Thieves in the Temple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning social media and Arctic drilling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: from centrist Democrats to empowered farmworkers.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning pollution and racism.

Our Administration plans to open up public lands near wildlife refuges and wilderness areas in California to oil and gas drilling. One wonders if this is their revenge on California for being a liberal paradise, but there's a bigger issue here: California is still woefully short on water, even a year after a seven-year drought finally ended, and supports an agriculture sector that produces about two-thirds of America's fruits annually. And California farmers responded to the drought by irrigating their crops with fracking wastewater, which testifies to that water shortage and suggests that, well, maybe gas drilling isn't the best use of our water tables to begin with. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to reject its own plan to open up relatively untrammeled California lands to drilling. Remember: they'd rather ignore us, but if they do, we can stop them in court.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell our FBI to stop trying to hide the onslaught of white supremacist violence in its official data. How are they doing this? By lumping all sorts of phenomena into one category, called "racially-motivated violent extremism," which would allow our FBI to lump white supremacists who shoot people with black protestors who get shot at by police. And that also means that the new category would also allow inattentive evil media outlets to run rampant with bogus statistics "mistakenly" attributed to black protestors! Well, as they say, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on, but our government should not enable lies to get around so quickly. And the problem isn't black protestors getting loud with people who don't listen; the problem is white racists shooting black and brown people dead. And our FBI needs to confront that, just as we all do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end our President's Muslim ban by passing H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then People for the American Way (among others) still helps you do that. The NO BAN Act would repeal all three of our President's Muslim bans, would prevent future Presidents from issuing similar travel bans, and would strengthen the Immigration and Nationality Act by explicitly preventing discrimination on the basis of religious belief. Would it be too much to ask of our government to make decisions on who can travel to and from our country on a rational basis? Would it be too much to ask of our President not to stoke rage and hatred on our fellow citizens with his Executive Orders? I'm an eternal optimist, so my answer to both of these questions would be "no, it would not be too much to ask." But that's only true if we demand that it be true.

Around the table: featuring upwards of three government officials acting badly.

Uh oh: Federal Aviation Administration inspectors say their bosses pressure them to overlook airline safety issues. Lest you think this corruption unique to our current Administration, attend testimony that our FAA started treating airlines with kid gloves in 2015, replacing the regulatory model you'd come to expect from a government agency with a "mutual cooperation" model. Don't believe the FAA's hype that one death in 10 years justifies their "mutual cooperation" model, not if a) said model is only five years old and b) we all know it takes time for serious rot to set in -- just as big telecoms aren't censoring all your favorite websites just because the FCC repealed net neutrality, airlines aren't going to discard all their safety standards right away, either.

George Goehl asks "Who Is Blocking Medicare for All?" And answers: centrist Democrats and big health care corporations, both of whom would be endangered if Medicare-for-All comes to pass. Upon hearing that a consortium of hospitals, health insurers, and big pharma corporations spent $143 million last year to fearmonger about Medicare-for-All, I thought maybe there'd be better uses for that money. You know, like providing health care to actual human beings. I mean, that would really be the best way for big private health care providers to keep customers around. Or is that a quaint philosophy?

Ho hum, drama-addicted, six-figure-making HUD official possibly violates Hatch Act by tweeting something political from her government account, then says she "honestly (doesn't) care" whether she broke the law or not. Not caring about breaking the law would mean a lot more if the law in question was obviously unjust and oppressive, rather than a minor inconvenience easily avoided with a laughably small amount of restraint. She doesn't seem like the kind of person who values restraint, though -- she just jeopardized her career with a not-funny taunt of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, for heaven's sake. In other words, she's the real snowflake, not those who'd criticize her. Funny how often it turns out like that.

In a peripherally-related note, minor-league baseball club apologizes for airing a purported Memorial Day tribute video that sandwiched a photo of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez between photos of Kim Jong Un and Fidel Castro while intoning about "enemies of freedom." I'll admit, though, that when I read "(w)e’re embarrassed we allowed this video to play without seeing it in its entirety first," I thought they meant to say "we're so sorry we did this thing we'd like you to think was a complete accident but was actually on purpose so we'd get free publicity." Anyway, skip the Fresno Grizzlies next time you're in town, and I say this as someone who has enjoyed plenty of minor league baseball games.

Finally, from the "Somehow Not 'The Onion'" file: our Department of Energy calls natural gas "freedom gas" and "molecules of U.S. freedom" in a press release. If you had been wondering exactly what kind of stamp Rick Perry would leave on the Department of Energy, now you know. (In a related note, a few weeks ago I dreamed that Rick Perry switched back to the Democratic Party for no particular reason. Of course Joe Biden promptly made him his running mate!)

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.