146 will only become law if we demand it, at every step of the legislative process. Hence the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge by passing the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act.

Around the table: from centrist Democrats to empowered farmworkers.

Keith A. Spencer at Salon says "There Is Hard Data That Shows a Centrist Democrat Would Be a Losing Candidate." See? It's not just a feeling I have based on 100 million Americans sitting out the 2016 election! Seriously, Thomas Piketty (of Capital in the 21st Century fame) looked at 70 years of post-election data from America, France, and the U.K., and found guess what? That poorer working families used to always vote for liberal candidates, but now they don't, because generally there ain't one to vote for -- and while some of these voters now vote for faux-populist right-wingers like our President or Ms. LePen, many others simply don't vote at all. A solution presents itself! Anyway, it's nice to see Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Joe Biden portrayed as centrists.

West Virginia Supreme Court rules unanimously that gas drilling corporations can't drill on one person's property to reach reserves on adjoining properties without "express" permission from the owner. In a sane and moral society, conservatives would celebrate this ruling as a victory for private property, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, I suspect that any "conservatives" who weigh in on this matter will squeal about TEH JUDISHUL OVERREACHEZ!!!!!, since "conservatism," in these times, only ever seems to mean "whatever makes rich people more money."

Is it "news" that our "liberal" media always talks about American aggression as a "response" to vague or nonexistent "threats" from Iran? Perhaps not, but it's still good to be reminded -- as it is also good to be reminded that when someone says some nation or other is a "threat," you have every right to ask "based on what evidence?" "Because Iran humiliated us in 1979 and 1980" is not evidence, nor is a quotation taken out of context, nor is an attack on Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure that even our own intelligence forces won't say came from Iran.

Ho hum, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposes gutting its own payday lending rule, and then payday lending bigwigs spend $1 million celebrating the proposal at one of our President's resorts. And that's why you don't put a "successful businessman" in office! As we learned, no doubt, when our President said he wasn't about to "hate" the Saudis because they spend so much money at his hotels. I expect we'll get further reminders of this kind of corruption as time goes on.

Finally, New York's farmworkers might get landmark labor legislation if the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act passes that state's legislature and gets the Governor's signature. A state Supreme Court decision extended collective bargaining rights to farmworkers -- who, as you know, do not enjoy the protections of federal law in this area, which leads me to wonder if our national Supreme Court will forget its putative aversion to meddling in state affairs -- but the FLPA would go further, giving them, among other things, one day off weekly (!) and overtime pay. That latter item is very important, as farms often make their workers put in 13-hour days. When farmworkers get to organize for better working conditions, a lot of our work as citizens will become a lot easier, and don't believe the farm corporations' whining that it'll be "too expensive." They should learn to count the cost of bad actions.