Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning clean water, pollution, and internet freedom.

S. 611, the WATER Act, would finally provide funding for the upgrades our water infrastructure needs, and not just for the people in dry Southwestern states, or factory farm-polluted rural areas, or places where drinking water just got outright contaminated like Flint, MI. Fact is, our government hasn't properly invested in upgrading our water and sewer infrastructure for decades -- you know, because right-wingers say government should only funnel taxpayer money to corporate cronies, and never do anything that actually helps people! -- and the WATER Act would be a step in the right direction, by allocating $35 billion annually to water/sewer investment. Where's the money going to come from, you ask? Well, I can think of more than a few defense-related boondoggles that could provide the money, and more than a few tax hikes on the rich that could provide the money, but the WATER Act would close corporate tax loopholes to fund the upgrades. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support clean, safe water by passing the WATER Act.

Meanwhile, our government is short an Interior Secretary, as you know, after former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke rode out (maybe not literally this time!) on a wave of investigations into possible corruption on his part; our President dutifully installed his number two man, former fossil fuel lobbyist (heard this tale before?) David Bernhardt, as his acting Interior Secretary, and now he's nominated Mr. Bernhardt as the permanent (as permanent as they get with this guy, anyway) Interior Secretary. (Gosh, that was an awful lot of parentheticals. Some folks just demand snark.) Anyway, you probably know the drill by now: just as former fossil fuel lobbyist/Jim Inhofe lackey Andrew Wheeler was a bad choice for EPA Administrator (the Senate confirmed him anyway, boo Senate!), Mr. Bernhardt is a bad choice to administer our public lands, since we know he'll administer them on behalf of fossil fuel corporations and not on behalf of, you know, the public. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of David Bernhardt as Secretary of the Interior.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject a trio of so-called "pro-net neutrality" bills (H.R. 1006, H.R. 1096, and H.R. 1104), then Free Press still helps you do that. For many years now, net neutrality has been popular across the ideological spectrum, and why not? Conservatives hate being told where they can go on the internet just as much as liberals do, after all. And net neutrality is so popular that not only did the FCC resort to calling their anti-net neutrality regulation "Restoring Internet Freedom," but right-wingers in Congress have for years routinely introduced supposedly "pro-net neutrality" bills that, just like these three new ones, let corporations censor content and block and throttle websites and forbid the FCC from ever regulating the internet as a public utility again. Which makes them, right, not "pro-net neutrality." But your Congressfolk may need reminding of the difference.

Action: concerning transparency, drug prices, and the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve.

You remember how reporting on the Standing Rock protests exposed police abuses? Well, North Dakota's state legislature is going to fix that! SB 2209 would restrict public access to state records relating to "critical infrastructure," which of course would include the Dakota Access pipeline that prompted all those protests and all that police brutality in the first place; the state Senate has already passed the bill, and now the state House is mulling it. And here you thought these legislators would want their bosses, the good people of North Dakota, to know what's going on with their "critical infrastructure"! A few legislators say it's all about "cybersecurity," but if it were, you have to wonder why so many more legislators aren't running with that; it sure looks like they're just trying to ram a bad bill through without anyone knowing about it. But you can call North Dakota House leadership using this page; just click on a member and get their office phone number. And call legislators from both parties, because this is a bipartisan mess.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1046, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, would let Medicare negotiate drug prices on behalf of its recipients. You may recall that when Congress created the Medicare Part D drug benefit during Bush the Lesser's first term, they forbade Medicare from negotiating for better drug prices, because BIG GUMMINT!!!!!, and you may also recall how little the Obama Administration talked about Medicare drug price negotiation during the Affordable Care Act process. But if you understand how much negotiating power Medicare would have -- negotiating on behalf of some 44 million Americans, most of whom are seniors, who are (as you might imagine) the biggest consumers of prescription drugs by far in America -- you also see that such power could help bring drug prices down, by almost $85 billion annually, so says even the Koch brothers-funded Mercatus Center. Hence both Social Security Works and Public Citizen help you tell your Congressfolk to support Medicare drug negotiation by passing H.R. 1046.

Finally, the Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) plans to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) to oil and gas drilling, which of course we've been fighting to prevent for decades, not just because the ANWR is a unique wilderness, but because scientists tell us there won't be that much oil to get out of it to begin with! Luckily for us, the BLM must take public comments on the matter before proceeding, hence Penn Environment helps you tell our BLM to keep oil and gas drilling out of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Is it worth it to try, you may ask? I wouldn't blame you for asking, since this Administration really doesn't seem to care about the people's will at all. The answer is yes, you should try, not just because doing the right thing is always better than doing the wrong thing, but because if enough of us speak out against it and our BLM fails to do our will, we might be able to nail them for law-breaking in court. Indeed, that's all that's stopped this Administration's pro-pollution agenda so far.

Action: concerning mandatory minimums, conservation, and William Barr.

Given that Senate Majority Leader McConnell (E-KY) has graciously allowed the Senate to vote on S. 3649, the FIRST STEP Act, now's a very good time to let the Drug Policy Alliance help you tell your Reps and Senators to support criminal justice reform by passing it. S. 3649 isn't everything we want, etc., but it would reduce some mandatory minimums, expand the "safety valve" for judges to grant sentences below mandatory minimums, and prevent prosecutors from heaping on longer sentences for firearm possession during first offenses. All of these things will help us actually rehabilitate prisoners (which is what civilized people do!), rather than simply heap more punishments on people in the vain hope that we'll look tougher. Sen. Cotton (E-AK) will try to sabotage the bill with amendments that would gut the bill, because he's so "tough," I guess. But how about regular Americans have a say here, rather than just law-and-order peacocks?

Meanwhile, Congress has also let the Land and Water Conservation Fund expire, as of September 30, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to support conservation efforts by reauthorizing the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Do not brook any absurd complaints from your Congressfolk about "fiscal responsibility" or hysterical hand-wringing about how it'll be "paid for," because it's their job to know that taxes don't actually fund the LWCF; royalties from oil and gas drilling do. They can't believe that "fiscal responsibility" is all about letting oil and gas drilling corporations get away with paying less money in royalties to the American taxpayer, can they? Well, our Congressfolk do believe a lot of strange things -- one of them apparently being that you can just let popular and well-running programs expire without suffering any consequences. They sure are lucky we're here to remind them of the consequences.

Finally, our President has nominated former George H.W. Bush-era Attorney General William Barr to succeed former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and if you're thinking a Bush-era Attorney General would be an improvement over Mr. Sessions or Mr. Whittaker, well, William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut reminds you that Mr. Barr did not exactly do yeoman work for the senior Mr. Bush. And he not only comes from an era that prescribed more punishment as the solution to every criminal justice problem, he's never left it! Even worse, he has long been an adherent of the notion that the President Must Always Be Obeyed, just like Supreme Court Justices Alito and Kavanaugh. Gosh, listen to such men and you'd never know our Founders rebelled against exactly the sort of fellow who thought he was right all the time and everyone had to bend to his will! So the Drug Policy Alliance helps youtell your Senators to reject the nomination of Mr. Barr as Attorney General.

Action: concerning prison slavery, fraudulent fees, and methane pollution.

Color of Change helps you tell the state of California to stop exploiting prison workers (who make as little as $1/day!) to fight wildfires. I have nothing to say to folks who think of prison workers as a giant pool of people they can use and abuse as they like, but to folks who wonder how California will ever make ends meet if they spend all more money paying prisoners to do the back-breaking work of fighting wildfires, I have this to say: your wonderment is a hostage situation -- don't pay prisoners what their work is actually worth, or we'll all burn up!. Too often we imagine that the world around us is the only world that can be, but we can bring back a world where states tax rich folks hard and stop funneling taxpayer money to crony corporations. At that point we'll actually find it a lot easier to do the right thing, but let's tell California to do the right thing anyway. Doing the right thing builds character, after all.

Meanwhile, Comcast has lately agreed to refund well over half a million dollars to Massachusetts customers who signed long-term cable contracts only to find themselves slammed with fancy-sounding fees that inflated their bills up to 40% above advertised prices. And when they realized they'd been had and tried to cancel their cable, Comcast slammed them again with a $200 "early termination" fee! Nice work if you can get it! And since it's absurd to think Comcast would only try this in Massachusetts, Consumer Reports helps you ask your state Attorney General to investigate whether cable corporations' add-on fees in your state amount to a fraudulent price hike. We imagine America as some kind of "free" market Wild West, but we must insist on laws (and law enforcement) that won't let corporations pull this kind of bait-and-switch on us. Indeed, things like this used to be a law-and-order issues for conservatives. I wonder what changed.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject its proposed plan to weaken its own methane emissions standards, then both the Sierra Club and the Union of Concerned Scientists still help you do that. You probably know the drill by now: oil and gas drilling corporations leak methane the way some folks leak gossip, methane emissions pack a far larger climate change punch than even coal emissions do, and when corporations ventilate methane into our air willy-nilly from drilling projects on public lands, they're also cheating American taxpayers out of royalties (since methane is a usable energy source, and, you know, public lands belong to the public). Always it seems like our Administration's EPA cares more about protecting polluters than protecting good Americans from polluters. But luckily, we are always here to remind them whom they are really pledged to protect.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning trade, clean water, and healthy food.

The governments of the United States, Canada, and Mexico plan to sign the new USMCA trade agreement -- the one that would replace NAFTA -- on November 30; after that, the pact will go to Congress for ratification, so now's a good time to tell our Congressfolk to ensure that we get the strongest USMCA possible, as Public Citizen helps us do. The USMCA would eliminate the "investor-state dispute settlement" system with Canada in three years, and drastically curtail ISDS use with Mexico; these are tremendously good things, because we deserve to know that investors won't be able to nullify our laws and exact tribute from us simply because they can convince some tribunal that our clean air and clean water laws "cost them money." But that doesn't mean we shouldn't demand more, such as the elimination of corporate welfare for big pharma and better enforcement of labor and clean air/clean water standards. So let's get cracking.

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed expanding offshore drilling in almost all of our coastal waters -- except around Florida, of course, because they need Rick Scott in the Senate that badly. I would naturally have said hey, remember how well the Deepwater Horizon spill went?, but it turns out that the Taylor Energy oil spill of 2004 is about to overtake the Deepwater Horizon spill as the worst oil spill in American history. If you're wondering how a 14-year-old oil spill is still spewing hundreds of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day, well, Taylor didn't even tell anyone about the oil leaking for six years and still claims there's "no evidence" the spill is even happening. And this is the kind of thing our Administration apparently wants more of in our great nation! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to scuttle its plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your state Governor to follow the lead of Arkansas and ban dicamba usage on your state's farms. Arkansas banned dicamba usage during that state's main growing season after finding that dicamba doesn't stay put once it's sprayed on crops -- it drifts away for up to three full days, leaving a trail of destruction in its path, and if it drifts onto neighboring farms -- which, hello, happens all the time -- then it also damages other folks' crops, and therefore their livelihoods, and also therefore our food. Arkansas also found workers getting sick after working with dicamba, which couldn't possibly happen to consumers, could it? Naturally, Monsanto has a version of dicamba it uses with its proprietary soybean crop which it modified genetically to better withstand its dicamba. But our choice is simple here: we can either stand with farmers or stand with big corporations.

Action: concerning worker rights, education, and Chaco Canyon.

A few years ago, our National Labor Relations Board made it easier for workers to hold parent corporations accountable for wrongdoing -- which meant, among other things, that fast-food corporations couldn't pretend their franchises were completely independent actors. Of course, the Presidency has changed parties since then, meaning that a whole new NLRB is in town, meaning they're trying to repeal the joint-employer standard as we speak, because RULEZ ARE TEH BADZ!!!!!! Repealing the joint employer standard wouldn't just hit fast-food employees, of course -- it'd also hit temp workers, since a lot of corporations love using temp workers instead of hiring full-time workers like their forbearers did. But our NLRB still by law must take public comments on its proposal, hence Jobs With Justice helps you tell our NLRB to reject its own proposal to repeal the joint-employer standard. Of course, I don't think a corporation should ever own another corporation, particularly for the purpose of evading its responsibilities under the law. But that's another fight, for another day.

Meanwhile, you know that our schools face funding crises -- largely because of our failure to tax rich people hard enough and our willingness to continue indulging the charter school scam, but I digress -- and this makes schools more vulnerable to corporate money. Case in point: McDonald's sponsors McTeacher's Nights, during which our teachers serve junk food to students. I bet it's rather popular with the kids, as they say, but our children don't need any help from our schools choosing to eat 1200-calorie meals that'll contribute to obesity and all the health care problems that go with it. But wait, there's more! Putting teachers behind the food counter also denies work and pay to McDonald's own workers (who make rather less than teachers), and, as it happens, the schools don't get a whole lot of money out of these events. Hence Corporate Accountability helps you tell McDonald's to stop with the exploitation of schools and teachers already and end their McTeacher's Nights. The Big Stick of Bad PR can find all bad actors eventually, if we will but wield it.

Finally, our Administration still has a jones for drilling for gas and oil in the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico, despite the damage oil and gas drilling does to our clean water, despite the thousand-year-old Anasazi ruins and roadways and rock engravings revered by Pueblo and Navajo -- that latter item suggesting, again, that for this Administration, your heritage only matters if you're white. Our government has, over the years, leased most of the public land outside Chaco Culture National Historical Park for gas and oil drilling, but not the land inside the park -- even our current Interior Secretary seems a little cowed by all the public pressure against drilling inside the park. And there's no reason not to keep up that pressure, particularly since our Interior Secretary is eyeing the midterms just like all the rest of us are. (Note: we'll continue fighting the way we fight regardless of the results.) So Food and Water Action helps you tell our Interior Department to reject gas and oil drilling leases in the Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

Action: concerning clean water, social media, and methane emissions.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn PIRG helps you tell Gov. Wolf to do his damnedest to keep lead out of our drinking water. Finding lead in your drinking water isn't something that only happens to "those people" in Flint, Michigan -- Detroit's public schools just shut off their drinking water after they found lead in it, and our Government Accountability Office (or GAO) found over one-third of school districts that had tested for lead found elevated levels of lead in their water. And remember: there is no safe level of lead consumption -- any amount of lead can cause brain damage and can stunt a child's growth and/or brain development. This is one of those things we actually need to be zero-tolerance about, but too many of our leaders act like they can do nothing about it. But that sure in hell ain't the American can-do spirit in action. And it's well past time our leaders get right with the American can-do spirit.

Meanwhile, Facebook's Messenger Kids app isn't just an app that exposes our youngest children to all the problems older kids already have with social media, like depression and bad body image -- it's an app that apparently breaks the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act! Nobody could have predicted! Apparently Messenger Kids lets folks approve children's accounts without actually proving they're the parents and also lets Facebook disclose children's data to members of the "Facebook Family of Companies," both of which would contravene COPPA protections. Of course this is the sort of thing our President talks about as being "in the way of companies making money and trying to serve people," but when you hear such a thing in the context of protecting children's private information, I hope that kind of statement sounds like the lame excuse it absolutely is. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell Facebook to abandon its Messenger Kids app.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to continue to require strong methane leak rules, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. Hey, weren't we just talking about those pesky regulations stunting our economy and forcing corporations to follow a lot of rules boo-hoo? Well, those "pesky" regulations forcing gas and oil drilling corporations to emit less methane not only protect us from pollution and climate change, they also keep usable energy from leaking into the atmosphere -- usable energy, I should add, that means royalties for the American people when it occurs on public lands. But our Administration just wants you to think it's thrown up its hands, what with the NHTSA's assessment that global temperatures would go up a staggering seven degrees by the end of the 21st century. But perhaps our Administration also needs to get right with the American can-do spirit.

Action: concerning ALEC, media consolidation, and public lands.

You may have heard that Verizon has lately left the American Legislative Exchange Council because of ALEC's newfound BBF, David Horowitz, a notorious right-wing Muslim-basher. Yeah, I wish more corporations had dumped ALEC over their support for Voter ID and opposition to municipal broadband, too, but I take an opening where I get it, so People for the American Way helps you tell other big corporations, like AT&T, Comcast, and UPS, to leave ALEC. I admit I was a bit surprised to learn that corporations were leaving ALEC over climate change, but I'd be a lot less surprised to find corporations leaving ALEC over David Horowitz. America's big corporations do seem to have wholeheartedly embraced liberal positions on social issues -- mainly, I suspect, to divert your attention from their reactionary positions on economic issues. But, like I said, I take an opening where I get it, and it's ALEC's economic work I hate the most.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger, then Free Press still helps you do that. Sprint and T-Mobile keep telling us this merger will be good for them, like we're supposed to be emotionally invested in that -- I'm such a churl I want only the things that are good for all of us, and having three big phone corporations instead of four ain't good for us. If four turns to three, then three can more easily turn to two, and two to one, and one was the number of political parties in the Soviet Union, and you know how that turned out. I don't make this analogy lightly -- one corporation monopolizing all of America's phone services would mean (especially in this post-neutrality age) one corporation deciding what you can see and hear. What do conservatives teach us? That concentrated power anywhere is evil. It's why we passed the Sherman Antitrust Act almost 150 years ago.

Finally, our Bureau of Land Management has proposed opening up almost all of New Mexico's Greater Carlsbad Cavern area to oil and gas drilling, and would even sell off some 50,000 acres for that purpose. Meaning it's no longer public land! Which you can only sell one time, I feel compelled to repeat with the italics hammer. Hence Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell our BLM to reject its plan to open up this area to oil and gas drilling. Read through Wild Earth Guardians's seven-point plan in the email you'd send and you'll be impressed with the breadth of its reasoning -- you would argue for prioritizing "securing public access to currently inaccessible lands" over corporate access and for strong safeguards against emissions and oil and gas leaks, among other things. So let's work on getting our policymakers to make some actual good policy, versus policy that enriches some crony or other.

Around the table: what we must do when the next financial crisis hits the fan, and other lessons.

Thomas Hanna at In These Times reminds us that the next time the banksters collapse the economy, we'll need to have a better response than "save the banks" -- like "require a public ownership stake, with full voting rights, in any financial institution that has to be bailed out due to its own fraudulent or speculative activities." I'd just say "nationalize the banks," and anyone who responds by calling that a BIG GUMMINT TAKEOVURZ!!!! ought to take a good look around and see what all that "freedom" for banksters has done for us. And public banks now make up about a fifth of the banks in Old Europe, while the Bank of North Dakota made sure that state didn't go in the tank after the oil and gas bubble burst there (oh, and North Dakota weathered the 2008 economic armageddon pretty well, too).

Chinese government bans one of its many non-state-sanctioned Protestant churches, for, you know, refusing to allow the government to install closed-circuit cameras within. The Zion church is one of China's many "black market" churches -- or, as we'd call them in America, churches. Memo to right-wingers still gnashing teeth over transgender folks in their bathrooms: this is what government oppression of religious freedom actually looks like. Then again, the lesson may be lost on them, since this tale also has actual Communists in it, rather than the "Communists" in America whose main crime is "not being a cruel and heartless Republican."

Surprise, surprise, North Korea still seems to be going to some trouble to conceal its nuclear weapons program. Also, North Korea doesn't appear to have gotten rid of any of its nukes, and appears to have made new ones. But what happened to we don't have to worry about it anymore? We must remember that all of our President's pronouncements have an expiration date, and that expiration date is generally "just after now."

Ho hum, Dept. of Treasury Inspector General finds that the outsourcing of IRS functions to private corporations is going very badly. Not just because they've only collected one percent of the money these deadbeats owe, but also because the IRS isn't holding these corporations accountable, and because private corporations are contacting taxpayers over the phone, just like pretty much every identity thief (and precisely unlike the IRS). This is the third time we've tried to privatize IRS debt collection; when will we learn? When we stop electing politicians whose one dream is to destroy everything about government that works, that's when.

Finally, Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis spoke to the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2017, which has, over the years, hosted a flotsam of racists and other unjustifiably aggrieved speakers. Naturally Mr. DeSantis calls the Freedom Center's apparent obsession with multiculturalism and diversity straight-shooting and truth-telling. But why would anyone expect any differently from a teabagger who has so obviously (and successfully) courted our President's support? And I wish I could say associating with this crowd would hurt him in Florida, as it would in, say, New Jersey.

Action: concerning monopolies and conservation.

Freedom from Big Tech helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission to start breaking up big tech monopolies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Why? Because they have too much power! You remember Orkut, Tribe, MySpace, and Friendster? Now they're either gone or mere husks of their former selves, because Facebook dominates all. You remember search engines like Momma and Ask Jeeves? Well, Google stomps all over them, too. And Amazon didn't just muscle B. Dalton, Encore, and Waldenbooks out of strip malls all over America, they sentenced uncountable small businesses to oblivion. How many times must I tell these pimps! Small businesses are more accountable to the communities they serve than any big corporation, and they innovate more, too -- which is why big corporations constantly buy small businesses out. But the bigger they get, the more they impose their will upon us, and we have every right to demand that our government -- which works on our behalf, ideally! -- put a stop to that.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission to reject the proposed Sprint/T-Mobile merger. You know the reasons to reject it: mergers kill jobs, raise prices, give consumers fewer choices, and concentrate power in fewer hands; the fact that neither one of these corporations planning to merge is AT&T or Verizon doesn't change any of that. We have, incidentally, another reason to reject the merger: that it might cut off access to smaller carriers that use the bigger carriers' lines, since the resulting bigger corporation can more easily push around smaller carriers. For example, Consumer Cellular -- you've seen their ads; they give inexpensive phone plans to folks over 50, and they even offer flip phones! -- uses T-Mobile's lines; you think the behemoth resulting from a Sprint/T-Mobile merger will give Consumer a better deal? Maybe that sounds like a first-world problem -- until you can't afford phone service.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which has given us such historic outdoors landmarks as the Delaware Water Gap and the Appalachian Trail. LWCF funding expires in just a few weeks, and Congress probably hopes you don't realize the LWCF is there -- and certainly we can't count on our President suddenly reminding us it's there, since the LWCF is about preserving the past for future generations and I just named two things our President doesn't give one rat's hind quarter about. But the LWCF dedicates certain offshore gas and drilling fees toward the task of buying up and preserving historic lands, and when it last expired in 2015, Congress only extended it for three years, despite initially authorizing it for 25 and then renewing it for another 25. Yes, that's another data point suggesting Congress really has gotten a lot worse over time. But we made them reauthorize it before, and we can do it again -- if we act.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering why posting has been relatively light lately, I'm working on the second Penny Rants volume, which will cover the years 2013-2016. I'll put that out in mid-October, and then I'll get to work on the third Penny Rants volume, which will cover 2017 and 2018; that'll be out in mid-January. I'll do some live shows to celebrate those two releases; I'll share more details about those as I get them. But, you know, save the dates, such as they are -- and thank you for reading, and for being good citizens.)

Action: concerning Social Security, taxes, and drilling on public lands.

You've heard of the Republican plan to fund a paid family leave plan with Social Security benefits, resulting in you getting less money when you retire if you've ever used paid family leave? Now it's a real bill! It's S. 3345, with no text or summary presently available at Congress.gov, which could be because, hey, this is a bill that robs your future Social Security benefits if you want paid family leave now. After all, where on Earth else could we possibly get the money to do that? From that $1.7 trillion tax "cut" giveaway to the rich Republicans enacted in December, maybe? Or even from the infinitesimally small payroll tax that would fund an actual paid family leave bill, S. 337, where folks making $50,000 annually would pay $8.50 a month. $8.50 a month! I've seen single servings of coffee that cost more than that! So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Rubio rob-the-future-to-pay-now plan -- doesn't sound very conservative when put like that, does it? -- and Moms Rising still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 337, the FAMILY Act, since that's a real paid family leave bill.

Meanwhile, speaking of that Republican tax scam, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and reject any further tax-cuts-for-the-rich Republicans (or our President) might contemplate. The Senate's talking about more tax cuts like there's no time for that, but don't you believe it -- if the House puts together a bill quickly enough, they'll move heaven and Earth to give more welfare handouts to their cronies. The massive corporate tax cut did not, as our President suggested, put $4,000 in every family's paycheck -- but it did result in a lot of massive stock buybacks, which concentrates power in corporate executive hands, because, yeah, they just don't have enough power already. And that 4% GDP growth from last quarter? You're not seeing any of that in your paycheck, either. You see, this is why America can't have nice things like paid family leave -- because our government cares more about its cronies than its owners, i.e., the American people. We'll just have to learn 'em.

Finally, our Administration plans to auction off two million acres of public land in six Western states so that gas and oil drillers can pollute it create jobs wean America off foreign oil redistribute yet more of our wealth as Americans upward, to themselves. Hence WildEarth Guardians helps you tell our Administration to scuttle these plans. We could go on (and we have!) about how gas and oil drilling spoil clean air and clean water, etc., and spoil wildlife habitat, etc., and these are very important things, but gas and oil drilling also put public lands off-limits to those members of the public who love the great outdoors. Surely it was love of the great outdoors (I doubt he conceived of pollution the way we do now) that moved the first President Roosevelt to start establishing national parks and monuments in the first place. How far we've fallen from him to our current President, the Whiner-in-Chief, for whom now is all and the future is for losers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning the Supreme Court, immigrants in the Army, and offshore drilling.

Our President has nominated D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court seat vacated by Justice Kennedy's retirement. I've received numerous emails exhorting me to tell Republicans to follow the "McConnell Rule" and refuse to consider the nomination until after the people seat a new Congress, but amused as I'd be to attack Mr. McConnell's bald and abject hypocrisy, and aware as I am that literally the only reason we have the President we have is the patently-undemocratic Electoral College, I will not be induced into hypocrisy myself; I called for hearings on Mr. Garland, and the Senate should hold hearings on Mr. Kavanaugh as well. But nothing prevents us from using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) and calling our Senators and telling them to vote the Kavanaugh nomination down. For Judge Kavanaugh will do a lot of damage if the Senate confirms him -- among so many other things, Judge Kavanaugh has written that Presidents should be immune from criminal prosecutions while in office, which is exactly the sort of thing that warms our President's heart, and chills ours.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the AP's report that our Army is kicking out immigrant enlistees without warning or justification -- immigrants who had enlisted in part so that they could get on an expedited path to citizenship, no less! -- Win Without War helps you tell our Defense Secretary, James Mattis, to stop these discharges and investigate previous ones. We've offered an expedited path to citizenship to immigrant enlistees for over a dozen years now (that's right, right-wingers, you can't blame TEH OBUMMERZ!!!! for this one, either), but now, in the name of "zero tolerance" of immigration, we're going to break this promise, too, because AMURIKA!!!!! Mr. Mattis -- who could be getting fired over Twitter soon, being the last remnant of sanity in our President's foreign policy apparatus -- has shown courage in the face of our President's ball-swinging before; with our counsel, he could do so again. (BTW, right-wingers: none of these immigrants are slackers "taking advantage" of our good nature, because nobody thinks putting themselves in the way of bombs and bullets is an "easy" way to get citizenship more quickly.)

Finally, our President has issued an Executive Order loosening regulations put in after the Deepwater Horizon Spillageddon in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, like we have no damn memory of anything at all. Because they "kill jobs," I suppose our President will say if he ever gets around to deciding he ought to justify what he's doing, but of course that'd be a lie -- clean air and clean water regulations create jobs for people who help corporations comply with them; what they don't do so well is redistribute income upward to oil and gas drilling bosses. Our President believes bosses are his only real constituency, but in our sick, immoral, and decadent society, becoming a boss doesn't even demonstrate superior talent at managing people or making good products or streamlining processes anymore -- it only demonstrates superior talent at corner-cutting, employee-screwing, and job-killing. Also, you know, the American people are the boss of the President, not the other way around. Penn Environment helps you tell our Interior Department to halt all offshore drilling off America's coasts.

Action: concerning immigration, slavery, and renewable energy.

I'm guessing by now you've heard tape of the wailing of immigrant children who've been separated from their parents at the border, replete with a Border Patrol agent's attempted gallows humor; naturally our President blames everyone but himself for these separations, our Attorney General throws Pauline letters at anyone who says his policy is cruel, our HHS Secretary simply denies any of this is even happening, and certain Administration supporters call the children "crisis actors" -- all ways, you notice, of avoiding admitting that you support separating children from parents, since saying you support that makes you, you know, look like a cruel bastard. "Zero tolerance" policies generally being bad policies in any endeavor, People for the American Way helps you tell our government to end its policy of separating children from parents during border crossings.

Meanwhile, Turkmenistan is yet another nation that forces its citizens to work in the cotton fields during harvest time -- which isn't "bringing everyone together for the common good" so much as forcing free people into slavery for the enrichment of crony cotton executives -- and it also tends to, ah, mistreat activists who try to call attention to this depravity. Hence the government of Turkmenistan has kept Alternative Turkmenistan News (or ATM) reporter Gaspar Matalaev in a labor camp for the better part of two years after he interviewed and photographed folks during said harvest. Hence the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell Turkmenistan to release Mr. Matalaev. (You'll be pleased to learn that our government banned the importation of cotton from Turkmenistan last month -- though if our President ever decides he has cronies there, that could change in a New York minute.)

Finally, an organization called Brown's Last Chance helps you tell California Gov. Jerry Brown, term-limited (again!) in 2018, to put California on a surer path away from fossil fuels and toward renewables before he leaves office. Look up the word "mercurial" in the dictionary and you'll see Jerry Brown's picture, but Mr. Brown has been making an awful lot of noise lately about the danger climate change presents to our planet, so he might be inclined to a) stop giving permits to fossil fuel corporations for new drilling and b) phase fossil fuels out of California's energy grid. I'm frankly more concerned about the health effects oil and gas drilling have on the clean drinking water of good Californians -- you don't have health without clean water, and Mr. Brown's record on this matter, which includes letting farms spray fracking wastewater on their crops how do you like those strawberries now? rather undercuts his public handwringing about his legacy. Good thing we're here to help.

Action: black lung disease, wastewater, and EPA funding.

First things first. The Black Lung Disability Trust Fund -- which, as you can tell by the name, helps coal miners with their extensive health issues -- has never been funded properly, such that the GAO now informs us that it's billions of dollars in debt. Even better, the tax on coal corporations which funds the trust will go down by more than half later on this year! Right-wingers will demand that we fund the trust some other way than making that those "poor" coal CEOs pony up more money, but that's a real Pandora's box right there -- after all, why not fund the trust by, oh, I don't know, repealing corporate tax cuts and tax cuts for the rich? Because SOCIALISM COMMUNISM NAZISM, that's why. So get a head start on solving this problem for-real for-real by allowing Change.org help you to tell your Congressfolk to support coal miners over coal executives by properly funding the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund.

Meanwhile, did you know that the state of Pennsylvania has been spraying gas and oil drilling wastewater on our roads to, get this, keep the dust down? Where carcinogenic and radioactive elements can easily drift into the air or work their way to our water tables? I will smack the next pimp who responds that well, dust is a problem on Pennsylvania roads, as if the mere existence of a problem automatically validates any conceivable solution. A more crafty pimp would say that this "solution" allows gas and oil corporations to "dispose" of their waste without resorting to, say, open-air pits, but, again, the mere existence of a bad solution doesn't automatically validate any other conceivable bad solution. I don't like radioactive and cancer-causing crap when it's on my California strawberries; why would I like it on my roads? Penn Environment helps you tell the state DEP to stop spraying down our roads with wastewater.

Finally, Congress is still trying to gut EPA clean air and clean water programs. How many times must I tell these pimps! Clean air and clean water programs are not BIG GUMMINT GONE AMOK!!!!, nor do they "hurt small businesses" (which certainly don't pollute at the rate fossil fuel corporations pollute!) -- these programs protect the American people, because without clean air and clean water, you can't have healthy Americans. And when you have healthy Americans (will right-wingers follow this line of reasoning?), you have lower health care costs. See? Clean air and clean water programs actually save money -- they just don't deposit those savings directly into fossil fuel CEO bank accounts, so Congress doesn't care about them. So we make them care. The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to put Americans before big donors by fully funding clean air and clean water programs.

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

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

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

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

Action: discrimination, fossil fuel funding, and campaign finance reform.

S. 2525, the so-called First Amendment Defense Act, would not "defend the First Amendment" so much as give various bigots the "right" to discriminate against people they fear will give them cooties. No, their position does not deserve more civility than that. The First Amendment prevents our government from putting you in jail for your speech and prevents our government from establishing a state religion, but refusing to serve people because they're gay isn't "free speech," it's discrimination, and when our laws say you can't refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple because "conscience," our government isn't "establishing a state religion," but preventing you from discriminating against people who also have rights. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to protect everyone's rights by rejecting the First Amendment Defense Act.

Meanwhile, U.S. Bank's CEO said last year -- in the wake of popular pressure following the Dakota Access protests -- that his corporation would stop financing gas and oil pipelines. But, possibly because we can't look at everything at once, U.S. Bank has pumped some $2 billion into these pipelines, including nearly $500 million into Energy Transfer Partners, the corporation behind Dakota Access. Just so happens, however, that U.S. Bank's annual shareholder meeting is later on this week, so Climate Truth helps you tell U.S. Bank to divest from oil and gas producers. You know what would help get us off oil and gas, besides big energy corporations throwing money into solar and wind? Big banks deciding to invest more in solar and wind! I mean, don't our best and brightest entrepreneurs always look to the future and plan ahead? We may have to pressure them a bit harder to get them to be those people.

Finally, H.R. 4077/S. 1959, the Honest Ads Act, would put online political ads under the same scrutiny the law already gives to print and broadcast ads, meaning voters could more easily find out who's funding them. We couldn't find out who's funding these ads as easily as we could if Congress had passed the DISCLOSE Act on any of the multitudinous opportunities they had to do that, but online political ads have escaped even the amount of scrutiny other political ads get, because the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 specifies only print, broadcast, and "satellite" communication. Recall that in 1971 ARPANET was in its infancy, and it'd be 20 years before the High Performance Computing and Communication Act (authored by one Sen. Albert Gore, Jr.) kick-started the internet. So Issue One helps you tell your Congressfolk to support campaign finance reform by passing the Honest Ads Act.

Action: discrimination, overtime pay, and methane emissions.

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

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

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

Action: fighting fracking and trophy hunting of endangered species.

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

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

Around the table: concerning working families, corporate taxes, health care, financial regulation, and public lands.

Thinking about picking up Uber or Lyft as a side job? Well, think again: an MIT study finds that Uber and Lyft drivers, once they're done paying all the costs like gas and insurance and repairs that Uber and Lyft don't pay, make a median income of $3.37 an hour. The paper's co-author says "(t)his business model is not currently sustainable," though perhaps he's too polite to say that this model doesn't actually aim to sustain itself per se, but rather aims to redistribute income upward from workers to executives and shareholders.

Ho hum, American corporations spend over $200 billion in stock buybacks over the last two months. But the President's votaries will go to the polls with BUT TEH THOUZANDZ DOLLARZ BONUZEZ!!!!! on their minds, even though some of them would react badly to the news that corporations mainly use their big tax cuts to consolidate their power so that they're less accountable to their shareholders, of whom there are generally many fewer after a stock buyback.

The incomparable Michael Hiltzik notes that the current Administration will spend $33 billion more next year to cover almost nine million fewer Americans, which might strike fiscal conservatives, if any remain, as unconscionably stupid. In a related note, the Genius-in-Chief told the CPAC crowd that his Administration is bringing out "tremendous plans" "at a fraction of the cost that are much better than Obamacare," though he's actually bringing out expanded short-term plans that are cheap because they cover almost nothing -- and siphon off younger, healthier folk from the bigger pools, which makes their health care more expensive. Why does our President tell us cheaper equals better? Because that's how he's made money his whole life.

The equally-incomparable David Dayen reminds us that Republicans and Democrats can't agree on gun control in the wake of the Parkland mass shooting, but can "come together" on gutting financial regulations. Well, that's what "bipartisanship" is all about, after all: Democrats and Republicans coming together to give Republicans whatever they want. Over two-thirds of the biggest banks in America will benefit from "loosened" regulations, with the help of at least three Democrat Senators up for re-election in 2018; why folks like Jon Tester don't figure that "bucking the party" and "bucking the banksters" could actually be the same thing I'll never understand.

Finally, a Project on Government Oversight report finds that our government has been routinely screwing Americans out of royalties when corporations drill for oil and gas on public lands. Our government used to charge about $40 in royalties for ever dollar they do now; how would you feel if that was your money? Oh, wait: it is your money. One of the tricks they use, apparently, is to declare a certain tract of land or oceanfloor "non-viable," and then act all surprised, I guess, when some low-bidding corporation drills the crap out of it and makes a killing. They say if we charge what it's worth we'll kill jobs, but it won't -- it'll only deprive a few corporate executives of some unearned money. Besides, we're the boss here.

Action: protecting free speech and public lands.

H.R. 1865, the so-called Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, would not only fail to help efforts to stop sex trafficking, but would actually chill online free speech. How? By holding internet service providing corporations liable for any sex trafficking arranged through their networks even without their knowledge. You think an ISP can monitor every piece of network traffic that flows through their servers? Of course not! That means ISPs will simply start censoring people left and right. Our laws already hold ISPs liable if they know about sex trafficking on their networks and do nothing about it, so H.R. 1865 is the epitome of law-and-order ball-swinging -- blaming the blameless, pretending you're tough when you're weak, and prosecuting so many people you can't effectively prosecute actual wrongdoers. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect free speech by rejecting H.R. 1865.

Meanwhile, our Bureau of Land Management, just 18 short months ago, enacted the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, which protects upwards of 22 million acres of California's Mojave and Sonoran Deserts from development, and also protects over three dozen unique species of animals. Guess what our Bureau of Land Management wants to do now that President Manchild runs things? Why, open up these areas to mining and gas and oil drilling, of course! That's offensive on the face of it, and when you realize that the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan also set aside land for renewable energy development, it's doubly offensive. But remember, kids: our President doesn't care about you unless you're someone's boss. Maybe if we were to remind him that solar and wind power corporations also have bosses, he'd change his tune a bit. In the meantime, CREDO helps you tell our BLM to reject efforts to open up protected federal lands to polluters.

UPDATE. The House has passed H.R. 1865, so redirect your efforts to calling your Senators to tell them to reject it. Tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers are, as always, in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a smartphone).

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

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

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

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

Around the table: health care, deficits, Russia, fossil fuels, and liberal chances in right-wing districts.

Our President proposes expanding temporary, cut-rate health insurance plans so that they're considerably less temporary. And the result? More young, healthy people will roll the dice with these plans that don't have to cover the health care issues (including pre-existing conditions) that all other health insurance plans have to cover -- which will help make all the better health care plans more expensive. He might as well call it making health insurance suck again! Seriously, when I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

The incomparable Dean Baker reminds us that (all together now) Republicans obviously don't care about deficits, despite the "liberal" media's insistence that they really, really do. "This rule should be taught in Journalism 101," he writes: "Reporters should not infer views or beliefs." That's obviously true, but what's even more important is that growth-through-tax-cuts-for-the-rich has never worked -- it didn't work under Mr. Reagan, it didn't work under Bush the Lesser, and it won't work under our current President. You'd think the "liberal" media would have noted the disaster that Sam Brownback's tax-cutting "experiment" has been in Kansas just recently, but for the "liberal" media, yesterday is always another country.

Cato Institute senior fellow/Soul Coughing fan Julian Sanchez advances a novel theory: "Russia Wanted Trump to Win. And It Wanted to Get Caught." Mainly, "Project Latkha didn’t merely aim to influence the outcome of the election, but also its tone, and Americans’ attitudes toward their own democratic institutions." Also, "If we run with the hypothesis that Russia’s core goal was to sow doubt about the integrity and fairness of American elections — and, by implication, erode the credibility of any criticism aimed at Russia’s — then the ultimate exposure of their interference may well have been viewed not as frustrating that aim but as one more perverse way of advancing it." And if Congress passes laws stifling online free speech, that'll only remind you of Mr. bin Laden's long game -- not to take away America's freedoms, but to get America to do that for him.

Former U.S. House Rep. Dennis Kucinich, running in a rather crowded Democratic primary for Governor of Ohio, says he'll stop all gas and oil drilling there if he gets elected. The flesh is willing -- someone should have long ago said "(f)resh water and clean water are not negotiable issues" -- but the observer who criticizes Mr. Kucinich's plan for not emphasizing what he would do in the absence of gas and oil is spot-on. Mr. Kucinich's public works program concerns infrastructure and statewide public broadband, which is good, but doesn't seem to specify solar and wind projects, so that's a missed opportunity.

Finally, a Pennsylvania Democratic operative said this earlier this week: "Democrats have to realize that Republicans can run conservative candidates everywhere and get to 218 House seats. Democrats can’t run liberals everywhere and get to a majority." Of course, Republicans are running mostly reactionary candidates, not conservative ones, but I'd also question the meaning of the word "liberal," here: if "liberal" means "social liberals who let corporations do whatever they like," I'd completely agree with his assessment. But if "liberal" means "economic populist," then I think he's dead wrong. Liberal economic populists can win anywhere, anytime -- as long as the consultant class doesn't get to them first.

Action: defending Medicaid, food stamps, clean air, clean water, and our coasts.

Now that Republicans have doomed us to trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future -- and not even so they can goose up the economy, but so they can give massive welfare handouts to the rich and to corporations -- they're all hot to destroy food stamps and Medicaid, so Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject proposed cuts to food stamps and Medicaid, while CREDO helps you tell state Governors not to impose work requirements on folks who get Medicaid. Never mind that most folks who get food stamps and Medicaid already work, so successful have corporations been (at least since the Clinton years!) at paying their workers so little that they qualify for Medicaid -- what about the folks who literally can't work, or who literally can't find work? Do right-wingers really think everyone's faking it? Oh, right -- they think everyone's faking it but them. You can lead a right-winger to other people's struggles, but you can't actually make him empathize.

Meanwhile, President Trump is ready to unleash yet another "hard power" budget proposal, so Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose all proposed cuts to EPA funding. Right-wingers love spewing the lie that EPA funding cripples a corporation's ability to make money, but you know what funding the EPA actually does? It enables the EPA to actually put boots on the ground at fossil fuel plants, and see what harm they might be doing to our clean air and our clean water. It also enables the EPA to properly clean up America's especially toxic areas via the Superfund program, which, naturally, EPA Administrator Scott "Cone of Silence" Pruitt wants to slash by a third. And you know, Mr. Pruitt might think climate change could be a good thing, but all these once-in-a-lifetime-this-month storms climate change has brought us, and will bring us more of, will actually make cleaning up toxic sites harder. Feel free to tell your Senators that.

Finally, speaking of the Trump Administration's compulsive short-sightedness, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to scuttle its plan to open up virtually all of our coasts to offshore drilling, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Yes, it is short-sighted to drill for oil and gas off virtually every coast in America -- the energy you'll extract will be burned off, but oceans are forever, and if you pollute them, you'll take a long, long time cleaning them up. But then Mr. Trump doesn't care about the long-term, as evidenced by his long career driving businesses into bankruptcy right after extracting all their value for himself -- he only cares about other bosses, the real beneficiaries of expanded offshore drilling. No, drilling workers aren't the beneficiaries, not when the Trump Administration rolls back safety standards for them, and not when we (or their employers!) could put them to work building out a renewable energy grid in America.

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

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

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

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

Action: "free" trade, Constitutional war-making, and offshore drilling.

With NAFTA renegotiations still going on, Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that any NAFTA renegotiation "puts people and planet before corporate profits," as the petition succinctly puts it. During his Tuesday night State of the Union address, President Trump called for trade deals that "protect American workers and American intellectual property." But the trouble with that isn't just that he's packed his cabinet with "free" traders, but that, for him, "protecting American workers" means nothing so much as getting rid of clean air and clean water regulations, which protects corporate bottom lines more than it protects coal miners' jobs. How odd that he advanced "intellectual property," too, since in previous "free" trade deals "protecting intellectual property" mainly meant protecting corporate drug patents longer so other countries couldn't make generics. So we're going to need to remind the President about our priorities, not his.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4837, the aptly-named No Unconstitutional Strike Against North Korea Act, would prevent Mr. Trump from using the 2001 AUMF to launch a military strike on North Korea and would refuse to fund any such strike unless Congress declares war first. H.R. 4837 doesn't "outlaw" war with North Korea, but merely prevents Mr. Trump from going to war on his own, and while supporting H.R. 4837 will prompt some Americans into calling you a "snowflake," remember that they are the real snowflakes if they let their own insatiable rage prevent them from adhering to our Constitution and to law and order. Hence the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight warmongering by supporting H.R. 4837. Don't brook any silliness from your Congressfolk about their "unwillingness to tie the President's hands" -- being Commander-in-Chief means literally nothing until and unless Congress declares war. That's how it's supposed to work.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Trump Administration to abandon its plans to open up almost all American coasts to oil and gas drilling, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. The Sierra Club reminds us that the Obama Administration, after overwhelming public feedback, abandoned plans to hand out oil and gas drilling leases off our coasts in the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans; what changed between then and now? A manchild President who cares nothing about workers and everything about other bosses like himself, that's what. No, his plan to drill-everywhere-and-screw-the-consequences won't "create jobs" for oil and gas workers so much as it'll create unearned income for already-too-rich CEOs who live to get by with as few workers as possible. A visionary President would put good Americans to work retooling our electric grid so it can run on solar and wind power. A visionary politician would even run on that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: "free" trade, and infrastructure.

NAFTA negotiators are meeting in Montreal as we speak, and since our President has already faltered before the challenge of demanding an end to the hated "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanism in NAFTA, and our Commerce Secretary thinks the hated TPP would be a wonderful guide to renegotiating NAFTA, it's up to us to act. So Public Citizen helps you demand that any future NAFTA deal put people before corporations. Corporations have the decided advantage, of course, since they're able to take a peek at NAFTA negotiations and we're not, even though we're, you know, the owners of government. And "free" trade deals have not only subjugated workers to corporations, they've overthrown American law -- recall that the World Trade Organization recently struck down a law mandating country-of-origin labeling for chickens as a violation of two of the more obscure "free" trade deals! And a more corporate NAFTA would do more of that. So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that Axios published a leaked outline of President Trump's infrastructure plan, and it's as awful as we've feared. The plan, you recall, would use some $140 billion in corporate welfare handouts to lure $1 trillion in private investment, but already you see the problem: private investors won't invest in a project unless it makes money, which makes it more likely they'll skimp on vital services to the people who need them just so they can make more money. And where's the money coming from? From oil and gas drilling in public parks, naturally. Of course we'd be better off simply reversing the recently-passed corporate tax cut, which offers a boon to corporations much larger than the infrastructure plan's $140 billion price tag, every year. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell our President to abandon his privatization-centered infrastructure program. He won't care, but duty is duty.

Action: internet freedom, and offshore drilling.

I still don't have a bill number for the proposed "resolution of disapproval" that would repeal the FCC's recent "Restoring Internet Freedom for Corporations and Certainly Not for You Little People" rule (which, as you can probably tell from my exaggerated title, itself repealed the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules), but you should still get on the horn with your Senators and tell them to support such a resolution. The resolution reportedly has 50 votes -- all 49 Senate Democrats plus Republican Susan Collins of Maine -- and only needs one more to pass the Senate. You can find phone numbers for your Senators using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or beneath this post, if you're on a smartphone) -- and you can also find tools for those Republicans Senators you hope might join the struggle, a thin hope, to be sure, but John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) occasionally get it in their heads to piss off the Trump Administration. Send Mr. McCain a get-well wish if you call him, since he's not presently well enough to even vote on bills.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to send a public comment to the Trump Administration demanding that they reverse their plan to open up all the coasts except those of their cronies' to expanded oil and gas drilling, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. What does expanded oil and gas drilling do? It gives us more oil and gas, in theory anyway, but we hardly need more of that choking off our clean air and muddying our clean water -- we need more renewable energy development in America, even as renewable energy sources like solar and wind are starting to become competitive price-wise with oil and gas. And if you responded to that sentence with a ha! If they're competitive, why do they need Big Gummint's help? Ha ha ha you liberals suck!, well, congratulations, because you're the moron who just told my audience why oil and gas don't need all the Big Gummint handouts, either. Thanks for playing, though, and remember to wipe off your screen.

Around the table: our President isn't crazy but enables craziness in others, and other lessons.

President Trump slaps 30% tariff on imported solar panels, because of course he did. Yeah, I'd prefer to make solar panels here too, but I don't see him moving this quickly on the Chinese steel he uses in his own buildings, and it sure looks like he got up in the morning and asked around the office for the best way to piss off liberals -- which is an understandable political strategy, I suppose, if the only "liberals" you know are the Democrats in Congress. As policy, we'd best interpret his move not as a "pro-worker" move (what, he thinks robots install solar panels?) or even as an "end to corporate welfare" for solar corporations; we'd best interpret is as actual corporate welfare for oil, gas, and coal, three industries that are losing ground to solar.

I approve of data showing the income gap between rich and poor across the planet, but comparing the "1%" to everyone else, even when the 1% makes more than 80% of the world's income, just isn't the most effective comparison, even if it rolls off the tongue more easily. Try the 0.1%, since you're just not in the same club as Rupert Murdoch if you make $450,000 a year -- nor do you do the same amount of damage to civilization. It is, after all, all about restraining the most powerful from running roughshod over everyone else's rights, even if right-wingers call the most powerful "job creators"! (In fairness, the "just eight people own as much wealth as the poorest half of the planet" is the better comparison.)

Execrable "evangelical" right-winger Tony Perkins announces that evangelicals have given President Trump a "mulligan" and a "do-over" when contemplating the President's extramarital affairs and general vulgarity, as long as he "delivers" on evangelical policy preferences. That may be taking the Parable of the Prodigal Son too far. I presume, also, that Mr. Perkins means evangelical elites, not your evangelical friends and neighbors, have been handing out these "mulligans," since a lot of them already know that if you keep handing out mulligans to folks like Mr. Trump, you'll just have to keep handing them out. (Read the whole article, though -- the work of defending Mr. Trump makes Mr. Perkins, and others, sound utterly unhinged.)

Florida voters will get to vote on a constitutional amendment guaranteeing most felons the right to vote this November. I sure hope those voters do the right thing, which is give back what their government took away, and deal another death-blow to the notion that folks who commit crimes should just keep on paying even after they've completed their sentences and reintegrated into society, all so some politician or other can make everyone watch his balls swing. (But I still think murderers and sex offenders still deserve the right to vote -- rights are either for everyone or they're not really rights.)

Finally, one of the male Trump offspring says the recent government shutdown "is a good thing" for the Trump Administration politically. I don't presume to disagree with his assessment so much as I presume to excoriate a society that tolerates such cynicism openly expressed, a society that encourages folks to think of life and death matters as sporting events where one side is up and the other down, a society that too rarely evaluates events in terms of the harm they do to people. In other words, we live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: the biggest threat to small restaurants, and other horrible truths.

In a wild development, Saudi Arabian government arrests over a dozen of its elites, including ten princes, on vague "corruption" charges not more than a few hours after creating an anti-corruption commission. You may be tempted to shrug at the sight of some elites abusing other elites, but don't be -- when a nation gives itself the power to jail folks and freeze bank accounts at will, it's telling the world how insecure it really is, and nothing good comes of powerful nations acting insecure.

Sadly, we have cause to be reminded, again, that "arming all the civilians" won't stop mass shootings. If you recall that mass shooters first and foremost have the element of surprise, and that they generally shoot a lot of people before everyone else can even figure out what's going on, you'd see that right away, but if you're someone who watches too many cop shows, you might not see it. Gosh, everyone on a cop show is a great shot, and it just isn't like that in real life.

President Trump meets with Native American leaders, and advises them to just go ahead and take resources like oil and gas from the ground. They blanched, of course, knowing that there are laws against that, but Mr. Trump reiterated that they should "just do it"; read the quoted passage again and you'll see that any interpretation suggesting that "just do it" meant "just get rid of regulations" is wishful thinking. People like Donald Trump seem to think regulations keep us from being tough guys, but tough guys don't whine about having to follow rules that protect our air and water, do they?

U.S. trade deficit increases nine percent over the previous year. As usual, we're buying more imports than we're selling exports, and usually I'd respond that the economy's like a cruise ship, and you can't turn around a cruise ship quickly -- except that President Trump constantly promises that he can turn a cruise ship around quickly, and constantly struts around like he's actually done it, so he gets no slack. The man's more comfortable running corporations into the ground and then extracting their value for himself, and that's not the skill set you'd need to turn around a trade deficit.

Finally, from the "Surprise, Surprise!" file, experts now tell us there are too many chain restaurants. You know the story: too many chain restaurants means that unique restaurants with good ideas can't survive, which demonstrates once again that the biggest enemy of the small business is the big corporation. At least the New York Times doesn't insult us by including testimony from an "economics expert" saying "well, this is just the economy getting more efficient." Efficiency is a tool, not a master.

Action: tax "reform," the "liberal" media, and methane emissions.

The House could vote today on the budget resolution the Senate passed last week, so the time is now to call your House Reps and tell them to reject the Senate resolution, which, as you know, calls for massive cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, among other unconscionable cuts. They just had a massive public debate over cutting Medicaid -- which prompted enough of them to come back from the cliff that they couldn't pass a health care "reform" bill -- and then they passed a budget resolution cutting Medicaid! Apparently they're willing to pay any price to cut taxes for rich folks (while telling you they're cutting your taxes, naturally), which is what the Senate budget resolution sets up. They say they have to pass this monstrosity in order to unlock money from their big donors (who would receive most of the tax cuts, after all), but they might more productively worry about all the votes they're not going to get from their constituents once they've screwed them over. Unless they think Voter ID and gerrymandering and Interstate Crosscheck will do all their work for them.

Meanwhile, it's bad enough that the "liberal" media has taken so long to sideline the phrase "alt-right" -- after all, why should we let Nazi wannabes tell us what to call them? -- but the New York Times has lately been using "data" and "analysis" from organizations such as the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (they stuck the word "American" in there just so they wouldn't be called FIR!), and NumbersUSA. But don't be fooled by the relatively benign-sounding names, because one John Tanton -- who has expressly called for a "clear" "European-American majority" in America, though I wonder how his ancestors felt about Italian-Americans a century ago -- founded all three groups, and no they're most certainly not more legitimate now merely because they've all advised our current President. Civilized people do not permit the "mainstreaming" of folks who aim to take rights away from others, nor do civilized people automatically assume that anything the President does is "worth discussing." Hence CREDO helps you tell our paper of record to stop normalizing extremists.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Department of the Interior not to weaken the Bureau of Land Management's methane emissions rules, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Given that methane emissions make climate change worse, make air dirtier, make people sicker, and waste good energy that could be delivering royalties to the taxpayer, what is Interior's rationale for delaying implementation of methane emissions rules? Because it wants to get rid of the rules anyway, and making oil and gas drilling corporations comply with them in the meantime wouldn't be "fair." Of course, getting rid of the methane emissions rules would still make climate change worse, make air dirtier, make people sicker, and waste good energy that could be delivering royalties to the taxpayer, so it wouldn't solve any of those problems. I guess the Trump Administration just doesn't care about people -- except, of course, the executives who are so put out by following rules designed to keep them from polluting.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: clean water, and auto emissions.

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

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

Action: three alerts about clean air and clean water.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Pennsylvania House Rep to reject HB 542, which has mutated from a bill about internet sales into a bill that would gut clean air and clean water protections in the Commonwealth, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. HB 542 would start privatizing the entire gas and oil permitting process -- in spite of the fact that you generally don't want unaccountable private corporations regulating matters pertaining to clean air and clean water -- and would also let the state legislature veto clean air and clean water regulations issued by the state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP), for those times when the legislature can't get its act together enough to simply pass laws dirtying our air and water, I guess. Don't legislators work for people? And don't people breathe air and use water? And aren't people the real job creators anyway? Without us, no one could sell a damn thing. Not even fuel!

Meanwhile, the EPA, which has shown a stunning reluctance to do any work on the American people's behalf since President Trump took over and put pro-pollution politician Scott Pruitt in charge, skirted yet another responsibility to government's owners last month, by failing to respond to the state of Maryland's petition that the EPA require upwind power plants to actually run the already-installed pollution-controlling equipment during the summer season. Why summer? Because summer is premium smog season, that's why -- heat and sunlight are like steroids to all the pollutants power plants put in the air, which means more asthma and more heart disease for us poor schmucks who don't run fossil fuel-fired power plants. (Well, fossil fuel CEOs also breathe air, as far as I know, but they sure act like they don't.) Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell the EPA to do its job and make power plants use their pollution-control equipment when people need it the most.

Finally, the Trump Administration still plans to roll back automobile fuel efficiency standards, because what is more popular than making people pay more for gas? That is, after all, the most obvious result of freezing fuel efficiency standards between 2021 and 2025 (instead of raising them every year, as our government is currently mandated to do). Of course, the worse result -- more pollution in our air -- may not be as obvious to us as the hit to our pocketbooks, but it's just as real. Why would the Trump Administration do such a thing? Besides, you know, we won fuck Obama? Because the Trump Administration believes big auto executives and big fossil fuel executives have more rights than the rest of us. But if you could "earn" more rights because you make more money, then they're not really rights, are they? The Sierra Club helps you tell the Trump Administration to keep fuel efficiency standards right were they are, so good Americans can breathe easier and save more at the pump.

Action: "free" trade, and endangered species.

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

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

Action: government oppression, offshore drilling, and bad media.

The government of Turkey sure has been on a roll lately, purging itself of thousands of workers President Erdogan has deemed insufficiently loyal after an apparent attempted coup in 2016, and arresting and detaining many more private citizens, including 10 human rights workers at a meeting at a hotel near Istanbul about a month ago. Among these detainees is an Avaaz staff member named Özlem, and Avaaz helps you call for her release. Also among them is Idil Eser, head of Amnesty International's Turkish branch, and Amnesty International helps you call for her release as well. If you can put a face to Turkey's oppression, you make it that much harder for Turkey to oppress folks. If you can put a relatively prestigious face (like Ms. Eser's) on Turkey's reign of terror, you can certainly move the needle a bit. But if you can also put a relatively unknown face (like Özlem's) on it, you can remind good folks all over the world that folks like them get caught up in government oppression, too. We might also find it useful to remind President Trump (whose Administration has, surprisingly, condemned the arrests, instead of ignoring them) that the Big Stick of Bad PR can come his way if he gets ideas.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration wants to open our coasts to offshore drilling again, apparently thinking we've all forgotten the Spillageddon in the Gulf a mere seven years ago, a spill that made British Petroleum look like the most heartless corporation in the world (in a contest that always has a lot of entrants!) and devastated the local economies of Louisiana and Florida for years to come. But, you know, some oil or gas CEO needs to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, so to hell with what the people need! Naturally the Department of the Interior will only take comments on the offshore drilling plan for another six days, so Food and Water Watch helps you tell our government to protect our water and our livelihoods and stop new offshore drilling. No use arguing this is about "American energy independence" -- real American energy independence would begin with expanding renewable energy sources like solar and wind. Trouble is, that program would also grant us independence from oil and gas CEOs getting all the say about everything, and we can't have that in the greatest democratic experiment in Earth's history!

Finally, Media Matters helps you tell major corporations to stop advertising on Sean Hannity's Fox News show. While it's true that Mr. Hannity's program has morphed from a garden variety right-wing hackfest into a full-blown Trump TV operation, basically we should be encouraging corporate advertisers to run away from his program because of everything he's ever said. (OK, he hasn't been as bad on gays as other right-winger blowhards, but that's nothing to take to the Pearly Gates.) And just to review: the First Amendment protects you from your government; it does not protect you from your employer or from your advertisers, and it certainly does not protect you from activists, critics, or customers. I say this not just to pre-empt charges that a campaign targeting Mr. Hannity's advertisers somehow "oppresses" him, but to pre-empt corporate attempts to expand this "right" into a weapon they could wield against, say, a disgruntled customer's negative online review of their product, or even a customer's desire to buy a competitor's product, or no product. When our politicians constantly whine about the First Amendment when someone criticizes them, these things are not so hard to imagine.

Action: health care, pollution, and food labeling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: tax "reform," and endangered species.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: methane emissions, war in the Middle East, and the Johnson Amendment.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you leave a public comment with the EPA opposing their decision to suspend the leak detection/repair part of their recently-issued methane emissions rule for two years. Two years without these requirements means two years more folks will get sick from breathing in carcinogens and two years that leaked methane assaults our climate. It's also two years that we waste methane, a perfectly usable energy source, by leaking it into the air! Those who don't care about climate change or other people's health should at least care about the wasted opportunity to make money. And of course you also know that an entire industry (the methane mitigation industry) has sprung up to help deal with methane leaks, which are as common at gas drilling wells as flies are at a pile of dung -- and the businesses doing this work charge as little as $250 for the service. So they can't really say TEH REGULASHUNZ KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!!! or TEH REGULASHUNZ DRIVEZ US TO TEH POORHOUSEZ!!!!!

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia's war against Yemen -- a war we help fund, despite not having declared war with Yemen -- drags on, to the point where a cholera outbreak has broken out across that nation. And naturally the Trump Administration -- the one that promised to do foreign policy differently, to be "smarter" about getting involved in the Middle East -- does nothing. Well, those rich Saudis pay a lot of money to stay at Mr. Trump's hotels, so what do we expect? We expect our government to do our will, not fill the pockets of our President, so Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk to vote on our continued involvement in the Saudi Arabian war in Yemen via the War Powers Resolution. We shouldn't need a damn War Powers Resolution, for real -- the Constitution already says Congress declares the war and the President fights it, and the Founders divided those powers so that a President wouldn't ignore the will of the people and fight wars they didn't want. So let us assert our will.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to protect the Johnson Amendment, which prevents churches from advocating for particular candidates or donating money to them, then People for the American Way still helps you do that. Does the Johnson Amendment restrict the free speech rights of churches? Ah, no, it doesn't -- churches can still talk all the politics they like, they just can't give direct aid and comfort to a particular politician's efforts to get elected or re-elected, or else they'll lose their tax-exempt status. Note well that last part, because it also refutes the BUT I GIVEZ TEH MONEYZ TO POLITICIANZ SO WHY CANTZ TEH CHURCHEZ!!!!! objection: as you're no doubt acutely aware, you are not a tax-exempt organization. Exemption from taxes isn't a right; if it were, we'd all be exempt from paying taxes. And the Trump Administration doesn't want "free speech" for churches, it wants freedom from responsibility for churches, a notion any good church would reject.

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

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

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

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

Action: ADA "reform," birth control, and renewable energy.

Just when you thought some things were safe from this Congress, along comes H.R. 620, the so-called American Disabilities Act Education and Reform Act of 2017, reminding us that when Congress says they're going to "reform" something, you should be scared. H.R. 620 would require disabled folks to give a written notice directly to any business owner who they think has violated the act (by, for example, not providing a wheelchair ramp), and then gives that business owner nearly half a year to make progress toward fixing a problem. They could no longer file a complaint with the Department of Justice or files a lawsuit on their own, since, hey, that actually works better. H.R. 620 is all about hurting people so that business owners don't have to follow the law, which is precisely the problem with America today. You may use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators about this matter. Don't brook any whining about the ADA "causing frivolous lawsuits," not when corporations file four out of every five lawsuits in America.

Meanwhile, thanks to a leaked rule proposal, we now know that the Trump Administration plans to allow employers to block their employees' access to birth control coverage if it conflicts with said employer's "religious beliefs." Because, after all, your employer's "religious beliefs" are so much more important than yours! Seriously, I'm sick of the notion that bosses have earned more rights than the rest of us -- though, of course, the apotheosis of the beliefs that bosses-are-great-and-people-suck is now our President. Hence the National Women's Law Center helps you tell the Trump Administration to stop trying to take women's rights away in the name of "religious freedom." Oh, and to anyone itching to lecture me about how hard CEOs have worked for the "right" to tell people what sort of health care they can have: you don't "work" for rights. You have rights because you're an American. And you don't have "more rights" because you have more money. You have more power, but not more rights, and it's time to learn the difference. (That's before we get to whether Our Glorious Elites have earned anything.)

Finally, Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry has lately suggested that the Administration might actually fight state-level renewable energy standards! How would he do that? Well, apparently he'd start by commissioning a study on "grid reliability" that will say guess what, since it's headed by a Kochhead? That coal and oil and gas and nuclear are "more reliable" than sun and wind, even though sun and wind will actually be around forever and, you know, storage of energy before it's used is an actual thing. And what could we call this little idea of Mr. Perry's? We could certainly call it corporate welfare, since it clearly aims to prop up the dirty fuel industries, and thus also the outlandish salaries of their CEOs. But we could most certainly not call it conservative for our federal government to attack standards that good Americans want and have fought hard to pass at the state level -- standards that have helped solar and wind become more competitive, price-wise. So Penn Environment helps you tell the Energy Department to stop trying to kill state-level renewable energy standards.

Action: fighting banksters, pollution, and low wages.

H.R. 10, the so-called Financial CHOICE Act, could get a vote before the full House any day now, and, as you know, under H.R. 10, the only folks getting any more "choice" are the banksters, who still demand and get welfare handouts from our government despite being approximately the most unpopular people in America. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're looking at it on a smartphone) to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject H.R. 10. Do not brook any hysteria about the crushing burden of regulations, as if regulations against onerous fees and interest rates hurt the crooks who peddle them than those fees and rates hurt us. And certainly don't brook any hysteria about the crushing burden of regulations on small businesses, because H.R. 10 isn't for small businesses -- it's for the big banksters who grind small businesses to dust under their $500 shoes. And certainly don't brook the unctiousness of "moderates" who think we can find a "balance" between what we want and what they want. You can find no "balance" with evil people who live to steal other people's money.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) stands poised to enact regulations protecting good Pennsylvanians from the air pollution emanating from natural gas drilling operations. Stop me if you've heard this before: the news rules aren't a bad start, but they could be better. For example, they presently only cover new gas drilling operations, when those are the ones less likely to pollute in the first place, and the old ones are still pumping out carcinogens, toxins, and smog. Oh, and methane -- can't forget the natural gas emission that packs a climate change punch many, many times harder than coal emissions do, and thus give the lie to the gas industry's contention that more gas drilling would help ameliorate the effects of climate change. Of course, methane isn't just a pollutant -- it's a form of energy, and ventilating it into the atmosphere at will not only dirties the air, it also wastes energy, and thus also wastes money. No use telling me gas drillers just can't keep methane out of the air, because this is America, the can-do country. Both Keystone Progress and the Sierra Club help you tell the DEP to enact the most vigorous gas drilling regulations possible.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to raise the national minimum wage to $15/hour via the Raise the Wage Act, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. Again: do not brook any of the hysteria coming from the right about how a $15/hour wage will destroy all small businesses -- the Raise the Wage Act would raise the minimum wage gradually, over the next eight years, and once minimum wage workers have more money in their pockets, they'll spend a lot of it at these same small businesses. Do not brook any hysteria about how it would raise unemployment, either -- if you work, like, anywhere, you already know that employers can't cut jobs any further than they already have and still get things done. And certainly do not brook slippery-slope arguments like ZOMG WHY DON'T WE JUSTZ RAISEZ TEH WAGEZ TO $40 AN HOURZ!!!!! The Raise the Wage Act would index the minimum wage to inflation; if it's ever $40/hour, you can be sure inflation will have gone up 267% in the meantime. Seriously, people who argue like that disgust me. Why not just say I got nothing? The honesty would be refreshing!

Action: foreign wars, "smart baby monitors," and the Bears Ears National Monument.

The Trump Administration has made a deal™ with the United Arab Emirates to sell weapons for $2 billion -- this, though the UAE (like the U.S.!) has worked with Saudi Arabia in their war on Yemen, and this war has pushed that nation to the brink of famine. And, ah, over what, exactly? Over the possibility that Saudi Arabia would have less influence in Yemen, thanks to a civil war upsetting a power-sharing structure that was a house of cards to begin with? This is why they bomb funeral processions and destroy Yemeni infrastructure? Yes, al-Qaeda and ISIS have both set up shop there, but (stop me if you've heard this before!) the Saudi war aims to destroy the one group that has actually effectively fought ISIS in Yemen. And here you thought this was exactly the sort of crapshow Donald Trump would stop us from getting drawn into! Anyway, as I've suggested, he doesn't get all the say about it -- Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell your Congressfolk to block the Administration's UAE arms deal at least until we can keep Yemen out of famine. Because famine is unconscionable anywhere on Earth.

Meanwhile, Mattel plans to release a "smart baby monitor" called Aristotle, one that would enable you to see what your child's doing in another room, but would also talk to your child. Why is that better than a baby monitor and parental interaction? I don't know, but Aristotle doesn't just interact with your child, but collects data about whatever it sees -- like patterns of sleep, eating, and changing -- and given that it can connect to online retailers, it might well share that data with them, so that your child's "interactive" experience can soon be cluttered with advertisements! Far too often in our sick, immoral, and decadent culture, "smart" devolves into "what makes more unearned money," but I'm so old-fashioned I only care about making parenting more efficient, which technologies like the oven, the washing machine, and the refrigerator have already done. Hence the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell Mattel to abandon their privacy-destroying, commercial-haze-inducing Aristotle. And maybe stop giving the author of Poetics a bad name while they're at it.

Finally, we learn that the Department of the Interior has declared that all comments about Antiquities Act monuments (including the Bears Ears National Monument) must be submitted after May 12, meaning if you submitted one beforehand, you'll have to do it again. Also, for whatever reason, the comment period on Bears Ears only lasts 15 days, while the comment period on other national monuments lasts 60 days. I don't see any of that surviving a legal challenge (why single out one monument over others is but one question a lawyer would have); it's enough to make one wonder if Mr. Trump is actually trying to run our government so badly that we have no choice but to dive into the arms of whomever the Democrats nominate in 2020. But we can't get caught up in 13-dimensional chess, of course -- we have to do our duty as citizens, which is to communicate our will to our government. Hence WildEarth Guardians still helps you tell the Department of the Interior to leave the Bears Ears National Monument alone. Because drilling on public lands ain't worth more than the people's will.

Action: EPA funding, affordable drugs, and drug policy.

Given Congress's failure to repeal methane emissions limits on public lands late last week, today's as good a day as any to let the Environmental Defense Fund help you call your Senators and tell them not to slash EPA funding as President Trump is so hot to do. But then again, why play defense? You can just as easily tell your Senators to increase EPA funding, so that the EPA can actually do more of the things our laws mandate that it do! EPA funding has, after all, been chronically short since the early 1980s, which makes it much harder to chase down the fossil fuel drillers who leak methane into the atmosphere and dangerous carcinogens into the water, for example. No one, and I mean no one, wants dirtier air and dirtier water -- even the CEOs who constantly whine about regulations preventing them from creating jobs boo-freaking-hoo won't drink the water near their drilling wells. And one more time: a CEO would never create a job if he didn't have to -- but regulations do create jobs, for all the people who have to figure out how to comply with them.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1776/S. 771, the Improving Access to Affordable Prescription Drugs Act, then Sign Here Now still helps you do that. The bill would, as its title suggests, help good Americans get prescription drugs more affordably, partly by letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices and allowing reimportation of cheaper-and-no-less-safe-because-they-re-the-same-damn-drug drugs from Canada, but also by hiking taxes on corporations that jack up the prices of their drugs. A word about that: corporations that pull a Daraprim or an EpiPen on the American public justify it by saying that the cost of drug research causes them to jack up prices. Now, how do we know that's utter bullshit? Because research is an expense, and only profits get taxed. Revenue minus expenses equals profits. So you don't need an economics degree to be able to smell that pile of dung -- in fact, I wonder if economics degrees actually hinder such olfactory acuity.

Finally, you've heard that Trump Administration Attorney General Jeff Sessions has directed federal prosecutors to level the most serious charges possible at accused nonviolent drug offenders, and also to seek mandatory minimum sentences wherever possible. Of course, that's his prerogative, but it's also a dumb idea. Every Executive branch makes do with finite resources by deciding it'll go after some things more than other things, but what do you think causes more problems in America? People smoking weed in their living room, or banksters illegally foreclosing on homeowners? Have we heard a peep from the Trump Administration about this latter item? No, we have not -- in fact, we have at least one foreclosure fiend in Mr. Trump's own cabinet. And though politicians constantly talk like we're in a massive out-of-control crime epidemic, we're actually not -- and even if we were, wouldn't treatment for drug addiction take care of the problem more effectively? So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell the Justice Department to rescind its memo, and thus support smarter crime prevention in America.