Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning endless war, drug prices, and vote suppression.

Long story short: tell our government to start making peace in the Middle East, tell the Biden Administration to fight for lower drug costs, and tell our Justice Department to investigate AI robocalls in New Hampshire. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Win Without War helps you demand a cease-fire in the Israel/Palestine war, while Civic Shout helps you tell our government not to go to war with Iran. I’m old enough to remember right-wing “war on terror” bloggers not wanting to attack Iran after we attacked Iraq; maybe they got enough jollies from Iraq, but maybe they also knew that occupying Iran would be even harder than occupying Iraq turned out to be! But if we let the Israel/Palestine war get any worse – and it will, since Mr. Netanyahu wants to keep Hamas a player so he can keep power – then we might have war with Iran, and that’ll go so, so much worse than war with Iraq did.

More Perfect Union helps you tell the Biden Administration to enact the most vigorous “march-in rights” rule possible. “March-in rights,” created by the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980, would enable our government to “march in” and make cheaper drugs whenever big pharma corporations charge too much for drugs that taxpayer money helped create, which describes, like, almost all drugs all the time now. Big pharma corporations will want to open up loopholes so they can still charge an arm and a leg (so to speak?) for life-saving drugs, so now’s the time for us to stand up for our right not to get gouged over drugs we helped create with our hard-earned money.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to investigate AI-enabled vote suppression during the recent New Hampshire Presidential primary. You’ve no doubt heard that someone used AI to create a Joe Biden-sounding robocall urging people to stay home on primary day and “save” their vote for the November election? Well, that’s vote suppression simple and plain, and vote suppression is illegal simple and plain. Doesn’t matter the New Hampshire Democratic Presidential primary wasn’t “important”! This was surely a test run; next time it happens, it’ll really hurt America.

Action: concerning endless war, public banking, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end the Biden Administration’s bombing of Yemen, pass the Public Banking Act, and protect the Affordable Connectivity Program. 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.

Just Foreign Policy helps you tell your Congressfolk to end the Biden Administration’s bombing of Yemen. Not just because Congress did not issue a declaration of war against Yemen as our Constitution requires, but because, frankly, it’s not achieving its stated goal (to stop Houthis from attacking local ships). President Biden even said it’s not working! I can’t let it pass by that Houthis have historically fought well against al-Qaida, and yet we still support the UAE/Saudi war aiming to exterminate them. I don’t care if Iran supports them! Has nobody in power thought maybe the war-making itself is the problem causing all other problems?

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Public Banking Act, which would, as its title suggests, help public banks flourish all over the land. Right-wingers will yell SOSHULIZM!!!!!, but seriously, who really wants to protect the big banksters who won’t lend in urban and rural areas? Only other banksters, that’s who, and they shouldn’t get all the say about everything. You may have noticed the Bank of North Dakota helped good North Dakotans get through the gas drilling bust of the last decade, and the Republicans who run North Dakota have done nothing to touch it. Why, it’s like they know it works! But we should all get to know that.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to save the Affordable Connectivity Program (or ACP), which allows over 20 million Americans to get internet access they otherwise couldn’t afford. Because cable prices are stupid high, amirite? But when I hear that Ted Cruz wants to kill this program because mean-girl, I must ask: isn’t Ted Cruz up for re-election this year? He must be feeling awfully good about his chances, to take such an objectively pro-inflation stand! But then I thought that after he abandoned good Texans for Cancun during that murderous 2021 winter storm. I sure would like to see good Texans remind him who’s boss this November.

Around the table: our sick, immoral, and decadent culture, part 876.

Back in late December Reuters published an excellent investigation of all the problems Tesla cars have been having – which the corporation has known about, and has been blaming on drivers. Ha ha ha it’s your fault your front right suspension has completely collapsed while you were driving! But we make the best cars! And come on, give us some room to grow, we haven’t been around for 400 years like Ford! This could only happen in an America where shareholder wealth is more important than customers’ lives.

French researchers find that hydroxychloroquine may have killed almost 17,000 folks, in six countries (Italy, Belgium, France, Turkey, Spain, and the United States) over a period of four months (March to July 2020) at pandemic’s beginning. One is tempted to say that must be a very small percentage of folks who died from COVID (the U.S. reached 2,000 deaths almost every day in April of 2020, for example), but you won’t find that reassuring if it happened to someone you love. What a hoot it was to have our President tell people to take it, saying “what do you have to lose?”

Americans for Tax Fairness study finds that Americans worth $100 million and up are holding an astounding $8.5 trillion in untaxed wealth. How is this possible? Because most ultra-rich wealth isn’t exactly liquid – it consists of unsold (or “unrealized”) real estate and hifalutin investments, which rich folks then use as collateral to take out low-interest loans to subsidize their lives (apparently adding five points to the prime interest rate didn’t stamp out these low-interest loans as I’d hoped). Thrilling that efforts to tap into this untaxed wealth “have virtually no support among Republicans.” Remember that if Donald Trump tries to run to Joe Biden’s left, because he’s shameless enough to do that.

When I hear that ISIS has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack on an Iranian ceremony (commemorating the Revolutionary Guard commander assassinated by President Trump in 2019), I am reminded that every fundamentalist thinks his fundamentalist forebears are sellouts. Remember when young right-wingers took shots at William F. Buckley, Jr., after he came out against the Iraq War? Like any of those little snot-noses would have been anything without him! Anyway, think the Tha Bush Mobb gamed out a member of the “Axis of Evil” finding itself in the crosshairs of a terrorist threat midwifed by the Iraq war? Of course they did! The “war on terror” is just the gift that keeps on giving! And it’s well past time we broke this wheel.

With the completely shocking news that FAA officials have ordered the grounding of over 170 Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliners after a window blew out on one of its planes while it was in the air, let’s take the wayback machine to 2019, when two Boeing 737 Max planed crashed in five months. You may not be surprised by the story’s critical elements: shareholder wealth being more important than customers’ lives, banksters running out engineers and making absurd demands of them because love of money. Yes, engineers should run more of America than they do. Certainly banksters shouldn’t! Banksters ruin everything!

You already know that Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley has lately omitted slavery while listing Civil War causes – but you may not know that she managed to deploy the phrase “I had Black friends growing up” in explaining that omission. Her larger point, apparently, was that slavery was so obvious it didn’t need to be mentioned. Of course describing slavery in the passive voice, i.e., “(i)t is a very talked about thing,” reveals that Nikki Haley fears offending assholes. Never fear offending assholes! Assholes live to be offended, and if you don’t offend them, they’ll just pretend you did!

Finally, Donald Trump actually claims that we could have “negotiated” the Civil War rather than fight it. Of course we should not “negotiate” enslaving Black men, women, and children – and that was why we fought the Civil War; just read President Lincoln’s private letters, in which he won’t STFU about how much he hates slavery and how happy he’ll be when it’s gone – but we should also remember that The Dealmaker only makes deals that benefit him, and he’d prefer making deals that benefit only him. Sadly, he’ll probably have the sense to skip over the next rhetorical step – World War II is something that could have been negotiated! You’d never have heard of Franklin Delano Roosevelt! – and just blame Teh Libruls for the Holocaust.

Action: concerning violence against protestors, medical debt, and ALEC.

Long story short: tell Iran to free Toomah Salehi, tell our CFPB to force big credit-reporting corporations to exclude medical debt from credit reports, and tell big corporations to stop funding ALEC. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to release hip hop artist and activist Toomaj Salehi immediately. (Mr. Salehi protested Iran’s hijab law after “morality police” killed Mahsa Amini over it last year.) Iran’s habit of arresting and torturing protestors does not exactly win hearts and minds among the world’s peoples, and convicting Mr. Salehi of an obviously made-up crime like “corruption on Earth” only reveals their utter insecurity, like the proverbial naked emperor who, upon finding everyone laughing at him, retaliates with mass shootings. And while, as Americans, we need to remember our own complicity in this horror – our government helped topple a democratically-elected leader, then installed a Shah so foolish and venal he gave Muslim fundamentalism its opening – we also need to fight fascism wherever we see it, and whatever the flavor, it’s operating in Iran today.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to force big credit-reporting corporations to exclude medical debt from our credit ratings. Currently the Equifax/TransUnion/Experian axis won’t do that, because including medical debt on credit ratings makes it harder for good Americans to get good credit, and that tends to benefit the worst actors among our bankster class. But our CFPB argues that medical debt has nothing to do with someone’s credit-worthiness, and they’re absolutely right – if you get sick, and your employer gives you crappy health insurance, what are you supposed to do, stay sick or die? Our CFPB looks ready to do our will here, but they still need to hear from us.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Think of any BS laws we’ve had to fight over the last couple of decades – “voter ID” laws, the “Stand Your Ground” laws racist states don’t even consistently enforce, laws criminalizing protest against corporate power – and you’ll likely see the gray, gnarled hand of ALEC behind it. At least 100 big corporations (including Coca-Cola, Walmart, Verizon, and Amazon) have dumped ALEC over the years thanks to our agitation, but that still leaves such big corporations as Pfizer, Chevron, UPS, FedEx, Eli Lilly, Anheuser-Busch, and (surprise, surprise!) Koch Industries. So we’ve got some work to do.

Action: concerning government oppression, net neutrality, forced arbitration, and political campaigns.

Long story short: tell Iran to free Toomaj Salehi, tell our FCC to reinstate net neutrality protections for internet content, tell our CFPB to end forced arbitration clauses in banking consumer contracts, and tell our FEC to prevent AI-generated falsehoods in political campaigns. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to stop detaining hip-hop artist Toomaj Salehi, because that’s what snowflake governments do when people use art to criticize them. Seriously, imagine Richard Nixon putting Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young in jail after “Ohio.” Bet he thought of it! Bet today’s right-wing politicians would say it out loud a lot more easily! (About whom, though? Taylor Swift? Todd Snider?) But I digress: criticizing a government (for killing a woman for wearing a hijab “wrong,” no less) is no reason to put a guy in solitary and beat the stuffing out of him. I’m sorry that even needs explaining.

Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate network neutrality protections for internet content post-haste. Our FCC finally has five Commissioners now, so they have no excuse anymore. Probably no issue has united liberals and conservatives like net neutrality – virtually everyone who’s not a big telecom PR hack wants you, not some corporation, to decide where you go on the internet, without big corporations blocking or throttling your favorite websites or forcing websites to pay for faster delivery. Naturally, confronted with this unanimity of public opinion, the Trump FCC told the American people to fuck off and repealed net neutrality. But the battle has been joined again.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to end forced arbitration in banking industry consumer contracts. Arbitration used to be for big corporations so they could fight each other outside of the court system, but now big corporations routinely force arbitration clauses on you just to buy or use their products, and banks are no different. Don’t believe the BS that the “average” arbitration award is much higher than what you’d get out of a class action suit, because if you lose, averages won’t matter – and your opponent may be able to extract a large award out of you. So yeah, you’re much better off relying on your right to a day in court, even if it doesn’t make you rich.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Federal Elections Commission (or FEC) to clamp down on AI-generated lies in campaigns. People want to unleash AI all over everything these days, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it! And “fraudulent misrepresentation” of a candidate’s words is already illegal, so it shouldn’t be any different if AI enables it. I guess AI’s creators would say if AI did it, and AI isn’t really sentient, then nobody’s to blame! But you see the problem with that argument in the phrase “AI’s creators,” I trust. Yikes, this shouldn’t be that hard.

Action: concerning endless war, stock buybacks, and judicial corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF, pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, and enact a code of conduct for Supreme Court Justices. 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.

Win Without War helps you tell your House Reps to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq. Tha Bush Mobb bullied Congress into passing that in 2002, and make no mistake: in bullying them, they were bullying us, and that’s a humiliation we can’t let stand anymore. And of course Presidents of both parties have used the 2002 AUMF to justify all manner of unconstitutional war-making since then, from bombings in Syria to assassinations in Iran; no President should be able to start and conduct wars without the permission of the American people through their representatives in Congress, because that’s tyranny. We still fight tyranny in America, right?

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would, among other things, quadruple taxes on stock buybacks. Stock buybacks used to be illegal because they concentrated shareholder power into just a few hands, and the recent Bed, Bath, and Beyond bankruptcy filing demonstrates pretty well why that was a stupid idea, as their executives plowed $12 billion into stock buybacks over the last nine years, meaning less money to invest in infrastructure and less money to pay the workers who gave their time and work only to get shafted. Remember: workers, not bosses, make the world go round.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a code of conduct for Supreme Court Justices, who are, somehow, the only federal judges who have no such code. As terrible as the Clarence Thomas/Harlan Crow drama has become – apparently Mr. Crow even paid for Justice Thomas’s grandnephew to go to private school, which is totally what Just Friends do! – we have also lately learned that Justice Gorsuch sold a house he’d been having trouble selling to the head of a big law firm that’s had business before the court mere days after being confirmed. If they can’t avoid the appearance of evil, we have to make them.

Action: concerning our "liberal" media and food safety.

Long story short: tell the New York Times to correct the record on Iran’s alleged nuclear program, tell your cable corporation to stop carrying the Fox News Channel, and tell our FDA to stop letting big food corporations add sesame to food just to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

FAIR helps you tell the New York Times to correct the record on our intelligence community’s findings on Iranian nukes, i.e., that we have not, in fact, proven that they are building them. Seem too much like inside baseball? I’ll bet the 2002 yellowcake uranium claim did, too, but it helped propel us into that stupid war with Iraq, the one where we accomplished nothing positive and helped create ISIS, and the one where numerous Americans felt perfectly fine accusing their friends and family of treason for opposing the war. Yeah, still sore about that, and if Donald Trump comes back to power, this stupid drama (did I mention stupid?) could play all over again in Iran. How about we strangle that drama in its crib?

Inequality Media helps you tell your cable corporation to deplatform Fox News, which is to say stop carrying it. This $787 million Dominion settlement sure couldn’t have come at a worse time for Fox News, as they’re about to renegotiate carriage fees with cable corporations, and the only channel that costs you more on your cable bill is ESPN. Thus it’s time, once again, to bust out the Big Stick of Bad PR. The good news? It works – popular pressure led both Verizon and DirecTV to stop carrying One America News Network. People who still want to mainline masturbatory rage can go to Fox Nation on the internet, but getting Fox on cable TV makes their bad habit harder to break, and we should help people break their bad habits.

Finally, the Center for Science in the Public Interest helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to stop letting big food corporations add sesame to their products just to avoid implementing stricter controls on allergens. Our FDA just started requiring that food corporations start telling you if their products contain sesame, but now these corporations are adding sesame to foods that didn’t have it before so they can avoid regulatory scrutiny! That’ll come as a big surprise to the million-plus Americans with sesame allergies. Don’t listen to the fool who says well they should just read the label then, like everyone reads every word on every label on everything they buy, and I'd lay money the fool who says that doesn't read any labels.

Action: concerning free speech, endless wars, tax cuts for the rich, and Social Security.

Long story short: tell Florida legislators to reject an anti-free speech bill,and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq War AUMF, repeal the Trump tax cuts for the rich, and pass the Social Security Expansion 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.

Free Press helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject SB 1316, which would require any blogger who writes about Gov. DeSantis or state legislators register with the state or face heavy fines. Can you say "poll tax," boys and girls? And how do they justify such a thing? By saying all we want to know is who our enemies are? Here’s who your enemies are, Florida: everyone who thinks for themselves. And that’s most of us in America. I’m serious; no more than a quarter of Americans are mindless drones lapping up whatever right-wingers spew forth. They get a lot more media coverage than we do, but to quote a famous philosopher: they do not surround us; we surround them. So let’s remind everyone of that.

The American Friends Service Committee helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that “authorized” the Iraq War. And while the 2002 AUMF, like the 2001 AUMF that enabled all kinds of madness in the “war on terror,” is worse than a wad of used toilet paper, every President since Bush the Lesser has used it to justify all manner of extra-legal military adventures – think Obama in Libya and Syria and Trump in Iran and Syria. We can’t bring back dead soldiers or dead Iraqis, or those whom ISIS has exterminated, but perhaps we can begin to earn their forgiveness by repealing the 2002 AUMF.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich, which would include the tax cuts in the top tax brackets and the massive cut in the corporate tax rate. Republicans are doing the helicopter dance about “deficits” and “debts,” but they all voted for the Trump tax cuts, which helped make trillion-dollar deficits in America the norm. So if they won’t force the rich to pay more in taxes now – you know, because DEFICITZ BADZ!!!!!! – then why should we listen to them about a damn thing? And if Democrats won’t have guts, we’ve got to have it for them.

Finally, Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security Expansion Act. When right-wingers play offense, what do we do? Play offense! Nobody roots for the team running the prevent defense at the end of the game! And taxing rich folks to pay for expanded Social Security benefits is actually quite popular, as you would imagine, given that most Americans, as I’ve said, are pretty smart. What are right-wingers going to do, pretend that taxing the rich is dumb? Taxing the rich, more than anything else, made ours the greatest middle class in history after World War II. So take no BS about this matter.

Around the table: where there's no safe space for fascists, corporatists, and whiners.

Terrorists have apparently poisoned at least 50 girls’ schools in Iran over the last six months, sickening at least 400 girls, and I hope the attackers get the justice they deserve, even if they come from Iran’s fundamentalist government, as some folks suppose. And can you blame them for supposing? In the meantime, the mere notion of farther-right activists in Iran who oppose educating girls gives that government some quite-undeserved breathing space – look, they say, something to distinguish us from the Taliban! Of course, distinguishing between flavors of fascism for purposes other than scholarship is offensive, more suited to the likes of Richard Spencer than to civilized people.

At least one legal expert thinks Fox News might really be in the soup after Rupert Murdoch’s recent admission that he knew Fox peddled a lot of election-denialism crap though he didn’t believe it – and that they might even be in the soup for more than the $1.6 billion Dominion’s asking in their now-famous defamation lawsuit. Fox can throw all the fecal matter against the wall they want – “our executives didn’t specifically order it,” “ZOMG TEH FIRSTZ AMENDMENTZ WILLZ DIEZ!!!!!” – but few would lament Fox News finally getting some of the karmic blowback it’s long deserved. Its votaries, of course, will just slog on, their persecution complex intensified, and if we’re very lucky, they won’t blow up any voting machines.

Ho hum, former Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) has rejoined the bankster industry from whence he came in 2010. After spending a dozen years defending the notorious “carried interest loophole” (which allows hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate than just about everyone you know) from widespread public opposition, he has joined, dig this, a hedge fund corporate board, which is a step up from becoming a lobbyist, lately the more common landing spot for ex-Senators. At least this won’t be the job Kyrsten Sinema gets in 2025, since Mr. Toomey’s a considerably more accomplished shiller than she is. Yes, I know she’d be upset to hear that.

I shouldn’t be spending any damn time on this matter, but no we have not recently “concluded” that COVID came from a lab accident. Rather, another federal agency has issued a “low confidence” report asserting that COVID more likely came from a lab accident than from exposure from an animal; the very phrase “low confidence” should not inspire your confidence, but some folks either don’t read or only read what they want to read. Note well, also, that the Energy Department’s “low confidence” report didn’t prompt any of the four other agencies that have reported about the matter to change their conclusions. Personal to those already typing “BUT TEH DEEPZ STATEZ!!!!!” in response: when you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Good for Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, who runs an online service that gets abortion medication to those who need it. She operates from the Netherlands, which, as you might imagine, makes it a bit more difficult for right-wing drama kings in American state legislatures to get at them, and I wouldn’t hold out hope for a Republican President, either, since he’s going to be an incompetent drama king, too. Yes, even if their name’s not Trump! Anyway, this is all very simple: if you’re against abortion, don’t get one. I wish more pro-life folks followed that advice, instead of telling their doctor they’re going to hell for giving them the abortion they asked for.

Eli Lilly announced it would cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35/month, and though I, too, am happy to say this proves that shame works, Matt Stoller reminds us that our FTC also had a lot to do with Eli Lilly’s new cap, by declaring in June that it would start going after the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (or PBMs) that probably do even more to jack up drug prices than even big pharma does. (Basically, PBMs demand bribes in order to make drugs available to health insurance corporations, and the bribes are really big now.) Remember this the next time your right-wing uncle tells you that government doesn’t work. It does – if we make it work.

Finally, when I hear that Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (E-GA) has literally demanded a “safe space” where right-wingers don’t have to listen to liberals anymore, I’m reminded that this isn’t a new tack at all: Nazi wannabes were demanding the exact same thing, using the exact same words, as long ago as 2016, and of course at the same time as they slammed liberals for demanding actual safe spaces for people who actually suffer from actual discrimination, and not just the shame and shunning of the community for bad behavior. These right-wingers probably think they’re satirists, too, but then a lot of awful people hide behind “satire.”

Action: concerning voting rights, endless war, racism, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, repeal the Iraq AUMF, and pass the Justice for Black Farmers Act, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC already. 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 the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Do you remember how our Supreme Court said the Voting Rights Act unfairly targeted Southern states for additional federal scrutiny – but also said Congress could fix the bill by ensuring that any state or municipality could face that same scrutiny? This bill does that! And right-wingers will whine that “it’s not needed” (which, like, duh) or “the South has changed” (also duh, in addition to being literally irrelevant to the bill). But they’re walnuts in the batter of eternity. We, on the other hand, are eternity, as long as we do good works.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to finally and for once and for all repeal the Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that authorized our adventure in Iraq. Come March 20, that mistake will be 20 years old, and at least three U.S. Presidents have used the Iraq AUMF to justify other stupid military adventures. Plus, you know Our Glorious Elites would love to party like it’s 1980 and wage war on Iran – Barack Obama actually solved this problem, but then Donald Trump pissed all over it, and now Joe Biden can’t (or won’t) fix it. That just makes it that much more urgent that we get this war-making tool out of the hands of this President and all future Presidents.

The Union for Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Justice for Black Farmers Act. Anyone who whines that we gotta do even more for Blacks? clearly doesn’t understand just how deeply we’ve injured Black Americans at virtually every opportunity, and so it goes with Black farmers trying to get land. If you know anything about redlining, if you know anything about how our government systematically shut Black folks out of every program meant to help good Americans, you won’t be surprised to find that Black farmers also face a long history of discrimination. And you won’t hesitate to help them, either. Unless you’re a troll, I guess.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) already. President Biden has now nominated Ms. Sohn three times to help do the very important job of keeping big telecom corporations from telling you where you can go and what you can do on the internet; he’s been admirably steadfast about this matter, and his steadfastness should find its reward here, not merely because doing the right thing should always find its reward, but also because the utter nonentities who oppose her are walnuts in the batter of eternity who shouldn’t get all the say about a damn thing in America.

Around the table: now *everyone* wants to be an insurrectionist!

I don’t necessarily think that the January 6, 2021 attempted coup in America inspired Bolsonaro supporters’ attempted coup in Brazil this past Sunday – most of the world has seen more coups than we have! – but I do think that when crybabies attempt a coup in the United States, then other crybabies across the planet become more emboldened. Also, while President Biden’s condemnation of the Brazil attack is far from worthless, I really needed to see more from him when Myanmar’s crybaby military staged a successful coup because they didn’t like the results of the 2020 election there.

I’m pleased that a British corporation has developed a tractor that runs on the methane found in cow dung, but I’d still like to know more about how well it works and how pricey it’ll be – I mean, if small farmers can’t buy it, then what’s the point? And that’s exactly what’ll happen if someone like Elon Musk gets his hands on it! The Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil, and I hate to see that proven so often.

Surprise, surprise, a Florida teacher trying to ban every book in sight gets described as racist and homophobic by her own students. One of this teacher’s crusades has a book about Wilma Randolph in its sights, because she thinks it’ll make white kids ashamed; now I wasn’t that spiritually-advanced as a youth, but I never made the world that much about me back then. Strange that grown-ups do – especially the ones in charge of educating kids.

When I hear that the government of Iran hanged two anti-hijab protestors – supposedly for murdering an Iranian cop, though both protestors said before their deaths that the government tortured them into confessing to that crime – I can only say this is a day ending in “y” in a fascist regime, and that when American fascists dream of the America they want, this is what they see. I do wonder if American fascists will they call their brethren in nations like Iran their “mud brothers,” as they called the 9.11 hijackers back in the day.

Finally, the South Carolina Supreme Court has struck down that state’s six-week abortion ban, saying, essentially, that the six-week ban doesn’t give women enough time to even find out she’s pregnant, let alone “take reasonable steps” to end her pregnancy. But the ruling puts a 22-week ban back in place; that ban only has exceptions for the life of the mother and the non-viability of the fetus. Why, it’s like we didn’t just spend an entire summer learning about all the reasons a woman might need an abortion.

Action: concerning violence against protestors, real tax cuts, and insurrectionists.

Long story short: tell the Iranian government not to execute Amir Nasr-Azadani over that nation’s head-covering protests, tell your Congressfolk to put kids over corporations in their year-end budget-making, and tell your Congressfolk to expel Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for her anti-American comments about the January 6 attempted coup. 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 things first. Change.org helps you tell the Iranian government not to execute pro footballer Amir Nasr-Azadani for alleged involvement in the killing of three “morality” “police” members during the Iranian protests over the death of Mahsa Amini. They’re not saying whether he plotted or he pulled the trigger, but they have charged him with, get this, “waging war against God,” which “crime” carries a death sentence. Well, that sure would be the easiest way of killing the folks who protested the Iranian government’s insane preoccupation with forcing women to wear head-coverings, as Mr. Nasr-Azadani did! Again, only snowflake governments charge people with “waging war against God.”

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk, once again, to “put kids over corporations” in making year-end appropriations bills. That means, of course, bringing back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021 and not handing out all kinds of corporate welfare goodies to their big donors – the CTC expansion actually helped kids stay out of poverty, while the corporate welfare handouts just funnel taxpayer money (that is, your money!) to some politician’s cronies. And enough about research and development tax breaks. R&D is an expense, so it already doesn’t get taxed; how much hand-holding do corporations need?

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to expel Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (E-GA). I know, she says she was joking when she told the New York Young Republican Club earlier this month that “(i)f Steve Bannon and I had organized (the January 6 attempted coup), we would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed,” but I was joking get over yourself is what all assholes whine when we catch them being assholes. Not to mention nothing she said was actually funny, except to folks who’ve made their cynicism into an idol. Not to mention that telling folks you’d have overthrown the government over WAAAAAAAAH!!!!! is stupid and evil.

Around the table: governments politicize protests, and other horrible truths.

Steven Rosenfeld estimates that over 42 million Americans will mail in their ballots this year, a 40 percent increase from the 2018 midterms. More folks getting comfortable with mailing in their ballots is a good thing, but we’ll have the same BS in Pennsylvania and Michigan this year that we had in 2020, where mail-in ballots can’t by law be counted until Election Day, and Republicans will appear to be “winning” races until the mail-in ballots all get counted. If they get counted! As I said last week, I think Doug Mastriano could pull some armed shenanigans in Pennsylvania (i.e., where “election protectors” physically prevent counting of mail-in ballots); think Tudor Dixon might try the same in Michigan?

Sam Biddle and Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept detail how Iran’s government suppresses protest and dissent by controlling the internet. “While disconnecting broad swaths of the population from the web remains a favored blunt instrument of Iranian state censorship,” they write, “the government has far more precise, sophisticated tools available as well,” like SIAM, which Iran uses to disrupt web usage. SIAM slows down connections to the point where the government can break encryption codes and spy on users’ content more easily; couple that with Iran’s notorious human rights record and you can see why good Iranians are protesting – and why they have so much trouble getting the change they need and deserve.

Ho hum, Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) releases relatively-unredacted report detailing how thoroughly the Trump Administration DHS politicized the Portland protests of mid-2020. Because taking video of police putting down protestors for political ads just wasn’t enough! Our DHS tried to compile a dossier on every single Portland protestor, but still collected far too much information on protestors, and when they couldn’t prove (or even reasonably assert) that IT WAZ ALL TEH ANTIFAZ!!!!! they said it anyway. And don’t take comfort that the Trump Administration went about their evil incompetently, because they only aimed to create chaos, and they sure succeeded in that.

ProPublica finds our IRS has “largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities as churches have become more brazen about publicly backing candidates.” And naturally some of these preachers who are “pushing the envelope” have become quite the drama hounds about it: dig the one who says “(t)he establishment media is coming after me” and “(p)eople of faith are under attack in this country” – where was he when the Bush Administration was harassing Muslims? Cheering it on, I bet! – or the one who says you’re “stupid” and “don’t know what you’re talking about” if you think he violated the law, a line of argument which always persuades folks who think differently!

Speaking of drama: after a union-supporting Starbucks barista in Buffalo says his bosses fired him for wearing a suicide awareness pin at work, Starbucks workers in seven states wear the pin in solidarity. Will Westlake wore the pin to honor a co-worker (and fellow union supporter) who committed suicide; you’d think bosses would pay more attention to what happens in their stores! But if Starbucks bosses can throw this big a tantrum over a pin, how do they expect to run a business? And if you’re thinking this might not be union-related, consider how many baristas say Mr. Westlake helped out their efforts even as his own store voted against unionizing.

Finally, because we need all the reminders we can get that corporate greed causes inflation, Exxon posted the highest profits ever by an American oil corporation for a three-month period, showing $17.9 billion for the third quarter of 2022. Yes, gas prices actually went down in August and September of that quarter, but the Economic Policy Institute instructs us that corporate profits still cause over half of our inflation. Democrats haven’t been talking enough about how corporations stoke inflation, but worse, they’re not talking enough about what they’ve done about it – they’ve curbed monopolies and let Medicare negotiate drug prices, where a Republican government would have just shown us the back of their hand.

Action: concerning the war on Yemen, money laundering, and the debt ceiling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to get us out of the war on Yemen, pass the ENABLERS Act, and abolish the debt ceiling. 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 pass a War Powers Resolution getting us the hell out of the Saudi/UAE coalition’s war on Yemen. Because it’s killing good Yemeni civilians as well as taking out some of the world’s best fighters against al-Qaeda, funny how that works out, right, Kurds? Saudi Arabia’s also cut back oil production as a sop to Russia, whose government deserves no sops at all. Too many politicians act like we have no alternative to allying with Saudi Arabia, too many generals wind up becoming consultants for Saudi Arabia, and too many regular Americans act like Saudi Arabia’s OK because Iran’s worse. Like the Greatest Nation on Earth should ever have to choose!

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5525, the ENABLERS Act. I’ve been calling folks who give aid and comfort to dictators “enablers” for close to two decades now, so it’s nice to see Congress getting into the act. The ENABLERS Act would give our government more tools to crack down on the many forms of money-laundering that enable Russia to continue its doomed-but-still-evil war on Ukraine; I suppose some folks on the right (cough Rand Paul cough) would complain that this would give government more tools to snoop into your bank account, but it’s actually hard to look like you’re laundering money for Russia unless you’re doing that.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to abolish the debt ceiling. Used to be the debt ceiling was just useless, since Congress raised it all the time without controversy, but now the debt ceiling is a tool of evil, since Republicans take it hostage every time they want to hurt good Americans. I am not overstating the case! As we speak, Republicans are telling us that if they get control of either house of Congress again, they will create another debt limit drama aimed at forcing cuts to Medicare and Social Security. Republicans are being so obvious about it that Democrats are even running ads about it! So, as with the filibuster, it’s best to take weapons away from legislators when they abuse them.

Action: concerning political prisoners, campaign finance disclosure, and chemical plant safety.

Long story short: tell Iran to release Vahid Afkari, tell President Biden to require campaign finance disclosure for federal contracting corporations, and tell our EPA to protect good Americans from chemical spills and explosions. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first: Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to release political prisoner Vahid Afkari immediately, expunge his record, and drop any charges against him. Mr. Afkari's story has a lot of recognizable particulars: participated in peaceful protests against Iran’s repressive regime, got arrested on trumped-up charges, got sentenced to over 30 years in jail (plus 74 lashes), has spent the last two years in solitary, and now has health issues that I’m sure are completely unrelated to the injustices his government has inflicted upon him. But, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, only a snowflake government does this to their own people. And if we pressure them enough, they’ll fold, because that's what snowflakes do.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to force corporations that contract with our government to disclose their campaign spending. This should be a layup – most corporations do business with our government sooner or later, and they spend taxpayer money, which is to say our money, so we deserve to know which politicians they’re funding. Right-wingers will whine that this would have a “chilling effect” on “free speech,” but it won’t, because money is not speech. Corporate executives will still be able to say what they like; they’ll just be less able to bribe their way to getting what they like. And why should they have it so easy, when the rest of us must howl to be heard?

Finally, the National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous Risk Assessment Plan possible for American chemical plants. More than one out of every three Americans lives within three miles of a chemical facility, meaning more than one out of every three Americans faces a significant chance of exposure to toxic leaks, fumes, fires, and explosions. And not for nothing, but most of these Americans are Black, Brown, or poor; why, it's almost like that's the idea. But if we believe that everyone deserves a chance in America – and even right-wingers make a show of believing that – then we must protect everyone from the toxic waste that could sicken, injure, or kill them.

Around the table: of dictatorships and monopolies, and the good folks who fight them.

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept assesses “The Dark Odds Facing Iran’s Brave Protestors.” Protests have followed the state’s murder of a woman for not wearing her hijab in strict accordance with new right-wing government laws, and though we want better for good Iranians, Egyptians and Syrians have failed to capitalize on the Arab Spring because “life under dictatorship had not allowed any alternative institutions to grow that could easily replace the tyrannies now in place”; Iran’s police state has similarly suppressed such institutions. That’s a cautionary tale for those Americans who think crime is the number one issue facing them because they’ve watched the same four or five clips on the TV news for two years now.

Matt Stoller assesses our progress in our fight against monopolies. Long story short: yes, our government loses antitrust cases in court, but has also made progress on right-to-repair, wage-fixing, and price-fixing. Still, “(i)n a highly concentrated economy, losing merger challenges simply shouldn’t happen,” but he also reminds us that we lose before very, very bad judging. Mr. Stoller remains hopeful that lawyers will figure out how to win cases even against bad judges, and that judges aren’t evil per se but “just operating on autopilot with antitrust. And he also reminds us that the “narrative of powerlessness is perhaps the most powerful weapon in the monopolists’ arsenal, because it causes us to give up on self-government itself.” We definitely need to hear that more often! The “phony war” metaphor at the beginning is a bonus.

When I hear that 80% of Americans want a federally-funded paid family/medical leave program, I recall that Newt Gingrich used to say if 70 percent of Americans want something, they should get it, though I bet he would just mouth a bunch of BS about it now and our “liberal” media wouldn’t challenge him on it. I’ll bet most of Joe Manchin’s constituents want a paid family/medical leave program, too, and if he’s scared that his approvals in West Virginia are upside down now that he’s helped bring the Inflation Reduction Act to fruition, I would remind him that his job ain’t just to do his constituents’ will, but to convince them when he’s actually done it.

Ho hum, Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State candidate wants to end mail-in voting because of alleged/nonexistent “voter fraud,” but not only has he voted by mail numerous times, he’s also done it while living in a different state from the one in which he was voting. In a sane, moral, and decent civilization, this news would finish his campaign; in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, he needs only hope he’s worshiped enough at the altar of His Personal Lord and Savior Donald Trump to please the big man’s votaries. Having claimed to be a “victim of election fraud” as the Republican nominee for Nevada’s 4th U.S. House district in 2020 – he lost that race by over 16,000 votes and nearly five percentage points – he may be well on his way toward this goal.

When I hear that Republicans actually plan to campaign on repealing drug-pricing caps passed entirely with Democratic votes – and that they’re using the same horsedoodle arguments about “stifling innovation” and “drug takeover schemes” and “price controls,” phrases that anger far-right partisans and literally no one else – all I can say is that I guess they’re counting on gerrymandering to deliver them the House, because they sure ain’t counting on making winning arguments. The shame of it is that it might work, especially given our well-founded suspicion that Democrats don’t want to win elections as much as they want to raise campaign money.

Finally, how about some good news? Over 270 workers at the Roosevelt Boulevard Home Depot in Philadelphia have filed a petition with our National Labor Relations Board to form a union. Much like Walmart, Home Depot has unusually terrific workers they get to treat like crap because those workers don’t have the opportunity to take their skills somewhere else anymore – which, of course, is because Home Depot has crushed smaller, independent hardware stores everywhere it’s gone. So let’s add “balancing monopoly power” as yet another reason we need more unions.

Action: concerning birth control, student loan debt, and endless war-making.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation protecting birth control, tell President Biden to abandon means-testing for student loan debt forgiveness, and tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq war AUMF. 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 a law protecting birth control from our Supreme Court. You know, like they failed to do with abortion. Nonetheless, Civic Shout’s petition shows cunning! A lot of politicians will happily voice their opposition to abortion – but how many will happily voice their opposition to birth control? I mean, sure, the far-right ones will and there are far too many of them in Congress, but they’re not a majority, at least not yet. And birth control is considerably more popular, after all. Why, a lot of men favor it! At least for their women, they do. And recall, Justice Thomas has already put it down in writing that he’d overturn Griswold!

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell President Biden not to erect stupid barriers to student debt relief. Like means testing! Look, our IRS already knows how much money you made last year, so making folks jump through bureaucratic hoops so they can get the relief they deserve is just a way of ensuring that folks don’t get that relief. Also, don’t get evicted or get in an abusive relationship, or else the application likely won’t find you! And don’t count on our Department of Education getting funded well enough to handle all the paperwork it’ll have to process. Recall that Republican Presidential candidates typically promise to disband the department entirely.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq. That mistake is now almost old enough to order a beer legally! And Presidents still use it for reasons wholly unrelated to the Iraq War – former President Trump, for example, used it to justify our assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, which almost brought us to war with Iran. So it was a bad idea in the first place, and we misuse it and bring ourselves to the brink of war – anything else? Oh yeah: our Constitution invests the power to declare war solely in our Congress, so letting Presidents go to war whenever they want contravenes our laws in addition to our morals.

Action: concerning Iran, gas prices, drug addiction, our Supreme Court, and our past mistreatment of Native Americans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to support the Iran nuclear deal, lower gas prices, and pass the MAT Act, the Judiciary Act, and the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies 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.

Peace Action helps you tell your House Reps to support re-entry into the Iran nuclear deal. Congressfolk on both sides have shown a disquieting unwillingness to re-enter that deal, and for what? To appease Trumpholes? To "put distance" between them and President Biden? To gain imaginary and irrelevant leverage over Iran's Republican Guard? Gosh, how about doing the right thing for the right reason for once? The Iran nuclear deal was keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but because Donald Trump decided to shit all over anything Barack Obama did that actually helped Americans, he took it away from us. And now Congress wants to make it harder to get it back? Tell them no.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to "protect Americans and keep gas prices low," because sometimes you gotta be simple and direct. And also sometimes because your Congressfolk are thick-headed because they only talk to each other and Beltway consultants! Recall Katie Porter telling us that her Democratic colleagues didn't talk about inflation because they didn't see anything about it in polling? The stupid is strong with some of our Reps and Senators! Anyway, if you want to deliver a more specific message -- like "pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, which would tax excessive oil corporation profits at 95%," you can add that to your signature.

People's Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 445, the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (or MAT) Act. All this locking people up for using and abusing drugs, tell me: has that worked? No, it has not, by the evidence that far too many Americans are still addicted to drugs. The MAT Act would remove certain bureaucratic obstacles to prescribing certain narcotic drugs that treat addiction. "Removing certain bureaucratic obstacles" may be the argument that seems to have attracted a stunning 46 House Republican co-sponsors! But only three in the Senate, meaning the Mitch McConnell Obstruction Machine may yet roll over it. Unless we speak out in numbers they can't deny, of course.

Stand Up America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2584, the Judiciary Act, which would increase the number of Supreme Court Justices from 9 to 13. I've been saying we need four more Justices to keep up with 13 federal Appeals Courts, but recent events have made the necessity of getting better Justices up there more urgent to me. And I'm sure it's even more urgent for the women and gays and transgender folks who would be directly affected by Sam Alito's made-up "deeply-rooted" doctrine. I'm able to imagine such a thing because I possess the quality of empathy, a quality today's Supreme Court Justices seem to suppress. Surely Joe Biden can find four more Justices who get what it's like to be human.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5444/S. 2908, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act. Federal boarding schools aimed to "civilize" the Native American, but they separated families and abused students, which ain't exactly civilized behavior. Some folks will refer to this bill as an "apology tour" or "cancel culture" or whatnot, but admitting you've done wrong, and then righting that wrong, is about as American as America can be. Note well that the Quakers put out this action alert and the Quakers admit their own past wrongdoing in running more than two dozen boarding schools! That's how you do it.

Action: concerning Medicare, forever chemicals, border walls, war-mongers, methane emissions, and Fox News.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to end a Trump-era Medicare privatization scheme, tell fast-food corporations to get "forever chemicals" out of food wrappers, tell our government to abandon the "digital border wall," tell the Washington Post to stop publishing op-eds by aging war-mongers, tell our EPA to crack down on methane emissions from factory farms, and tell big corporate advertisers to abandon Fox News. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell the Biden Administration to end the Trump-era program that allows private insurers to pay for some Medicare patient care. Without telling them, I might add! C'mon, you know Donald Trump: if it were such a great idea, he'd never STFU about it! He surely wouldn't have hidden it! Sadly, the Biden Administration seems to be doing just that, having (after a public comment period that I'm sure didn't go well for them) renamed the DCE program (for "direct contracting entities") as ACO REACH, and yes that is an acronym. ACO REACH won't be as odious a program as DCE was, but as one observer said, "you don't slap a band-aid on a tumor and call it cured," and whatever they call it, DCE will remain the tumor that threatens to spread the cancer of privatization to all of Medicare.

Consumer Reports helps you tell fast-food corporations Arby's and Nathan's to commit to getting the PFAS chemicals out of their food wrapping. Doesn't matter that you just throw it out when you're done with it, because they don't call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" for nothing -- you find them in just about everything anymore, they don't break down into safer elements, and scientists have linked them to cancer. And not for nothing, but the longer you let your cheese fries just sit in that wrapper, the more PFAS you'll likely have in your food. Chick-fil-A and Burger King have lately committed to getting the PFAS out of their food wrappers, following McDonald's and Wendy's; now Arby's and Nathan's need to follow suit, lest we one day get to the point where we can't get PFAS chemicals out of our products and our bodies.

Fight for the Future helps you tell our government to abandon plans to form a "digital border wall." That's got to be better than Donald Trump's vanity border wall, right? Not so much -- the "digital" wall relies partly on facial recognition technology, and as we know, facial recognition technology has the hardest time recognizing the non-white faces that would comprise the bulk of would-be immigrants to the U.S. Also, the "digital" border wall uses drones, which I'm sure will never turn on us. If we must have fewer immigrants to the United States, then we must do three things: 1) make all jobs in America good-paying jobs, 2) stop interfering with other nations' efforts to do same, and 3) stop letting corporations make all the decisions in America. That'll make wisdom and compassion much easier.

Win Without War helps you tell the Washington Post to stop running op-eds from discredited war-mongers. The news hook here? On the eve of the possible resuscitation of the Iran nuclear deal, Post ran a John Bolton op-ed, as if Mr. Bolton hadn't orchestrated its destruction by President Trump. Mr. Trump, for his part, delivered perhaps the only guilt-free laugh line of his Presidency the day he said if he'd listened to John Bolton we'd be on World War V by now! He also pushed that war in Iraq, and if you're thinking maybe we should let bygones be bygones after almost 20 years (!), just remember that no one who pushed that disaster paid for their evil works, which included smearing half of America as "traitors." "Forgive and forget" works in our personal lives, but it just enables politicians.

Food and Water Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to start cracking down on the climate change emissions coming from factory farms. This was a big joke to right-wing hotheads a decade ago, but farms pump out more than a third of all methane emissions in America, and not through flatulence but through industrial production. Joke'll be on them when they realize that our EPA can-so regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, and can-so regulate it on factory farms. They won't do it, though, unless we tell them to do it, and given how much factory farms already get away with by threatening higher food prices, our EPA really won't want to do it, unless we get in their grills about it. And we may have to do it more than once, and we may have to do it in court.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Fox News. No, that's not "censorship"! Governments censor, but our First Amendment doesn't guarantee a "right" to be paid by advertisers, just as it doesn't confer protections against activism or criticism. Why, I'd call it "starving the beast," and if Fox News has to get by with MyPillow and Snuggy ads, that's just the churn of civilization. We don't have to tabulate every awful thing Fox News has ever done to deserve shame and shunning, I trust, though demonizing the half of Americans who opposed the Iraq war as "traitors" does stick in my mind. If you want to meet corporate executives halfway, though, I suppose you could tell them they should abandon Fox because Fox sucks up to Vlad the Bad, and that's a bad look these days.

Action: concerning Iran, drug prices, climate change, taxing the rich, our Supreme Court, and our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to allow us to restart the Iran nuclear deal, cap insulin costs at $35/month, pass more and better climate change legislation, tax the rich and corporations more, expand our Supreme Court, and pass the Postal Service Reform 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.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk not to obstruct our President's efforts to restart the Iran nuclear deal, a major achievement of the Obama Administration. You'll recall how right-wing Senators actively obstructed the deal in 2015 by telling the Iranian government a future Republican Administration would probably scuttle it. Which Mr. Trump did, and for no good reason! The deal was keeping Iran from developing nukes, and its absence has permitted them to develop nuclear weapons technology much further than they had before. Don't brook any stupidity about how you can't "trust" Iran, because the deal required verification of Iran's compliance, not trust. Jesus, right-wingers can be so stupid. Anyway, we can restart the deal -- if we get in our Congressfolks' grills about it.

Both More Perfect Union and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin costs at $35/month, for which President Biden asked in his recent State of the Union address Daily Kos wants us to tell them to do it via budget reconciliation, but I'd honestly prefer they force Republicans to filibuster the insulin cap. Not because that legislation might not make it through reconciliation (the Senate parliamentarian killed the $15/hour minimum wage hike, you recall). It's more that I want to get Republicans on record as being objectively pro-death for diabetic children. People all over America are risking death by rationing their insulin because they can't afford it, so I expect they'll be even less receptive to Republican yammering about price controls than I am.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to step up their climate change game, given the possibility that our super right-wing Supreme Court may soon hamstring our EPA's ability to even regulate climate change. If that happens -- and it'd be a hell of a reversal of precedent, since our Court ruled as recently as 2014 that our EPA could regulate carbon emissions under existing law -- Congress will have to write more specific laws, which they're loathe to do, but which they'll have to do if we want a planet to live on in 30 years. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently found that climate change is outrunning us, so we'd better pick up the pace -- without right-wing rubbish about how "this isn't the government's job."

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a 15% minimum tax on corporate profits, both domestic and offshore, while Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax on billionaires. Neither of these actions does everything I want them to do, but they'll make our tax code a good deal better -- a 15% minimum corporate tax will, with one swoop, end a lot of corporate welfare in America, and the wealth tax will begin to address the problem of runaway billionaires in America. If the nation's billionaires can add trillions of dollars to their net worth while the rest of us are struggling under the yoke of a pandemic, something's very wrong. And we, as Americans, have a duty to make it right. Corporations and rich folks need to pay more taxes, end of story.

Demand Progress also helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand our Supreme Court. Yes, we should do it because six of the nine Justices are far right-wingers, and we should do it because a President rejected by 54% of the electorate in 2016 appointed the last three of those. But there's another good reason: we have 13 federal Appeals Courts in America, so having one Supreme Court Justice to manage each District Court will make all those courts work better. These reasons are all better reasons than ones Congress used the last seven times they changed the number of Supreme Court Justices. And if Republicans think it's unfair to expand our Supreme Court under a Democratic President, well, they should have won the 2020 election. I won't lie: I say that at least partly because I know it'll piss 'em off.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act. Ignore fake "concerns" about Medicare from certain right-wing Senators (which even Sen. Portman of Ohio have said are bunkum). The bill would allow our Postal Service to offer services like fishing licenses which will increase revenue -- a consistent issue with our Postal Service, since taxpayers haven't funded it for decades -- and would, more importantly, shed our Postal Service of the mandate to prepay retiree benefits decades in advance, a mandate required of no other public or private entity and a mandate that, frankly, feels like a Bush Mobb effort to destroy our Postal Service. With the Postal Service Reform Act, our Postal Service would get much-needed breathing room.

Action: concerning racism, voting rights, Medicare, defense spending, and student loan debt.

Long story short: tell state legislatures to stop trying to erase Black history education, tell states to stop taking voting rights from felons, tell President Biden to end a Trump-era Medicare-privatization scheme, tell Google to stop working with our Pentagon on AI technology, and tell President Biden to cancel student loan debt and release the memo his office prepared on the matter. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell state legislatures to stop trying to "disappear" Black history from their schools' curricula, while People for the American Way helps you tell state legislatures to stop erasing the history of all historically-oppressed Americans. Go ahead and sign both! Now, I don't oppose a school board's right to determine curriculum for its students. Of course they have the right to do that! And we have the right to tell them they're doing it wrong if they're doing it wrong! And we also have the right to tell folks who think patriotism equals denying the evil we've done that patriotism acknowledges that evil, and then works to fight and defeat that evil. Hey, nobody said civilization was easy.

Common Cause helps you tell state legislators to stop taking voting rights away from felons merely because of their past felonies. Rights ain't rights if some folks don't have them! And taking voting rights away from felons, in a society that systematically targets Black and Brown folks, is racist, period, end of. Lately we've seen good folks go back to prison because they didn't know their past conviction made voting illegal for them, and the reason they didn't know? Because some states would rather just put you in jail than tell you you're doing something that could land you in jail! I mean, it sure looks that way. Generally we should err on the side of more people voting rather than fewer. And people who think otherwise know they'd lose a fair fight.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to end the pilot program that delivers Medicare recipients into private health insurance plans without their knowledge or consent. Yes, the Trump Administration really started such a thing, and while it often seems like they were just a bunch of Medicare-haters, they also saw an opportunity to please the banksters who back the Direct Care Entities (or DCEs) that take over part of a senior's medical care. Run that name through your tongue again. Direct care entities -- why take three words to say "carer"? And why use the word "entity," like it's some suddenly-sentient satellite from Star Trek? Because if they told you the truth about what they were doing, you wouldn't go along. And neither should the Biden Administration.

MoveOn helps you tell Google to stop entering into AI tech contracts with our Pentagon. Because they're going to use AI to kill people, that's why, and though our defense mavens will no doubt tell you that using AI will save soldiers' lives, anyone who read Philip K. Dick's "Second Variety" knows what's really going to happen: AI will take over and start killing anyone it likes, for its own damn reasons. And maybe Google shouldn't be putting its billions behind such madness; at least, that's what a large number of Google's employees seem to think. Besides which, I think the best way to save soldiers' lives is not to fight stupid wars. Have we fought any non-stupid wars lately? No, we have not. And if we fight in Iran and the Ukraine as some defense contractors want, that won't change.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to a) release the memo his office prepared detailing his power under the law to cancel student loan debt, and b) cancel the damn student loan debt. It would give breathing room to millions of good Americans who we told go to college so you can get a good job -- millions of Americans who learned they weren't going to realize that promise! President Biden campaigned on forgiving $10,000 per borrower, which ain't a whole lot, but it's something; now he's claiming he can't do that, and sitting on the document that may well say he can do more than that. Joe Biden can be short of compassion at times (as he can be with marijuana law, as well); let's see if we can help him be his best self here.

Around the table: how we got on the brink of war yet again, and other sad tales.

Puzzled about the buzz over the Ukraine? Bryce Greene at FAIR explains the relevant issues, as well as our "liberal" media's failure to cover them. You won't be surprised to learn that "(t)he backdrop to the 2014 coup (in the Ukraine) and annexation (by Russia, of Crimea) cannot be understood without looking at the U.S. strategy to open Ukrainian markets to foreign investors and give control of its economy to giant multinational corporations." And, guess what, we backed that coup in 2014, and when has doing such a thing ever backfired on us? (Spoiler alert: it's still backfiring on us in Iran!) So, yeah, we helped bollocks all that up, too, and in such a way that our "assistance" would be needed later; couple that with Vladimir Putin's (admittedly quite deserved) unpopularity, and you not only have a "justification" for war, but a stick right-wingers can use to beat Mr. Biden with if he doesn't take us to war. Admittedly the right's love of Mr. Putin is actually getting in the way of them using that stick at present, but in the end, consistency isn't that important to the right.

Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court strikes down state's mail-in voting law as "unconstitutional," though the law will stay in place until the state Supreme Court can hear an appeal. So no, this doesn't mean Donald Trump will be reinstated as President, not just because if he somehow got 20 more electoral votes he still wouldn't have enough to have won the 2020 election, but also because (as our state Supreme Court has already noted) nobody sued and won about this when it would have made a difference. Hilariously, more than a few state legislators who voted for the mail-in law are now suing against its constitutionality! It's like something happened over the last year and a half or so to change their minds so dramatically. (And I do mean "dramatically.")

When I hear that TikTok is a "Time Bomb" "Feeding Us Junk News Non-Stop," I'm reminded that "junk news" is a phrase I've been hearing for at least two decades (and describes a phenomenon that's existed twice as long as that), and that a lot of local newscasts have just given up and paraded a collection of viral videos for years now. I agree that TikTok has so, so much more potential for good, but then again YouTube used to be a lot better for us than it is now, and Twitter certainly never fulfilled its potential. Even Tiktok's algorithms don't seem to be substantially different from other harmful social media (or mainstream media) organs. I guess I was hoping for some new insight, and probably that's my fault.

The headline "Kyrsten Sinema Would Lose 2024 Primary in a Landslide: Poll" actually understates the case a bit. You remember Scott Walker being down five to 10 points in polls to various Democratic challengers less than a year before he won his 2012 recall election? Well, this sure ain't that -- a Data for Progress poll finds her down 58 points, by 74-16, in a hypothetical primary match-up against Rep. Ruben Gallego. Granted, her numbers ain't down that far from just a few months ago, and Ms. Sinema has over a year to recover in the eyes of Arizona Democrats -- if Democrats lose the Senate in 2022, she can make a more compelling case for sticking with her, think that's the plan? -- but a 58-point deficit in a poll like this suggests she'll far more likely be the Joe Lieberman of 2022. She'd appreciate that.

Finally, some good news: our Interior Department has cancelled two mining leases near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, on the grounds that the previous Administration (and stop me if you've heard this one before) didn't do the environmental review required by law and cut our Forest Service out of the decision-making process entirely, also in contravention of the law. The phrase "law and order" leap to mind? It should, or else my life's work has been for nothing. None of this guarantees that the Biden Administration will protect the Boundary Waters on a more permanent basis, but it gives us more of a fighting chance, which is all I ever want. (Only read the whole thing if you're prepared for a mining corporation spokeshack to sound even more moronic than usual.)

Action: concerning methane emissions, Oak Flat, war in Yemen, the Hyde Amendment, and the Equality Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep the methane emissions tax in the Build Back Better Act, pass the Save Oak Flat Act, end our involvement in the war on Yemen, and repeal the Hyde Amendment, and tell your Senators to pass the Equality 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 legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Did you know there was a methane emissions tax in the Build Back Better Act? I didn't! So you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to tax methane emissions in the Build Back Better Act. They'll never see it coming! This would be a tax corporations pay, not people, no matter how much corporate cronies tell you "people will just wind up paying for it." Sure, if corporations want to be even less popular than they are now! And seriously, why would civilized people tolerate "just passing on the cost to the consumer"? Possibly because corporatists have gaslit us into believing we can't do any better than letting corporations have whatever they want! But methane emissions pack a massive climate change punch, and it's well past time for us to punch back -- and taxing methane emissions could end methane leaks, which would leave climate change with fewer teeth.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1884/S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. Oak Flat is an area within the Tonto National Forest in Arizona that just so happens to be sacred to several Native American nations -- but also the site of a planned copper mining project. The two former Arizona Senators Jeff Flake and the late John McCain snuck the Oak Flat copper mine authorization into a 2014 defense authorization bill, since it would never have survived as a stand-alone bill, not least because the corporation operating the project, Resolution Copper, is owned by Rio Tinto, which used to employ Mr. Flake as a lobbyist. If we pass this bill, we can begin to make amends for treating sacred lands like a used dishrag -- unless we're only going to let white people have religion in America, I guess. That seems to be the Republican preference! But they don't get all the say around here.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end our complicity as a nation in the killing of Yemeni civilians. We've been trying, and jackboot lockstep agreement with Saudi Arabia's aims ain't pervasive in Congress anymore -- as evidenced by the Biden Administration's proposed $500 million sale of "arms maintenance," which is further from "arms" than we used to be -- but when you've got the advantage, you don't sit back, you press it. People who try to argue with you about this try to tell you BUT IRANZ IZ TEH WORSEZ!!!!, which sure ain't a way of saying "Saudi Arabia is awesome!" or even "what we're doing in Yemen is sad, but it has to be done." They may be handing us victory with their bad arguments, but we still have to take victory.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the notorious Hyde Amendment, which prevents any taxpayer money from funding abortion. Yeah, I would never want an abortion to happen either if I could help it, but I'm not about to tell someone carrying a fetus with no organs, or a fetus that could kill or maim her once delivered, to stand on principle. Hell, I'm not about to tell someone with one more uterus than I have to stand on such principles! When men can give birth, we'll reopen that conversation. And I know, Joe Manchin actually insisted the Build Back Better Act include the Hyde Amendment, probably just so he could do the helicopter dance in front of us yet again. Nyah nyah I'm the 50th vote! Suck on this, liberals! But he doesn't get all the say around here; we do. And all we have to do is act like it.

Finally, since Monday was Coming Out Day, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. This bill represents a major civil rights boon for gay and transgender folk -- no longer could banks, employers, and landlords discriminate against gay and transgender folk merely because they're gay and transgender, and no longer could states pass "bathroom bills" that do nothing but enrage the easily-enraged and hurt transgender folk. And right-wingers call all that discrimination "religious freedom"! But one more time: you do not have a "religious" right to abridge other folks' rights. Some people act like citing one's "religious" "conscience" is a get-out-of-being-civilized card, but it ain't. A lot folks claiming religious exemptions because they don't want to get a vaccine are about to find this out.

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, paycheck fairness, saving our Post Office, and war in Yemen.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act, and also to confirm President Biden's USPS Board of Governors nominees; and tell our President to stop arming the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators' phone numbers, or use the links in the following paragraphs.

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. You've heard a lot about Republican vote suppression shenanigans lately, but you may not have heard that "blue" states have fairly restrictive voting laws as well! We notice it less, because crazy Republicans tend to lose elections there, but Rhode Island (for example) has a strict Voter ID law, Connecticut doesn't offer any early voting, and New York makes you jump through flaming hoops to change your party registration in advance of a primary. These states have poor folks and folks of color, too; why should we leave them behind?

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. What I was just talking about in re restrictive voting laws in "blue" states? The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act could fix that, as well. The Voting Rights Act singled out Southern states for federal approval of voting rights law changes, but the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would amend the Voting Rights Act so that any state or locality with a record of vote suppression would have to submit their voting law changes for federal pre-clearance. Your Republican Senators may be interested to hear that. I mean, of course they've figured that out (even Tommy Tuberville!), but they'll still be interested to know that their constituents have figured it out.

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Right-wingers have been bleating about TEH MENZ INZ TEH WIMMINZ SPORTZ!!!!, and I feel like I've explained pretty well why that's utter bunkum, but Chris Walker at TruthOut tells us even more: not just that most Americans oppose the anti-transgender laws states have been rushing to pass lately, but that scientists find that trans athletes actually don't get much of an advantage by transitioning. If you thought about it for a minute -- that transitioning to another gender involves a lot of hormonal and musculoskeletal changes -- you'd agree. Of course, Republican politicians are trying to create an electorate that doesn't think about anything even for a minute. But we outnumber them, so we don't have to put up with that.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Our House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act last week, with exactly one Republican voting in favor of it, and I bet you already know that was Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania's 1st. (Nope, not even former Democrat and avowed disciple of "bipartisanship" Jefferson Van Drew of New Jersey's 2nd.) The Paycheck Fairness Act would (among other good works) prevent bosses from firing workers for talking about their pay with their co-workers, which is usually how women find out they're not getting paid as much as men. I guess Republicans will retort that the Paycheck Fairness Act restricts corporations' rights to restrict your speech! Everyone knows our First Amendment protects you from your government, not your boss, but that doesn't mean your boss's right to restrict your speech must be absolute -- particularly when that tramples over your rights as secured by the law. So don't brook that silliness, either.

Common Cause still helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors nominees -- not just because they're good nominees, but because they'll likely fire notorious Postmaster General/aspiring election thief/bad boss Louis DeJoy -- but maybe you should also call Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY), at 202.224.6542 and demand that he actually schedule this vote. President Biden nominated the three individuals well over a month and a half ago, so what's the holdup? You'd hate to think it's because Democrats want to privatize the Post Office, too, but simply want Republicans to get the blame for it. You'd hate to think that, but you also have to consider that. We should let Mr. Schumer know we're thinking that, too.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to stop arming the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. The news hook, of course, is that, contra his promises, our President still plans to approve the sale of "matériel that can be construed to have a defensive purpose," per the New York Times, and though that means fewer guns and bombs, it also means offensive weapons that, well, "can be construed to have a defensive purpose." Yemen is now the second-hungriest nation on the planet per the Global Hunger Index, all to deter Iranian influence there, supposedly, but the Houthi rebels the Saudi/UAE coalition targets are some of the best fighters of al-Qaeda on Earth, and with all the destruction the coalition has unleashed on Yemen, what are the chances good Yemenis actually find Iranian help less attractive now? It's like these wars are supposed to make everything worse. But we don't have to let that happen.

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 right-wing drama, the filibuster, sanctions, and food safety.

So Colorado Gov. Jared Polis issued a proclamation urging good Coloradans to avoid meat for one day out of the week, but Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts declared his own "Meat on the Menu Day," which I might take as a good-natured rib from a beef-producing state, except that he then said that Colorado's "MeatOut Day" was a "direct attack on our way of life." Gosh, don't anyone tell him what Catholics do on Fridays during Lent! Seriously, abstaining from meat for one day a week represents a "direct attack on our way of life"? Jesus Mary and Joseph will right-wingers ever stop their incessant whining? You may call Gov. Ricketts at 402.471.2244 and tell him to cut the drama, because statements like "direct attack on our way of life" is how people convince other people that having a veggie burger makes you a "terrorist." I do not exaggerate -- it isn't that long a walk from "animal rights protestors are terrorists" to "people who don't eat meat terrorize the meat industry." I love steak myself, but I won't buy it from Nebraska producers as long as their Governor is a whiner.

Speaking of people who really shouldn't open their mouths ever, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) literally promised a "scorched-Earth Senate" if Democrats follow through on nixing the filibuster. How do we respond to threats? We still do the right thing, that's how! Hence you may call your Democratic Senators and tell them to ignore Mr. McConnell's threat and get rid of the legislative filibuster. Yeah, I already knew that Mr. McConnell could unearth many more layers of obstruction. But if Democrats cower before this threat, then they do not deserve to win another election again, ever. Besides which, Mitch McConnell himself ended the use of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees not even four years ago! And he has also said, far more recently, that folks should try winning arguments before they try getting rid of the filibuster; does demanding a physical quorum merely to turn on the lights in the Senate chamber resemble a "winning argument"? Imagine the spectacle of a group of grown men reduced to doing such things, and you'll help end Mr. McConnell's manufactured hostage crisis post-haste.

Also, as you know, America uses economic sanctions as a weapon against a lot of nations, including Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and Syria, but all of that comes with a cost: the good citizens of those nations can't get food, medicine, electricity, or medical supplies, all of which becomes more acute during a pandemic. You may now know, however, that our Treasury Department has the authority under our laws to allow these nations to import essential products (including food and medicine) during a pandemic. A truly great nation wouldn't need to be told to do this, of course, but we are that nation, so we must tell our government what to do. Toward that end, Roots Action helps you tell our government to stop letting sanctions actually hurt the innocent, especially during a pandemic. Anyone who tells you letting humanitarian supplies through is just a way of letting weapons through -- as if there's literally no such thing as a port inspector! -- has revealed themselves as one of two kinds of people: 1) someone proud of their cynicism, or 2) someone irredeemably cruel. I'm not sure which kind of person is worse.

Finally, our government has long had a jones to speed up processing lines at chicken plants -- a program even Bush the Lesser rejected! -- such that chicken inspectors get hurt more and pus and bile and blood shows up in your chicken casserole more frequently. Also, too, don't they know there's a pandemic on? But along comes H.R. 1815/S. 713, the Safe Line Speeds During COVID-19 Act, which would suspend all waivers our Department of Agriculture has granted allowing big food processing corporations to shoot their chickens by at 175 per minute, plus it'd stop Agriculture from extending those absurdly-high line speeds to pork processors. Further, the bill would defund any Agriculture efforts to speed up lines in the future, and direct our Government Accountability Office (or GAO) to investigate the harm these high line speeds have done to our food processing workers. These are all good works, and just remember that work accidents and food poisoning are still very unpopular in America. Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support food and worker safety by passing the Safe Line Speeds During COVID-19 Act.

Action: concerning diplomacy, monopolies, trophy hunting, and abortion access.

President Biden did run on a diplomacy-first foreign policy, and though one could easily say he broke that promise when he ordered a missile attack on Syria, we could compel him to renew that promise by telling our Congressfolk to pass S. 434, the Iran Diplomacy Act, as Peace Action helps us do. Contra what you've heard from Trump votaries still unable to admit they made a grievous error in supporting the man -- I have no sympathy for them, of course, since admitting your mistakes builds character -- the Iran nuclear deal was achieving its aim (i.e., of keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons) until Donald Trump withdrew the United States from it because IRANZ IZ TEH BADZ!!!!!! Seriously, if he explained it better than that, he must have only done so to the mirror. Of course, when someone good at being evil comes along -- cough Tom Cotton cough -- we won't be able to avoid war with Iran very easily, unless we've already got the Iran nuclear deal back in place and it's continued to work for a couple of years. Do good works and you inspire people; sustain good works and you make evil works a lot harder.

Meanwhile, Roots Action helps you tell our U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights to break up Amazon. Not just because half of all online commerce goes through Amazon -- and half is far too big a market share, frankly -- but because Amazon has driven so many businesses small and large out of business (I, for one, think a world without Encore Books is a rather smaller world). The Roots Action petition -- a DIY campaign created by a user named Vahid R. -- explains further: Amazon's monopoly status enables it to treat its employees badly, bully its business partners, and reach out and monopolize other sectors of the economy. We all worried that Amazon would eventually monopolize grocery stores when it bought Whole Foods, but it's already done worse than that in cloud computing, where it currently controls about a third of the market, more than its next two major competitors combined. Politicians like to make a show of being mad about big tech, but if we stay silent about monopolists, they won't do anything about it.

In other news, Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore the ban on importing trophy animals like elephants. You may recall this being an issue of some notoriety in late fall of 2017, after a photo of one of his offspring sporting a bloody elephant tail went viral on social media, and Mr. Trump actually delayed his plan to reverse the ban -- for nearly four months! Hey, shame doesn't work as well on everyone! And generally we should avoid electing the people most immune to it! In any case, Mr. Trump did follow through on reversing the ban before spring had sprung in 2018, so now it's time to remind our Congressfolk that even though elephants aren't "endangered" in America per se, they are pretty obviously endangered in Africa (i.e., where you'd go to get hunting trophies), where their numbers have sunk from 10 million to less than half a million. And, hey, if you got to know an elephant -- they mimic you, they mourn their dead, they adapt to change, they work together toward common goals -- you'd never hunt one down and cut its tail off just to show everyone what big balls you have.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell our President to lift unnecessary restrictions on abortion. Specifically, you'd ask President Biden to lift the in-person restriction on getting mifepristone (which, when used in tandem with either misoprostol or gemeprost, induces medical abortion) and instruct our FDA to review all of the restrictions it's put on the drug. Our FDA requires that folks pick up mifepristone in person, which sucks during a pandemic, but also sucks at other times, because Jesus Mary and Joseph you can get Xanax delivered through the mail, so there's no reason you can't get mifepristone through the mail, either. Not to pile on, but if you're poorer, getting the drug through the mail might be your best option. Maybe Mr. Biden -- being personally opposed to abortion but unwilling to tell everyone else how to feel about it, which closely resembles my position on the matter -- thinks being pro-choice but letting our FDA restrict access to mifepristone is a "compromise." But there is no compromise possible with right-wingers, certainly not on abortion. At least not publicly! Ask Scott DesJarlais what I could mean by that.

Finally for-real-this-time, our House didn't vote on the COVID relief bill yesterday, but they'll likely vote on it today, so give your House Reps a call and tell them to pass it, even if you called them yesterday.

Action: concerning COVID relief, saving our Post Office, private prisons, and Iran.

The House passed a COVID relief bill on Saturday morning; now it's time to tell your Senators to do the same. Tell them they must include the $15/hour minimum wage in the bill, even if it means overruling the Senate Parliamentarian. I don't particularly want to do that, but let's be realistic: Republicans will do it next chance they get, and blame Democrats for it. And we should still work on Sens. Manchin (D?-WV) and Sinema (D?-AZ) about their particular unwillingness to pass the $15/hour minimum wage; their phone numbers are 202.224.3954 and 202.224.4521, respectively. Most Americans want this minimum wage hike, and more than half of Republicans want it, and ain't no way all the Republicans who don't want it all live in Arizona and West Virginia. Sens. Manchin and Sinema should stop adhering to the conventional wisdom on "how to represent a conservative state." You represent a conservative state the same way you represent the will of any other state: by doing the will of its people. And again, ain't no one in America going into the voting booth in 2022 saying thank God Democrats preserved the sanctity of Senate procedure at great cost to all of us!)

While you've got your Senators on the phone, you'll want to tell them to confirm President Biden's three new nominees to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors. President Biden nominated them not too long after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told a House Committee to "get used to me," so maybe now we won't have to get "used" to the big-time Republican donor who tried to foul up voting-by-mail and whose solution to all the problems Congress has created for our Post Office over the years is to cut back on delivering mail by air, which will make every day like the most recent holiday season, when packages took as long as a month and a half to get where they were supposed to go. Seriously, saying you can't serve the public because you don't have the money is un-American -- we can stop forcing our Post Office to pre-pay pension and health benefits at a scale we demand of literally no other government agency or corporation, or we can let our Post Office offer banking services again (which Daily Kos helps you do), and people like Louis DeJoy won't have their excuses anymore.

Meanwhile, President Biden has ordered our Justice Department to stop using private prisons, but hasn't ordered our Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) to do so, and our Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) operates under the auspices of DHS, hence Amnesty International helps you tell DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to release all detained immigrants and stop ICE from using private prisons to detain folks. Private prisons obey the profit motive, after all, and if abusing prisoners makes them more profits, they'll do it! Doesn't matter, necessarily, that private prisons also have to obey government regulations concerning the safety and health of detainees -- private prisons can ignore those regulations and dare our government to stop them, and if someone dies in neglect, well, a government fining a private prison won't bring that person back to life. That person is someone's mother, father, sister, brother, son or daughter, too -- not a faceless warrior in a "caravan." Generally, these folks run from oppression, and we're Americans, so we need to live up to our heritage, not cut it down out of wrath and sloth.

Finally, you've no doubt heard that President Biden proved he's just like all the other Presidents by ordering air strikes against Syria, presumably against Iran-supported militias -- so Win Without War reminds us that, hey, we can avoid firing missiles by rejoining the Iran nuclear deal, which they help you tell Mr. Biden to do! President Biden was Vice President when the Obama Administration negotiated that deal, after all, and it worked -- until President Trump, determined to piss on anything with the Obama name on it, withdrew America from the pact for no good reason. (And then put John Bolton in charge of our NSA, which, in retrospect, may not have been the best way to cure Mr. Trump's jones for war with Iran, since it clearly didn't get us there.) Seriously, war with Iran won't be as easy as war with Iraq was -- Iran has a lot more people to control! -- and war with Iraq, as it turned out, wasn't that easy and gave us ISIS, almost like that was the whole idea. We can avoid such miserable foreign policy choices by going with the diplomacy that's proven to keep Iran from developing nukes, and that's the Iran nuclear deal.

Action: concerning sedition and war on Yemen.

H.Res. 25 would command our House Ethics Committee to investigate any sitting Congressperson who might have aided and abetted the January 6 attempted coup. Just so happens that one of the coup's organizers -- one Ali Alexander, apparently a star of social media who will not otherwise be remembered in a hundred years -- now says he "schemed up putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting" with three U.S. House Reps: Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona, and Mo Brooks of Alabama, while one witness has accused Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) of giving Capitol tours to rioters in the days before the attempted coup. "Investigating whether the coup was an inside job" sure does sound like a job for our Congressfolk! Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your House Reps to hold seditionists accountable by passing H.Res. 25. Don't brook any silliness about "unity" and "healing" and "looking forward" -- if no one pays for this, they'll just do it again and again.

Speaking of "looking forward," you may be exhausted enough from this Administration that you'll just be happy when they're gone, but fact is our President is on tape asking why Georgia's Secretary of State couldn't just find him 11,000-plus votes, and when you break the law, you should be punished. At least, that's what all his votaries say when black people break the law (and also when they don't!), but we've documented their blind spot pretty well over the years. Hence Daily Kos also helps you tell our government to investigate and charge our soon-to-be-ex-President for soliciting election fraud. Again, his votaries will tell you only "those people" commit election fraud, though the data tells us otherwise. Perhaps they'll also tell you he was "just joking," though "just joking" is how boys, not men, hide behind their wrongdoing, and if everyone was in on the joke, how come Georgia Republicans decided to tape the call? Soon they'll blame this on antifa, too.

In other news, Color of Change helps you tell the Chicago Police Board to fire Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 President John Catanzara for his recent remarks supporting the January 6 seditionists. Just so happens the Board is already investigating Mr. Catanzara for various posts on Facebook, including one in which he said Muslims were "savages they all deserve a bullet" (sic), but last week he said he "get(s)" and "share(s)" the seditionists' "frustration," and he also suggested that "the worst crime here is trespassing," which is kind of like having it both ways. Pretty much anyone still not in thrall to this President (as Mr. Catanzaro apparently is) disagrees with all of those assessments, and really, more and more Americans are waking up to the fact that too many of our law enforcement officers will side with racists and seditionists when the heat is on. That means it's well past time to start rooting out the rot.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell President-elect Biden to reverse our government's recent labeling of the Yemeni Houthis a terrorist organization. Our current President seems desperate to screw up as much as possible on the way out the door -- I half-expect toilets removed and kitchen cabinets pulled down -- and so it goes with this designation, which could choke off humanitarian aid to some 20 million good Yemenis regardless of whatever the Houthis have done. One could interpret this designation as a sop to Saudi Arabia, which really doesn't need any more sugar than we already give them, and a way of putting pressure on Iran, which wouldn't be necessary without the stupid Iraq War and which in any case the nuclear deal was already doing until this President pulled out of it for no damn good reason. I know Mr. Biden will have a lot on his plate (though, really, he's not going to be doing it alone!), but stupid people should not get all the say about everything, and shouldn't get to cause people to die, either.

Action: concerning human rights in Iran, COVID vaccines, and media consolidation.

Iran released reknowned human rights lawyer/activist Nasrin Sotoudeh for three weeks due to her serious COVID-19 infection -- but now they've put her back in prison, even though she still has it and is still contagious! For a 38-year sentence, for the crimes of, let's see, "encouraging corruption and debauchery and providing the means," "propaganda against the system," "disrupting public order," and gosh let's stop, because we all know why she's really in prison: she's represented, among other folks Iran's government consider "undesirable," like women who won't wear a hijab in public, protestors against the obviously-stolen election of 2009, and folks facing a death sentence for they crimes committed while they were minors. In short: a snowflake government imprisons a fighter for justice on trumped-up charges. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to drop charges against Ms. Sotoudeh and release her immediately. Time is short here -- and not just for her sake.

Meanwhile, we're going to have a hard time getting everyone a COVID vaccine (and not just because our current Administration decided not to get enough, amirite?), but we certainly don't need the World Trade Organization (or WTO) making it even harder. Some countries have proposed temporarily waiving WTO rules that give corporations monopoly protections for their putative intellectual property, but our Administration, naturally, opposes such a waiver. Big corporations make COVID vaccines with massive public investment, so we should get a say in this, and the families of the dead do not give one rat's hind quarter about intellectual property rights in the middle of a pandemic. And why should they? Our job on Earth is to help each other, not hide behind rules designed to help already-rich big pharma corporations maintain their unearned monopolies. Hence Rethink Trade helps you tell your House Reps to urge our outgoing President to reverse course on this matter and save a lot more lives.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) not to permanently waive media ownership restrictions in the New York market, then Free Press still helps you do that. I'm of the mind that no corporation should own any other corporation, let alone three media outlets in one market, but (guess who?) Fox owns WWOR, WNYW, and the New York Post, and if the FCC goes through with its plan, Fox gets to own them not on a "temporary" basis, but a permanent one, and I don't know about you, but I've sure had enough of Rupert Murdoch-created drama, even if his right-wing cable news channel is on the outs with our soon-to-be-ex-President and his votaries. Seriously, local news media is dying all over America, and media consolidation is the main reason why -- one corporate owner makes three or 10 or 300 news media outlets into cookie-cutter outlets, none of which reflect the diversity and uniqueness of the people they serve. As Americans, we deserve better -- and we must demand better.

Around the table: in which we avert a "voter fraud" tantrum but, sadly, not others.

You have to read this entire article about a Michigan County momentarily balking at certifying election results to suss out the real story: the two Republicans on the Wayne County, MI Board of Canvassers threw a tantrum over "unbalanced absentee ballot polling books" which were no more unbalanced than they were in any previous elections, hoping to create a big "voter fraud" drama -- and only relented when poll workers and voters gave them a big bowl of what-for. So democracy still works -- if we make it work.

Our FBI finds that folks committed more hate crimes in 2019 than in any of the previous 10 years. I've always been a bit suspicious whenever I'm told "hate crimes are on the rise," but the FBI's findings are likely accurate -- we did have a black President for most of that time, which some folks clearly never got over, among them the racist white President who followed. I find this data more useful than, say, comparing hate crimes now to hate crimes in the 1990s, when police departments weren't even convinced of the necessity of reporting hate crimes (let alone the 1930s, when hate crimes were far worse, I'm sure, and also not considered crimes).

How can President-elect Biden "Score a Major Foreign Policy Victory on Day One of His Presidency," per Thomas Knapp at Counterpunch? By re-entering the Iran nuclear deal, that's how -- and he won't need permission from Great and Awesome and Bountiful One True American President Mitch McConnell, because the Iran deal is part of the U.N. Charter and our Senate ratified the Charter long ago. He wants Iran to do more before re-entering, which I guess looks tough, but really isn't -- the Iran deal already has enough accountability mechanisms, and aren't we tired of "looking tough" yet?

Candidates Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro supported or promoted fare badly in Brazil's local elections. As in other nations, mayoral and city council elections represent a sort of midterm referendum on Brazil's President, so I guess these results prove that you can only go so far acting like a complete asshole. I know another asshole who's learning that lesson presently -- well, insofar as he actually learns lessons.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, our poor wittle baby of a Pwesident is all upset that he won't get the cwedit for the COVID vaccines that may hit the market in a few months. Prick spent four years taking credit for things he never did and now he fumes he won't get credit for the vaccine, which he also didn't do? Jesus Mary and Joseph we can't be rid of him fast enough. Let him soil his diapers at Mar-a-Lago.

Action: concerning our Supreme Court, pollution, and unconstitutional war-making.

The Amy Coney Barrett nomination goes before the full Senate very soon, so use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Senators and tell them to reject the Barrett nomination. We could belabor Republican hypocrisy in refusing to consider Merrick Garland's nomination in 2016 and then ramming through Ms. Barrett's nomination now, but the best argument against her is her own record. In her three years on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, she has not only demonstrated a pattern of ruling for corporations and against workers, but she has also demonstrated a pattern of refusing to even interpret laws, and that refusal too often manifests as a complete lack of compassion for those times our laws fail our people. Frankly, she acts like we should just put legal matters to justice machines and be done with it. Of course we also know that (in her life before federal court) she stated her opposition to Roe v. Wade publicly more than once and she belongs to a far-right religious group that teaches women to be subservient to their husbands. That might have suited our Court in 1830, but not now.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) has proposed hiking fines for air polluters in our Commonwealth, which they haven't done in 15 years, but naturally pro-pollution state lawmakers want to put a stop to that -- it's like they don't breathe the air themselves! -- so Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislator to reject House Concurrent Regulatory Review Resolution 3, which would cut DEP funding dramatically. Pennsylvania legislators have long had a starve-the-best mentality with regard to punishing polluters (silly legislators, not understanding that the polluters are the beast!), and the result is a DEP that can't do its job the way our laws require. And the hike in air polluter fines would allow our DEP to continue to crack down on polluters. Don't let our legislators fool you: they understand perfectly well that revenues pay for services; they'd just prefer not to perform these services, so that big polluting corporate executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. But surely they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

Finally, the notorious 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force, the one they used to attack Iraq, is still on the books in America, but the negotiation of the annual defense appropriation bill presents another opportunity to repeal it, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore some semblance of the rule of law in America by repealing the 2002 AUMF. The war with Iraq has been over for many, many years -- George W. Bush told us so! -- but future Presidents, of both parties, invoked the 2002 AUMF for all kinds of unconstitutional adventures, from President Obama's adventure in Syria in 2015 to our current President's ordering of Gen. Soleimani's assassination earlier this year. Yeah, Mr. Obama didn't even go to Congress before bombing Syria, and our current President clearly forgot that Congress never declared war on Iran, which would be the only legal basis for killing Mr. Soleimani. And yes, Congress has spent the last 80 years essentially ceding its Constitutional war-making power to the President -- but why do we have to take that?

Action: concerning good House bills, sanctions on Iran, and Chad Wolf.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Why do we keep doing this? Because we need to establish our will, as we communicate it to our Senators -- and thus also establish how badly they're doing at adhering to our will, which is their sole job, and a job they're doing much worse than our House is. And the more we do it, the closer we get to fulfilling the promise democracy.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and Secretary of State Pompeo to reject any more sanctions on Iran. We could go on at length about the damage more sanctions would do to good Iranians, who will certainly bear the brunt of sanctions more than their rulers, but all we need say is, well, calling this Administration's policy toward Iran piss-poor would be a grievous insult to piss. The Obama Administration helped craft a successful agreement that kept nuclear weapons out of Iran's hands, but this Administration withdrew from that agreement, apparently as part of a plan to create international chaos that could only be resolved by war with Iran, which is so 1980, you know. You could argue, I suppose, that Mr. Bush's Iraq policy only strengthened Iran in the region, thus tying our current President's hands, but just as two wrongs don't make a right, two stupids don't make a smart. So let's not remain hostage to bad foreign policy, because that would be un-American.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to the permanent Homeland Security Secretary position, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. They'd have plenty of reasons to reject the nomination, including Mr. Wolf's ardent support for family separation and illegal detainment of protestors, as well as his refusal to accept new DACA applications even though our Supreme Court told him to do it. But now that we're less than a month away from Election Day, our Senators would probably just prefer to wait this whole thing out and see how things go, given that voting for Mr. Wolf would be tough to defend to the voters who are about to decide your immediate future. It's funny that none of them have said confirming Mr. Wolf is essential given "the grave threats we face," since you know that's what they would have said in Tha Bush Mobb years. Still, we must remind them that cowardice is evil, and the time to do the right thing is always now.

Action: concerning foreign arms sales, Congressional corruption, and harassing protestors.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to block our Administration's proposed $478 million weapons sale to Saudi Arabia, then MoveOn still helps you do that. I've been thinking lately of a line from Space: 1999, spoken by Commissioner Simmonds after being told by Commander Koenig he didn't have the "right" to make a particular decision: "I got to being Commissioner by doing what's necessary, not what's right." Governments are full of people who "got where they are" by doing what was "necessary," but no rational human being looks at this topic and says you know what Saudi Arabia needs? More American weapons! People only support such a thing with excuses -- at least they're not Iran being one of the more absurd ones -- or with appeals to your cynicism, like the world's a bad place. But what if the world's a bad place because of all the things folks believe they "have" to do? Then maybe we ought to do some good things instead.

Meanwhile, H.R. 7200, the Transparent Representation Upholding Service and Trust (or TRUST) in Congress Act, would require all Congressfolk to put certain assets -- like securities, commodities, and futures -- into a blind trust within 90 days of assuming office. The bill would exempt "widely held investment fund(s)" like mutual funds and T-bills, presumably because the public can check the status of these investments more easily than the kinds of hifalutin "financial instruments" that seem to break our economy a lot these days. Of course, H.R. 7200 follows on the heels of a number of U.S. Senators apparently making major investment decisions right after being privately briefed on how bad this COVID-19 pandemic was going to get. And H.R. 7200 actually has two Democratic sponsors and three Republican sponsors; might it be an example of actual bipartisanship, not the "bipartisanship" where Democrats just cave to Republicans? I don't know, but the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight corruption by passing the TRUST in Congress Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our FBI from harassing black protestors, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. No, our FBI's still using the "Black Identity Extremists" category to identify, spy on, and otherwise harass folks protesting the fact that police execute black folks without even charging them with a crime, and much more so than they ever do to white folks. And maybe our President sits back and chortles at all the tear gas and facial recognition software police turn on protestors, but not the rest of us -- at least, not if we're civilized. It does boggle the mind that so many folks call themselves "conservative" but still think literally any criticism of police completely cripples their ability to do their job. Set aside that this isn't very "law and order" of them -- how weak must they think police officers are? I, for one, think they'll do well in a reality where we don't demand they fight protestors.

Action: concerning good House bills, insider trading, and sanctions against Iran.

It's time to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). I know, I know, Congress is too busy working on a bailout, er, stimulus bill to pass all these good bills the House has already passed. Well, tough toodles! If they don't like us telling them what to do, they can always find another job.

Meanwhile, as you no doubt know, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) dumped over $1.5 million in stocks while getting daily briefs on the threat of a pandemic, well before the U.S. stock market tanked, and after telling the public things were going fine! Nice work if you can get it! And apparently he wasn't not the only one! Sens. Loeffler (R-GA), Inhofe (R-OK), and Feinstein (D-CA) also dumped a crapload of stock at around the same time. Now, none of these four Senators are stupid people, so maybe we can't actually convict them of insider trading in a court of law. Still, I'm old enough to remember when a Senator would rather resign than face the appearance of corruption, and maybe that's a time we need to bring back; we sure would have better Senators if we did. In the meantime, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban government officials from trading in individual stocks while they hold office.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell Treasury Secretary Mnuchin to suspend sanctions against Iran for the next 120 days. Why? Because the pandemic is hitting Iran harder than us right now and economic sanctions tend to prevent things like ventilators from ever getting to Iran. And why else? Because we don't need to be imposing sanctions on Iran at all! Our President reimposed sanctions on Iran after unilaterally pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal which was working I say for the 40th time, all so he could pretend to be tough. There's really nothing deeper at work with this guy; he loves looking tough, though having been a millionaire literally since the age of 8 he's never worked a job in his life that could have actually made him tough. And now innocent Iranians have to die so he can look tough? Yes, Iranians are also suffering because they, too, have a government that likes looking tough when it's actually full of weaklings. But we have more control over our government, and little over theirs -- unless anyone has a time machine we can take back to 1953 to prevent the CIA-aided overthrow of Mr. Mossadegh.

Action: concerning good House bills, war with Iran, and internet privacy.

Happy Monday, good citizens! It's time to call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). Our House of Representatives has assembled a good record of passing legislation that protects voting rights, health care, worker wages, consumer protection, and real internet freedom, and our Senate has done bupkus about all of that. And they won't do anything until they hear from us, in numbers, again and again and again.

Meanwhile, last month our Senate passed S.J.Res. 68, which would prevent our President from waging war on Iran without Congressional approval, and now the House must pass the bill, so we can send it to our President. He'll veto it, but let's make him veto some legislation, particularly legislation that would make him adhere to our Constitution. I said that the House might pass this bill with a quickness, but clearly I forgot that our Congressfolk hate taking up foreign policy-related legislation that might "hamstring" the President in foreign policy, but how many times must I tell these pimps!. Delegating war-making powers to Congress, not our President, is a feature of our Constitution, not a bug! Our Constitution only gives the President the authority to figure out how to win wars Congress has already declared, not the authority to go off all half-cocked. Hence Peace Action West helps you tell your House Reps to restrain our rogue President from unilaterally starting a war with Iran by passing S.J.Res. 68.

Finally, Clearview AI aims to scrape your photos off your Facebook page so it can create the world's biggest facial recognition database -- which should trouble you, since facial recognition a) generally oppresses activists more than it catches actual criminals and b) can't hardly tell black folks apart and it's almost like that's the idea. Besides, they're your photos! You put them on the internet, but that doesn't mean you give permission for big corporations to make your life hell! Besides, Facebook does have privacy settings, the existence of which signal your own intent as to how you want folks to use your photos, and also signal Facebook's duty in protecting them from folks you don't want to see them. Commonsensical, right? You'll be gratified to learn that Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn have all threatened legal action against Clearview for scraping photos from their sites -- but not Facebook, apparently. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to stop Clearview AI from harvesting your private photos for their nefarious ends.

Action: concerning human rights, land mines, and stupid airline fees.

Yasaman Aryani and her mother Monireh Arabshahi protested Iranian forced veiling laws for women back in 2019, by riding a train without a head covering, so naturally an Iranian judge sentenced them to 16 years in prison for "inciting and facilitating corruption and prostitution." 16 years for not wearing a head covering! I mean, gosh, it's not like they stole the pensions of thousands of workers or something. You naturally recognize "inciting and facilitating corruption and prostitution" as the kind of snowflake charge that snowflake governments concoct when they're trying to keep people down. And though Iran has lately reduced Ms. Aryani's sentence to a little over 9 1/2 years, that's still a little over 9 1/2 years too long to spend in jail because you didn't wear a head covering on a train. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Iran to free Ms. Aryani and her mother immediately. Because even repressive governments still respond to the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Meanwhile, our Administration has decided to end American prohibitions against military use of land mines. I guess they'll say other nations get to use land mines, so we should, too, which was pretty much our Administration's argument for bowing out of the INF last year. But over 160 nations have joined the Mine Ban Treaty since 1997, and the fact that the United States is pointedly not one of them means we largely leave it up to the Executive branch to voluntarily stop using land mines in war-making. After three-plus years, we are hopefully seeing the value of not leaving so much up to the Executive branch, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation banning the use of land mines. And another thing: land mines don't just go away if no one sets them off, but remain a threat for decades, and so they maim and kill people long after all the wars are over. It sure seems to me that civilized people wouldn't allow that to happen.

Finally, Consumer Reports instructs us that the three largest American airline corporations -- American, Delta, and United -- actually charge fees to families if they want to sit together on flights, and are otherwise happy to sit children as young as 1 or 2 next to complete strangers! And here you thought getting government out of our way was going to help make a more family-friendly America! Of course, you don't need to be a Noam Chomsky acolyte to see that a corporate-controlled America must be less family-friendly, because families get in the way of corporate profits (or, more precisely, executive pay), so Consumer Reports helps you tell the three biggest airline corporations to stop separating families on flights. You may wonder why we don't simply tell Congress to pass a law. We may do that in the future! But first, we'll try wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR, which really ought to work on corporate CEOs here, since it concerns family separation.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, unconstitutional war-making, and freedom of the press.

It's Monday morning, and you know what that means: it's time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. You may be tiring of telling your Senators to pass these bills, but the more they hear from us, the more embarrassed they'll be -- and the more they'll swing our way, as is their damn job. They need to hear from us that we want bills that protect voting rights, working families, public lands, disadvantaged minorities, and internet freedom. And they need to suffer the consequences of standing against these things -- you know, like losing their jobs.

Meanwhile, our President has declared that the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF), which authorized war with Iraq, also authorizes war with Iran! And that's reason enough to let Demand Progress help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 AUMF -- because all this open-ended authority for the Executive branch to wage war isn't a good thing, and certainly isn't how our Founders envisioned our government running. They envisioned Congress declaring war, after all, and the fact that Congress has largely abdicated that duty since the end of World War II doesn't change that fact, and certainly doesn't change what's right or what works. I wish I could say that our current President's claim was the most absurd claim I've heard from a recent President over his authority to bomb wherever he likes, but sadly, it's not -- President Obama's claim that various AUMFs gave him authority to strike in Libya and Syria were, frankly, more strained, and if our current President's votaries weren't so good at letting their pride erase their memory, they'd see that their Personal Lord and Savior is wrong, too. I'm not going to lay money on that happening any time soon, but I'd be happy to be wrong about that.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell the Brazilian government to drop cybercrime charges against journalist Glenn Greenwald. Mr. Greenwald's website, The Intercept, published articles last year exposing the infamous Brazilian "corruption" probe -- one which happened to put a lot of liberal politicians in jail, and just so happened to put the current President's opponent in jail while the campaign was going on! -- as an utter sham, and for that, the Brazilian government has arrested him. I like to believe folks are deeper than they seem, so I wish there were more to it than that, but there's not -- journalists who actually practice journalism, and expose the folly and venality of Our Glorious Elites, are more likely to wind up in jail than banksters who foreclose on grandmothers overdue by 27 cents on their mortgage. Of course, Brazil has laws, too, so they can't just put a journalist in jail for publishing leaked or hacked info; they have to insinuate that Mr. Greenwald somehow aided the hackers. But I'll believe the journalist who exposed government misdeeds over the government embarrassed by those misdeeds any day. It's not like we have a lot of journalists left, after all.

Action: concerning war with Iran, school lunch nutrition standards, and health care privacy.

Word on the street is that the House may vote next week on two excellent ideas: defunding any future Presidential attempt to wage war on Iran, and repealing the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). The whole point of breaking off from King George III was most decidedly not to defer to a President who makes King George III look like the very model of sanity, so Win Without War helps you tell your House Reps to restrain our President's attempts to start war with Iran. In a related note, the Project on Government Oversight informs us that over 50 members of Congress and/or their spouses own, on average, somewhere between $45,000 and $110,000 each in defense corporation stock, and you can smell the conflict of interest there, right? As in what incentive do our Congressfolk have to stop us from fighting stupid wars if they stand to make money from them. So the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to divest from "all investments tied to their Congressional responsibilities." They'll say that's hard, but so's anything worth doing, so don't brook any whining from your Congressfolk.

Meanwhile, our Department of Agriculture has announced that they intend to roll back literally the only achievement of the Obama USDA -- the nutritional standards that replace junk food with more fruits and vegetables in school lunches. House Republicans have been trying to gut these standards for years, armed with dramatic anecdotes about kids throwing out apples, because what else can you do when you are objectively pro-childhood obesity? Am I being too harsh? On these clowns? Our USDA's maneuvering has nothing to do with "reducing burdensome regulations" and everything to do with catering to big food manufacturing corporations who want our kids hooked on their burgers and fries. It might also have to do with a President who really thinks fast food is the best food -- or, more broadly, a President who thinks long-term thinking is for losers. So Change.org helps you tell our USDA to protect kids' health by reversing course on its school lunch rollbacks.

In other news, you know that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (or HIPAA) protects your private info when you go to the doctor or to a hospital, but what about the information you're giving to health-tracking apps on your phone? The corporations that collect that info can do whatever they like with that data, including selling it, and I don't think you signed up for that! And if you're not particularly worried about your heart-rate-while-jogging getting sold to someone who might try to sell you new running shoes, consider that apps tracking menstrual cycles actually reveal a lot more information that you would think -- like, how often you have sex, how often you have sex without using birth control, even how many miscarriages you have. And then imagine some data broker compiling that info on you into a profile that could affect your ability to get insurance (or get it at a good price)! Smells like dystopia, doesn't it? So Consumer Reports helps you tell health-tracking app corporations to protect your privacy.

Action: concerning war with Iran, peaceful protest, product safety, and shareholder power.

We've heard rather little about war with Iran this week -- but that doesn't mean we won't! Particularly since our President killed Gen. Soleimani in the middle of an impeachment, and that impeachment ain't going away just yet. Hence Win Without War helps you call your Senators and tell them to reject war with Iran. To think, if Jimmy Carter had simply bombed the crap out of Iran in 1980 he might have won a second term! But if our President is thinking the same thing, he's forgetting that 40 years have passed, and several wars-fought-under-false-pretenses have passed, and thus we're all a little skittish about fighting another one of those. And if you're thinking that maybe killing Gen. Soleimani really did prevent a war, note well that the whole "he was going to hit four U.S. embassies" rationale is, well, based on fairly flimsy evidence-if-we-can-call-it-that, with at least one Administration official saying people were wondering if our President had made it all up. And that's why we restrain Presidential power, as our Constitution commands us to do.

Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee (or IOC) has lately banned political protests during the Games; protest might include kneeling, raising of fists, or wearing of armbands or signs. You may recall that track stars John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists in support of the civil rights movement while getting medals in 1968; yes, "The Star-Spangled Banner" was playing, and if you think Messrs. Carlos and Smith "disrespected our country" in doing so, I'd say you were a bit sensitive. Surely your love of country can survive your being told you're not doing quite enough to fight racism, can't it? Hence Color of Change helps you tell the IOC to rescind its ban on political protest during the Olympics. Would I thus allow a white athlete to make one of those obnoxious white-power symbols during our national anthem? Of course I would! And let's see how many pals he'd have afterward, both among his fellow athletes and his corporate sponsors! Probably less of both than Colin Kaepernick, whose True to 7 shoe is doing quite well as we speak even though NFL teams with far worse quarterbacks won't sign him.

In other news, H.R. 5565, the Safety Hazard Recall Efficiency Information Act, or SHARE Information Act, would amend the Consumer Product Safety Act so that corporations couldn't mark information about their product defects "confidential"; yes, our laws actually allow them to do that, even though a lot of good Americans might benefit from information about, oh, just to pick an example out of thin air, the dangers presented by inclined baby sleepers linked to at least three dozen infant deaths over the last decade. The bill would also stiffen penalties for violating the Consumer Product Safety Act; what a shame that right-wingers never call that "law and order," though it's a perfectly valid application of the phrase. You can meet those right-wingers who complain that the SHARE Information Act would impose "more bureaucracy" on poor beleaguered corporations with the words "law and order" -- or the words "dead babies," if you like. But first, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote product safety by passing the SHARE Information Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to reject its own rule that would curtail shareholder power at big corporations, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. The SEC would require shareholders to own ten times more stock before you could even introduce a shareholder resolution; as usual, one must ask what is the SEC afraid of? They must be afraid of Boeing not being able to build unsafe airplanes like the 737 MAX -- because shareholder resolutions did try to call attention to Boeing executive coziness with federal regulators, and under the new rules, you sure would see a lot fewer of those. Boeing has taken a lot of PR hits, and deservedly so, over its problems with the 737 MAX, but making it harder for shareholders to prevent their corporations from making grave errors like the 737 MAX sure seems like the wrong lesson to learn. Of course our President seems to live for learning the wrong lessons. That doesn't mean we can't teach him the right ones.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: with more horrible truths about American politics.

The incomparable Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs advises us on "How to Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda." I hope by now it'll all be reminder more than revelation, but reminders sure ain't useless, and I'm glad we're getting this particular reminder before we get too engrossed in yet another Middle East quagmire. I can't resist highlighting the part where Ben Shapiro says TEH OBAMA DRONED TEH TERRURIZTZ TOO!!!! and Mr. Robinson reminds us that such statements "prove() exactly nothing about whether (our President)’s actions were legitimate." Always they talk about what great debaters they are, and then they resort to personal attacks when they're on their heels, which means they're not great debaters.

The incomparable Dean Baker tells us -- because apparently our "liberal" media, at least, needs telling! -- that maybe "College Presidents Aren’t Who We Should Consult About Free Higher Education," since, you know, they all stand to lose money from taxpayer-funded higher ed. They may not have been (as Mr. Baker says) the worst people to ask about it, though -- I bet the worst people to ask about it would be the Vice-Presidents and Deans and Vice-Deans who don't do any useful work and whose mere existence is a major driver of the high cost of education.

Ho hum, another provocative act against a foreign power by our government, another litany of TV and radio "pundits" who all work for defense contractors without proper disclosure of their conflicts of interest. You can contact NPR's public editor about Mr. Keane's appearance on Morning Edition without disclosing his past defense contractor employment here, but as for the rest of them, this is yet another reason we need, and deserve, a la carte cable packaging -- we may not watch this rubbish, but we still pay for it if we have cable, which most of us do. (Don't believe the excuse that disclosure would scare "knowledgeable people" off of television and there'd be dead air all the time -- I mean, this is America we're talking about, full of folks who actually have something to say and hungry to get it heard.)

At last, someone (namely Noah Feldman at Bloomberg) shows skepticism that John Bolton's statement expressing willingness to testify at our President's impeachment trial means a damn thing. Why is saying you'll testify if subpoenaed some gift to America? And if Senate Republicans don't even want witnesses, why would they subpoena him? And have no Congressional Democrats considered the possibility that the Mustache of Evil is running a con game on them? And why can't Democratic politicians stop hoping for some Great Republican Savior? (Also, too, as Mr. Feldman points out, Mr. Bolton's reasoning is not exactly cogent.)

HuffPost/YouGov poll finds that while a mere 43% of Americans supported our President's decision to kill Gen. Soleimani, 30% of Americans "strongly supported" the decision, and this finding, for once, does not map that well onto my long-held belief that 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane -- and suggests that maybe poking Iran more will get our President more votes on Election Day. It is all about the margins with this guy, after all. I suppose it's possible the poll came out too quickly after the assassination to tell us very much of anything, but I guess time will tell, or at least suggest.

Action: concerning war with Iran, child labor, and endangered species.

Now that Iran has apparently taken its "fierce revenge" on two American bases in Iraq -- an attack our Administration knew about beforehand because this has all been one big drama, people! -- House Democrats will bring a War Powers resolution to a vote today, a resolution that would restrict our President from taking future military action against Iran without the Congressional approval our Constitution demands. Hence both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Win Without War help you tell your Congressfolk to support a War Powers resolution that would restrain our President. Also, if you want to take to the streets today to protest war with Iran, then No War With Iran! helps you find a demonstration near you. Don't believe the hype that we shouldn't "hamstring our President" from "protecting Americans," because "protecting Americans" is nowhere near as important to this President as pretending to be tough before the cameras, and also because if any President demands hamstringing, it's this one. And if any President demands it, then all Presidents must get it.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell the CEOs of chocolate-producing corporations Mars, Hershey, and Nestlé to stop using child labor to make their candy bars. Some two million kids in West Africa (you have to go where the cocoa grows, after all) work on growing and harvesting cocoa, which involves using heavy instruments and spraying pesticides; some of them are as young as 10 years old, and they might make very little money or they might make no money. Once again we must ask ourselves: is this the world we would have made? A world where we force kids to do hard labor to make candy bars? I know someone is going to pipe up with well you don't want your candy bars to cost ten dollars each, do you? I would advise that person to do three things: 1) slap themselves, 2) contemplate how little effect the $20 fast-food worker wage in Denmark has on the price of a Big Mac there, and 3) slap themselves again, because "cheap goods" does not excuse evil.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4348/S. 2491, the PAW and FIN Act, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. The PAW and FIN Act would (and this is becoming a sad refrain!) roll back Administration rules that make it easier for polluters to kill off endangered and/or threatened animal species. For example, our Administration would force our policymakers to consider the "economic costs" of listing a species as threatened, and by "economic costs" you know they mean the cost to some executive or other who now won't be able to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home? They sure don't mean "jobs"; why, they don't even say jobs! Big thinkers in the Administration don't consider that money always goes away, but a species we protect from extinction can live forever. This focus on short-term executive pay rather than the things that last -- why, it's like this Administration isn't conservative at all.

Action: concerning war with Iran.

You've no doubt heard by now that our President ordered the assassination of Iranian Gen. Soleimani over the weekend, which has left many of us wondering if we're going to be involved in World War III just a few days into a new decade. But let's take wondering out of the equation by telling our Reps and Senators to prevent war with Iran -- you know, like they should have done in the defense authorization bill last month but were too chicken to do. Only Congress has the Constitutional power to declare war, after all, even if they've spent the last 60-plus years deferring to our Presidents in exactly the manner our Founders aimed to prevent. Demand Progress, Win Without War, and the Friends Committee on National Legislation all help you write your Congressfolk telling them to stop the march to war with Iran, but I advise you to call your Reps and Senators, too, because we need to clog up their phone lines, or they'll just pretend they didn't hear us.

Folks on the right will tell you that if you oppose our President's unconstitutional action, you don't know anything about the situation, but we're not schmucks and we don't need to taste dung just to make sure it's not really meatloaf. The House impeaches a President, then he goes after a Middle Eastern bogeyman -- gosh, where have we heard this tale before? But those of us who may be more charitably-inclined also may observe plenty of other signs this is all typical Presidential drama -- that our President just couldn't help but drop broad hints about the attack to fellow elites at Mar-a-Lago, that our Administration has absurdly tried to link Mr. Soleimani to the 9.11 attacks, that the Fredo Corleone aspirant who also happens to be our President's middle child actually told Twitter last week that his dad was about to "open a big ol' can of whoop ass," and that virtually every right-winger in America who has spent the last several days lecturing us about Gen. Soleimani never mentioned him before.

Of course, yelling about your supposed "ignorance" in failing to support our President's vanity military attack will only be the beginning -- next they'll tell us we're "weak," and that we're "objectively pro-Iran," and that we're "traitors." We're none of those things, of course -- we're Americans who love our country and hate what Our Glorious Elites constantly do to it. Seriously, they use America like toilet paper and then call you a "traitor" when you point that out. So let's make sure we let our Reps and Senators know how we feel, by using one of the action tools in the first paragraph above, or calling them, or both.

Around the table: important lessons from the week, including yet another lesson from our President in How Not to Be.

Bad news: as we feared, and despite our best efforts, the House passed a defense authorization bill without any of the amendments limiting our involvement in the war on Yemen, preventing unilateral war with Iran, or stopping defense spending on our President's vanity border wall. The bill would grant federal employees parental leave, and it would curtail our military's use of PFAS chemicals, but the bill also doesn't go far enough in keeping them out of our drinking water, and doesn't even have an amendment (which had actual bipartisan support) helping military families on food stamps. In the words of one antiwar activist, Democrats got "completely rolled" on this bill. The good news is that we don't trust them to do the right thing; we trust ourselves to do the right thing, and if we don't get the results we deserve, we work harder.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (E-KY) tells Fox News (sic) that he and our President's counsel will be in "total coordination" during his impeachment trial. As Rep. Jeffries keenly points out, imagine a jury saying it will be in "total coordination" with a defendant during a criminal case and you'll understand how utterly corrupt that statement is. In past years, a politician would never have said this out loud, and yet the fact that Mr. McConnell said it on Fox News (which, ah, has a rather selective viewership) rather than, say, your local nightly newscast (which will more likely attract a broader cross-section of your community) hints at how corrupt our politicians might yet become.

I would caution against viewing the Conservative Party's resounding victory in this week's British elections as a 2020 harbinger, except that the Tories, at least, could convincingly identify themselves with one side or the other in the Brexit debate, while Labour seemed to be try to have it both ways -- and, how about that, our Republican incumbent will most assuredly campaign against "free" trade in 2020, while most of his possible Democratic challengers will most assuredly try to have it both ways. As for the sheer size of the loss, I suppose it's possible Labour just threw it, in the belief that the Tories will likely bollocks up Brexit again either by exiting wrong or just failing to exit, but we all know by now the dangers of assuming a nominally liberal party is playing 13-dimensional chess. (However, for those who think the elections are a resounding rebuke of "socialism": how well, exactly, did those center-right Labour leaders do in 2010 and 2015?)

Our "liberal" media is still trying to puff up the Pete Buttigieg candidacy, hastening, even, to (in Joshua Cho's words) "portray() a lack of voter support as an obstacle to their preferred centrists’ ascent, rather than evidence of a problem with the centrists for not supporting a progressive political agenda representative of most voters." In other words, Pete Buttigieg could be President, if not for those pesky voters! But I don't think Bernie Sanders would get "liberal" media plaudits for flip-flopping on Medicare for All, as Mr. Buttigieg has done, because the rules for moderates and right-wingers are always different for actual liberals. And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we'll fight the way we need to, and the sooner we'll win.

Hate to pile on the Buttigieg Boom -- OK, I don't -- but former health care executive Wendell Potter tells us that Mr. Buttigieg's work at McKinsey entailed, in part (and in Mr. Buttigieg's words), "performing analytical work...identifying savings in administration and overhead costs," which Mr. Potter suggests is code for "laying off workers, offshoring, and hiking rates." I guess Mr. Potter would know, and since I take the Parable of the Prodigal Son seriously, I also think he's courageous for saying so. You'll want to remember that if Mr. Buttigieg were the nominee, our President would never shut up about "why Pete Buttigieg wants to keep his work at McKinsey so secret," as if he himself hasn't spent the last couple of years trying to keep everyone away from his tax returns, but that hypocrisy won't elect Mr. Buttigieg, since he has nothing to offer voters except elite fever dreams about his "electability." I'd call all that ironic, but I demand more from irony than yet another stomach ache.

Finally, I try to avoid discussing the Drama-King-in-Chief as often as possible, but him telling Time's new Person of the Year, Greta Thunberg, that she has "anger management" issues is beyond disgusting. The man who shouts at everyone all the time doesn't get to lecture anyone about "anger management" -- particularly not, you know, folks angry that the adults are going to make their planet uninhabitable. This may be a cue to our "liberal" media that it shouldn't assume that if the President says it, it must be news -- and that if this President says it, it's more likely a lesson for America in How Not to Be.

Action: concerning war with Iran, billboards in space, and facial recognition technology.

As you no doubt know, our President's in a good bit of trouble right at the moment! And you know what that could mean? Why, it could mean war with Iran! Yeah, I know, he's made noises about not wanting war with Iran, and he did cut John Bolton loose not too long ago, but he's also done a lot of saber-rattling lately and plans to send more troops to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Now, a lot of his attempts to gin up a war have fallen flat so far, and you have to hope we all remember how Bill Clinton fired a couple of missiles in Mr. bin Laden's direction a couple days after admitting to his affair with Ms. Lewinsky -- not to mention all the times we got color-coded terror alerts from Tha Bush Mobb after some unrelated reversal or other! But, just in case our President is able to change the subject from his own rotten doings, Demand Progress helps you tell our Congressfolk to ensure our President can't go to war with Iran without Congressional approval. You know, like our Constitution says.

Meanwhile, some corporations want to put giant billboards in orbit! Yes, it's true! Like we don't have enough crap in the sky! Actually, the "billboards" will be groups of satellites that congregate to form the image of a corporate logo, but the difference is semantic, and the end result will be the same: you won't be able to look up at the sky without someone trying to sell you something. And, ah, you can imagine what'll happen if even more satellites occupy the night sky, right? Some of them will accidentally crash into each other. This may be what led the late, great Carl Sagan to call billboards in the sky an "abomination." Yes, not only is this a bad idea, it's an old idea, which also makes it a zombie idea. Well, we all know what to do with zombies, so Environmental Action helps you tell your House Reps to put the beatdown on the notion of giant floating billboards in the sky. People spend their time wishing for a better future and floating billboards is what they come up with?

Speaking of which, Fight for the Future helps you tell major live event corporations not to use facial recognition technology at their events. Why? Facial recognition technology invades the privacy you expect to have at a live event -- yes, you do expect some privacy, even at a "public event"; does everyone need to know where you are at all times? Facial recognition technology is also pretty terrible; no doubt you have heard that facial recognition technology, like your Tea Party uncle, can't tell black people apart very well. No government at any level regulates facial recognition technology very well -- for example, none of them regulate how long a corporation can hold onto the data it's scraped at a live show. And using this bad, unregulated, invasive technology can do folks real harm -- it can get them deported, detained, or otherwise harassed, again because our governments don't do their job and regulate how corporations can use the technology. And rather than hold our breath and wait for governments to do their job, let's just not use the crap, OK?

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and war with Iran.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act, well, you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers. Regardless of what they say, it is absolutely your Senators' job to be supporting voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections. Don't be thrown off by Mob Boss Mitch's recent embrace of $250 million in federal funding for secure elections, either. The SAFE act would provide more than that, plus it would mandate paper ballots, which would be a lot better than having our votes simply disappear into the ether. Though some Senators would want them to disappear.

Meanwhile, with ramped-up saber rattling over Iran in the news lately, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure the recent must-pass defense bill explicitly forbids our President from waging war in Iran without Congressional approval. I know, our President fired long-time Iran war-monger John Bolton, and told Lindsey Graham to stop trying to push him into a war he doesn't want, but that's all drama -- our President (who still loves another Iran war-monger, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo) could merely be waiting until Iran does something, or possibly "does something." Don't tolerate the folks who whimper that "we don't want to tie the President's hands" by forcing him to go to Congress for a war declaration as our Constitution requires. How many times must I tell these pimps! Congress is supposed to tie the President's hands in exactly this manner, so that our President doesn't haul us off to war after war after war. This is one of the reasons we broke away from King George III, for Christ's sake!

Around the table: chronicling more drama and venality from Our Glorious Elites.

Soon-to-be-released study documents some of the ill effects of our use of depleted uranium weapons in Iraq. You won't like the pictures. The study concerns the relationship between how far Iraqis live from the Tallil Air Force Base, which has been burning waste in open-air pits since 2003, and the rate of birth defects and levels of uranium and thorium found in local Iraqi citizens' hair. Surprise, surprise, the close you are, the sicker you are. No use chalking this up to "the horrors of war," because this was a shitty war propping up a shitty President. Vanity always has a price, but too often the vain don't pay it.

Ho hum, the Washington Post writes articles about Uber without disclosing owner Jeff Bezos's massive investment in Uber. And note well The Artist Formerly Known as Jane Galt writing that we shouldn't ask Uber and Lyft to treat their workers right because those corporations are "hemorrhaging money," which not only obscures the fact that their investors somehow get richer while these corporations hemorrhage money, but is what, class? That's right, a manufactured hostage crisis -- "don't make the corporations treat the workers better, or the corporations get it!" Although that's "the genius of capitalism," isn't it -- that a corporation dies when it doesn't make money? Not when your boss has sunk $400 million into the corporation in question, I guess.

Speaking of America's Soon-to-Be Least Popular CEO, we learn that Mr. Bezos's recent move to stop covering health care for Whole Foods's part-time workers wound up saving him a total of six hours of pay. This is what monopolies do to people! This is why we shouldn't let tycoons buy up as many corporations as they can! Some fools will say that's a drop in the bucket to Mr. Bezos, but it ain't a drop in the bucket to any of his workers. Also, too, Amazon doesn't pay any taxes.

It's time for another important reminder about Presidential drama! When you witness things like our President fighting with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) about whether we should bomb the crap out of Iran, keep in mind that you're looking at a "fight" that makes our President look rational and makes Republicans look like they have significant disagreements about policy, when he's not and they don't. As I always say, it's drama, and it's not even particularly good drama.

Good news, good peoples! Federal District Court Judge blocks enforcement of South Dakota law that would put pipeline protestors in jail for 25 years. Judge Piersol is right to suggest that a "Riot Boosting" law could have put Dr. King in jail for decades, too, but I have to say how gobsmacked I am that governments are going so far out of their way to protect the investments of private corporations. It sure doesn't seem like the "spirit of capitalism" in which conservatives supposedly believe. In fact, it seems a lot more like corporate welfare.

Finally, Christina H at Cracked tells us all about "6 Famous 'Frivolous Lawsuit' Stories That Are Total B.S." I have never, not even one time, heard a story from the tort "reform" crowd that didn't devolve into these-aren't-all-the-facts or the-system-did-actually-work. And generally half-told anecdotes are what you get, because tort "reform" proponents aren't going to cite very much actual science in a country where corporations, not people, file four out of every five lawsuits. So when someone says I'm gonna tell you a story about frivolous lawsuits, either be on your guard or walk away.

Action: concerning war with Iran, racist housing policy, and school lunch shaming.

You've heard that our President doesn't want to go to war with Iran? Don't you believe it! No, him firing John Bolton doesn't mean we're in the clear, and him fighting Lindsey Graham over Iran policy doesn't mean we're in the clear, either. What would put us in the clear? Communicating our will to our Congressfolk that we don't want another stupid war in the Middle East, that's what! Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Khanna-Gaetz amendment, forbidding funding of any military operations in Iran without explicit Congressional approval, in must-pass defense authorization legislation. Seriously, if you're thinking that maybe this President is "different," or that only he can stop the "deep state," stop that. True, this President may be less adept at maneuvering the levers of power than his predecessors, but he only cares about his own ego, and the only people who can stop the "deep state" are us. So we need to keep working.

Meanwhile, our Administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed gutting civil rights protections mandated by the Fair Housing Act, so the National Women's Law Center helps you tell our HUD to stop its efforts to let more landlords discriminate against folks of color. I don't know what their rationale for this move is. I kinda hope it isn't we don't need these protections anymore, because, gosh, have they talked to a real estate agent? Real estate was, for many years, the last place you could get away with saying something openly racist like "this is a good neighborhood because it's mostly white." Actually, I do know what their rationale is -- our President and his father got sued real good back in the 1970s for refusing to put folks of color in their apartments. Is this his revenge? I kinda hope not, because a man who'd do that is a small man indeed, and I prefer to believe the best about people.

Finally, you may have heard that schools have been shaming kids whose parents can't pay school lunch fees, sometimes by making kids wear wristbands (gosh, so many people love strutting around these days, I wonder why?) or by putting their names on public lists. I've said we shouldn't be afraid to shame people, but we shouldn't shame kids who did nothing wrong -- we should shame adults who, for example, redistribute everyone's income upward to themselves! Anyway, H.R. 3366/S. 1907, the No Shame at School Act, would prohibit this kind of school lunch shaming, plus it would prevent school districts from handing over parents' private info to debt collectors -- because this, too, is apparently a thing now -- and it would streamline the certification process for school kids so that simple misspellings (for example) won't lead to school lunch debt. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out working families by passing the No Shame at School Act.

Around the table: don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya, John Bolton! And other tales.

"John Bolton Tried His Best to Draw the U.S. Into a War," writes Alex Emmons at The Intercept. "Luckily, He Failed." But don't suggest that our President was crazy-like-a-fox and brought Mr. Bolton into the fold so he could expose his fraudulent ideas, because our President flat-out pissed all over the Iran nuclear agreement when it was working and reimposed sanctions on Iran, supposedly so he could get a "better deal." And with what leverage? You'll recall the shot-down drone and the seized tankers and you'll see that our President never had any leverage -- after all, are you going to bomb the crap out of a country that's playing the diplomatic equivalent of I'm-not-touching-you?

A retired Air Force colonel blows the whistle on what he calls "gross financial mismanagement" and "gross waste" at our Guantánamo Bay detention center. I'll admit I was gobsmacked to discover that even one conviction (and exactly one conviction!) has ever come out of Guantánamo. But that's what you get when you create drama over "dangerous people" who would "go back to terrorism" if they were ever released, never mind that we can hardly convict them of anything after 10, 15, or almost 20 years. (See, it's not just our President who creates drama. George W. Bush was a master at it.)

Voter ID, Interstate Crosscheck, and voting roll purges you know about, but states and localities have been suppressing the vote in one other important way: closing polling places, too often without notice. 13 states now have over 1,000 fewer polling places than they did six years ago; I wonder why? A lot of them close polling places supposedly because they're not compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act, but why close it and not, say, make it ADA-compliant? Don't say "because that costs money," because that answer won't win in court.

Ho hum, leaked documents reveal how our FBI is hiding data about how it responds to white supremacist violence versus black protestor "violence." They call it all "Racially-Motivated Violent Extremism," just as not too many years ago they called it all "Abortion Extremism" when mainly anti-abortion folks committed the violence. Yet the FBI still tabulates the "Racially-Motivated Violent Extremism" by race, and thus should be able to account for their actions.

Finally, the number of folks without health insurance in America went up in 2018 for the first time in nine years. You won't be surprised at the main culprit -- a drop in public health insurance program coverage under a reactionary Administration -- nor will you be surprised that Southern and Hispanic children seem to get hit harder. Boy, it sure is a good thing our President promised really great health care for everyone, and then said he'd do something about high drug prices before declaring that high drug prices were all Medicare's fault. Also, too, why is he so desperate to annihilate pre-existing condition bans? Pre-existing condition bans are the one thing about Obamacare everyone likes. Oh, I guess that's our answer.