Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: the corruption, it burns!

Hard to believe, Harry, but gas drilling billionaire Kelcy Warren, suing Beto O’Rourke for defamation, has given money to judges who could hear and rule in his case. No use arguing that a billionaire can’t be expected to keep track of every single campaign donation he makes, because that’s a very good reason not to have billionaires in the first place! And what’s the “defamation” here? Mr. O’Rourke excoriated Mr. Warren for donating $1 million to his opponent, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, weeks after signing legislation that helped Mr. Warren’s corporation. That’s “c’mon, I’m not a schmuck” territory.

In a peripherally-related note, our Supreme Court failed to disclose its financial relationship with the “expert” they brought in to review that probe they supposedly conducted to find the person who leaked the ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. Said “expert,” former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, helps provide various security assessment for the Justices, but more pertinently: why does anyone look to Michael Chertoff as an “authority”? He’s a Bush Mobber, dammit, and a civilized society would ignore him unto death.

Central Bucks School District backs down from its effort to scrub Elie Wiesel quotations from school library posters. And just days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, to boot! In case you thought they were coming to their senses after a year of doing far right-wingers’ bidding, they’ve contracted with a PR firm for $15,000 a month “in an attempt to repair strained public relations and improve the school district’s image,” and I bet the good folks of Bucks County just love seeing their tax dollars thrown away like that. Want a better image? Don’t appease evil.

When I hear that first-term Rep. Andy Ogles (E-TN) has completely ignored federal laws requiring him to make his personal finances public, I wonder if House Republicans would apply the Santos standard, i.e., they’d toss him from our House if they found he’d broken the law. Ah, I kid – they’ll find a reason not to, and that reason will probably have something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop or pronouns or M&Ms or litter boxes or whatever tantrum right-wingers are throwing that day.

Finally, Snopes.com informs us that that obnoxious twittering about gas prices and egg prices and such shooting up just because Donald Trump isn’t President anymore is utter horsedoodle. “Vince Langman” thinks he’s clever understating the actual figures for gas prices ($2.54/gallon, not $2), mortgage rates (3.7%, not 3%), and inflation (2.5%, not 1%) as of January 2020, and no doubt he’s right now composing an eight-paragraph rant about nitpicking. Maybe he could ask a bank what’s the difference between 3% and 3.7% interest over 30 years.

Action: concerning methane emissions, screen time, and sales taxes.

Long story short: tell our EPA to issue the strongest methane regulations possible, tell our FTC to keep big tech corporations from manipulating children into staying online forever, and tell 22 states to stop levying sales tax on menstrual products. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue the strongest methane regulations possible. Our EPA has lately issued a proposal that updates their 2021 proposal, and that’s good, but it doesn’t go far enough – it could limit flaring and leakage from storage tanks more vigorously, to name two issues. Methane leakage is so prevalent in gas drilling that it's birthed an entire industry (the “methane mitigation” industry) to combat it. And it packs a climate change punch that’s 80 times worse than coal emissions, which are still pretty bad. Accommodating gas drilling corporations ain’t worth it if we don’t have a planet to live on.

Fairplay helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to ban website/app design that manipulates kids into spending more time online. Asvirtually every scientist not directly in the employ of a big tech corporations would tell you, kids don’t need to be spending all that time in front of screens, and they certainly don’t need apps and programs that reward them for spending more time onscreen. Too often we imagine ourselves so helpless in the face of evil. We should react to the news that big corporations manipulate children into spending all their time onscreen not with “well, that’s just the ‘free’ market at work, what can you do?” with “so stop them.” Children are our future, after all.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell 22 states to stop charging sales taxes on menstrual products. I’m not a fan of sales taxes anyway – they hurt working people harder than rich folks – but I’m even less of a fan of sales taxes on essential items, which is why states tend not to assess sales taxes on groceries, though not “luxury” items like coffee. If you’ve ever started bleeding uncontrollably out of your vagina without any warning, then you know that a tampon is not a “luxury” item. For most men, I’m sure it’s a matter of not thinking, though in my experience that statement doesn’t make women feel any better. But if the result is sexist, the intent matters little, and if it’s sexist, we need to fix it.

Action: concerning immigration, pollution, and corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the DREAM Act, reject efforts to gut the National Environmental Policy Act, and prohibit Congressfolk from trading in stocks. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 264, the DREAM Act. Like President Biden's recent moves on marijuana pardons and student loan debt, the DREAM Act is not some radical act, but a bill that would simply expand the number of immigrants brought here as children who can stay in the only country they know anything about, as long as they demonstrate continued residence here and continued contributions to society. Shouting about PROTECTINGZ TEH BORDURZ!!!! and BUILDINGZ TEH WALLZ!!!! is entirely inappropriate in the context of someone who literally had no say in coming to America. In fact, it’s damn cruel. Is it so fucking much to ask for people not to be cruel in America?

US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk not to weaken the National Environmental Policy Act. When you hear the likes of Joe Manchin talk about “permitting reform,” they really mean they don’t want federal agencies to evaluate big gas, oil, and pipeline projects for the harm they might do to our clean air and clean water, hence the drive to “reform” the National Environmental Policy Act. I guess we should be happy that Republicans helped take down Mr. Manchin’s infamous “side deal” on “permitting reform,” which they appear to have done out of pique. The pique of evil people is a hell of a thing to count on, though; we’d do better to count on ourselves, doing our job as Americans.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation banning members of Congress from owning or trading individual stocks. Because you can’t trust people who are compromised by their own investments! And if your Congressperson pretends to get all offended at that, trust your own common sense rather than their histrionics. Congresspeople oversee vast swaths of our economy, and if they invest their own money in the parts of our economy they’re overseeing, they won’t do it on our behalf, but on their own. It’s that simple. Congress has really dropped the ball on this matter this year, but that just means we have to make them do better.

Action: concerning fracking, flooding, and recycling.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning overtime pay, drug policy, and offshore drilling.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to help more Americans get overtime protections, decriminalize pot at the federal level, and end offshore oil and gas drilling leases. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell President Biden to update our nation’s overtime rules so more good Americans can get overtime pay. You may also want to tell him to do better job than President Obama did; the Obama rule, overturned by a Texas District Court Judge late in 2016, essentially established the difference between workers with executive/administrative duties and workers without only by salary, when the rest of us establish that difference by, you know, looking at a worker’s actual duties. President Biden can avoid this by raising the pay threshold for overtime pay, without overreaching (or sabotaging!).

Progress America helps you tell President Biden to take marijuana off of Schedule I (and not move it to any other Schedule), which would essentially decriminalize pot at the federal level. This is exactly the wrong place to be a “law-and-order” politician – why, many right-wingers who fancy themselves “law-and-order” adherents actually support legalizing pot! And despite his reported misgivings, Mr. Biden promised on the campaign trail to “decriminalize marijuana, period,” “let out” anyone serving time for possession, and “expunge” the crime from everyone’s records; it’s really, really hard to find any wiggle room there. So he can start by descheduling pot.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Bureau (or BOEM) to end offshore oil and gas leases. Again, President Biden said he’d put an end to that, and his attempt to do so got overturned in court, but this public commenting process allows us to establish a body of evidence that might get the next oil/gas drilling lease ban through a court – our laws don’t allow our Executive branch to solicit public opinion and then simply ignore it, after all. Think we should keep drilling for oil and gas in the ocean? Then think of the Spillageddon in the Gulf slamming our shrimp industry in 2010. And think of oil/gas drilling killing our salmon industry in Alaska.

Action: concerning our media, Social Security, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, fully-fund our Social Security Administration, and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Remember that time I told you to tell your Congressfolk to reject the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act? Well, Matt Stoller has convinced me I was wrong, so feel free to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass it. I said the bill would have “link taxes” in it, and while such a thing could happen, it hasn’t happened in Australia, where a similar bill passed and has revitalized the journalism industry there. The bill would basically allow newspapers to collectively bargain for better ad rates with Google and Facebook; newspapers can’t do that now because it would run afoul of antitrust law, but farmers get this exemption under certain circumstances, and newspapers should, too.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to fulfill President Biden’s request for additional Social Security Administration funding. We’re finally starting to fund our IRS so we can go after rich tax cheats, and Republicans are telling lies about it – the IRS is coming for you, working person, as though that wasn’t all they were already doing! What will Republicans say about funding our Social Security Administration so it can reopen offices and extend hours? I mean, Rick Scott already said any cut to Medicare spending equals a cut to benefits, so the opposite must also apply, right? I kid, of course – they’ll say whatever. But our seniors deserve more help.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuel corporations. Joe Manchin made sure the Inflation Reduction Act had some of those, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still tell our Congressfolk that we don’t want to spend any more taxpayer money (i.e., our hard-earned money) on dying industries that pump filth into our air and water. But, as the Inflation Reduction Act also does, we need to subsidize emerging renewable energies more than we subsidize oil, gas, or coal. And the only folks who don’t see that are the folks who make all their money from oil, gas, and coal – and the Congressfolk they buy, of course.

Action: concerning saving our Postal Service, fuel efficiency, and education.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fight to keep U.S. Postal Service Jobs, tell our Department of Energy to force home-heating furnaces to be more efficient, and tell our Department of Education to fight for teaching against racism and sexism in classrooms. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to roll back Postmaster General DeJoy’s plan to cut 50,000 U.S. Postal Service jobs. Raising prices, cutting services, and now putting postal workers out on the street – these “bold” ideas come straight from the CEO playbook. But America ain’t a corporation; it’s a democracy, so the American people should get more say in our Postal Service’s runnings than any one well-placed former CEO. And most Americans want our Postal Service to run well and do right; it’s why we were able to make the Postal Service Reform Act into law (with actual bipartisan support!) earlier this year. But evil doesn’t sleep, so we keep fighting even after we win.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of Energy to enact the most vigorous energy efficiency standards possible for home-heating furnaces. Last time our Department of Energy meaningfully addressed furnaces was over 30 years ago), so yeah, this is long overdue. We want furnaces to use less gas, and furnaces that use less gas already exist, so don’t believe the lies from the gas industry that better standards would “kill jobs” or whatnot, because a) big gas drilling corporations would replace all their workers with mounds of dung if they could and b) all the gas industry wants is for you to spend more money on gas. So they shouldn’t get all the say about everything, should they?

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our Department of Education to stand up to the right-wing drive to stamp out all discussion of racism and sexism in our classrooms. Localities generally run public school systems, so what can our Department of Education do about this? They can join lawsuits against states that pass such restrictive legislation (like Florida’s notorious Stop WOKE Act, to which a federal judge has lately taken an axe), or they can offer incentives to school districts that reject that legislation (per the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965). So let’s tell them to get to stepping.

Action: concerning taxes, drug prices, and fossil fuels.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass legislation raising taxes on the rich and lowering prescription drug prices, tell your PA state legislators to stop investing in gas infrastructure, and tell your Congressfolk to pass a big oil corporation windfall profits tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Senators to pass a bill that will raise taxes on the rich and lower prescription drug prices for all of us. No, it literally does not matter that Joe Manchin torpedoed just such a thing this past week! Nobody made Joe Manchin our One Great and True and Real American President, and if this was your will last week, and it’s still the right thing to do, then why wouldn’t it be your will this week? Because of one spiritually and morally corrupt Senator? Our Glorious Elites have created a Second Gilded Age in America, where corporations gouge us so lazy executives so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, so we ain’t got time for Manchinean drama.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn PIRG helps you tell your state legislator to end all new gas infrastructure investment. They’ll say what Tom Corbett used to say – “I want the jobs” – as if there’s just no other way to create jobs! You know what’s actually a pretty good way to create jobs? Invest in renewable energy infrastructure like there’s no tomorrow, and not just because there’ll actually be no tomorrow if we don’t. A lot of out-of-work coal miners would take to building out solar and wind and geothermal infrastructure pretty well – a lot better than they’d take to “just learning to code,” which seems to be Our Glorious Elites’ answer to everyone they’ve ever displaced through their laziness and apathy.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall tax on big oil corporations. Rule one is “when prices and profits go up at the same time, corporations are stealing food out of your mouth.” And rule two is “if you’re tempted to think they’re raising prices because of Russia’s war on Ukraine, see rule one.” Seriously, we live in such a sick, immoral, and decadent time that CEOs just come out and say they’re passing costs on to the consumer, and investors just come out and say you should invest in a corporation which has a lot of control over pricing. There’s another name for such a corporation, though, and that name is evil. And we need to start punishing evil in America again.

Around the table: in which we confront horrible truths about security, renewables, and campaigns.

Salon asks Brennan Center scholar Elizabeth Goitein "(w)hat would have been the worst-case outcome on Jan. 6." The answer? A military coup. And yet many Presidential emergency powers, granted through law by Congress, could also have wreaked havoc -- the Insurrection Act of course, but also the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which lets Presidents freeze bank accounts of Americans suspected of collaborating with a foreign power, and the Communications Act, which may allow our President to flip a kill-switch on our internet. And that's before we get to the emergency powers Presidents claim to have in the rarely-seen-I-wonder-why Presidential Emergency Action Documents.

In a related note, Branko Marketic at Jacobin tells us why we should be wary a domestic anti-terrorism bill like the one our House passed last week. Long story short: the bill isn't as repugnant as something Republicans would push and have pushed, but that's not a high bar to clear, and one could easily imagine its mechanisms being turned against liberals, as, indeed, all the other mechanisms of "national security" already have been. The Biden Administration still harasses anti-racism activists far too much, and a future Trump Administration (until the man dies, no sense imagining it'll be some other Republican) will do considerably worse.

When one hears that "Supply Chain Failures Prove Growing Need for Localized Economies," particularly with regard to food, one is right to ask: how do we help recreate local economies? The article suggests more than a few ways to do that -- from supporting mutual aid groups and farmers' markets all the way up to fighting "free" trade deals and supporting seed banks. We should also note that our FTC's proposed merger guidelines (which could also undo mergers) could be a good ally in this fight -- if we can keep corporations from getting absurdly huge, we can also keep them from throwing our lives into chaos at will.

This Harper's-style list about corporate involvement in spreading the "Great Replacement" theory should disabuse any notions we might have that corporations are somehow too "woke." Many corporations find racists to be useful idiots, since they distract folks from what the corporations are doing. It's like they're saying yeah, you did catch me polluting your water table, but before you shoot me, have you ever considered how Black and Brown folks get all the goodies and you can't get anything? And the reason you "can't get anything" is corporate power! And too many folks remember the good times, without remembering that reining in corporate power and taxing the rich were how we got the good times.

Arguing against renewable energy because of the extractive/exploitative effects of lithium mining sure is better than merely saying ha ha you're using coal to power your electric car! or passing around pictures of supposed "electric car graveyards" on Facebook, but it's no reason to throw up our hands and say we're just going to have to use oil and gas and coal forever, either. And it's also no reason to say every advance in technology exploits someone, as if the Indigenous folks who live near the salt lakes that provide around seven-eighths of all extracted lithium simply don't matter, or don't know better. The can-do thinker, of course, would be thinking past lithium in the first place.

Finally, Democrats are starting to see some of their early redistricting victories/non-losses get reversed in court. "(C)ollapsing across the map" is overly dramatic, but that's not the real issue: the real issue is that no Democrat should lose to any of these insane Republicans, and like the baseball manager who's already complaining about injuries three weeks into the season, Democratic politicians seem to be psyching themselves into doing just that. I sure hope I don't find out that it's always been about locking in the big campaign donations! After all, if you win, you have to do things, but if you lose, you can keep fundraising off the knuckle-dragger you just enabled to victory.

Action: concerning climate change, corruption, pollution, mine reclamation, and peaceful protests.

Long story short: tell Home Depot to stop using the Canadian boreal forest for its products, tell our government to investigate FDA corruption in re our baby formula shortage, tell our Army Corps of Engineers to examine pollution from pipelines more vigorously, tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, and tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the removal of peaceful protestors outside Supreme Court Justices' houses. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Environmental Action helps you tell Home Depot to stop sourcing its wood products from the Canadian boreal forest. Our reasoning is the same for our world's largest intact forest as it would be with the Amazon rainforest or the Tongass National Forest: old trees are our best weapon against climate change; they don't call them "the lungs of the planet" for nothing. Thus turning them into cabinets or toilet paper is, in this context, rather short-sighted. And if we can prompt the world's largest hardware store into abandoning logging in the forest, we'll likely get others to follow. If not, the Big Stick of Bad PR is always ready for deployment.

Progress America helps you tell our government to investigate our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) for its role in our current baby formula shortage. And I don't care what corruption at our FDA this uncovers! If you don't want to get shamed and shunned by your civilization, then don't hurt people. Chances are that investigators will find that the revolving door between industry and our FDA doesn't help us deal with food safety crises, and they might also find that our FDA has given established baby formula-manufacturing corporations too much of a free pass on safety inspections. That'd be a shame to learn that, but knowledge is power.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to close the loopholes that big oil and gas drilling corporations use to evade scrutiny about the pollution their proposed pipelines cause. Specifically, we'll call for less "fast-tracking" of pipelines. We should be "fast-tracking" solar and wind projects, if we must "fast-track" anything at all! Yet big oil and gas drilling corporations constantly assert that their pipelines are "too urgent" to ensure they don't spew filth into our water tables. But no one will be sitting around a campfire in a hundred years saying we can't drink the water now, but at least CEOs made good money for a while!

The Sierra Club helps you tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. We should blame our Senate for dragging their feet on confirming Mr. Biden's nominees, but this one's on our President, because he hasn't even put a name forward. The long name gives you the idea that this is some bureaucratic rando, but with all the coal mines closing up around America, reclaiming and repurposing that land becomes a lot more important, and someone's got to run things at the department that would do that work. And, ah, this is the kind of thing that actually helps potential Trump voters in Appalachia. So how about we do it?

Finally, FAIR helps you tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the repression of peaceful protesting outside of Supreme Court Justice's homes. They actually suggested these protestors were totalitarians! By suggesting that they were "(e)rasing any distinction between the public square and private life"! Key word there, of course, is any -- protesting outside of the private homes of public figures who have, very publicly, made known their opposition to the popular will does not erase literally "any" distinctions between public and private spheres. And, ah, who exactly "harassed" or "intimidated" these Justices? If anything, protestors have been too polite.

Around the table: water is a human right! And other truths.

When I read about indigenous water rights activists traveling all over Mexico to protest corporate "looting" of good Mexicans' water, I feel a little ashamed that I'd never considered that hydroelectric projects could steal water from farmers. I mean, gas fracking corporations stealing water I knew about, but hydro still retains a green sheen that deflects criticism. I'm also reminded that Mexico's constitution literally guarantees the right to water to its citizens, and that corporate use of public water (which all water should be!) violates that right. I wish the water protectors in Mexico luck, especially since Mexico is one of those places where they'll shoot you in front of everyone for defying the will of corporations.

USC report finds that "what the safety net promises" low-income working families "and what it delivers are vastly different." And gives reasons! Some programs simply don't offer help to all those who need it, while others are so riddled with bureaucracy and complicated rules that eligible families simply give up applying, and that's before we get to language barriers, the absence of "a single go-to source of information that clearly and easily communicates what programs a family is eligible for," and, of course, the stigma of being a "welfare queen," which, as we recall, only existed in the darkest imaginations of Ronald Reagan. The good news? Even the Biden Administration seems to get there's a problem, and has taken steps to fix it, though we'll need to take more steps.

When I heard that many good Americans who oppose abortion would still help a friend of family member get one, I wondered if that meant those folks aren't very anti-abortion at all, but just fronting about it. But I should have known better! Not just because anti-abortion folks do set boundaries (only a few would pay for it, but more would help pay for it, almost half would help plan it, and three-quarters would offer "emotional support"), but because we all know from the gay marriage debates that the most rabid anti-gay marriage votary can easily crumble once it's his or her son or daughter who's gay.

I find myself far less impressed than many observers that Joe Manchin's approval rating in West Virginia has shot up over the last year-plus, despite his nefarious trashing of a popular legislative agenda, because the spike in his approvals comes almost entirely from Republicans. And those who would say he's really "got his finger on the pulse of West Virginia" should consider a) whether very many Republicans who approve of him now will vote for him in 2024 if a real Trumphole runs against him or b) whether someone who actually led on Build Back Better, and explained to his right-wing constituents why it'd be good for them instead of constantly cutting it down, could have achieved the same results. Seriously, when they say Joe Manchin "really understands his people," they're kind of cutting down "his people."

When I hear that Elon Musk's proposed purchase of Twitter might well "forc(e) us off a platform that we otherwise find just too hard to quit," I say we can only hope! I used to love my Twitter feed back in the day -- the old 140-character limit sure helped me say more with less! -- but it's always been a damn swamp where you could only stand out by being a prick. And I fear the mass exodus from Twitter won't be big enough, since (as Ms. Marcotte says) too many people think they need it to stay "plugged in" to current events. On one hand, I get that; I get most of my news through email, but I sure haven't left Facebook. On the other hand, anything worth doing is hard, and when do we start punishing trolls with shame and shunning?

Finally, when I hear that Democrats have yet to commit to a unified strategy for the midterm elections, I find I'm more than happy to help! What has unified Democratic government gotten us? an ad could say. The end of the pandemic. Seven million more jobs. The deficit cut by $1 trillion. Wages going up faster than they have in decades. Not a single American soldier lost in Ukraine. And the monopolies that cause inflation getting challenged in court for the first time in decades. And what have Republicans been doing all that time? Burning books. Defending dictators. Making it harder for you to vote. Whining about masks and vaccines. Oh, and this: (cut to January 6 footage). Vote Democrat on November 8. You're welcome again, Democrats.

Around the table: they're banning *math textbooks*! And other absurdities.

When I heard that the Florida Department of Education had rejected 41 math textbooks for various reasons, including "references to critical race theory," I found the tale was so absurd I wondered if media outlets were overplaying it. Apparently they are not! Even though Florida also said they'd rejected the math books for "inclusions of Common Core" and "the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics," I noticed they put their objections to critical race theory first, so I guess this really must be mostly about math books containing word problems about Tony and Aisha taking a train together. Banning math books is weapons-grade PR, of course -- for the Democrat who actually uses it! Don't worry about being civil, gang, because Republicans never do.

You won't be surprised to hear that child care and elder care programs can reduce inflation, even though it's the opposite of the Gospel According to Republicans and Joe Manchin. They're still complaining that those $1,400 checks you got a year ago have caused all this inflation, and not the greed of corporations making record profits. Anyway, child care and elder care both cost an arm and a leg -- because what are you gonna do, not get it? -- and thus subsidizing these things can help working families fight the effects of inflation. No, that won't cause more inflation! Remember: corporate greed causes inflation, and we've got tools against that, like good tax policy and strong antitrust enforcement.

When I hear that "Liberal Cities Are Not Immune to Mounting Attacks on Abortion Rights," I remember that cities are actually pretty diverse, and that while a lot of folks in them vote Democrat mainly because the alternative is untenable, not everyone who does that is pro-choice, and the anti-abortion movement can peel some of those folks off, and in the long run maybe even convert them to Free Marketeers. And sadly, though my world is big enough for a liberal anti-abortion group, the "Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising" hangs out with too many right-wing nutjobs to be that group.

Here's something we should be saying a lot more: "Ron DeSantis loves using very young kids as political props." The phrase "using children" should be weapons-grade PR enough, frankly, particularly when you're surrounding yourself with children as you sign anti-abortion legislation and anti-education legislation. It works the other way for him, too, when you recall that he bullied a group of college students into taking their masks off because wearing them, he said, was "COVID theater." That man sure does know all about theater, that's for sure. But not a whole lot about leadership.

At last someone else sees why Ron Johnson keeps winning Senate elections in Wisconsin -- not just because Democrats prepare for victory so badly, but because Mr. Johnson himself sounds like a jerk on right-wing radio but then seems so nice on his TV ads. Something for everyone! Democrats hammering him on how he personally benefited from the 2017 tax "reform" might work, but Democrats showing off his two-faced nature to everyone might also work. Some folks will secretly root for a guy who "sticks it to the man" by getting himself a tax cut -- this, even though the taxpayer is "the man" here -- but folks like liars a lot less.

Finally, I guess I'm not surprised that President Biden has reopened fossil fuel drilling leases on public lands -- legalese aside, the guy can do very little about the corporate greed that's actually driving inflation, but he has to at least look like he's doing something, though giving out a lease doesn't produce more gas tomorrow. But I am a little surprised (and pleased!) that his Administration raised the royalty rate for drilling on public lands by 50%; oil and gas drilling corporations will whine about having to pay the taxpayer more for the privilege of drilling on public lands (i.e., our lands), and sadly that could well mean that President Biden changes his mind! I sure hope not, though. If we're going to have drilling on public lands, let's at least make some bank. And if the "high price of drilling" scares oil and gas drilling corporations away, well, I'll just have to deal with it.

Action: concerning taxes, gas prices, corruption, energy policy, public lands, and saving our Post Office some more.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, tax the windfall profits of oil and gas corporations, prohibit themselves from trading on the stock market, pass legislation promoting renewable energy, pass legislation protecting public lands and rivers, and confirm two USPS Board of Governors nominees so they can fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion that put extra $250 and $300 monthly checks into working families' bank accounts. "Don't Take Away Our Monthly Checks," the petition's title reads, and sadly Congress has already done that, because Joe "the Penguin" Manchin said folks spent those checks on drugs, and no, I will neither forget nor forgive that evil lie. And he wonders why no one wants to talk to him these days! In real life, the CTC expansion helped good Americans buy groceries, clothes, and school supplies for their kids, and with so many good Americans still unemployed this time last year, it gave more than a few families breathing room. And now with inflation at almost 8%, wiping out the otherwise impressive gains workers have made in wages over the last year, we should bring it back.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall tax on oil and gas corporations. Gasoline prices have shot up, and big corporations use the Ukraine war as an excuse to do what they were going to do anyway, just as other corporations have used inflation as an excuse to drive other prices up, so we've got to discourage them somehow. Don't listen to your right-wing friends and neighbors when they whine that a windfall tax would "tax success," because, frankly, that demonstrates a very warped view of success. Scientists who develop new vaccines and teachers who help a generation do better are successes, but people who game themselves into a position to price-gouge a nation aren't successes -- they're parasites, and we should deal with them as such.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to prohibit themselves from trading or owning individual stocks. And why should they do that ha ha ha snort say the cynical, but they should do it because it clouds their decision-making and interferes with their oversight duties. If you've got a million bucks invested in a corporation that makes facial recognition software, how likely are you, really, to regulate their lousy racist technology the way you need to? Not likely, one would think. They get so pissy when you don't trust them, but it's not our job, as Americans, to trust them -- it's our job to make them do our will, and hold them accountable when they don't. Making sure they get rich sure doesn't do anything for their bosses, the people.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that makes renewable energy, not fossil fuels, the future of energy in America. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently issued a rather dire assessment of what we're doing to our planet, but the Russian war on Ukraine has also, I would think, given a lot of good Americans pause about getting fossil fuels from other countries when we've got plenty of sun and wind here at home. Oh, some right-wingers do see this as an opportunity to make our government allow oil and gas drilling everywhere, but oil and gas ain't gonna be around forever, while the sun rises every morning and the wind always comes back. When they said always said oil and gas were more "dependable," they meant that oil and gas delivered executive pay dependably. We gotta do better.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a slew of bills that would help keep our public lands and rivers clean. It ain't just wildlife that depends on clean public lands and rivers, after all -- we depend on them, too, to provide clean water and to give us places to go and explore. And small businesses also depend on public lands and rivers, because folks who come to enjoy them need to buy stuff just like we all do. Do we think bait shops and canoeing services support any old pollution because "it's the price of a free market"? Hopefully we won't find too many big corporations convincing people that we've "gone too far" in protecting land and water from development, because once they pollute public lands and rivers, it's hard to bring them back to health. We should know by now that we're better off solving problems before they start.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Senators to confirm two more USPS Board of Governors appointees so they can fire our Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Getting the Postal Service Reform Act passed was important, but we've also got to get Mr. DeJoy out, not just for trying to hamper our Postal Service's ability to get votes where they needed to go, and not just for his allegedly corrupt dealings with former Board of Governors member Ron Bloom, whom President Biden sacked. Fact is, Mr. DeJoy has actually tried to convince everyone that slowing down the mail and charging more for worse service were good ideas, and not some sort of pretext to privatize our Post Office. They're bad ideas, in a can-do America that always finds a way. To deliver life-saving medications, I feel compelled to add.

Action: concerning accountability, Russia, climate change, campaign finance, hunting trophies, and law and order

Long story short: tell our DOJ to investigate and possibly prosecute Donald Trump, tell fossil fuel corporations to abandon their Russian investments, tell our Transportation Department to release a promised climate-change reporting rule, tell state legislators to get private corporation campaign donations out of sheriffs' elections, tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to ban importation of hunting trophies, and tell President Biden to pardon non-violent marijuana offenders. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Common Cause helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate Donald Trump for attempting to subvert the will of the American people after winning the 2020 election. Late last week House January 6 panel lawyers alleged in a California federal court filing that Donald Trump and several of his allies committed crimes as part of their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and if the January 6 panel has enough evidence to say that, then our Department of Justice has enough reason to hold Mr. Trump accountable. We witnessed a lot of these alleged crimes happening in real time, not just on January 6, of course, but also on January 2, during that alternately begging/threatening phone call to Georgia's Secretary of State. But a lot else happened in the dark, too, which is why we need to shine a light on it.

Sum of Us helps you tell French fossil fuel corporation TotalEnergies to quit investing in Russia, and also to quit fossil fuels. Yeah, it may not do the latter just because we say so, but it's more vulnerable to pressure on the former -- though it stands virtually alone among Western fossil fuel corporations in keeping its investments in Russia, saying that no sanctions have compelled them to divest thus far, and also suggesting that gas drilling is a more "realistic" option for getting off climate change. Set aside the fact that wherever gas drilling wells leak methane, they pack a bigger climate-change punch than coal. Switching to gas is the "reasonable" option only because that's their will to begin with! If they put their capital behind renewables, we'd see a lot more renewable energy right now.

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to release the Biden Administration rule mandating measurement of climate change emissions from our national highway system. "Measurement," too, not mitigation! We've tried to get mitigation passed during the 2021 battles over the Biden agenda, with limited success. But the Trump Administration overturned this rule while in office because of course they did, while the Biden Administration has announced they'll reinstate it. Thing is, they haven't actually done that, hence our efforts to get more out of them than they've delivered thus far. They really ought to, since it could very well wind up in court one day, which never went well for Mr. Trump.

Color of Change helps you tell your state legislators to get private corporation campaign donations out of county sheriffs' elections. You know how politicians always tell you that campaign donations aren't bribes because they're not quid pro quo transactions and anyway of course you can rely on them to separate what's good for them from what's good for the public? They lie about all of that, of course, but county sheriffs have a much harder time lying all of that when some private prison corporation, or some real estate magnate, or some big telecom corporation, fills their campaign coffers. Gosh, what could these actors possibly want? Like, you know, land for a private prison, more arrests to fill those beds, usurious phone rates for prisoners? Win here, and we can one day win everywhere else.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ban importing elephant trophies under the authority of the Endangered Species Act. Savanna elephants are endangered in Africa, which is, of course, where hunters go get their trophies, and maybe once upon a time we could argue that we must deploy trophy hunting as a necessary evil in regions where elephant populations have overrun human populations, but that time sure in hell ain't now, not when elephants all over Africa are in danger of disappearing in our lifetimes. And not for nothing, but if you've ever seen an elephant mourn its dead, you sure as hell wouldn't parade around your neighborhood with a bloody tusk shouting look what I did! The more we learn of our world, the more responsible we must be, but hey, civilization ain't easy.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell President Biden to pardon non-violent marijuana offenders. He campaigned on doing that, so he ought to start keeping that promise. There will be right-wingers who will say "you're not supposed to pardon people to further political ends." Go ahead and ask them how they felt about George H.W. Bush pardoning a slew of Iran-Contra participants or Bill Clinton pardoning big campaign donors or Donald Trump pardoning Steve Bannon, because those are all examples of "pardoning people to further political ends." Pardoning folks we shouldn't have jailed to begin with? That's just righting wrongs, which is something civilized people always do. And if folks want to call "righting wrongs" "political," then let them get caught with their cynicism hanging out.

Action: concerning "don't say gay," energy policy, anti-trans policies, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell Florida state legislators to reject the "Don't Say Gay" bill, tell President Biden to sanction Russian oil and gas corporations and invoke the Defense Production Act to build renewable energy infrastructure, tell big corporations to pressure Texas's Governor into rescinding his anti-trans policies, tell our Department of HHS to ensure a key pro-higher drug prices NIH official has as little say as possible about march-in rights for Xtandi, and tell big corporations to stop insuring dirty fossil fuel projects. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. MoveOn helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject the notorious "Don't Say Gay" bill. The bill no longer requires school officials to tell parents of gay or trans kids that they're gay or trans -- that's a conversation those kids would want to have on their terms, you know, in a free country! -- but the only reason that part of the bill's gone is because good Americans spoke out against it. Shine some light on the rest of the bill, which would criminalize even talking about queer issues in a school setting -- regardless of how relevant it might be to, say, a history or social studies class -- and we might be able to kill it like the vampire upon our culture that it is. (No use telling me that restriction only applies to third-graders and younger, not when Florida educators are going after much older kids as we speak!)

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to sanction the Russian oil and gas industries, and I quote, "no matter the impact it would have on the price of fossil fuels" here in America. America has suffered from worsening inflation ever since the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce declared "war" on American antitrust enforcers, and you won't have to drive around much to see that gas prices are already going up, again, though, again, to some degree they're hiking prices because they can. Still, I'd prefer higher energy prices to coddling Mr. Putin's favorite fossil fuel corporations. Besides, we can fill the gap in other ways -- like ending stupid sanctions against Venezuela, for example. Or using renewables!

Speaking of which, Stand.Earth helps you tell President Biden to ban fossil fuels from Russia and invoke the Defense Production Act to help manufacture more renewable energy infrastructure. It is a matter of defense, after all -- we would build more renewable energy infrastructure in order to, literally, defend ourselves from Russia using its fossil fuel leverage to browbeat us into submitting to their outrageous invasion of Ukraine, and (as Stand.Earth's email missive points out) will not require Mr. Biden to get permission from One Great And True Real American President Joe Manchin. He'll piss and moan about it, as drama kings tend to do, but ain't everyone sick of that already? I bet most folks are quite sick of it, and need only to be reminded of it. We're not all conscious of all of our feelings at once, after all.

In light of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's latest attempt to pander to the most rage-addled among good Texans -- classifying commonly-accepted health treatments for transgender kids as "child abuse" -- Public Citizen helps you tell Texas's five biggest corporations to lean on Gov. Abbott and tell him to rescind his bass-ackward trans policies. Big corporations need all the good PR they can get, after all! And if right-wingers attack corporate power because it's too "woke," well, we can work with that, too. Greg Abbott enacted his notorious anti-trans policies before his primary; perhaps now that he's won, he can pretend he didn't do it. Let's at least make him earn that, by wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR against the corporations that could actually make him do better.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell HHS Secretary Becerra to make sure National Institutes of Health (or NIH) official Dr. Mark Rorhbaugh recuses himself from any march-in proceedings the Biden Administration initiates over the prostate drug Xtandi. Dr. Rorhbaugh apparently has worked with big pharma lobbyists to sabotage march-in proceedings from within, which isn't his job at our NIH, because in government, you're supposed to serve the people, not the big corporations! This matters because our NIH handles march-in rights proceedings -- that is, those proceedings in which our government mandates a generic version of a drug that its creator charges too much for. And maybe the guy who's actively working against cheaper life-saving drugs shouldn't get to make all the decisions about making cheaper life-saving drugs! Seems reasonable to me.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell several big insurance corporations to stop funding polluting projects that help exacerbate climate change. Lately the American International Group, better known as AIG, has declared it will stop insuring new tar sands, Arctic drilling, and coal projects, and that's good news, not least because you almost certainly helped that process along if you were part of the public pressure that changed minds at AIG, but other famous big insurance corporations, like Chubb and Liberty Mutual, have not declared any such intention. Well, like I said, big corporations need all the good PR they can get, and they need to avoid the Big Stick of Bad PR as much as they can, so perhaps with a little more public pressure, we can get Chubb and Liberty Mutual to do the right thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: featuring yet another injurious monopoly and a sputtering caravan of whiners.

Matt Stoller relates the evil logic of monopolies to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Long story short: Russia controls so much of the fossil fuel market (gas, oil, even coal) that they can raise prices whenever they want, such that their invasion actually funds itself! Clever, unless you insist, as I do, that cleverness also be useful, and not just to some dictator or other. Do you suppose Facebook will let me say that Russia causes inflation by hiking fuel prices at will? Or is that an even more loaded question than I thought?

The second item in Bess Levin's February 28 news rundown -- to which you should all subscribe if you don't already -- describes Donald Trump taking credit for the fact that Putin's little Ukraine adventure isn't going as well as he'd hoped, because he "insisted" that NATO nations "pay() their dues," although, as Ms. Levin notes, Donald Trump not only didn't do anything worth taking credit for (because he invented the whole dues-paying story to begin with), but did an awful lot of harm to Ukraine, not least in trying to extort its President. You remember, the first thing for which our House impeached him?

Australian scientists, thinking they've developed tracking devices for magpies that are relatively unobtrusive, are surprised to discover the magpies helping each other get the tracking devices off. Thus the magpies not only demonstrate intelligence and problem-solving skills, but altruism, which they previously hadn't demonstrated to researchers, at least not in a way they'd noticed; one wonders what it was about the tracking device that provoked that response. I guess you never do know what'll bring folks together. Right, Vladimir Putin?

U. Aberdeen/U. Cal. Berkeley scientists theorize that our brains smooth out all of the visual noise our eyes receive by, essentially, "perceiv(ing) in a given moment an average of what we saw in the past 15 seconds" as the "illusion" of a "single visual snapshot." Thus whatever we're seeing at a given moment could be up to 15 seconds old. These researchers looked to understand "serial dependence," which describes a phenomenon in which you would "see" an object or person more or less as you've been seeing it for some time, so you don't have to process new information. In any case, I wonder if that's why I occasionally "sense" that a kicker's about to miss a field goal.

If Mitch McConnell is really worried that Rick Scott's "Rescue America" plan "could expose the party to unnecessary attacks this fall," well, I'd have to say that horse has left the barn. And Sen. Scott's walkback is weak: he can't be so cut off from ordinary Americans that he really thinks any of us care about the fine line between Senator-just-saying and Senator-running-party's-campaign-arm, can he? Then again, this is Rick Scott, America's CEO, we're talking about -- last time he talked to regular folk he was probably chewing them out for something that wasn't their fault. Anyway, he's beyond "when you're explaining, you're losing" and well into "when you're in a hole, stop digging." (Of course, Democrats still have to run campaign ads using the information Mr. Scott has so helpfully provided, but that would be like winning, which Democrats generally only do passively. I'd be happy to be wrong!)

Finally, when I hear that the far-right trucking caravan that started in California won't make it to D.C. because it's just not big enough anymore, I must say I'm disappointed. Come on, fellows! Let your freak flag fly! Come and get your humiliation; you've earned it! This couldn't possibly be because our Supreme Court struck down President Biden's vaccine mandate and because our CDC recently recommended that folks in low- or medium-risk areas can go maskless indoors, could it? (Remember: I've said I didn't disagree with the tactics, only with the message, the entirety of which, as far as I can tell, is waaaaaaaaaah.)

Around the table: more thoughts about Ukraine, oil, dark money, and stupid right-wingers.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch reminds us that Vladimir Putin "Has Gambled Everything on His Snap Invasion of Ukraine" but "Now His Political Survival is in Doubt." "So why did Putin do it? Explanations that he has gone mad or plans to rebuild the Soviet Union are propagandistic. More convincing as a reason for him taking this present extraordinary risk is hubris, which is an occupational disease among those who have been too long in power -- 22 years in Putin’s case." I actually thought Russia would roll over Ukraine fairly quickly and then get worn down by years of guerrilla war, but now I'm not even sure Russia will do that well. Even George W. Bush could claim MISHUNZ ACCOMPLISHEDZ!!!!! for a few minutes.

In case you've been caught short by Mr. Putin's claim that his real aim is to fight "neo-Nazis" in Ukraine who practice "genocide," Jeffrey Veidlinger at The Conversation will set you straight. Long story short: Russians have more free speech rights in Ukraine than they do in Russia, and the neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine today have virtually no electoral power. I guess Mr. Putin is hoping you'll remember there were pogroms in Ukraine in the 19th century and that many Ukrainians collaborated with the actual Nazis, but these facts don't exactly make Ukraine unique (and the Ukranian pogrom occurred while it was part of the Russian empire, maybe that's a cautionary tale!). Besides, if Mr. Putin really wants to punish the sin of Nazi collaboration, why isn't he invading Norway or France?

If you've been thinking how refreshing it is that our "liberal" media has learned to hate imperialist wars, Jeff Cohen at Common Dreams will bring you back to Earth with the reminder that our "liberal" media never refer to American imperialism, except in quotation marks meant to be ironic. I'm still a bit puzzled that folks aren't thinking of the Iraq war when they think of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia has deployed 190,000 soldiers to take over a nation of 44 million people living on a little over 600,000 square miles; America deployed 150,000 soldiers to take over a nation of a little over 25.5 million folks living on a bit less than 440,000 square miles. The numbers ain't that different; I guess some Americans just want to forget it all, particularly that part where they called folks like me who opposed the war traitor.

When I heard that nationalizing the fossil fuel industry might be a good way of controlling inflation, I thought, well, with all the corporate welfare they already get, this isn't such a bad idea. We would (per Robert Pollin, who makes a lot of good suggestions in the article) spend about $350 billion buying a controlling interest in the three biggest oil corporations, but that's a one-time cost, of course, and it'll save the taxpayer a lot years down the line! I also remembered that the Trump Administration imposed (and the Biden Administration has, sadly, continued) imposed economy-crippling sanctions on Venezuela essentially because they had the same idea. Does that mean that if we nationalized the oil industry in America, our government would impose sanctions on itself?

You won't be surprised to learn that dark money is funding women's groups opposed to the nomination of Judge Jackson to our Supreme Court. I hope, after all these years of pretending the exception to the rule destroys all rules, we've learned not to devour every perceived irony as if it were manna from heaven. Women against women? Big whoop! The world's a big place, with lots of places for Teh Stupid to hide! I'm about as tired of hearing that right-wing judges always respect "the rule of law" while liberal judges are all "activists." Have they read some of these decisions coming from Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh? If it's not "activist" to ignore precedent, or to go on a fishing expedition for a precedent that fits your conclusion, I don't know what is.

Finally, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) spewed this forth on Twitter this past Sunday: "You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets." The rest of the Twittersphere roasted him, but I would like to point out that incoherence is a step up for this guy -- just five years ago, he was a first-term House Rep yelling that we "kill" "all" "radicalized Muslim suspects." To think this dude was a police captain and he still said, out loud, that we should kill suspects! And now he's a Congressdolt. I hope no one uses him as an example of "how people rise on merit in the Republican Party."

Action: concerning rape, pollution, taxes, and law and order.

Long story short: tell Honduras to sign a bill allowing rape victims to access emergency contraceptives, tell Chile to start regulating the clothing industry, tell New York's Governor to extend clemency to Robert Webster, tell President Biden to end offshore drilling, tell our IRS to simplify free tax filing, and tell our Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for the January 6 attempted coup. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Avaaz helps you tell Honduran President Xiomara Castro (Honduras's first female President) to sign a bill that would repeal Honduras's ban on emergency contraception. She's under a lot of pressure not to sign the bill, and you can guess how that pressure reveals itself: "this is too risky a move for a President not even a month into her term," "the first female President shouldn't appear to be too friendly to women," "don't you know we only outlawed the killing of women in 2013 and we barely prosecute it?" But right is right and wrong is wrong, and you know what's wrong? Raping 12-year-old girls and demanding they carry any resulting pregnancies to term, that's what. And that happens in Honduras all the time. Good Hondurans bear the primary responsibility for getting their President to do their will, but nothing prevents us from helping out.

Sum of Us helps you tell Chilean President Gabriel Boric to stop allowing big clothing corporations to use Chile as a dumping ground. You've heard of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," a massive floating island of plastic trash now three times as large as France floating in the Pacific? Now acquaint yourself with the mountain of clothes growing in the Atacama Desert, made up of clothes manufactured largely in Asia, unsold in Europe and America, and dumped as trash in Chile. Ugly, to be sure, but you may not be convinced that this is a big deal, particularly for a new President who, having declared that "(n)eoliberalism was born in Chile, and here it will die," might be looking for bigger fish. But nobody wants their country used as someone else's trashcan. Indeed, Mr. Boric may owe his election to that sentiment.

Change.org helps you tell New York Gov. Hochul to free Robert Webster, currently serving a 50-year sentence for arson. You'll recognize most of this story -- a conviction based entirely on witness testimony, exculpating evidence not fully explored at trial, a judge failing to account for Mr. Websters' status as a minor during sentencing -- but you may also be wondering: half a century for arson? The arson's aftermath involved a police officer's murder, which may have induced a longer sentence for Mr. Webster -- a much longer sentence than the one given for the police officer's murder, if you can believe it. Has Mr. Webster been even better than a model prisoner despite spending two-thirds of his life in prison? Yes, he has. So let's help him out.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell President Biden to end offshore drilling. The Administration has just started leasing a million acres off Alaska's Cook Inlet for gas and oil drilling, and I've recited the problems with Arctic drilling enough over the years -- oh, hell, one more time: oil spills are even harder to clean up in the Arctic's frigid waters, we know little enough about the Arctic ecosystem that we don't know all the harm drilling would do, and fishing is a big industry in Alaska that would be endangered by the inevitable oil spill. A federal court stopped the Biden Administration's big Gulf of Mexico leasing plan, but the Administration ought to see the writing on the wall by now, not just in court, but in a warming world where other, more renewable technologies can shoulder more of our energy burden.

Public Citizen helps you tell our IRS to implement free tax filing for good Americans who have relatively easy tax filing to do, which is most of us. Our laws already authorize our IRS to do this! And if you have relatively straightforward tax issues, our IRS already has all the information it needs to fill our your damn tax return for you! I suppose the objection would be that "tax-filing is a big business in America," but if a big chunk of that business doesn't need it, does that business deserve to be so big? Of course not! That business will have plenty of work for folks with complex investments and the like. But charging folks hundreds of dollars every year for doing work they don't need to do? That's profoundly wasteful, and our economy shouldn't churn money from waste.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for his actions leading up to the January 6 attempted coup. We have lately learned that Mr. Trump was already preparing to fight a 2020 election loss in court three months before Election Day, and while I'm sure his votaries call that "being prepared," it also means folks like John Eastman (who wrote the infamous memo laying out how Mike Pence could have invalidated 2020 election results on January 6) and Cleta Mitchell (who participated in Mr. Trump's infamous "find 11,780 votes" call to Georgia's Secretary of State) might have more to tell, since they advised these legal efforts from the start. And look, we all know he would have done anything to win; now we need only know what laws he might have broken.

Around the table: right-wingers want to "defund the police," and other truths.

When Matt Stoller talks about big tech corporations trying to "defund the police," he means that big tech corporations donate to the politicians who'll cut off funding for our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC), who enforce antitrust law and who are more hostile to monopolies than at any time in at least 40 years. Strange that every time Republicans try to cut funding for our IRS or for Medicare's fraud investigators, they don't call it "defunding the police," though that's really what it is. But just try to criticize a cop for killing a Black man who was brandishing a cellphone, and these very same people will scream their lungs out at you like their mamas never taught them any manners. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you yammer on about "urban crime" but you never mention corporate crime, I won't listen to you.

Good news, everyone: Ecuador's Constitutional Court has ruled that indigenous populations have the right to veto any drilling or mining projects on their land. When Marco Rubio hears about this, I'm sure he'll yammer on about trial lawyers, even though getting a small community's permission before drilling for oil or gas near their homes would strike most reasonable thinkers as the conservative thing to do. Giving the most autonomy to the most local forms of government is still conservative, right? Or has the word been tortured until the only thing it says is more money for rich people?

Matthew Jordan and Sydney Forde at The Conversation tell us that "Canadian Trucker Protests Show How the Loudest Voices in the Room Distort Democracy." I've said truckers have the right to close off roads even though they're a bunch of whiny brats, but yeah, if I were living in Ottawa right now, I'd probably be disgusted with all the horn-blowing. Well, as they say, the emptiest wagon makes the loudest noise. You know, just like in campaign finance!

If you've been thinking that the successful recall of three San Francisco school board members sends yet another signal of a Republican wave in 2022, don't think that, and not necessarily because their replacements will be appointed by a Democratic Mayor anyway. Folks much closer to the controversy inform us that the main issue voters had with the school board was its rampant incompetence -- they cared more about renaming Abraham Lincoln High School than, you know, figuring out how to get kids educated in a pandemic. I mean, getting Confederate names off schools is fine. But Abraham Lincoln was a stone-cold slavery fighter! No, really -- look past his carefully-calculated public pronouncements and look at his personal letters, in which he can't STFU about how much he hates slavery.

Some observers, noting that Republican Senators on the Finance Committee boycotted a meeting about a particular Fed nominee, wonder if they'll do the same to the eventual Supreme Court nominee. Some of them are already talking like she won't be qualified just because she'll be Black and female, though plenty of Black women are qualified enough to serve on our Court. And thus the same Senators who rushed the Kavanaugh and Barrett nominations will suddenly become apostles of patience and prudence if their stupidest questions aren't answered to their liking. And Joe Manchin will pretend not to notice Republicans inflicting yet another injury to his beloved "bipartisanship," and Kyrsten Sinema will just blame all liberals everywhere for not "getting to yes" with the party that only says yes when they get everything and you get nothing.

Finally, some more good news! our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) will reinstate California's authority to set stricter emissions standards than our federal government. This means, of course, that automotive corporations will build their cars to stricter standards, because California has a lot of people in it, you know, but they did it before Donald Trump, so they can do it again after Donald Trump. We really don't ask that much of our "big," "bold" "entrepreneurs."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, the Postal Service Reform Act, the Future Generations Protection Act, the Algorithmic Accountability Act, and the Supreme Court Ethics Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Congressional intransigence, bad media, free tax preparation, and pollution.

Long story short: tell President Biden to get with the Executive Orders already, tell all the other cable corporations to keep OAN out of their lineups, tell Spotify to eject Joe Rogan from its service, tell our IRS to make tax filing free for all Americans, and tell the Biden Administration to protect the Chaco Canyon area from fossil fuel drilling. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell President Biden to make 2022 "the year of Executive actions." Sure, right-wingers will cry tyranny whenever he does something the law already allows him to do, but right-wingers cry tyranny every time a liberal disagrees with them, and do they remember our last President? The one who openly admired dictators and constantly joked about how he wished he had their powers? Anyway, the federal firefighters now making $15/hour won't consider their raises an example of "tyranny," and if good Americans can get cheaper prescription drugs and cleaner air and less student loan debt, they won't bemoan that we didn't wait until we got permission from Joe Manchin to get it done, either. Seriously, do good works and people will appreciate it.

You've heard that DirecTV is kicking the nefarious One America News Network (or OAN, or OANN, who cares?) off its lineup this spring, so now MoveOn helps you call Verizon at 1.844.329.6087 and tell them to do the same, and MoveOn also helps you find phone numbers for corporations like Xfinity, Dish, and Spectrum at this website, so you can tell them to keep OAN out of their lineups. OAN doesn't have a constitutional right to a place in cable corporation offerings, for many reasons: 1) it's a thing, and things don't have rights, 2) if OAN were a person, our First Amendment would only protect it from our government -- not from employers, not from customers, and not from activists. When we hear that OAN might not be able to promulgate more 2020 election lies without DirecTV's support, all we can say is: we can only hope!

UltraViolet helps you tell Spotify to get rid of the so-called "Joe Rogan Experience" already. Mr. Rogan's anti-vax nonsense no doubt violates Spotify's own ban on COVID misinformation, but he's also a franchise dealer of other kinds of bullshit, among them white supremacy, xenophobia, and transphobia. Mr. Rogan no doubt imagines himself a free speech martyr, all while trying to deflect criticism by suggesting you shouldn't really take him all that seriously, and no doubt he also imagines that anyone who disagrees with him is trying to censor him; all I can say about all of that is, yes, I also remember being a hormone-addled 15-year-old boy who aspired to the purest cynicism. But I became a man, and put away childish things. And we have no obligation, as a civilization, to enable those who don't -- let alone pay them $100 million a year.

Demand Progress helps you tell our government to offer tax-filing services for free, for everyone. It does seem more than a little absurd that in the richest nation on Earth you generally pay someone to do your taxes, does it not? Actually, our laws obligate our IRS to provide a free tax filing option -- but for the last 20 years our IRS has, er, partnered with private tax prep corporations Intel (which owns TurboTax) and H&R Block, which have, for their part, gone very far out of their way to obscure their free tax prep services even from Google searches. Both corporations have lately dropped out of this program, so what's the holdup? Is our IRS looking for yet another private tax prep corporation to do their job for them? Don't they get that privatization, including "public-private partnerships," means higher prices?

Finally, Pew Environmental Trusts helps you tell Interior Secretary Haaland to protect New Mexico's Chaco Canyon area from gas and oil drilling. The Biden Administration has lately advanced a fairly solid proposal for the Chaco area that would ban new oil and gas drilling leases on all public lands within a ten-mile radius of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico for the next 20 years, a ban praised by the All Pueblo Council of Governors, which represents 20 Pueblo nations in Texas and New Mexico. Of course, at my age, 20-year bans don't seem so imposing anymore -- the 20-year moratorium former Interior Secretary Salazar imposed on uranium mining in the Grand Canyon area is now more than halfway over -- but a 20-year ban can more easily turn into a permanent ban than, say, a zero-year ban. And renewables have gotten a lot cheaper over the last 20 years.

UPDATE. Common Cause also helps you tell AT&T to cut all ties with One America News. AT&T owns about two-thirds of DirecTV, but AT&T money put OAN on the map in the first place, so let's, as they say, starve the beast.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, pollution, landmines, and Guantánamo.

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject a fake gerrymandering reform bill, tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous methane emissions regulations possible and start monitoring factory farm pollution, tell President Biden to keep his promise to outlaw certain landmines and close Guantánamo Bay, and tell our USDA to stop oil trains from rumbling through Utah. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA informs us that the recently-introduced HB 2207 only pretends to create a citizens' commission for redistricting, in that it give the political parties far too much power over its composition and direction and would actually amend our state constitution to let one party have complete control over the process. They'll call that the voters' will, when gerrymandering Rorschach-blot districts that excise sides of streets and individual houses is the perfect way to subvert the voters' will! They got some cojones, these clowns, but that's all they got. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to find your state legislator's phone number so you can tell them to reject this bill -- unless it includes the Samuelson amendment that would at least give good Pennsylvanians a real independent citizens commission, which would negate all the bill's horrors.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous methane emission rules possible. Best to get to stepping, though, since their deadline for comments is Friday. Methane packs a bigger climate change punch than coal, and when big corporations let it leak from their oil or gas drilling facilities, they're not just moving the coastlines uncomfortably closer to you, they're wasting perfectly good energy -- and if they're drilling on public lands, they're also cheating you, the taxpayer, out of royalties. In short, nobody likes methane leaks -- except the big gas and oil corporations that don't want to do their part to keep our planet livable because it means the CEO can't gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home. And they shouldn't get their way about that.

US PIRG helps you tell our EPA to start monitoring factory farm pollution. Which cause the most water pollution in America, and which our EPA pledged to start monitoring 17 years ago; what's the holdup? The holdup, I suspect, is that big ag corporations get even more deference from our government than all the other big corporations to which our government defers -- all these big corporations have to do is dangle the spectre of high food prices and they get whatever they like. Well, we're not hostages in America -- we're free people. And asking our EPA to start monitoring (not even stopping!) factory farm pollution is not so damn much to ask. Rivers of hog poop have a lot of methane in them, too, and too much hog poop makes people sick. Don't people count for anything?

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to re-ban anti-personnel landmines. Donald Trump lifted this ban during his deleterious four years as President, and President Biden promised he'd undo it, but he hasn't, yet, and it's not like he hasn't had the time -- a stroke of a pen is all it'll take. Put five beers into Donald Trump and I'm sure he'll tell you other countries get to do it so we should too, but the whole point of America is to be the best possible example to other countries. It's like none of these folks in politics remember that -- or, more likely, they think they don't have to earn it anymore. But we must always earn America. And landmines have been known to blow people's legs off 50 years after the war's over, so let's not let cruelty be the example we set for the rest of the world.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to close Guantánamo Bay already. Again, he promised to do this, and it's not like he can't get something done if he puts his mind to it -- like, you know, our withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he should have done a lot better but at least he did it; get us out of this now 20-years-going-on humiliation and he might actually start stacking up some accomplishments. Guantánamo still has almost 40 detainees, held without charge or trial, and if they'd really done something so bad you'd think our government could charge them with something. That tells you they didn't do a damn thing! Someone already stands ready to say if even one terrorist was there it was all worth it, but they'd never say that if they were detained at Guantánamo for years on end. So we can blow them off.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to revoke permits for an oil railway running through the Ashley National Forest in Utah. Jesus Mary and Joseph what is it about Utah that makes big corporations want to screw with it? Utah has some of the most beautiful country in the world! And this railway won't even dig out the minerals that big corporations often covet in Utah -- but it will ruin wildlife habitat and wetlands there, and for what? If we don't move past oil -- which is more than possible in a world where solar and wind now cost less in some places than fossil fuels -- then we're not going to have a planet left. Why, even those jerks at Fox News who spend all their time laughing at people who want more solar and wind won't have a place to go.

Action: concerning January 6, voting rights, crypto, wastewater, glyphosate, and conservation.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expel those members who helped plan the January 6 attempted coup, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, tell our SEC to start regulating crypto, tell Pennsylvania to stop using oil and gas wastewater to tamp down dust on state roads, tell the President of France to keep his promise to fight glyphosate’s EU licence, and tell our USDA to reinstate Roadless Rule protections for the Tongass National Forest. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

GOP Coup helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.Res. 25, which would investigate whether certain members of Congress should be expelled for their role in the January 6 attempted coup. Not just Paul Gosar or Andy Biggs, either -- also Lauren Boebert, who gave that suspicious tour of the Capitol the day before the attempted coup, and Lindsey Graham, who suggested right after the election that Georgia's Secretary of State toss legal ballots (per said Secretary of State's own testimony). If you were trying to nullify the will of the American voters -- and, to review, 81 million of us voted for Joe Biden, while 74 million of us voted for Donald Trump -- then you don't deserve a seat in Congress. I hate it when politicians tell 81 million people they should just fuck off and die, and that's what the above-named politicians have told us. So get 'em out.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act -- and kill the filibuster to do it if they have to. Which they do, because Republicans all oppose gerrymandering reform, campaign finance reform, and racist vote suppression, for some reason. (Spoiler alert: the reason is that they can't win without gerrymandering, big corporate donors, and keeping Black and Brown folks away from the polls.) And when they tell you voting reform has to be "bipartisan," remind them (as Rep. Clyburn did the other day) that amending the Constitution to end slavery and give ex-slaves the right to vote were not bipartisan. We don't care about "bipartisanship" -- we care about our government doing right by us.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to start regulating crypto. No, I'm not going to call it "cryptocurrency," because it is not currency -- it is a speculative investment, and our SEC's job is to protect investors from criminals, and boy oh boy does crypto look like an area rife for criminal activity; after all, if they call something money but can't explain how it works in terms regular folks can understand, it's BS. And a "currency" that seeks to bypass banks and governments ain't a good idea -- if you get screwed over in a crypto scheme, you're going to need a gun to get relief, and civilization's whole purpose is to stop you from doing that. I don't want banks and governments off the planet; I want them to be civilized.

MoveOn helps you tell the state of Pennsylvania to stop using oil and gas drilling wastewater to tamp down dust on state roads. Yeah, they still appear to be doing that, even though that stuff is full of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals, and even though our state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) put a moratorium on this practice four years ago. Apparently fossil fuel corporations found a loophole in the moratorium allowing wastewater use on unpaved roads, and you'd hate to think the state put out that moratorium knowing they weren't going to effectively enforce it! The best part? A Penn State study found last summer that fracking wastewater does a bad job keeping down the dust; why, doing nothing at all was better than using wastewater in some cases! So, yeah, let's stop doing that.

Sum of Us helps you tell French Presiden Macron to oppose any re-approval for glyphosate in Europe. Mr. Macron had pledged to phase out French use of glyphosate by the end of 2021, but he failed in that; soon France will take over the Presidency of the European Union this month, and glyphosate's license expires this year, so with a lot of popular prodding, perhaps he'll keep his promise then. He can't be thinking he's got a tough re-election campaign coming and he needs to be nice to the big carcinogen producers, can he? He's dumb as a bag of hammers if so: Europe has always had a much less corporate attitude toward agriculture than the U.S., and cancer-causing chemicals aren't actually popular anywhere. So we may need to lend the steel in his spine in this matter.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Forest Service to restore Roadless Rule protections for the Tongass National Forest. I've told this story a hundred times, not just of thousand year-old trees capturing almost half of all the carbon our national forests capture, but of greedy logging corporations and their Enabler-in-Chief, whose Forest Service took away Roadless Rule protections late in 2020 even though over 95% of us left public comments supporting keeping those protections in place. After all, it's not like we're the boss of government or anything. The Biden Administration is working to restore this rule as we speak, but they've gotten cold feet about doing the right thing before (cough keeping military weapons away from police cough), so we gotta remind them.

Action: concerning Build Back Better, worker rights, drilling near neighborhoods, probation "reform," and prosecuting Bolsonaro.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a vigorous Build Back Better Act, tell Kellogg's and Starbucks to give their workers fair contracts, tell California to prohibit oil and gas drilling in neighborhoods, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject a probation-related bill, and tell the International Criminal Court to prosecute Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First up: let's call our Senators and tell them to pass the Build Back Better Act more or less as the House passed it -- plus let's make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, roll back the Trump tax cuts on corporations and on the top tax bracket, limit SALT repeal to workers making less than $400,000, and let Medicare negotiate drug prices on all its drugs. And enough of inflation as a fear stick! "Government spending more" does not mean "more inflation," no matter how much right-wingers want you to think so! You know what's driving inflation? Corporations charging you more! And brook no BS about "how much the bill will really cost" or whatever rubbish report Sen. Graham cajoled our CBO into creating. Joe Manchin is not stupid enough to "fall for this" -- more likely, they're all acting out the drama that'll enable him to vote against the bill. West Virginia residents can counter this by calling Sen. Manchin and communicating their will. Telling him they're on to the drama wouldn't hurt.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Kellogg's to give their striking workers a fair contract or else you'll continue to boycott their products. They're hiring permanent replacement workers as we speak, but that doesn't mean we should concede defeat, and anyway those replacement workers sure are in for a shock! Kellogg's actual workers are striking right now partly because of the notorious two-tiered salary system one could say is designed to pit worker against worker, but also because of 16-hour work days and forced overtime. Kellogg's last contract offer (which workers overwhelmingly rejected) purported to address the two-tier system, but would only allow 3% of workers at each plant to ascend to the top pay tier annually, meaning workers would have to wait nine years to get the pay they deserve! Keep that in mind when Kellogg's rolls out its propaganda about all the pay increases they offered.

More Perfect Union also helps you tell Starbucks to negotiate fair contracts with its workers in Buffalo who have voted to join a union. Nobody's worried that Starbucks coffees will be too expensive if Starbucks treats its workers fairly, are they? Because that is to laugh! Admittedly today's CEOs are so clueless they might well put that line out, but I've been at so many Starbucks branches that don't hire enough workers to handle the volume, plus Starbucks messes with its workers' schedules just as much as any other non-union corporation. It's well past time we recognized that work is work, that no worker is "worthless" merely because they work a service job. Unions should have led us in this direction a long time ago, frankly! But the time to do the right thing is always now.

Vision CA helps you tell the government of California to stop oil and gas corporations from drilling where good folks live. Gov. Newsom has proposed a 3,200 foot setback for drilling -- meaning corporations couldn't drill within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, and hospitals -- but only to new drilling wells; you would want existing wells to obey the 3,200 foot rule, too, right? After all, they pollute just as much, if not more, than new wells. This is an instance where "grandfathering" bad wells in will hurt people. Also, you'll urge California to ban new permits within setbacks until the rule takes effect, which will have the effect of getting drilling corporations used to the ban, since we care so much about their feelings these days. More important, of course, are the good citizens of California who deserve clean air and clean water.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the ACLU helps you tell your state Senators to reject SB 913, a probation "reform" bill that will, in the ACLU's words, "trade one bad system for another." SB 913 would, on balance, make it easier for folks on probation to get sent to jail, when the whole reason behind probation is to offer an alternative to putting everyone in jail, plus it would make it easier for poor people to be sent to jail, by keeping people on probation indefinitely if they haven't paid restitution. If the words can't do the time, don't do the crimehave formed on your lips, I would hope you'd say that to corporate criminals if you say it to the imaginary Black folks in your head, and besides, keeping people on probation forever until they've paid a fine is a very good way of tripping people up so they go back to jail again, which would be a private prison corporation's wet dream. And they already have too many of their dreams realized at our expense.

Finally, Avaaz helps you tell the International Criminal Court to open a prosecution against Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, not necessarily for all of the awful stuff he's done (a Brazilian Senate committee recommended he be indicted over his mishandling of the COVID pandemic), but particularly for his actions against the Amazon and against the indigenous folks who defend it. The Amazon has lost the equivalent of 3,000 football fields per day during his nefarious rule, and he has encouraged a lot of illegal logging and mining in the Amazon, plus violence against the good folks who live there, all of which may well meet the ICC's "crimes against humanity" standard, particularly when you consider that the Amazon rain forest would be the world's best defense against climate change if we'd just leave it the hell alone. Treating the world like your personal piggy bank should have consequences, but it won't if we don't demand it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning pollution, farming, prisoners, food safety, and racism.

Long story short: tell your PA state Assemblyfolk to reject pro-pollution bills, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Farm System Reform Act, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, the Baby Food Safety Act, and the GI Bill Restoration Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject a pair of objectively pro-pollution bills, HB 1947 and SB 275. They would, guess what, explicitly forbid Pennsylvania cities and towns from enacting laws that would help them get off our national addiction to fossil fuels. Very conservative of them! What ever happened to "the smallest body of people should make the most important decisions affecting that body of people"? Money, that's all -- if a municipality decides to buy only solar or wind power, then big gas and oil executives won't be able to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Sad! And Pennsylvania's Supreme Court found similar legislation unconstitutional, so let's save our legislature from further embarrassment by communicating our will.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4421/S. 2332, the Farm System Reform Act. The Farm System Reform Act would place a moratorium on the building of new factory farms, restore country-of-origin labeling laws for meat, and help break meat packer monopolies by reinstituting "spot market" meat sales, so that meat packing corporations don't force farmers into sales agreements that ultimately crush them. Hopefully you don't look at phrases like "no more building of factory farms" and say "but won't that drive prices through the roof?" We're seeing, right now, how oversized ships are actually driving inflation upward, simply by making themselves the only conceivable option in shipping. We're not there yet with oversized farms, but if big corporations get their way, we will be. Thus we have to stop them before they do.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act. Some folks pay over a buck a minute to talk to their loved ones in prison, and folks can't afford that. And prisoners certainly can't afford that, since they don't even make anything close to minimum wage in prison. If you find yourself thinking then they shouldn't have done the crime then ha ha ha snort, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that folks who can stay in touch with loved ones without paying an arm and a leg have a much better chance of staying out of prison once they get out than folks who can't stay in touch with loved ones, and 3) consider that just because you're in prison doesn't mean big telecom corporations should take advantage of you. If you need to slap yourself again, go ahead. Wisdom ain't easy.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2229/S. 1019, the Baby Food Safety Act. If you've heard of toxic metals like cadmium, arsenic, lead, and mercury in baby food, then you see the need for such legislation. And this bill's pretty comprehensive -- it'd impose maximum levels of toxic metals in baby food, require our FDA to review and lower those levels if necessary, expand our FDA's recall authority over toxic baby food, and even commission research on agricultural methods that'd reduce toxic metals in baby food. Our government, commissioning research -- why, that sounds like our government doing their job! And if the thought of government research makes you guffaw, just remember: without it, you'd have no COVID vaccine. No, really. You didn't think private corporations did all that, did you?

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5905, the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, which would extend G.I. Bill benefits to survivors and descendants of Black soldiers who fought in World War II. Why? Because the G.I. Bill enabled a lot of good American WWII soldiers of Italian, Polish, and German descent to get into the middle class for the first time -- but denied that access to Black soldiers, using methods of discrimination you won't have to work too hard to imagine. We made them a promise, and we reneged on it; now, with the GI Bill Restoration Act, we can make it right. Naturally, right-wingers will call this "reparations," like that's a bad word. They'll try to make any word a bad word! But that shouldn't keep us from doing the right thing.

Action: concerning Afghanistan, Facebook, Steve Bannon, nuclear weapons, fossil fuels, and forever chemicals.

Long story short: tell our government to help suffering Afghans, investigate Facebook, charge Steve Bannon for defying a Congressional subpoena, and curtail development of nuclear weapons; tell big banks to stop funding big fossil fuel projects, and tell our EPA to regulate "forever chemicals" as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Win Without War helps you tell the Biden Administration to release and monitor Afghan assets. Key phrase in that formulation is "and monitor" -- nobody wants to release good Afghans' assets and just see the Taliban seize them. The former government of Afghanistan kept their citizens' money in international accounts, which is why this is even an issue in the first place, and now those citizens are at risk of starving to death and running out of medicine -- never mind that they can't even buy supplies or run businesses! -- and civilized people don't wish that fate on anyone. And it is their money, after all. Don't calculate that starving a few Afghans is the price we pay for isolating the Taliban. Again, civilized people don't do that, and besides, the Taliban live in a world where even ISIS hates them.

The American Economic Liberties Project helps you tell various Executive branch agencies (including our Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Federal Trade Commission) to investigate Facebook for possible crimes. Such crimes, per the incomparable Matt Stoller, may include: wire fraud (in inflating both video numbers and advertising "reach" numbers), securities fraud (in its failure to disclose such inflation to investors), violating the False Claims Act (an inflated number is a false claim), insider trading (Mr. Zuckerberg sold a lot of stock after learning of the Cambridge Analytica imbroglio), and price-fixing (Facebook allegedly got preferential treatment from Google in exchange for not competing with them). That's all illegal for good reason, and criminal charges may be the only thing that'll bring Facebook to heel. So let's demand that.

Left Action helps you tell our Justice Department to charge Steve Bannon for defying a Congressional subpoena. Our House subpoenaed Mr. Bannon in the course of its investigation of the January 6 attempted coup, but Mr. Bannon has claimed he could not testify until various executive privilege claims make their way through the courts. Presumably he has noticed that Donald Trump isn't President any longer, despite the fever dreams of right-wingers (including himself). Our House has since voted to hold Mr. Bannon in contempt; now the ball's in our Justice Department's court to decide whether to enforce that holding. If they care about law and order, they'll enforce it; you shouldn't be able to defy a Congressional subpoena during an investigation into an attempt to overthrow our government without consequences.

Peace Action helps you tell the Biden Administration how you want their Nuclear Posture Review to proceed. Chiefly, you'd argue for fewer nuclear weapons (and no new nuclear weapons) and you'd argue to take nuclear weapons off of "hair-trigger" alert, since we already have enough nukes to destroy the world hundreds of times over and they've never been particularly precise weapons. And how good a response is a nuclear strike to most of what happens in the world today? Should we have used nukes on Osama bin Laden after 9.11? Of course not, and too much of what harms our soldiers in the field are improvised explosives, suggesting that the future of warfare might be more about guerilla warfare. All new nukes do is make defense contractors rich, which ain't a good enough reason to do anything.

Daily Kos helps you tell the big banks to stop funding big fossil fuel projects. A lot of big banks express concern over the effects of climate change -- so why do they continue to fund big oil, gas, and coal projects? Possibly because they're not really telling the truth about their commitment to fighting climate change? It's a question worth asking! It's not just about pollution, either -- it's also about running roughshod over the rights of indigenous folks who live on the lands that big corporations would like to dig up. It sure seems like they'd do less harm to the indigenous if they concentrated more on solar and wind investment. They'd enable a lot less pollution, too. We deserve more of these win-win situations in our lives, but we won't get them unless we speak out.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to regulate "forever chemicals" as vigorously as possible. They call PFAS "forever chemicals" because they don't break down and once they get in your body, they stay there -- and then they wreak havoc, causing cancer, thyroid disease, reproductive issues, and liver damage, among other things you don't want to happen to you or anyone else. Unfortunately, you can find PFAS chemicals in damn near everything, from non-stick pans to fast-food wrappers to stain-resistant carpets to water-repellant jackets to firefighting foam. Maybe that all seems to big to fight. Who could blame you for thinking so? But back in the day, slavery was too big to fight, too, but we fought it and won. And we can win here, too -- but not if we stay silent.

Action: concerning our Post Office, offshore drilling, "Instagram for kids," fossil fuel drilling, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell President Biden to reform our Postal Service and end offshore drilling, tell Facebook to abandon its plans to let children use Instagram, tell AXA's CEO to stop insuring fossil fuel projects, and tell AT&T to abandon One America News Network. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom and USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already. He should have already fired Mr. DeJoy merely for slowing down the mail and charging more for it, because why should we tolerate paying more to get our medicine and ballots and Social Security checks slower? I'm old enough to remember when merely proposing such a thing would get you laughed out of the room. But apparently Mr. Bloom stands in the way of our USPS Board of Governors firing Mr. DeJoy, and even better, Mr. DeJoy has invested with a fund Mr. Bloom runs, which sure smells of corruption even if we never put either man in jail for it. If Mr. Biden replaces Mr. Bloom, we're all one step closer to replacing Mr. DeJoy, at which point hallelujah!

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell President Biden to end offshore drilling. You don't need to stop with the recent spill of the Southern California coast -- you need only remember the Exxon Valdez spill and the BP Spillageddon in the Gulf of Mexico, both of which were avoidable and took forever to clean up because corporations don't like paying to clean up their messes. President Biden wouldn't just be fulfilling a campaign promise by ending offshore drilling -- he'd also open up space for the wind farms he wants to line America's coasts, as I imagine it would be difficult to do both things in the same spot. And if I had to pick, I'd rather have the turbines out there -- no, they won't kill all the birds, and no, they won't make you sick, and no, they won't be so noisy you can't function. And we might get to keep our planet.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell Facebook to abandon its ill-conceived (and ill-concealed!) plans to hook children on Instagram. You no doubt know from multitudinous news reports that Facebook knew that young girls who used Instagram had much worse body images than girls who didn't, and it was still like pulling teeth to get them to "suspend" their plans for an Instagram for Kids app. And don't let anyone justify Instagram-for-Kids by saying "they're just going to find a way to get it anyway," not just because defeatism is unworthy of a civilized people, but because our job, as adults, isn't necessarily to play catch-up with social media so much as to give our kids spiritual nourishment so they don't run to social media for it. Old-fashioned of me, I know.

Sum of Us helps you tell AXA CEO Thomas Buberl to stop insuring new gas and oil projects. He's supposedly going to decide on that matter this week, and AXA (which operates mainly in Europe and the Middle East) was the first big insurance corporation to refuse to insure new coal projects, but we still need to let AXA know we're watching, not least because we also know big oil and gas drilling corporations are also watching, and preparing to drown out our voices with the power of big money. Oh, and also their "expertise," which is mainly expertise in BSing and gaslighting. When that's all they got, we need to oppose them, in numbers they cannot mistake. The only way to beat big money is to fight big money, after all -- and our victories today guarantee more victories in the future, as long as we keep working.

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell AT&T to end financial support for the One America News Network. Just because AT&T might have wanted "its own conservative (sic) news network" years ago doesn't mean we have to put up with all the rage-inducing crap on TV news today -- and since AT&T is apparently OAN's sole funder, the first blow we strike might be the decisive one. OAN are the people who tell you lies about the 2020 election, lies about COVID vaccines, lies about the January 6 attempted coup, lies about Black civil rights activists, and lies about how "oppressed" white folks are. They're also the folks who think that people who "believe" Joe Biden won the 2020 election should be executed for treason. I want the assholes who say such things to get the oblivion they deserve. They sure don't deserve more corporate money.

Around the table: and now for another exciting chapter of "weak Democrats, insane Republicans."

When I hear that a majority of Americans don't know exactly what's in the Build Back Better plan, I'm inclined to say, no shit, Sherlock! The fact that Democrats allow the discussion to be all about "how much money we're going to spend" leads me to think they're all trying to tank it, not just the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis. I mean, if they told media outlets and their constituents "we want to lower drug prices, get everyone paid family leave, and cut taxes for working families, and we're going to pay for all of that by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations," people like Joe Manchin and Henry Cuellar would be irrelevant, because their own constituents would be raising hell with them in a way they couldn't avoid. It's sad that Democrats have forgotten how this works -- or, perhaps more precisely, "forgotten."

In a related development, four Senate Democrats say they won't back the Build Back Better Act if Joe Manchin guts all the climate change provisions in the bill. That's as it should be! Of course, no good deed goes unpunished in America, so liberals will get all the blame if this all fails, despite the fact that, again, it's been the Manchin/Sinema/Gottheimer/Cuellar axis saying "no" to things most American people want this whole time. (Also, the gas drilling corporations say we shouldn't enact a methane emissions tax because the cost "would be felt by consumers," as if said corporations have literally nothing to do with passing on that cost, and as if we should merely tolerate corporations doing immoral crap.)

Here's some good news: 20 state Attorneys General have sued to stop the DeJoy plan to cripple our Post Office, and oh boy the suit claims that Mr. DeJoy didn't follow the law in making changes to services and prices. Sound familiar? Of course it does -- it's the thing that tripped up every Trump Administration rule that died in court, which was a lot of them. You can't just do whatever you want in the Executive branch, and our Founders would spin in their graves to observe that, even if none of them could have foreseen a phenomenon such as the Administrative Procedure Act.

When I hear that Terry McAuliffe is hopping mad that the House didn't pass the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal," I feel compelled to wonder why he thinks this is the hill to die on. He knows full well why it didn't pass -- because actual liberals knew if it passed, right-wing Democrats in the Senate would kill the larger Build Back Better Act -- so he indulges in hippie-punching like it's 1993. He deserves to lose -- but more to the point, Democrats deserve to lose as long as they act like cowards. (I say "act like," of course, because, as I've suggested, I think they are acting -- they want to keep things the way they are, and losing their Congressional majorities in 2022 to fascists is part of the plan.)

Lawrence Torcello at The Conversation tells us "How Columbus Day Contributes to the Cultural Erasure of Italian-Americans." You may find that counter-intuitive, particularly if you're sensitive to how badly America's treated Italian immigrants over the years (and if you know that Columbus Day observances began as a sop to ill-treated Italian-Americans), but I'm an Italian-American myself and I'd much rather celebrate Chef Boyardee Day. I'm not kidding -- everyone eats spaghetti now, only because Ettore Boiardi made it seem less foreign to large numbers of Americans. Or how about a day for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ida Lupino, or Alan Alda?

Finally, Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post wonders "How Dumb Can a Nation Get and Still Survive?" Sympathetic as I am to his frustration over lies about masks and vaccines, I've long said it's not stupidity per se that afflicts us, but rage -- Fox News has been enraging folks en masse since at least 2002, and now they have a lot of imitators, both in media and in politics. Hate to sound like a broken record, but it'd help if Democrats would do good works with their power when they have it, lest we all witness the spectacle of a decisive number of voters actually preferring fascists to weaklings.

Action: concerning Medicare, home care, taxes, drug prices, and corporate welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the full Build Better Act, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, enable Medicare to negotiate drug prices, tell Congress to lower drug prices for everyone, and end corporate welfare for fossil fuel corporations. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

With Build Back Better Act text coming within a day or two, now would be a good time to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass the full bill, with all $3.5 trillion of planned spending. That means (among other things!) expanding Medicare and expanding home- and community-based care services, since these are the two initiatives Congress will most likely drop from the bill. But wait! What about what Joe Manchin wants? Everybody asks that, but not enough of us ask, "what about what we want?" I find it hard to believe that the American people would object to expanding Medicare, since clear majorities in poll after poll find that Americans want everyone on Medicare. I also find it hard to believe that the American people would object to spending on the home- and community-based care that we're all going to need sooner or later. But in order to prove that, we have to speak out.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise all $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act from higher taxes on the rich and on corporations. But wait! What about the Unspeakable Nine in the House Democratic caucus? Again, the correct question is "what about what we want?" The American people have, again, demonstrated in poll after poll that we want to tax the rich and corporations a lot harder than we're currently doing; we have demonstrated this, in poll after poll, despite being relentless propagandized by the politicians and our "liberal" media about the "harm" higher taxes on the rich and corporations would do. And again, we have to speak out in order to prove it -- particularly since the winged monkeys of the right are certainly speaking out.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to close the "stepped-up basis" loophole which enables the rich to avoid taxes on investments. The rich have gamed the system well enough that they never have to sell an investment to get cash -- they can just go get a loan using their investment as collateral for that loan, sheltering their investment from taxation. Don't believe the hype about closing this loophole affecting family farms and small businesses, because the Biden proposal specifically exempts these businesses, as long as the owners hold onto them. "Stepped-up basis" sounds pretty inside baseball, I know, but that doesn't mean your will to close it should count less than the will of some PR hack who makes a living confusing everyone. Your will is your will, and your representatives need to respect that.

Public Citizen still helps you tell your Congressfolk to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. "Moderate" Democrats stand ready to proclaim that we "can't afford" that, but if Medicare can negotiate drug prices, it will save the taxpayer money. As literally any sentient life form would tell you! Let alone the right-wingers at the Mercatus Center, who told us in 2018 (not that they, ah, foregrounded this information) that Medicare drug price negotiation would save us $84 billion annually, meaning $840 billion over 10 years, meaning about one-fourth of the total price of the Build Back Better Act. Does that mean we should still raise all that money from the rich and from corporations? Of course we should! But we should also enact policy that would make Medicare run better for less money. And if the big pharma corporations don't like it, well, again, we need to stop asking about them, and we need to start asking about us.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices for everyone in America. Medicare drug price negotiation would do wonders for the drug prices our seniors pay, but we all deserve lower drug prices. Seriously, should we merely tolerate corporations that charge a thousand dollars monthly for life-preserving insulin just because they can? Should we tolerate corporations charging $600 for an EpiPen that cost them far less to produce? No, we are civilized people, so we should not tolerate that. And if any of your friends or family tell you that folks should eat better so they don't become diabetic, remember that if any of them become diabetic, they'll assume they worked hard to avoid it whether they really did or not. Pretty much everyone is like that, and civilized people don't assign blame so much as solve problems.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to end fossil fuel subsidies. If they cost us over $20 billion annually, that's $200 billion over 10 years, or around five percent of the cost of the Build Back Better Act; five percent ain't a lot, but surely every dollar counts, particularly when it's our dollars they're talking about. Fossil fuels hardly need the welfare handouts we give them, not when they monopolize their markets, not when they refuse to embrace renewable energy as any forward-looking entrepreneur ought to do, and certainly not when they make money hand over fist. You've heard them say oil corporations only make seven cents per gallon of gas? Think of all the gas you buy, and multiply that by 300 million Americans, and you'll begin to see that argument is a lot like saying a CEO is underpaid because he only gets $6 every time he draws breath.

Action: concerning evictions, chemical safety, corporate welfare, worker rights, discrimination, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell our government to extend the eviction moratorium, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the PFAS Action Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the PRO Act, the Equality Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell our Congressfolk to extend the eviction moratorium. Thanks largely to pressure from House liberals such as Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), the Biden Administration did issue an order extending the eviction moratorium for 60 days in high-COVID areas, and even though real estate groups might get our Supreme Court to overturn it rather quickly, that order isn't useless -- if nothing else, it buys a little time for somehow-undistributed COVID relief money to get to the renters who need it. Still, Congress needs to hear from us that they should do something about this -- Republicans would just love to see hundreds of tent cities spring up all over America. And I'm not worried about landlords' well-being. You don't get to be a landlord if you're not well-off. Besides, hardship builds character; isn't that what we always tell renters?

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act, and -- this is critical! -- not weaken it to please their corporate paymasters. H.R. 2467 would, among other things, mandate that our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) set standards for how much PFAS chemicals we can tolerate in our drinking water; the ideal number would be "zero," given how hard it is to break PFAS chemicals down (they don't call them "forever chemicals" for nothing!) and how scientists have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer and birth defects, but given their ubiquity in our products, we are already compromising by setting any non-zero limits at all. And our Senators know this bill should pass, so they'll try to weaken it and then take credit for it. That's a wicked game, and we shouldn't let them play it.

Both the Sierra Club and Food and Water Action help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. This bill would end some $15 billion annually in corporate welfare subsidies to corporations that, frankly, don't need the money, like oil and gas drillers. Literally the only people in America who want to keep that welfare coming are the oil and gas drilling corporations who get it, and, sadly, they contribute big bucks to the politicians who'll vote on this bill. And these corporations don't spend nearly as much in campaign contributions as they collect in corporate welfare! So we the people need to stop that. After all, we're the majority.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The big story this past week, as you may know, is a National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) hearing officer determining that Amazon did, in fact, break laws during the April unionization vote at its Bessemer, AL warehouse, and our NLRB may order another election in the coming weeks, but wouldn't it be nice if it didn't even come to that? The PRO Act would stop a lot of big corporate abuse and intimidation -- including the forced anti-union propaganda meetings and the retaliation against pro-union workers -- before it happens. Again, big corporations won't like it, and they will spend to stop it. But I would ask this of our Senators: do you really want to take "I was easily bribed repeatedly by big corporations" to the Pearly Gates?

The Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Have I mentioned how disgusting I find the arguments against the Equality Act? Why, yes, I believe I have, in some detail. And what's most disgusting about them? None of them are true! Why, those arguments would need to take two buses and a train even to get in the same neighborhood as the truth! The Equality Act prevents bosses, landlords, and banks from discriminating against gay and transgender folks just because they're gay and transgender, end of story. If that offends folks' "religious beliefs," then maybe -- just an idea -- they shouldn't base their religion around who they hate.

Finally, Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. And Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Again: the arguments against these bills all suck. The bills would curtail gerrymandering, enact same-day and automatic voting registration, give all voters 15 days of early voting, force big campaign donors to disclose their donations, give power to stop vote suppression at the state level back to our Justice Department, and end certain racist de-registration practices, so if folks call all that "a Democrat power grab," they may want to consider whether it only looks that way because of actual Republican power-grabs -- like Voter ID, or creating Rorschach-blot legislative districts, or closing polling booths in Black neighborhoods, or using the Interstate Crosscheck database to de-register Black voters without telling them, or any of the several dozen other right-wing tricks you can name.

Around the table: whiny brats with guns should not get all the say about everything, part 955.

A Washington Post report finds that FEMA doesn't aid a lot of Black families in the deep South because they can't produce deeds and wills to prove they own their land. You should not be surprised to learn that "the long-held tradition of informal land ownership" among Black folks was a necessary response to Jim Crow laws preventing Black folks from even getting wills and deeds to begin with. FEMA's insistence on such documentation doesn't actually come from the law, but from their apparent desire to keep scammers from getting federal assistance. We'd damn well better find another way, though.

University of Chicago neuroscientists find that rats will help their fellow rats escape a trap even when tempted to ignore them with chocolate. They put two rats in a cage, with one roaming freely and one not, and the free-roaming rat was "more agitated" when his cagemate was trapped than when he was in an empty cage, and the free-roaming rat also figured out how to open the trap after a lot of effort. They call it "(t)he first evidence of empathy-driven helping behavior in rodents," but I suspect the only reason we didn't observe this already is that we didn't look for it. You spend a lifetime trying to overcome prejudice only to find you've moved the needle only a little. Still, you do the work, because the work is worth it.

Tennessee fires the state's immunization program director, apparently after she gave completely sound and legal advice that teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 don't need their parents' permission to get the COVID vaccine. Of course this is the right-wing way -- to act like such drama-addled morons that the best of us throw up our hands and disengage from the fight -- but the best part of her story is the part where unnamed busybodies told her she should have been more "politically aware" that sharing the science after being explicitly told to do so by her superiors would be "pok(ing) the bear." People like that should a) slap themselves and b) contemplate a little more seriously the fact that anything "pokes the bear" as far as right-wingers are concerned. Next up on Fox News: Tucker Carlson comes out against oxygen.

Hard to believe, Harry, but an AT&T PAC gave $100,000 to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott the same day he called a special session to pass more vote suppression bills, even though AT&T has voiced support for improved voting access. You hate to say things like "good words mean nothing," but corporations make it so hard not to say such things. I sure hope they don't say "we gave to Greg Abbott to keep a real monster like Allen West out of office," because Greg Abbott is already a real monster.

Ho hum, Texas's February cold snap may have shut down that state's power grid and killed over 200 good Texans, but at least a couple of gas corporations made record profits. I can already hear right-wingers cluck-clucking that NO SUPPLIEZ PLUS HIGH DEMANDZ EQUALZ TEH HIGHZ PRICEZ DUHZ!!!!!!, and I suppose they are free to inflict their reasoning on the families of the dead. Plus they've always said that TEH FREE MARKUTZ!!!! would always prevent this sort of thing from happening, because people wouldn't stand for it. The Free Marketeers didn't imagine state legislators would simply ignore a cold snap to whine about "voter fraud" and transgender athletes and critical race theory. Or did they?

Finally, we learn that Donald Trump apparently thought whomever leaked the story of him hiding in the White House bunker while George Floyd protests went on outside the White House last year should have been "charged with treason" and "executed." Ever get the sense this is a man who says ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME all the time? Perhaps you have. If we ever get to the point where exposing the Emperor's cowardice is "treason," this democracy is doomed. And about a quarter of the electorate are there right now, actively trying to doom our democracy merely because it doesn't tell them only what they want to hear. But I would much rather die in a nuclear war than die because of whiny brats with guns.

Action: concerning surprise medical bills, pollution, and campaign finance.

Long story short: tell our government to fight surprise medical bills, tell our EPA to act more vigorously against chlorpyrifos, tell Boeing to stop donating to politicians who try to overturn elections, and tell our President to appoint a strong anti-pollution Commissioner to the FERC. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will. And good hunting!

Penn PIRG helps you tell President Biden to enact the strongest possible rules against surprise medical bills. The No Surprises Act, which passed last Congress, authorizes our Executive branch to write, enact, and enforce rules preventing big health insurance corporations from foisting surprise medical bills on good Americans, but you know those big health insurance corporations (and the hedge funds, don't forget them!) will be all up in our President's grill, saying if he really kept them from, say, billing people for surgeries in-network with anesthesiologists who just so happened to be out of network, it'd kill jobs, or be a "burden," or something. Never do they think about the actual burdens they foist on us. That's why we remind our President.

In a related alert, Change.org helps you tell our government to stop medical collections from getting reported to credit bureaus and stop corporations from garnishing wages to pay those bills. Because people already are afraid to go to the doctor! And they don't need more reasons to be afraid! I suppose someone will come along and say what's wrong with paying what you owe ha ha ha snort, but as usual they ask the wrong question: why should health insurance cost so damn much, and why should so many medical bills come as a complete surprise to you? You can't just bootstrap your way out of a hostage situation -- you also need the law to help you, as civilized people have a right to expect.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reconsider its failure to ban chlorpyrifos from use on crops. You haven't been able to use that chemical in household chores for decades now, so why are we still spraying it on food? When scientists have linked chlorpyrifos to brain damage in kids? Naturally our EPA didn't think this was a big deal under the Trump Administration, but a federal court (of course) told them to go back to the drawing board and either ban it or set safety levels for it. Seems like a lot of Donald Trump's bright ideas die in court, and that's to our advantage. So let's take it.

Public Citizen helps you tell Boeing to stop giving campaign contributions to the Republican Congressfolk who helped try to overturn the 2020 election. After January 6, corporate campaign contributions to these clowns became toxic, but you probably always knew that as soon as we stopped looking, they'd restart their sedition-funding ways. Hence, we're reminding them that we're still looking. Jesus Mary and Joseph Donald Trump lost the election by seven million votes, and people who can't accept that are big whiny babies. Do civilized people let big whiny babies make all the decisions all the time? No, we do not. And big corporations need to start realizing their first duty isn't to their shareholders or their executives but to our civilization.

Finally, Food and Water Action helps you tell our President to appoint a new commissioner to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (or FERC) who will fight for energy policy that reduces pollution and helps us avoid the worst effects of climate change. Because we deserve that! FERC regulates the sale and transportation of gas and electricity, plus it also reviews proposed gas pipelines; you can see a whole lot of trouble there, can't you? Trouble in the form of more hurricanes, more wildfires, more floods, more droughts? Generally FERC has tended to rubber-stamp the dirty energy projects that make all these things worse, but a Commission vacancy comes up on June 30 (why, that's next week!), and that means an opportunity to get someone on there who looks a little more skeptically at these projects. But not if we don't speak up.

Action: concerning jobs, racism, debt, clean water, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk what you want from the infrastructure/jobs bill, and tell your Congressfolk to support Black history, get relief for folks from their utility bills, keep lead out of our drinking water, and end the filibuster. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Regarding that American Jobs Plan: the Environmental Defense Fund helps you demand that Congress pass a bill that addresses pollution and renewable energy, since Republicans don't think lead-free pipes and solar panels can be "infrastructure." Happy to let oil and gas corporations suck at the corporate welfare teat, they are, but not to do anything about it, even though God only gives you one life. Meanwhile, Progress America helps you tell Democrats, explicitly, "no climate, no deal" -- as in, if the American Jobs Plan doesn't address the issues I've already discussed in the first sentence of this paragraph (among other issues!), then it should die. Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk that whatever they come up with had better not gut the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion. That's part of what "using unspent COVID money" means, since the monthly CTC expansion checks haven't started coming yet. The good news? Those first checks go out July 15, and good Americans with children will get used to them right quick, so if Republicans start talking about the "urgency" of "getting something done," know that they're sweating, and that we can wait them out. (If any of them say we're "weaponizing" the CTC checks, I will smack a pimp. Republicans weaponize everything, so they don't get to whine about "weaponizing" monthly checks they didn't vote for. You'd think they'd have some damn pride. I mean, some of them are going to meet their Maker sooner than I am.)

The Daily Kos Liberation League does some freaking alchemy with this action alert, which helps you tell your Congressfolk to, and I quote, "support Black history education in our K-12 schools and denounce the racist attacks by Republican leaders. That's what all the right-wing attacks on "critical race theory" are really about: preventing our children from learning any decent Black history in our schools. No, it's not about "banning white people" or "sending whites to reeducation camps" or "cancel culture" or whatever swill they're peddling; it's about trying to make sure you don't learn enough about Jim Crow that you can't tell that Jim Crow still operates in America -- more subtly, yes, but that's what evil does when you beat it the first time. And you have to beat it every day of your life.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1783, the Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act. As I'm sure you know, good Americans have been having trouble meeting their utility bills during this pandemic; S. 1783 would provide $30 billion to cancel water bill debt, electric bill debt, and broadband bill debt. All of these are essential services -- yes, broadband, too, or have we already forgotten how much work and school we had to do online this year? -- and you know what's far, far worse than the "moral hazard" of government forgiving people's bills? The actual moral hazard of cutting off their services so they can't stay healthy and contribute to society! Look, we can't all be hedge fund managers -- most of us have to do real jobs, and real jobs, as we have been reminded over and over again, don't always pay enough, particularly when we don't have them. The Maintaining Access to Essential Services Act can help more good Americans better endure these horrible truths, and thus better fight another day.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1376, the GET THE LEAD OUT Act, which, despite its name, has nothing to do with local Led Zeppelin-related radio programming. What "moral hazard" will Republicans identify in a bill aiming to (as the title says) get lead out of lead pipes all over America, since literally any amount of lead in your drinking water can cause brain damage? Will they decry all the Big Gummint spending, as if private corporations will ever solve lead-pipe issues on their own? Will they lament all the regulatory bureaucracy supposedly inherent in forcing more lead-pipe disclosure in housing contracts? Will they claim that the bill's funding mechanisms (subjecting more large estates to the Estate Tax and closing the "carried interest" loophole that lets hedge fund managers evade taxes) will "kill jobs"? Yes, that all sounds incredibly absurd, and even if they were valid arguments, they still couldn't hope to meet the real moral hazard of exposing our children to brain damage.

Finally, pursuant to most of our goals this year, Public Citizen still helps you tell your Democratic Senators to end the filibuster. Do we care that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema say they won't support an effort to end the filibuster? Of course we don't! All we care about is that we express our will, and if we tell our Senators enough times, they'll start to look bad for not doing it. And, you know, I spent over a decade defending the filibuster, and arguing that we ought to make Senators actually talk their way through the filibuster like they did in the old days. But, honestly, I've fucking had enough.

Action: concerning credit errors, internet privacy, methane emissions, social media, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell big credit corporations to fix errors in our credit reports, tell TikTok to stop collecting biometric data, tell our EPA to enact vigorous methane regulations, tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep drillers away from Dinosaur National Park, tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump permanently, and tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 of student loan debt per person. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will. And good hunting!

Consumer Reports helps you tell the big credit reporting corporations to fix errors on their reports and make their reports more transparent and accessible to their customers. Which could be any of us! More than one in three Americans told Consumer Reports that they've found errors in their credit reports, and an error could cost you a job, a house, or a loan, so this ain't nitpicking here. You'll also ask Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion to freeze your credit by default (rather than make you jump through hoops to freeze it, you know what I mean) and making credit reports and credit scores free to access forever. I eagerly await Republicans complaints that this would all be some kind of "job-killing" plan.

Fight for the Future helps you tell big social media corporation TikTok to stop collecting biometric data, like voice and face prints, from its customers. All these newfangled social media contraptions seem to come up with all these newfangled ways to intrude upon your privacy! And it's no use saying this is the future, there's no such thing as privacy, because that's a defeatism a civilized person can't abide. Losing $92 million in a biometric-related lawsuit earlier this year and $5 million to an FTC fine (for collecting children's data, no less!) have apparently taught them the wrong lesson. Perhaps the Big Stick of Bad PR can teach them the right one.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to fashion stronger methane regulations than the ones we've got. For all the good reasons: because methane-mitigation technology has gotten a lot better over the years, because methane packs a climate change punch even worse than coal, because leaking methane into our air is not only pollution but also a waste of energy, and because leaking methane into our air is not only pollution and a waste of energy but also steals taxpayer royalties, since any usable energy found on drilling operations on public lands belongs to us. Congress famously failed to roll back Obama-era methane rules in 2017, but the Trump EPA rolled them back late in 2020; now it's time to roll back the roll-back, and keep pollution and climate change from killing us.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep oil and gas drilling away from the Dinosaur National Monument. They call it that at least in part because you can find actual dinosaur fossils in the cliff faces! The century-old monument straddling the border between Colorado and Utah isn't just the home of historical wonders, but of two rivers that feed the Colorado River, so if some big corporation goes blasting a mere mile from the edge of the monument, it'll pollute the drinking water used by over 40 million people. It's not worth polluting that much water just so some executive can gild the plumbing on his 19th vacation home. Executives ought to learn to make money off renewable energy. Hell, some already have.

Progress America helps you tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump permanently. Some liberals have publicly worried about the free speech "risk" of doing such a thing, too, but remember that hardly anyone was using Facebook 13 years ago, so we don't actually have to treat it like it's the all-media or something. And Facebook's a private corporation, so it doesn't have to publish everything someone wants, any more than Random House does. We should hold Facebook liable for the slander and terrorist threats it publishes, but that's a different discussion. And besides, who stopped Donald Trump from putting his rantings on a weblog like we did in the old days? Oh, right: he did, because he apparently has no patience. So let's stop coddling him.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to forgive $50,000 of student loan debt per borrower. He's showing an awful lot of reluctance, and I remember when Barack Obama showed this kind of reluctance, it meant he wasn't going to do anything. But don't let that stop you! We need to keep on him, because we're right -- forgiving that much student loan debt would stimulate the hell out of this economy, plus it would show we're actually willing to correct the wrongs we commit as a civilization. What "wrong" was that, you ask? The wrong where we told everyone they should go into massive debt on a college degree so they can get good jobs -- and then took away all the good jobs! Worse than Lucy with a football, we were. So let's do better.

Action: concerning endless war, public trans, government spying, corruption, voting rights, and polluter welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Iraq war AUMF, create zero-emission public trans, release COINTELPRO files to the public, and pass the IG Independence and Empowerment Act, the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the End Polluter Welfare Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that "authorized" war with Iraq and which all subsequent Presidents have used to fight unconstitutional wars all over the world. I put "authorized" in quotation marks because only Congress can authorize war, and they have to go through the trouble to declare war, not "give the President power to fight wherever he pleases." This is one of the reasons we broke off from England, folks! And Presidents have been abusing the AUMF for over 18 years now. Which means this mistake's old enough to vote, and it's damn near old enough to drink! So let's kill it already.

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you demand that Congress pass legislation creating a zero-emission public transportation system. Yeah, we keep telling our Congressfolk what we want from this jobs bill, but they keep ignoring us -- so perhaps we should change tactics and demonstrate that the people want public transportation that doesn't choke the world with pollution. It's not so much to ask, right? Right-wingers act like people who like electric buses are weak. Of course, they then go around whining endlessly about how everyone thinks they're racist, but that's beside the point. The point is, having a livable planet in 30 years isn't "weak." Even if a few oil and gas executives don't get to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Which is what right-wingers really favor, whether they'll admit it or not.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2998, which would release all of our FBI's COINTELPRO files to the general public. I guess this bill's opponents will argue "bygones!" and "look forward" and "saying any part of our past wasn't absolutely perfect is treason!" But COINTELPRO went after protestors and activists ranging from anti-war and civil rights organizers to the Ku Klux Klan. Hey, maybe that's how you get right-wingers to support H.R. 2998! I kid, of course -- today's racists know well enough to disavow any love for the Klan. And yet our most recent departed President's campaign slogan was a Klan slogan from the '70s! So, again, learn about the past, and we can make a more perfect union in the future.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2662, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. "IG" stands for "Inspector General," and you may recall, particularly during 2020, how much maneuvering that irredeemably corrupt President did just to avoid the scrutiny of Inspectors General, who spend all their time investigating waste and fraud and abuse of power. You may even remember that Mr. Trump had to be talked out of firing all of them at the beginning of his term! Well, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act would place more limits on a President's ability to fire IGs and allow IGs to subpoena folks who've left our government if they can shed light on wrongdoing. It's bad if all that stands between us and oblivion is an Inspector General. But, ah, it's a lot worse if they're not there, or if they're a Presidential lackey.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And Public Citizen helps you tell them to do both. I know, I know, One True Real and Great American President Joe Manchin has expressed a preference, but he ain't the boss of us. And, toward that end, Daily Kos helps you sign up and call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator to vote for the For the People Act. 79% of them support the For the People Act, after all! And if he's going to write 299 stupid paragraphs about why he won't, at least we can get his constituents to embarrass him.

Finally, both the Sierra Club and Food and Water Action help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. Our government shovels $15 billion annually toward oil and gas drilling corporations that don't need it; how would you feel about that if it were your money? Oh, right: it is your money. The bill would also prohibit federal funding (which is, again, your money) toward fossil fuel R&D and/or international fossil fuel projects. Solar and wind power aren't pie-in-the-sky technologies anymore -- walk around your neighborhood and count the roofs with solar panels if you're unconvinced. Also attend the ridiculous stories you hear about wind turbines; if wind really didn't work, wouldn't they just tell you that?

Action: concerning the Child Tax Credit, paid family and medical leave, internet freedom, public transportation, and corporate welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass paid family and medical leave, and pass the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, the Freedom to Move Act, and the End Polluter Welfare Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools on the bottom of this page.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent. This summer, that expansion will deliver an extra $300 monthly to folks with children under 6, and an extra $250 to folks with children between 6 and 17. I've given this matter a lot of thought lately, and it sure seems to me that an extra $250 or so monthly will give parents a lot of breathing room, which will help them be the best parents they can be. Already our everything-for-the-rich-and-screw-everyone-else economy makes it hard for them to be their best; the CTC expansion is a rare government policy that actually does that. So we really ought to keep it around.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a paid family and medical leave plan. Paid family and medical leave will be a focus of President Biden's American Families Plan, but it might be better in the short run to tell them we support paid family and medical leave in the abstract, and then hold them accountable for the details later; at that point, they won't be able to say their constituents didn't talk about paid family and medical leave. We're the only big nation on Earth that doesn't have it, and no it wouldn't be particularly onerous to fund. You've heard that America's billionaires have made over $1 trillion more since the pandemic's beginning, right? Well, that'd be a good place to start.

Both Consumer Reports and the ACLU help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. Again, though President Biden's American Jobs Plan would nominally include more broadband, our Congressfolk still need to hear from us about it, not least because too many of them (cough Republicans cough) have been banging their saucepans telling everyone that broadband isn't "really infrastructure." All you need to do to prove them wrong is go through a pandemic! Now kids go to school over the internet, adults go to work over the internet, folks see a doctor and buy groceries over the internet -- yeah, it's obviously infrastructure. Why do we listen to Republicans again?

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2287/S. 1172, the Freedom to Move Act. Since at least the beginning of the Reagan years, we've been caught up in the idea that we should each have our own cars and rely less on trains and buses to get us around. But I think we're seeing the folly of that idea -- not just that it's selfish, but that it'll also help destroy our planet a lot faster. And you know, not everyone can have a car -- some people just don't make enough money, and they need public transportation as a result. Hence the Freedom to Move Act would issue grants to help make fare-free public trans a reality; after all, why shouldn't we spend our money on things we might all use? (And, not for nothing, but yeah, this bill or something like it could also get folded into the American Jobs Plan, so best to let our Congressfolk know we want better public transportation.)

Finally, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act, which would end some $15 billion of corporate welfare for big fossil fuel drillers. I have to say I find far too many fiscal hawks will go after social spending with almost absurd ease, but will never say anything about corporate welfare -- which is far larger, and which represents a far greater immorality -- unless you provoke them, and why should I have to provoke people to do the right thing? Can't people do the right thing on their own? Can't they follow their own philosophy consistently and fight all big government handouts? If they can't, you have to wonder who might be lining their pocketbooks.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, voting rights, the filibuster, public lands, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell our government to do the right thing about the Israel/Palestine conflict, tell your Congressfolk to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, write a letter to the editor advocating that we end the Senate filibuster, and tell President Biden to reverse Trump-era land grabs at several national monuments and forgive student loan debt. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolks' phone numbers and/or use the links in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

First things first. MoveOn helps you tell President Biden to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict and an end to Israeli evictions of Palestinians, while Demand Progress helps you tell our government to stop funding Israeli occupation of Palestine and Avaaz helps you tell world governments to sanction Israel for its actions. You don't need to know "who started it" to support these petitions; you only need to know how it is -- one nation is way more powerful than another, and brutalizes the other. And of course you should also be suspicious when you notice that the violence has buoyed the electoral fortunes of the Israeli Prime Minister who can't win an election outright but somehow stays in power.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. You've no doubt heard that New Great and Bounteous One True American President Joe Manchin likes the latter bill but not the former, but who cares? We want both! We want both the bill that would help us end partisan gerrymandering and force big campaign donors out into the light and the bill that would restore the Voting Rights Act! Why should we have to settle just because Joe Manchin's the 50th vote?

Speaking of all of that, Common Cause helps you write a letter to the editor of your local paper advocating that we end the Senate filibuster. I used to advocate for fixing the filibuster, so that the Senators who would use it would actually have to work for it by explaining, at considerable length, why they oppose campaign finance disclosure or ending tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs overseas (to name just two popular initiatives they've filibustered over the years), but fuck that: Senators have abused this power, so they get nothing from now on, and Mitch McConnell's threats to slow down Senate business to a crawl if they get rid of the filibuster are irrelevant. Remember when Sen. Bunning (R-KY) singlehandedly stopped any further unemployment insurance considerations in 2010? Yeah, he wasn't running for re-election. Anyone who stops a popular bill because he wants a proper quorum to turn on the lights in the Senate building won't get re-elected, either. If we have anything to say about it, that is.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Biden to roll back Trump-era land grabs at several national monuments, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. When Trump votaries contemplated the phrase "drain the swamp," do you think the phrase "by chipping away at national monuments so that gas and oil drillers could pollute it" followed naturally in their minds? I would say not! Folks love their national monuments a lot more than Our Glorious Elites would like you to think, and they're actually not all that emotionally invested in big corporate CEOs making even more money from gas and oil drilling. Tell them "it's for the jobs" and you may get most of them to pause -- but tell them "that's what they want you to think," and then explaining exactly why that's what they want you to think that (i.e., as in the previous sentence above), will win most of them right back. Too bad our "liberal" media never thinks to do that. Hey, we can't do everything. That's why we live in a civilization.

Finally, both the ACLU and Daily Kos help you tell President Biden to cancel at least $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower. You've heard folks say they can't retire because they still have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt? Well, it's not actually the kind of thing that deserves the response well you should have thought of that before taking on all that debt ha ha ha snort, because our society has been telling everyone for years they have to get a college degree if they want to survive, and when you go telling people that, you either have to deliver on that or make it right if you don't. And forgiving $50,000 in student loan debt will make that right for a lot of people. Personal to those who'd be jealous: go gripe with God about when you were born, and God will you the same thing I will, that every damn thing in the world ain't about you.

Action: concerning taxes, health care, chemical safety, public transportation, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the American Rescue Plan's Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, fight big pharma price gouging, pass the PFAS Action Act and the Freedom to Move Act, and keep bigger, heavier trucks off our roads. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers -- or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion from the American Rescue Plan permanent. The CTC expansion provides an extra $300/month to parents of children under 6 and $250/month to parents of children between 6 and 17, and I can tell you from experience that an extra $250 a month goes a long way. I guess all the Republicans who voted against it but will still try to take credit for it will argue that it was only supposed to last a year anyway, but, ah, are children going to stop having needs after this pandemic is over? The CTC expansion is good policy that'll cut child poverty in half in America, and would cost a mere $109 billion (out of some $4 trillion-plus in federal expenditures) in 2021, and when was the last time our government spent $109 billion to do people some good, instead of just throwing it away on corporate welfare? That would be a habit we would want to help them cultivate.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight big pharma corporation price gouging. Surely our Congressfolk know we all hate big pharma price gouging -- diabetics who spend more on insulin than they do on their rent or mortgage certainly know it more acutely! -- but we still have to tell them we expect them to do something about it, and even though the Social Security Works petition doesn't get into many specifics, there's still space in the comments for you to get into specifics. Like, say, allowing Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices, which even the right-wing Mercatus Center says would save over $80 billion annually. And $80 billion in lower costs for the taxpayer could help pay for a lot of better things -- like expanding Medicare.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PFAS Action Act. The House passed the PFAS Action Act last term, and even though that bill attracted two dozen Republican votes in the House, Mob Boss Mitch wanted no part of it in the Senate, which meant two more years of "forever chemicals" that never break down and which scientists have linked to cancer and reproductive issues in our water. The PFAS Action Act would require PFAS manufacturers to clean up their own messes -- which seems as unprecedented in our politics as it doesn't in our parenting! -- and would require our EPA to limit the amount of PFAS chemicals that can appear in our water. That would cause a lot of non-stick pan makers and firefighting foam makers to make their products differently, but c'mon! This is a can-do nation!

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Move Act. What would the Freedom to Move Act do? It would offer grants to states and localities so they can offer fare-free public transportation -- it is public transportation, after all! -- and also so they can build out more public transportation to underserved urban and rural areas. The bill would authorize $5 billion in grants annually, which one could fund almost entirely by repealing oil and gas drilling subsidies! Those are big, big private industries that don't need taxpayer help, after all, but public transportation by definition belongs to us, and everyone who wants to use public trans should be able to. I am irritated to find any of these are controversial matters.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep bigger, heavier trucks off our highways. But bigger, heavier trucks can haul more, says the tiny little Satan sitting on my right shoulder, and thus save money! Yeah, Satan always loses me at "save money." Bigger, heavier trucks can haul more, that's true, but bigger, heavier trucks can also overturn more easily and they can also use more gas and pollute more easily and they also damage our roads and bridges more easily, so there has to be a point where having the biggest, heaviest truck actually costs us all more money, even if it allows some trucking executive to gild the plumbing in his 14th vacation home. And no one's advocating hauling goods in Geo Smart cars. Satan was just about to tell me they were. But I'm so on to Satan.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, broadband, the Middle East, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk that "going big" on the infrastructure/jobs bill is more important than "going bipartisan"; tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax, make broadband internet more accessible to all, and stop Israel from oppressing Palestinian children; and tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject a slew of pro-pollution bills. Use the tools in the upper-right corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's (and PA state legislators') phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the American Jobs Plan "big, bold, and green" -- and reject weakening it just to get Republicans on board. Not just because Republicans tried to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, either. Fact is, we've got a lot of problems in America that we can address by a) raising corporate taxes and then b) spending that money on projects -- like rebuilding sewer lines and building out renewable energy -- that'll make this nation greater. When everyone has clean water, we'll be greater. When everyone uses energy that doesn't kill the planet, we'll be greater. And when everyone has a job helping accomplish these things, well, you get the idea. Even if Republicans don't.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax. It's a piddling little tax, frankly -- two percent on assets over $50 million, and then three percent on assets over $1 billion -- but it'd raise a lot of money (upwards of $250 billion annually), and frankly these billionaires made out like bandits during this pandemic. Naturally, with all their money, they can buy more time with folks like Joe Manchin and tell tall tales about how "dangerous" it would be to raise taxes on the rich right now. But according to them, there'll never be a good time to do that. Can't raise taxes on the rich because the economy's bad! Can't raise taxes on the rich because the economy's good! All we have is our voices, so we'd better use them.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1783/S. 745, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All (or AAIA) Act. We've all seen, I would hope, how integral broadband has become over the last year, thanks to the pandemic, but if you live in a rural or urban area or a reservation, you don't have the access the rest of us have, thanks to big telecom corporations refusing to build out into areas where they can't make money hand over fist! The AAIA would, among other good works, better-fund the FCC's Emergency Broadband Benefit program and pre-empt state laws that forbid municipalities from offering their own broadband services. Which are excellent wherever they're tried; just ask the good residents of Chattanooga, TN.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2590, the Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act. The bill would keep our government from spending taxpayer money on Israeli oppression of Palestinians, including putting kids in military detention, demolishing homes, and grabbing more Palestinian territory. We're already violating international law by doing all of that! And most Americans would prefer we didn't enable their behavior. And no, you're not an "anti-Semite" for not wanting your taxpayer money to hurt other people. Even American Jews have been hearing that for years! Best to define "anti-Semitism" as, you know, things that hurt Jews, not things that merely interfere with Israel's political aims.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senators to reject five objectively pro-pollution bills. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but these bills (HB 72, 139, 288, 939, and 950) would hamstring our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) from issuing clean air and clean water regulations, mainly by granting the legislature additional powers to stonewall those regulations. All for the greater glory of gas and oil drilling corporations! The law already grants our DEP the power to issue regulations; if you don't like the regulations they issue, you leave public comments, which our DEP has to take into account in making a final decision. You don't demand tenth, eleventh, and twelfth innings in a game you lost in the standard nine.

UPDATE. The Sierra Club link in the final paragraph above no longer directs you to the five-bill action alert, possibly because the state House has now passed all those bills; calling your state Senators about the five bills would be the only option left, and the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page would help with that.

Action: concerning taxes, education, birth control, reforestation, privacy, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fund our IRS properly so it can catch more tax cheats; tell your Congressfolk to pass the College for All Act, the EACH Woman Act, the REPLANT Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to better fund our Internal Revenue Service so it can catch rich tax cheats. Our IRS estimates that tax evaders cheat us out of $1 trillion every year, and that represents about a quarter of our entire federal budgets most years, so the law and order thing to do, the pro-law enforcement thing to do, would be to give our IRS the funding it needs to make tax cheaters pay up, so we can then properly fund roads, bridges, schools, firefighters, police, et al. And now you know why Republicans stamped their feet so much in the early 2010s about "political bias" at our IRS -- so they could curtail collections, starve our government of money, and make it run so badly that even fascist assholes routinely get elected to federal office now. And if Congress doesn't fund our IRS, just look out for the QAnon/Trumpholes that'll take over Congress in 2022.

Speaking of things better tax collection could pay for, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2730/S. 1288, the College for All Act, which (among numerous other reforms) would pay for tuition and fees for all students who come from families that make less than $125,000 annually. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the bill's main sponsor, says the money would come from the Tax on Wall Street Speculation Act, which would tax stock trades at half of one percent, bonds at one-tenth of one percent, and derivatives at one-two hundredth of one percent; this bill would raise around $240 billion annually, which, in the context of the $1.2 trillion in wealth billionaires have accumulated during this pandemic, sure ain't too damn much to ask.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2234/S. 1021, the EACH Woman Act. The EACH Woman Act would repeal the notorious Hyde Amendment that prevents federal funds from covering abortions, but abortion is a legal medical procedure, and thus federal funds should cover it. The Hyde Amendment has essentially kept the world the way it was before Roe v. Wade, when rich folks could get abortions and poor folks can't. Right-wingers are always complaining about "how many babies Those People are always having," but then cling to the Hyde Amendment like grim death. It really is like they'd just prefer a world where nobody ever solves any problems and rageheads get to pop off all the time. But we're Americans, and we deserve better than that. And if you're against abortion, don't get one.

And now for the rare Arbor Day-related action alert: Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the REPLANT Act. The REPLANT Act would help reverse deforestation in America by mandating the planting of over a billion trees over the next decade, and if you're thinking of indulging in some hippie-punching over this, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that trees help purify our air and thus help us stay healthier, 3) consider that trees also trap a lot of carbon dioxide and thus help mitigate the effects of climate change, and 4) a lot of animals use trees to find food and shelter their children. How much of any of that does your average office complex or gas drilling well do? Yeah, that's what I thought.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. The bill would close the legal loophole that allows big data mining corporations to sell your personal data to law enforcement, a sale which completely circumvents our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Big telecom corporations can't sell your personal data to law enforcement, because it's against the law; big data brokers should face the same prohibitions. And if that puts them out of business, well, why do we tolerate a business model that's essentially "make money violating other people's rights"? A sane, moral, and decent society asks these questions; this sick, immoral, and decadent society doesn't ask them anywhere near enough.

Finally, Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. Expand Medicare to include everyone, pay for it by converting the money big corporations already pay for private insurance into an employer-side payroll tax, and voila! We've solved all health insurance problems without any workers -- or corporations! -- spending a penny more on health insurance, plus we stop leaving 30 million Americans out in the cold. Plus no more surprise bills, no more four-digit deductibles, and no more networks with shifting boundaries. People who want to keep their private insurance? Too bad! You'll just have to settle for much better insurance.

Action: concerning vaccines, drug prices, police brutality, chemical safety, and methane emissions.

Long story short: tell certain House Reps that vaccine access is more important than intellectual property rights, tell your Congressfolk to control drug prices, fight police brutality, and keep PFAS chemicals out of our products, and tell Pennsylvania state regulators to close a major loophole in its gas drilling emissions proposal. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the following paragraphs.

Word on the street is that Democratic Reps. Scott Peters (CA) and Ron Kind (WI) are trying to dissuade President Biden from supporting a waiver that would allow vaccine development all over the world -- meaning, I guess, that Messrs. Peters and Kind are objectively pro-COVID. Standing up for "intellectual property rights über alles" is a dubious enough proposition even outside of a pandemic, but, ah, fellas? Taxpayer money helped develop these vaccines, so they're not "someone else's property." And as long as COVID is alive somewhere on Earth, it can come back to bite us. So, you know what's coming: you can reach Rep. Peters at 202.225.0508 and Rep. Kind at 202.225.5506. Remind them not just of their moral duty here, but also that taking this stance after getting all that big pharma money, which both men have done, is a bad, bad look.

Here's the kind of action alert I normally avoid passing along: Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk that, hey, drug prices are too high and they should make sure drugs cost less. Yeah, that's usually too vague for my taste, but it's also exactly the kind of thing Congressfolk need to hear, and frankly there aren't too many ways they can come up with to pretend to lower drug prices. If you want to tell them to let Medicare negotiate drug prices and/or empower our government to manufacture generic drugs whenever prices go above a certain level and/or assert more control over drugs taxpayer money helps to fund in the first place, well, hey, there's a comments section on the petition.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2892, the Protect Our Protestors (or POP) Act, and H.R. 2893, the National Police Misuse of Force Investigation Board Act. The former bill would make police violence against protestors a federal crime, and the latter would create a federal agency tasked with investigating deaths in police custody. Don't let folks tell you that cops can't do their job if we pass these bills, and not just because literally everyone who's ever had a job has said that when their jobs' standards have changed. Police officers aren't supposed to mow down peaceful protestors with tear gas and rubber bullets, and they're also not supposed to kill people before even charging them with a crime. I mean, if you can't hold yourself to those standards, maybe you need to sell shoes.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act, which would empower our EPA to regulate PFAS chemicals. You may know PFAS chemicals better as "forever chemicals" that don't break down, that scientists have linked to cancer and thyroid issues, and that you can find in damn near everything, from nonstick pans to food wrappers to firefighting foam. Congress might actually be eager to pass this bill -- just say the words "keep our firefighters healthy" to Republicans and they at least give the matter some thought -- but we ought to tell them what we want them to do anyway, because big corporations come along and make them an awfully forgetful lot.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) to fix a loophole in its proposal to control methane emissions from gas drilling. The DEP's proposal exempts older facilities from its scrutiny, which would only make sense to you if you accept the conventional "wisdom" that we should cut older buildings a break because they're old, but that's rubbish, not just because a building is a thing and not a person, but because the older facilities cause more than half the pollution, which should make sense to you, regardless of the conventional "wisdom." Some wisdom doesn't need quotation marks, after all.

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

Long story short: tell certain Democratic Senators to get behind the PRO Act already, tell Arizona legislators to reject vote-suppression legislation, tell federal regulators to break up big tech corporations, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat Act and the so-called "FRACK Pack" of pro-clean air and clean water bills. Use the tools in the upper right hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning marketing to children, public lands, and law and order.

Long story short: tell Facebook not to launch an "Instagram for kids," tell our FDA to outlaw flavored tobacco products, tell our President to restore Bears Ears and stop the Byhalia Connection Pipeline, and tell our Justice Department to investigate the alleged crimes of ex-President Trump. The following paragraphs will provide email/petition tools for all of these actions. Good hunting!

Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell Facebook to scrap plans to create an Instagram platform just for children. Because children don't need more attention-diverting, crazy-making internet crap, that's why! Adults can handle it a lot better. You may well be asking yourself, self, didn't they worry about my grandparents reading too many pulp Westerns when they were children? I'm sure they did, but I'm also sure that reading pulp novels is far, far safer than imbibing images far faster than any generation has done before. And giving kids one more way to plug in to the virtual world ain't gonna help them in the real world. So let's tell Facebook to do better by them, rather than prime them to be the good consumer drones of the future.

Progress America helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to ban the sale of flavored tobacco-based products, including e-cigs, menthol cigarettes, and flavored cigars. Again, making these products taste like gummy worm or cotton candy is a way of setting kids up for lung cancer when they're adults; after all, luring adults into smoking now that everyone knows it causes cancer will only go so far. Better to harvest the addicts young, I guess they think, if not say. (And behind closed doors, I'm sure they are saying it.) Seriously, should any product for children be literally addictive?

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to restore the famous Bears Ears National Monument to its original size. I guess the courts can one day decide whether the Antiquities Act really gives Presidents the ability to scale down national monuments (Mr. Trump did it, so I lean "no"), but scaling down Bears Ears in the first place was a profound insult to the Native Americans who both pushed for the Monument's creation and took care of it once it was created. Mr. Trump, of course, took about 85% of it away so oil and gas drilling corporations could enrich their executives and befoul the land. I would think anyone would find that offensive.

The Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell President Biden to revoke federal permits for the Byhalia Connection Pipeline. Why? Because it would run through the Memphis Sand Aquifer and thus pollute the drinking water used by good Americans in and around Memphis, TN -- I don't say "potentially pollute" because pipeline leaks are just about a near-certainty, particularly in an age where the corporations that run the pipelines do so with near-impunity. Just so happens the pipeline would run through mostly Black communities as well; you hear enough about that to think that might have been the idea, too. This ain't tough: do more solar and wind and you won't be polluting our air and water so much, particularly in neighborhoods that got it bad enough.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate the various allegations against Donald Trump. I say "allegations" even though we all heard him try to get the Georgia Secretary of State to "find" 11,000 more votes, and we all watched him do a lot of other crap one would think would get you put in jail. If your Trump-loving friend comes at you with "but this is unprecedented!", go back at him with "oh, you wanted a President who'd smash traditions and now you want tradition to protect him?" If you still have Trump-loving friends, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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