Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning government shutdown dramas.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a clean government-funding bill without drama, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion without using it to keep handing out corporate welfare, and reject any attempt to slash IRS funding. 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.

It’s government shutdown week again, so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject cuts to programs good Americans actually need and fund our government without hysteria or drama. This is typical right-wing garbage: wail about TEH DEFICITZ!!!!! and then punch working families in the face while leaving cutting corporate welfare intact. But any one of us, at any time, might need food stamps or Head Start or, you know, affordable housing that doesn’t have lead paint in it – yes, this is what our Best and Brightest Leaders Ever have proposed to do! But cut tax breaks for corporations that outsource our jobs overseas? Republicans would never! And that’s why we fight them 24-7.

It gets worse! The National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021, the one that put $250 or $300 checks per child every month in working families’ bank accounts – but Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk not to extend corporate welfare handouts. Rumor has it Republicans might support the former to get the latter, but we don’t have to have both to get one done! There’s negotiation, and then there’s hostage-taking; holding CTC expansion to corporate welfare is hostage-taking, and the parties can talk about their numbers in our House and Senate all they want, but they’re supposed to negotiate with us, not each other. No law on Earth compels us to accept a side dish of shit with our steak.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any Republican attempt to slash IRS funding. Don’t believe any BS that added IRS funding “gives them the ability to come after little people,” because hello! Our IRS was so underfunded they could only go after us “little people,” because we can’t hire million-dollar lawyers to get us off the way rich folks and corporations can! Strange that Republicans have stopped saying even that; it’s like they looked at the 2022 election results and found out that it didn’t get them enough votes! Most of us Americans, once we clear out all the distractions Our Glorious Elites force down our throats, understand that taxes pay for things we all use and rich people and corporations need to pay a lot more in taxes than working families do.

Action: concerning marriage, lead poisoning, and campaign spending.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, tell our Interior Department to keep lead out of bullets and tackle used to hunt and fish on public lands, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the DISCLOSE Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act. Our House passed it a few weeks ago, but our Senators won’t, unless we get in their grills about it. The Respect for Marriage Act would protect gay and interracial marriage protections from our Supreme Court’s recent thirst for overturning the precedents that protected them in the first place. No, really, Justice Thomas specifically called for our Court to use the Dobbs decision (which overturned Roe v. Wade) to overturn rulings protecting gay and interracial marriage! So when the mustache-twirling villains actually tell us what they’ll do, we have to stop them.

Mobilize 4 Change helps you tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to ban lead from bullets and fishing tackle that Americans use on public lands. Really, is this so much to ask? Not a hunting ban, or a bullet ban, but a lead bullet ban. Any right-winger who complains about this is a whiner, simple and plain. I mean, I think they’re whiners anyway, but I bet everyone thinks the lead-bullets-or-bust crowd are a bunch of whiners. But when we hunt animals with lead bullets or go fishing with lead bait on public land, that lead gets into animals that don’t get hunted, like, apparently, half of all bald eagles. And that lead also gets into the water that we drink and that fish swim in. Seriously, this is a bank shot.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 443, the DISCLOSE Act, which would force large organizations to disclose their biggest donors, particularly when they run ads about judicial nominations. The bill would also expand prohibitions against foreign financing of campaigns to digital media, in case you were worried the Russians would spend heavily on Facebook ads favoring Republicans this year. I can’t say that’s a dumb worry! Anyway, huge majorities of Americans favor more campaign finance disclosure, so we should get more of what we want for all our trouble, maybe?

Around the table: featuring some of the usual suspects -- monopolists, corporate welfare kings, weak Democrats.

Actual epidemiologist David Martinez, who's worked on both COVID vaccines and COVID treatments, informs us that future COVID vaccines will have to adapt to (and predict) new COVID variants. Flu shots do this now, and they don't always predict ascendant variants perfectly because, as they say, the future is the hardest thing to predict. But better to go with what we know works, and to improve on what works, than to trust the "truth" of social media "influencers" looking for eyeballs, or right-wing media "personalities" who gin up rage for ratings.

Matt Stoller discusses how banksters are "gobbling up" baby formula manufacturing corporations like that won't make our problems even worse. Along the way he presents even more evidence of monopolists saying I want higher prices out loud. And yet folks still blame higher wages and/or more government spending for inflation, and I don't think they're "not getting it," I think they don't want to get it. But let them be complicit with this massive income-redistribution-upward scheme -- we can shame and shun them once they're out in the open, and then God'll sort 'em out at the Pearly Gates.

Ho hum, Atlantic City casinos plead pandemic-related poverty to get corporate welfare, and good citizens suffer, since cities run on tax dollars, after all, and if big corporations pay less, regular Americans pay more. And the crushing irony? The casinos actually did what any self-respecting corporation would do -- invest more heavily in online gambling after predicting that its on-site gambling would plummet due to COVID -- and still demanded, and got, the PILOT tax break! I guess right-wingers will tell us next that they "earned" the tax cut by doing the right thing! Tell that to the good citizens of Atlantic City who have one real grocery store in the casinos' shadow and whose kids have the highest level of lead exposure in the Garden State.

The National Rifle Association planned to hold a massive fundraiser at a farm owned by a nominal Democrat running for Senate in Missouri. Said candidate, Trudy Busch Valentine (yeah, of those Busches), apparently convinced the farm's board to cancel the event, but only after the Intercept published its article, and ain't no scrubbing 15 years of her family funneling money to the NRA. Actual Democrat Lucas Kunce should run ads about this, in addition to all the legitimate issues (monopolies, financial predators) he can run winning ads about. Only the furthest right folks in America still approve of the NRA, after all, and there ain't enough of them to win elections on their own; all we need to beat them is a Democrat who stands for something other than "winning," which is all a lot of losing Democrats (like Ms. Valentine) stand for.

The Biden Administration will forgive any remaining federally-backed debt owed due to attendance at the notorious Corinthian Colleges, the for-profit college chain which went defunct in 2015 after a raft of corruption-related allegations. Forgiveness, here, includes both the end of future loan payments and a rebate for past loan payments on still-outstanding loans, and this money will go mostly to folks who went to Corinthian for vocational training, exactly the folks who too often get left out of the student loan debt conversation. Now cue some crying from Marco Rubio, who called Corinthian Colleges a "constituent" back in the day, a label he has never affixed to any good Floridians who got the shaft from Corinthian.

Finally, yes, Virginia, Republicans have actually advanced a climate change "plan" that consists almost entirely of corporate welfare to the fossil fuel industry. "Streamlining permitting" mostly means "skipping reviews that would catch and prevent pollution," and the Republican plan doesn't actually set any goals for reducing emissions -- after all, why would you ever want to measure your progress? -- so you'd be right to wonder if Republicans simply concocted the worst plan they could think of, just so they could gin up rage about it. Shouldn't work, right? People hate pollution, after all! Still, Republicans have created a new constituency out of book banning this year, so I can't say they'll fail here.

Action: concerning law and order, food safety, abortion rights, cluster bombs, and social media.

Long story short: tell governments to end cash bail, tell our FDA to limit lead in fruit juice, tell your state legislators not to restrict abortion rights, tell President Biden to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and tell your pension fund to support shareholder resolutions that would rein in Facebook's bad behavior. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell our state, local, and federal governments to end cash bail. Don't listen to the loud voices saying how can cops do their job without cash bail? If you can't do your job without holding people indefinitely without trial, then you need to find a new job. Our Constitution guarantees your right to a "speedy trial," not a "trial whenever we get around to it so we can reassure the weak we're doing something about crime." Certainly you have a right to a speedy trial even if you don't have a crapload of money! And if a poll tax is unconstitutional, why isn't cash bail?

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to put a stricter limit on lead in fruit juice. Our FDA has proposed lowering the current limit on lead in fruit juice from 50 parts per billion to 10 ppb for apple juice and 20 for other juices, but manufacturers are perfectly capable of meeting a more stringent 1 ppb limit -- even if they say it'll "cost them money"! -- and that lower limit sure would be a whole lot better for folks who drink it. Especially kids! They'd have a lot less brain damage, cancer, and diabetes, that's for sure, and thus a longer life, with more potential for doing big things. That is what America's about, after all.

With the impending reversal of Roe v. Wade, Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators not to restrict the right to abortion. I've been loathe to criticize pro-lifers in the past -- though not pro-life politicians, particularly the ones who make their mistresses get abortions! -- but I suspect a lot of pro-lifers simply don't understand that (for example) a woman who tries to carry her fetus to term, but has to abort it because it'll kill her if she doesn't, isn't a "murderer." When it happens to them, perhaps they'll get it, but I wouldn't wish that on anyone, and if I can get it -- having absolutely no chance at ever getting pregnant myself -- then why can't they?

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to join the world cluster bomb ban, particularly now that Russia and Ukraine are using cluster bombs on each other. Over 100 nations have banned cluster bombs by signing onto the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but of course we're not one of them. Seems to me that if you're a law-and-order adherent, you'd oppose cluster bombs. Why? Because they kill people long after the war is over, which is neither lawful nor orderly. Let's not become so decadent a civilization that we beat our chests about how lawful we are but then let unexploded bombs kill people 50 years after we've all forgotten we were ever enemies.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell your pension fund to vote in favor of shareholder resolutions that would curb Facebook's ability to injure our civilization, i.e., with their algorithms that help white supremacists find each other easily. Now, because Mark Zuckerberg gives him and his cronies 10 votes for every vote everyone else casts, the resolutions won't win. But they rarely do! Even a resolution that gets 25% demonstrates that shareholders might be willing to take their money elsewhere, and executives tend to poop their pants at that thought. Maybe I should put the image of Mark Zuckerberg pooping his pants in folks' heads more often.

Action: concerning clean water, forced arbitration, scientific integrity, corruption, and plastic pollution.

Long story short: tell your Philadelphia City Council to replace lead-contaminated drinking fountains, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act and the Scientific Integrity Act, ban members of Congress from trading in defense stocks, investigate corruption allegations against Postmaster General DeJoy, and pass the Reducing Waste in National Parks 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.

Philadelphia residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your City Councilmember to pass Bill # 220221, which would force the city school district to replace all drinking fountains in schools with lead-filtering ones by 2025. That's because a recent study found 98% of Philly school drinking fountains had lead in them, and recall that no amount of lead in drinking water is safe, and that any amount of lead a child ingests can cause brain damage. So doing something about this shouldn't be this difficult, particularly since the American Rescue Plan Act delivered an extra $1.1 billion to Philly public schools and the district would only have to spend (per Penn Environment) around $6 million of that to fix the problem. But politicians won't do the right thing unless we demand it.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. I don't want to downplay the importance of the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act; it is a major piece of legislation, and I don't think I ever described the Affordable Care Act with that phrase. But why not press your advantage? Forced arbitration is unjust in every contract, for every reason -- and if arbitration is so great, why do corporations force you to use it? If you want to band together in a class action suit with other similarly-wronged folks, why should corporations get to stop you? Because they "deserve" more say than you? They don't -- but they'll get it, if we don't speak out.

Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 849, the Scientific Integrity Act. The Scientific Integrity Act would force Executive3 branch agencies to create (and enforce!) a scientific integrity plan that keeps politics out of scientific decisions. After all, we just had President Troll pack EPA scientific boards with corporate polluter hacks, and that's not the kind of thing that free people should have to put up with. The bill would also keep political employees from muddying up scientific data and give whistleblowers more power to expose wrongdoing. Oh, and it ain't just about the EPA: our Food and Drug Administration sure hasn't earned a reputation for sobriety as of late, what with their greasing the skids for the Alzheimer's drug that may not even work. So, yeah, let's put a stop to that kind of thing.

Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban members of Congress from trading in defense stocks. Why can't we cut the defense budget, even though we spend more money than the next 8 nations combined and still never feel secure? It couldn't be because nearly 50 members of Congress have almost $7 million in investments in defense contracting corporations, could it? I'm still appalled how cheaply people can be bought -- yes, $7 million is a lot of money even when divided among 50 individuals, but you know that's a drop in the budget next to our annual defense budget, meaning that defense contracting corporations can purchase a lot of legislative power for their buck. We need to make a world where our leaders avoid even the appearance of evil.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy for yet another potential conflict-of-interest, this one concerning the free COVID tests our Postal Service delivered to our houses. Turns out Mr. DeJoy owned stock in one of the corporations that supplied COVID testing kits to the public, and didn't divest himself of said stock; some folks no doubt think this is no big deal, but owning stock in a corporation that might get work from our Postal Service while you're running said Postal Service is an invitation to corruption, the kind of thing our laws proscribe precisely because we don't want such corruption to happen. America may be the get-ahead country, but we don't want it to be the get-over country, and that's why we fight corruption.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5533/S. 2960, the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act, which would ban single-use plastics in our national parks. Not just because you don't want to see that while you're hiking or climbing, but because our national parks protect a lot of our clean air and clean water, not to mention ecosystems you don't see anywhere else. And seriously, how many cheap plastic bags do you need at the Sequoia National Park? There are plenty of alternatives to plastic bottles, coffee cups with plastic lids, and take-out containers, and the internet is anxious to tell you all about them. I suppose some folks must oppose a bill like this, but I suspect they're the same folks who think freedom is mainly all about being as obnoxious as possible and preventing others from shunning you for it.

Action: concerning pollution, worker safety, clean water, and dumping Fox News.

Long story short: tell Brazil to reverse an Amazon-killing rail project, tell our Postal Service to use electric trucks, tell the Biden Administration to protect Chaco Canyon, tell UPS to treat its injured workers better, tell our EPA to get all the lead pipes out of our water, and tell big telecom corporations to stop carrying Fox News in their cable packages. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell the government of Brazil to reverse course on building the Ferrogrão railway project, which would cut through indigenous lands and destroy nearly a thousand kilometers of Amazon rain forest. Naturally Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro -- who, with Donald Trump out of power, may rank as the world's worst political leader -- doesn't care about indigenous peoples, or about the ancient that do more to fight climate change than perhaps any other spot on Earth, but we care, and frankly we matter more than he does. And, frankly, so do the indigenous people who have heroically fought the Bolsonaro government. At least, in a sane, decent, and moral society, that would be true. But we must work to create and preserve that society every day of our lives. Hence we do it here, regardless of what he or his corporate cronies want.

Penn PIRG helps you tell the Board of Governors of our U.S. Postal Service to change direction on their new fleet of mail trucks and make them all electric instead of gas-guzzling. That'll have a big effect on climate change, since these trucks go all over the country every day. Now some right-wingers will do a victory lap after saying all mail trucks use electricity from coal ha ha ha snort. But even the electric mail trucks that would run in West Virginia (the only state that gets nearly all its energy from coal) won't be pumping tailpipe carbon emissions into our air, and in states that use more renewables, of course, running those trucks will cause even fewer climate emissions. This is progress! Right-wingers want you to let the perfect to murder the good, so that you never do good. We've gotta fight that.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell our Department of the Interior to keep mining and drilling out of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park and its surroundings. By now you may be able to recite the reasons why we'd do that -- mining and drilling pollutes the water, pollution kills wildlife, Chaco has religious significance to nearby Native nations. The Biden Administration has proposed a 20-year ban on new gas and oil leases within a 10-mile radius of Chaco, but we'd like that to extend rather past that, ideally to "forever." I've said it before and I'll say it again: when you blow up land that folks lived on for thousands of years, that land is gone, forever -- and the fuel you'll make from it will be gone almost as quickly, as will the money you make from it. As far as renewable energy, the sun may set and the wind may die, but they always come back.

More Perfect Union helps you tell UPS to stop retaliating against injured workers and start doing right by them. UPS runs a lot of warehouses, as you know, and its workers handle a lot more heavy packages than you or I do, so they get hurt a lot -- and UPS tries to keep them on the job, or catch them in "lies" so they can fire them (if you get asked 50 times exactly what time you got hurt, you think you'll give exactly the same answer 50 times?), or send them to Concentra, a corporate clinic chain that apparently specializes in pushing workers back to work without giving them basic health care like X-rays or MRIs. Not for nothing, but Concentra has close to three dozen complaints on the Better Business Bureau website, where they're ranked one star out of five. UPS needs to do better.

Environmental Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to get all the lead pipes out of our water systems. There's money to do that now, thanks to the infrastructure bill Congress passed last year, but our EPA still has to mandate that the lead pipes be gone, or else we risk losing some of that money. There's literally no benefit to having lead pipes in our waterways -- lead leaches out of those pipes and into our water eventually, and there's no safe amount of lead one can imbibe, because any amount of lead can cause brain damage, which then leads to other intractable health problems. You know how you get preventive health care for no additional cost now? Well, we should also get clean water from our government at no additional cost.

Inequality Media helps you tell big cable corporations to take the Fox News Channel off the air. It's not censorship! Censorship is when our government takes something off the air; good Americans joining together to pressure private corporations to take something off the air is just the churn of civilization. And no, Fox doesn't have a First Amendment right to get carried by other big corporations! If folks really want to diddle their rage glands all day, they can go find Fox News on the internet, where big telecoms should deliver all files at the same speed (per net neutrality principles); needless to say, we'd fight algorithms that shove Fox News down your throat. We've got to win civilization every day.

Action: concerning vaccines, clean water, Arctic drilling, and conservation.

Long story short: tell President Biden to pressure Moderna to share its vaccine technology with the rest of the world, tell our EPA to replace all lead-lined water pipes, tell our FDA to vigorously regulate agricultural wastewater, and tell our government to flatline an Arctic drilling project and protect old-growth trees everywhere in America. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to pressure Moderna to share its COVID-19 vaccine technology with the rest of the world. And by "pressure," I would mean "remind them that you can, by law, simply take charge of the patent and force them to share their tech with the rest of the world." You've heard that South African scientists had to reverse-engineer the patent from scratch? Great job, and I'm sure their travails will make a great HBO miniseries one day, but why should it have even been necessary? Someone already figured it out and decided to make the most amount of money possible from it, so millions of folks all over the world have to die? I swear the worship of mammon will kill us all one day, if it hasn't doomed us already. But in the meantime, duty is duty.

Environmental Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to replace all lead-lined water lines in America within a decade. The infrastructure bill passed last year will spend more money on lead-pipe removal than we've ever spent at any time in our history, and that's good, but our EPA still should establish the legal goal of getting rid of all the lead pipes in America, because that'll make it less likely that some of that money gets diverted to, ah, purposes not exactly related to lead-pipe removal. And any amount of lead in your drinking water causes brain damage, and we could have as many as 24 million children drinking water with toxic levels of lead in it, so the need is dire, and our EPA needs to recognize that, and our EPA also needs to require that we remedy it.

Staying with clean water for the moment, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to enact the most vigorous agricultural water requirements possible. Meaning what? Meaning big ag corporations have to work harder to keep the animal feces out of the water they use on their crops, and therefore our water, since it all winds up at the same place. It took our CDC nearly eight years to link two 2014 listeria outbreaks -- which hospitalized 22 good Americans and killed three -- to agricultural wastewater. Our CDC further estimates that close to 50 million Americans will get food poisoning this year, and 3,000 will die from it. And nobody laid up in a hospital with a disease they didn't need to get wants to hear that the way we do things now keeps your food cheap!

Both the Wilderness Society and the Center for Biological Diversity help you tell the Biden Administration to scuttle any plans they might have to restart the notorious Willow Project in the Western Arctic Ocean. The Trump Administration green-lit the program in 2020, and like a lot of Trump Administration projects, a judge stopped it because (and stop me if you've heard this one before!) the Administration didn't do the environmental reviews required by law before giving the project the green light. But this is yet another oil-drilling project in an area of the world we don't know enough about to drill in safely. You know the drill: frigid waters, fragile ecosystems, other sectors of the economy (hello, salmon fishing!) that could get injured or wiped out. But you still gotta say things to your government a couple of times (or a couple hundred times!) before they get it.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell the Biden Administration to protect old growth trees from logging wherever they may be in America. I've trumpeted the thousand year-old trees in the Tongass many times in this space, but they're not the only old-growth trees we've got -- we have many pines, junipers, oaks, and sequoias that old (and older) in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, and our oldest trees are some of our best climate-change fighters, given that they've been absorbing carbon dioxide far longer than you or I have been alive. And most of these trees only die when they get batted around by severe weather or someone injures them. And I keep saying this, but when they're gone, they're gone, and the money we get from cutting them down will never last as long, or do as much good.

Action: concerning Israel and Palestine, Amazon rainforest oil, heavy metals in foods, airline refunds, and fairer pay for flight attendants.

Long story short: tell Israel to end its apartheid against Palestine, tell California to stop importing oil from the Amazon rainforest, tell our FDA to vigorously limit heavy metals in foods, tell our DOT to force airlines to give refunds for cancelled flights, and tell airline corporations to pay flight attendants fairly for all the work they do. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to end his nation's apartheid against Palestine. I hate to use that word, but for close to 50 years the word has had a meaning in international law; per the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, apartheid refers to certain crimes "committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime." That's the Israel/Palestine relationship in a nutshell, and if you're only thinking of the bad things Palestinians do, recall that Israel holds all the power in this relationship. You have heard, perhaps, that Mr. Bennett would be even less sympathetic to this call than his predecessor. Duty calls nonetheless.

Stand.Earth helps you tell California to stop getting oil imports from the Amazon. Now, you can think of a very good reason to stop buying Amazon oil right off the top of your head -- because the Amazon rain forest is the best carbon emissions sink we have on Earth, and what do you think oil drilling will do to all of that? But if you're a regular reader of this blog, you know there's another damn good reason to boycott Amazon oil: because that irredeemable asshole President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil wants to completely destroy the Amazon (and the numerous indigenous folks who live there) by turning it into money he and his cronies will never live long enough to spend. You certainly wouldn't want to enable him! So save the planet, certainly, but also poke Mr. Bolsonaro in the eye. He deserves no better.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to set vigorous limits on heavy metals in food. Consumer Reports has lately found high levels of heavy metals such as lead and arsenic in almost one-third of popular herbs and spices, and if you're like me, you put that stuff in your food without even thinking about it! And this is like a lot of things: do it once and you'll probably get away with it, but do it many times and you'll have serious health issues. And so will your children -- they're even worse at just "getting the lead out" of their bodies than we adults are. Our FDA doesn't actually plan to consider this question until 2024. I don't need to tell you what else might happen in 2024 that ensures it never gets done. So let's prod them into doing the right thing now.

US PIRG helps you tell our Department of Transportation (or DOT) to force big airline corporations to give cash refunds for cancelled trips. Airlines have cancelled at least 20,000 flights just since Christmas Eve -- it wasn't that long ago! -- and I don't care whether that was because all of their workers had the omicron variant or not; if you can't provide a service you promised to make, you need to make it right, particularly when you're sitting on a mountain of cash with which you can make it right. It's a shame we even need to tell our Department of Transportation to do this! Big airline corporations should care enough about you to do it on their own! Of course, they're just another sector of our economy that thinks it's so indispensable it can do what it wants. But they ain't bigger than us.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Change.org helps you tell big airline corporations to pay flight attendants for the time they spend helping folks board the plane. It wasn't that long ago I was on a plane, so I remember the flight attendants being right there when I boarded, and to hear they make as little as $2 an hour for that even though they're supposed to be there was more than a little sickening. People think flight attendants don't do anything if they're not handing out peanuts and booze, but a lot of work goes on that either folks don't see or folks take for granted. I don't even take saying hello to me as I board a plane for granted; I don't know if I could greet a hundred people in a row nicely. If we are in that era where service is the main things folks have to sell, then folks ought to at least be well-paid for it.

Action: concerning drug prices, clean water, animal abuse, public lands, and family separation.

Long story short: tell our Department of Health and Human Services to allow generic manufacturing of an overly-expensive cancer drug, tell our EPA to get the lead out of our drinking water, tell Facebook to stop allowing illegal endangered wildlife sales, tell our government to keep copper miners out of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, and tell our Department of Homeland Security to reunite families separated at the border. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell HHS Secretary Becerra to permit generic manufacturing of Xtandi, which its manufacturer currently sells for $400 a pill -- in America, at least! In other nations (including Japan, where Xtandi's manufacturer, Astellas Pharma, has its headquarters), it "only" charges about one-fifth of that, and I put "only" in quotation marks because that's still $80 a pill; allowing a generic of Xtandi would likely cut that price to $3. And our HHS can do that, using the "march-in" rights granted by the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act; most of us would say that our government should take control of a drug if the corporation that manufactures it is charging us an arm and a leg for it. I think we would say that even if Mitch McConnell calls it "socialism" or "communism." So let's do it.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to get the lead out of our drinking water. Just so happens our EPA is mulling this very thing, and for good reason -- basically any exposure to lead also exposes you to brain damage (and the developmental problems that come with it), and the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended a standard of less than one part lead per billion. Yes, that infrastructure bill provides a lot of funding for removing lead pipes, but you would hate for that money to get wasted in the wrong places just because some Congressperson or other had an outsized influence on the matter; if our EPA can contribute solid research telling us where the most lead pipes are, for example, that would help forestall such a tragedy. Wasted money here will be wasted life.

Avaaz helps you tell Facebook to ban sales of illegal endangered wildlife species on its platform. Or, as they put it, "make the illegal wildlife trade extinct" -- which spells MIWTE, so we won't think of putting that on a red hat, but still, it's a worthwhile goal for a civilized people. As we speak, only 7,000 cheetas exist in the wild, but unsavory types have sold over 4,000 more on Facebook! Don't succumb to the temptation to feel sorry for Facebook -- just like most evil people, their whole M.O. is to stoke drama, and if they can get attention for promising to make it better just like every wife-beater does when they're cornered, all the better. Still, the Big Stick of Bad PR can save lives here -- if we but wield it against Facebook. Saying most people oppose animal abuse wouldn't be a reach.

Both Environmental Action and MoveOn help you tell our Bureau of Land Management to protect the famous Boundary Waters Wilderness from copper mining. Copper's an intensely useful mineral -- if our hospital tabletops were still made of copper, we might have had a much easier time with this pandemic! -- but if you get a finite amount of a useful material by permanently damaging an otherwise renewable resource, then you're doing resource management wrong. And the Boundary Waters Wilderness -- so named because it straddles the border between Ontario and Minnesota -- contains over a thousand lakes and over a thousand miles of rivers and streams, and covering as it does around 1,700 square miles (an area bigger than Rhode Island), when pollution gets in one area, it's going to get to the others. We'd want to prevent that.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell our Department of Homeland Security to reunite families separated at the border. You can amend the ACLU's comment tool as you see fit, but certainly we should demand that the Biden Administration reunify separated families and give them the due process they deserve -- which includes counseling for their suffering and accountability for those who caused it. Family separation was Trump Administration policy, but it's now the Biden Administration's problem to fix, and they ain't going as fast as justice demands. Luckily they're asking the American people to fix it for them, and I'm sure a few rage-heads will write comments I'd prefer not to contemplate, but I suspect the vast majority of Americans don't want families separated no matter where they're from. We were all from somewhere else once, after all.

Action: concerning, at least one more time, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Senators to get the lead out of our drinking water, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, invest in the care economy, enact paid family/medical leave, let Medicare negotiate drug prices, and expand Medicare. 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.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Senators to ensure that the Build Back Better Act protects our clean water by funding lead pipe removal. As you know, the infrastructure bill President Biden signed begins the work of getting the lead out of our water pipes, but will by no means finish that work, which is why the Build Back Better Act needs to finish that work. I'm reminded, in the wake of Donald Trump whining that Republicans shouldn't have passed that infrastructure bill, that Mr. Trump's own infrastructure plan was to use $150 billion in tax cuts to "attract" $1 trillion in investment -- in exactly the kinds of "infrastructure" that makes money for some boss-man but doesn't actually help anyone. Getting the lead out of our drinking water helps everyone, so let's finish the job on that.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Senators to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. Here I'm reminded that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) made loud noises about the cost of the bill when she originally spoke about it, but drew all her red lines around the parts that would have paid for the bill, like raising tax rates on the wealthy and on corporations! Doing that kind of bait-and-switch does open you up to the charge of being a liar, and in a sane, moral, and decent society, she would be so ashamed of what she's done that she wouldn't run for re-election. Why do I get the sense she's even more immune to shame than many of her colleagues? Anyway, that's why we keep doing what we do.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senators to ensure that the Build Back Better Act funds the "care economy," i.e., things like child care and home care. Cutting child care costs in half would be, as a famous philosopher once said, a big fucking deal, and I guess it's gratifying that Senators Manchin and Sinema haven't spoken out about any desire they might have to kill it, but I sure hope I haven't summoned a demon by saying that. And again: child care subsidies aren't "communism." Ask anyone who says so what they would do about child care corporations jacking up the cost of child care simply because they can -- that is, because almost all two-parent families have two working parents. Just remember: if they respond by saying "that's a discussion we should have," they're signaling that it's a discussion they're never going to have.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help you tell your Senators to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Sen. Manchin is the 50th Democratic Senator who opposes this one; he says he'd like to pass something more "bipartisan," and more specifically something that relies more on payroll taxes, but he doesn't really think Mitch McConnell will allow that to happen, does he? And frankly our House's four-week paid family/medical leave plan is better, since it doesn't rely on regressive payroll taxes for funding. (Not incidentally, it also doesn't violate President Biden's requirement that the bill raise zero taxes on folks making less than $400,000 annually.) Now, previous paid family/medical leave bills did rely on payroll taxes, and they weren't onerous, but why do the worse thing if you can do the better thing?

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, Penn PIRG, and More Perfect Union all help you demand that your Senators put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. This was the other pay-for Kyrsten Sinema drew a red line against: the notion that Medicare could actually save the taxpayer money by negotiating for lower drug prices for American seniors. Seems the only folks who favor higher drug prices for seniors are the big pharma execs and the politicians who take their money. And when big pharma CEOs say that Medicare drug price negotiation will "cripple innovation," just remember that innovation only comes from necessity, not from comfort. Also remember that folks who have all the money don't "innovate" anything except how to get more money.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Joe Manchin doesn't like this, either, and to justify his opposition he mouthed a bunch of word salad about making sure Medicare is solvent first. Maybe he was just trying to avoid saying that he's been collecting a lot of money lately from big Republican donors with whom he previously had no connection. I should say that he and Sen. Sinema have been doing that, of course, and folks who shrug and say money talks really need to ask themselves: should politicians only listen to big donors? Politicians have to listen to their real bosses, their constituents, and most good Americans would have their Senators vote differently on a lot of these matters.

Action: concerning, at least once more, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to get the lead out of our drinking water, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, invest in the care economy, enact paid family/medical leave, let Medicare negotiate drug prices, and expand Medicare. 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.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the Build Back Better Act protects our clean water by funding lead pipe removal. The bill our President signs today provides some funding for that purpose, but not enough, and it's not "cheating" to make this bill provide the rest, it's doing the right thing, a thing we ought to encourage our Congressfolk to do more. Their excuse for cutting lead pipe removal funding, of course, would be "the BIF already does it, so why do we need to do it again?" I just explained why; now we all need to explain why to our Congressfolk. Opposing clean water is politically difficult, but Kyrsten Sinema, for one, thinks she's the greatest political operator ever, so I wouldn't put it past her to do it. That makes what we're doing a, er, pre-emptive strike.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. The American people approve of raising these taxes on the rich and on corporations at a near-supermajority level, so the 51 Senators who oppose it aren't "being bipartisan" or "just trying to get things done," they're actively trying to subvert the people's will, which is the precise opposite of their job. It's that damn simple, and all the damn drama ruins everything. I speak, of course, of the drama where politicians try to prove they're "essential" by throwing a wrench in everything that isn't "bipartisan" enough, by which I actually mean "doesn't capitulate to Republicans enough." They should think about capitulating to the people. Because that's their job.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the Build Back Better Act funds the "care economy," i.e., things like child care and home care. The fact that this plank of the Build Back Better Act has made it this far tells me this was a big priority for Joe Biden, but now that Joe Manchin is playing Henny Penny about the inflation rate, it's in as much danger of being cut (or cut out) as anything else. But we have to start investing in Americans again. Folks who think infrastructure is only about roads or bridges are shallow; they don't understand how we actually build civilizations. Of course roads and bridges are infrastructure, but without people, people who will fight for and maintain the values we pass on to our children, a civilization can't exist. Some people would like that! But they don't deserve veto power.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Again, part of building a civilization is treating its people right, and being literally the only highly-developed country that doesn't guarantee paid family/medical leave to all its citizens is pretty much the opposite of treating people right. Joe Manchin's fretting about "the cost" is especially offensive here -- previously, Kirsten Gillibrand's bills funded it with a tiny payroll tax, one that would have cost the worker making $50,000 annually a mere $8/month. $8! And don't let anyone tell you that because people abuse the Family Medical Leave Act (which provides unpaid leave), we shouldn't pass this. Better to simply fight fraud, than to give up on civilization because fighting fraud is hard.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, Penn PIRG, and More Perfect Union all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. More Perfect Union also helps you tell your Congressfolk to make sure a $35/monthly cap on insulin prices stays in the Build Back Better Act; that's a big deal, since Americans pay way, way, way too much for insulin, which is a life-saving medicine, after all. Our House is apparently reinserting Medicare drug price negotiation into their version of the Build Back Better Act -- and since this would save the taxpayer money, it'd make the impending CBO score look much better -- so let's make sure everyone knows the American people's will is more important than Kyrsten Sinema's will, or Bob Menendez's will.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Democrats have gone with a different approach than I would have done, by improving health care services here and there, rather than, say, passing Medicare-for-All health insurance (and hate to beat a dead horse, but I've offered more than one viable funding mechanism in this space). Anyway, that doesn't mean the improvements they'd make aren't worth making -- but nor does it mean we shouldn't ask for more, like dental and vision care for seniors and reducing the eligibility age from 65 to 60. When we ask for more, people like Joe Manchin have to give you more. Hell, asking for anything has brought him further left than he'd like to go. So we ought to keep doing that.

One more thing: ignore all the pablum about how inflation should give us pause about passing this bill. The causes of inflation right now are a) COVID and b) supply chain monopolies, and neither of these have anything to do with paid family/medical leave, Medicare drug price negotiation, or any of the other things we've described above; these items certainly haven't become "irresponsible" just because inflation's above six percent now. (I'm old enough to remember when inflation was double that, but I digress.) Yes, Joe Manchin probably will use it as an excuse to kill the bill outright now that he's cut it by more than two-thirds, but we're not supposed to game out "what Joe Manchin will do"; we're supposed to express our will until our representatives in House and Senate do our will. We're right, and they're wrong. That ain't changed. Republicans, and people like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, will always find some excuse to do the wrong thing sooner or later; the only antidote to their excuses, and their inaction, and their cowardice, and their malice, is our will, expressed in numbers they can't deny. So let's keep doing that.

Action: still in the shadow of the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to get the lead out of our drinking water, raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, stop obsessing about SALT caps, enact paid family/medical leave, let Medicare negotiate drug prices, and expand Medicare. 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.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the Build Back Better Act protects our clean water by funding lead pipe removal. Yeah, the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" the House just passed does do some of that, and that's not nothing, but we need to do more of it. And remember: if you don't have clean water, you don't have health care, period. And no clean water isn't something we "took care of" a long time ago and don't need regulations to take care of now -- we always have to take care of clean water, just as we always have to take care of the things we win. The fight for justice never ends; only right-wingers want you to believe that, and only about the things they hate. You see they're always fighting! And they'll come for your clean water if you let them.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. The Build Back Better Act as currently constructed doesn't whiff on these matters -- an effective 42% bracket on income over $10 million and a 45% bracket on income over $25 million, plus a 15% minimum corporate tax and a 1% stock buyback tax -- but my goals are always 91% on millionaire income and 55% on corporate profits over $1 million, and just because certain people don't want those rates to go up at all doesn't mean we should stop fighting for them. Don't worry about getting blamed for the bill's failure, because America already blames liberals for everything. Freeing, isn't it?

You may want to get on the phone with your Congressfolk and tell them not to make or break the Build Back Better Act over SALT caps (or caps on deducting state and local taxes). Tom Suozzi's red line (NO DEALZ WITHOUTZ TEH SALT CAPZ GONEZ!!!!!) ain't any less stupid than all of Kyrsten Sinema's red lines, and restoring state-and-local-taxes deductions to their pre-2017 levels will mainly benefit the very wealthy. Sen. Sanders (I-VT) has proposed eliminating the SALT cap only for Americans making less than $400,000 annually, and I think that's a good compromise, because most folks just don't care about rich folks in blue states getting their state and local tax deductions back, because gosh, they're just trying to eat. And Democrats want to be about that, right? It's hard to tell.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Our House Democrats are dutifully putting it back in the bill as we speak, and Joe Manchin must be laughing. "Didn't they hear me the first time I said no?" The more pertinent point is that Joe Manchin doesn't hear all the good Americans who say yes. And that's no less true in West Virginia (where the whole BBB agenda is very popular) than anywhere else! And if he wants to be an asshole, that doesn't mean you walk on eggshells around him -- it means you keep doing the right thing, and see if that keeps prompting him to be an asshole. We have to teach people not to enable assholes, after all.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, and Penn PIRG all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. You'll be happy to hear that Democrats have heard you about that -- putting a very, very small version of Medicare drug price negotiation back in the Build Back Better Act, one that would let Medicare negotiate drug prices for 10 drugs in 2025 and 10 more three years later, which is exactly the kind of reform that sounds like very weak tea now, but which folks will fight for when Republicans take control of either Congress or the Presidency again. There is absolutely no harm, however, in expressing your will for more comprehensive Medicare drug price negotiation. "Making bad Democrats lose elections" does not count as harm.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. This is the thing we've made the least progress upon, largely due (and stop me if you've heard this one before) to the bloviation of Joe Manchin, who wouldn't dare expand Medicare services until "we put Medicare on a more solid footing." Medicare, the program that's been around longer than I've been alive, longer, even, than Star Trek has been alive? What is it that keeps Medicare going? Oh, right -- the will of the American people, who have worked for it, paid into it, fought for it, and deserve to have it when they need it. These are all principles that seem to elude Joe Manchin, since he doesn't seem at all conversant in them.

One more thing: just because the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" is now law -- and yes, though it's a flawed bill, it's not a bad bill, and Democrats will no doubt spend the next ten months forgetting to take the credit they deserve to take for it! -- doesn't mean we still shouldn't act on the Build Back Better Act. Withholding a vote on the infrastructure bill was the Democrat liberal wing's best chance at getting "moderate" Democrats to acquiesce on the larger Build Back Better package, and now that that's gone, what can still hold "moderates" to doing the right thing? Oh, right, us -- the only thing that has ever made politicians do the right thing. So let's hold their feet to the fire, folks.

Action: concerning, once again, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations (including enacting a Billionaire's Tax) to pay for the Build Back Better Act, and make sure the Build Back Better Act lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, expands Medicare, funds paid family/medical leave, expands good Americans' access to clean water, and permanently expands the Child Tax Credit. 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.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pay for all of the Build Back Better Act by making the rich and corporations pay more taxes and include the "Billionaire's Tax" in the Build Back Better Act. These are not contradictory aims, unless we no longer include billionaires in the "rich," which is a day I hope I never see. Billionaires have made almost $2 trillion more during this pandemic, so while "moderate" Democrats whine about how much to cut the Build Back Better Act, billionaires sit back and laugh. We don't have a merit-based society anymore, not when a catastrophic pandemic actually makes the ultra-rich richer. The first step to rebuilding that merit-based society is restraining the power of the rich, because they run roughshod over our freedoms.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, and Penn PIRG all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act. Brook no more excuses or bad arguments from your Congressfolk! No more rubbish about "killing jobs" (don't make me do the right thing, or I'll fire all my workers!) or "price controls are bad" (like people would hate paying less for drugs!) or "it won't do any good" (even a blind infant could see that it will, which is why 80-90% of Americans want it!) or "it's not fiscally responsible" (ah, to let government to pay less taxpayer money for Medicare drugs?). And brook no more silence from certain Congressfolk, either (cough Kyrsten Sinema cough). If they're going to screw us over, we should at least make them explain themselves.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep the Medicare expansion in the Build Back Better Act. I know, it ain't Medicare-for-All, but I don't let the perfect murder the good, and lowering the Medicare age to 60 (which will bring more healthy people into the Medicare pool, and thus save Medicare money!) and giving seniors dental/vision/hearing care are both good works. And let Bernie Sanders teach you how to respond to the Joe Manchins of the world who complain about "everything being an entitlement": "does Senator Manchin really believe that seniors are not entitled to...hear and see properly?" And don't let the Joe Manchins pearl-clutch about "getting Medicare solvent first." Tax the rich harder and we can pay for it. Let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices and we can pay for it. This ain't rocket science.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. I'm gobsmacked that Democrats want to do this but don't want to advertise that they're doing it! How afraid can they really be that Republicans will whine WHEREZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!! Jesus Mary and Joseph Republicans have been whining that for longer than I've been alive; you have to prepare for those arguments. Paid family/medical leave will help everyone in America, and even big corporate CEOs know that, and have come around to supporting it in recent years, just like most other Americans do. And there are a million ways to pay for it (Sen. Gillibrand's bill originally would have levied a tiny payroll tax amounting to $8 a month for someone making $50,000 a year), but Republicans act like not wanting to do it means it doesn't exist. We need to stop letting them gaslight us.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1352/S. 916, the WATER Act. Just so happens the best way to do that right now is to get a strong Build Back Better Act passed (which means the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" also passes); the email tool in the link above reflects this reality. Currently the two bills would spend over $30 billion to replace lead water pipes, which is about the amount the WATER Act would require to get the job done. Any amount of lead causes brain damage in children -- it may not be an accident that crime rates have risen and fell with the rise and fall of lead emissions from cars! -- so we can't have lead pipes anywhere in America. Remember what Alexander Cockburn used to say: without clean water, you don't have health in America.

Finally, both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent in the Build Back Better Act. Just as we demand more from our coddled billionaires, we demand more relief for those of us who work hard at real jobs, raise families, and still have trouble making ends meet. Through no fault of our own, I should add -- what, we should all just become hedge fund managers? It seems like a no-brainer to make the CTC expansion permanent, not least because it's put $250 and $300 checks in good Americans' pockets every month since July of this year, yet some "moderate" Democrats oppose the expansion. Because doing so makes them look "tough"? Yeah, snatching a check out of some overworked, underpaid worker sure is tough. I will work to make such "toughness" dead and dishonored before I leave this world.

Action: concerning taxes, Social Security, Medicare, drug prices, clean water, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, expand Social Security, expand Medicare, lower drug prices, get the lead out of our nation's water pipes, and protect workers' rights. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. You've heard that big corporations have worked their nefarious will on Democrats by shrieking about "international competitiveness"? You've heard that Joe Manchin says he won't support a reconciliation bill over $1.5 trillion? Ain't nothing over until we say it is! If we say, in large enough numbers, that corporations and rich folks need to pay more taxes, then nothing corporate lobbyists or drama-hound Senators will matter. It's that simple! There is no law of physics that says "whatever Joe Manchin says goes." There is no law of physics that says "nothing can be done because there's just too much corporate money in politics." The only law of physics is the popular will. And we have to act like it.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security. Don't believe the hype that TEH SOSHUL SECURITIEZ IZ TEH INSOLVENTZ!!!! Big corporations trot that lie out every few years, in the hopes they will get their grubby hands on what you worked for, paid into, fought for, and deserve. Truth is we can make Social Security by expanding benefits, and we can shore up whatever hole might appear in the Social Security trust fund in 20 or 30 or 70 years' time by raising the ceiling on payroll taxes. Currently Social Security simply doesn't tax income over $142,000, when that's where all the money is! Seriously, lifting the income cap on Social Security's taxes will infuse a lot of life into the greatest pension there ever was. And like I said, Americans deserve to live a dignified retirement.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare in the budget reconciliation bill. Democrats have proposed lowering the Medicare age to 60, expanding coverage to dental, vision, and hearing care, and letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, which will save the taxpayer enough money to fund all the new coverage. And, frankly, lowering the coverage age to 60 will probably save some money, too, as folks do tend to be healthier at 60 than they are later. Indeed, we could very well apply the same logic to argue that Medicare should include everyone, since folks are also generally healthier when they're 20 or 40 than they are at 65 and up. And we will argue that! For now, we need merely argue that expanding Medicare is actually better, even if Chicken Littles say otherwise.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices for everyone. Why do big pharma corporations charge us more for the same drugs people get in Canada and England and France? Because they can, that's why! And they don't charge more money in those other nations because they can't. Letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would be a start -- Medicare buys drugs on behalf of over 60 million Americans, after all -- but we can do other things as well, like empower our government to produce generics of a drug if the manufacturing corporation won't lower the price. Hell, we can enact price controls, too! I don't know where "price controls" became this nasty epithet; a lot of good Americans would like our government to control drug prices.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1352/S. 916, the WATER Act, which would get the lead out of our drinking water pipes all over America. Don't hesitate to support the WATER Act just because you also supported H.R. 1376, the GET THE LEAD OUT Act, which essentially does the same thing -- it's more important right now for our Congressfolk to hear that we want the lead out of our water pipes, since the budget reconciliation blueprint passed by both Houses of Congress aims to do just that. And they need to hear that more than they hear "international competitiveness" or "ZOMG inflation" or "ZOMG the deficit," which is what the forces of evil are pummeling our Congressfolks' ears with as we speak. Like I said in today's earlier post, I hate it when horseshit wins. We are the horseshit killers.

Finally, both The Juggernaut Project and Daily Kos help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would repeal state-level "right-to-work" laws all over America -- the PRO Act's opponents act like that's a bad thing to do or something -- and would also protect workers from their bosses dragging them away from their important work and forcing them to watch anti-union propaganda. Because if you were treating your workers right, you wouldn't need to propagandize them against unions! One good thing about this pandemic? We demand more from our jobs than the back of our boss's hand. If we pass the PRO Act, we can get more of what we want from our jobs.

Action: concerning voting rights, clean water, saving our Post Office, pollution, corruption, and bad nominations.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, remove all lead water pipes in America, pass the Postal Service Reform Act, bring back the "Polluter Pays" tax, pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, and reject Rahm Emanuel's nomination as Ambassador to Japan. 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.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Our House passed H.R. 4 last week; now our Senate needs to follow suit, so that the Voting Rights Act can have some teeth again, after our Supreme Court knocked them out in Shelby County v. Holder. Our Court ruled, in that case, that the Voting Rights Act discriminated against Southern states in its pre-clearance formula (solely because more Black folks vote now than they did before the law, a line of reasoning the late Justice Ginsberg likened to throwing out your umbrella merely because it's stopped raining). Our Court also ruled that a pre-clearance formula that didn't discriminate against the South would pass their muster; hence H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a record of vote suppression to submit its voting law changes for Justice Department pre-clearance. Republicans will argue we don't need it, but the evidence of your own eyes will say otherwise.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to replace all lead water pipes in America. Just so happens the budget reconciliation blueprint passed by both House and Senate this month could do just that! And that's what we should demand from our Congressfolk -- the removal of all lead pipes. LCV estimates that $45 billion would get it done, and that's, frankly, not much higher than other bills (most famously the WATER Act) have aimed to allot. And when "moderate" Democrats come at you with "we're afraid to tax corporations more due to international competitiveness," you can come right back with so we should tolerate brain damage from lead pipes anywhere in America? Because that is what these irredeemable weaklings really stand for. And it's about time all Americans understood this dark calculus.

Progress America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076/S. 1720, the Postal Service Reform Act. The Postal Service Reform Act would address the real cause of our Postal Service's recent financial troubles -- namely, the mandate to pre-fund retirement benefits for the next 85 years, like literally no other entity, governmental or corporate, has to do. If you had to pre-fund 85 years of retirement funds, hopefully you wouldn't go around wondering why your pockets are empty all the time. Get rid of that absurd mandate, and most of our Postal Service's financial problems will fix themselves, and we won't have to cut services or hike prices (as Postmaster General DeJoy would do) or close Post Offices (as Congressfolk occasionally propose). Why should only stupid ideas get implemented in America?

US PIRG helps you tell your House Reps to reinstate the "polluter pays" tax, so that big polluting corporations have to pay to clean up their messes. You'll recognize the principle, no doubt, from childhood discussions/arguments with your parents: you make the mess, you clean it up. We all accept that as axiomatic these days, yet we don't make corporations pay to clean up their messes, even though their messes are bigger than any pile of dirty clothes you ever left sitting around. We don't make them clean up their messes, I guess, because of "international competitiveness," but seriously, we should tolerate pollution just so a corporation can "compete"? If that's the price of competition, give me cooperation. And maybe these corporations should talk to your mother about cleaning up their messes. If they're lucky, she won't be holding her wooden spoon.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. The Ban Conflicted Trading Act would prevent Congressfolk from trading in stocks and securities while they're in office. Because doing such a thing would be a conflict of interest the minute you did it, given that you'll likely be voting on issues that would affect your trading, whether you sat on a finance-related Congressional committee or not. Really, that is the standard to which we should hold ourselves -- even the stink of corruption should send us running in the other direction. Some people argue against passing such laws because they're "common sense." In doing so, they ignore the mountains of evidence that trading corrupts politicians, but they also miss the point -- laws like this wouldn't "insult common sense" so much as fight malice.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Rahm Emanuel to be Ambassador to Japan. What is this, a "lifetime achievement" award? If so, Mr. Emanuel's hardly earned it on the merits! He's been pushing corporatism on the Democratic Party for decades, and he marred his tenure as Mayor of Chicago with (among other things!) his aggression toward the city's education system, his cover-up of the Laquan McDonald shooting, and his privatization of city parking services. And after that record of "accomplishment," we'd put him in charge of relating to a nation with over 100 military bases and the third-biggest economy on Earth. Wasn't Michael Jordan available? He's more accomplished, after all.

Action: concerning taxes, drug prices, human rights, chemical safety, national monuments, and lead poisoning.

Long story short: tell Democrats to raise taxes on the rich, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Lower Drug Prices Now Act and stop selling weapons to Egypt, tell your Senators to pass the PFAS Action Act and reject the so-called Protect Utah’s Rural Economy Act, and tell our EPA to get the lead out of our water pipes. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell Democrats to tax the rich big-time in their upcoming budget reconciliation bill. Because you can talk about the Wealth Tax and the Millionaire Surtax and the like, but sometimes you just have to say tax the rich already! Now some Democrats are already like I can't raise taxes going into an election year! They're wrong: you can raise taxes on rich people who aren't paying enough in taxes whenever you like, because people actually like that -- as long as you defend what you're doing with some fierceness. Some of these Democrats don't know from fierceness, but that's why we're here -- where they lack it, we must give it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices already. Somehow they couldn't get this done along as part of the Affordable Care Act, but letting Medicare negotiate its own prices was popular then, and it's popular now. Plus it's a revenue raiser! Which is not only common sense -- forcing Medicare to pay higher prices for drugs costs more money, after all -- but is also supported by research. By right-wing research! The Koch-funded Mercatus Center infamously said it would save Medicare over $80 billion annually -- and remember, Mercatus wants Medicare dead.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop selling arms to Egypt, as well as to other countries with notorious human rights records. Just this past February, the Biden Administration approved a $197 million missile sale to Egypt only days after Egypt raided the homes of six relatives of an Egyptian-American activist. Imagine your government raiding the homes of your parents, your brother, your sister, your nephew, your aunt and uncle, and your grandmother! And then imagine some even larger country selling our government $200 million in guns the next day. Seem like a good idea? No, it does not. So let's stop enabling that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 2467, the PFAS Action Act. The House passed H.R. 2467 last week with 23 Republicans voting for it, some you already know (Brian Fitzpatrick) and some you'd never expect (Matt Gaetz); the bill would direct our EPA to designate PFAS chemicals -- also known as "forever chemicals" because they never seem to break down like other chemicals do! -- as the hazardous substances they clearly are, and would task our EPA with determining whether PFAS chemicals are also toxic pollutants, because that would require regulation under the Clean Water Act, and thus require our EPA to limit their discharge into our water, particularly our drinking water. There had damn well better be 10 Republicans who'll vote for this bill, and I don't want to hear any whining about "nanny states" from any of them.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject S. 31, the so-called Protect Utah’s Rural Economy Act. How would S. 31 "protect Utah's rural economy"? By freezing the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments at the size to which Donald Trump shrunk them as President. Really, that's all the bill does. If you remember that Mr. Trump shrunk these monuments only so that mining corporations could dig up those lands, then you'll probably be just as puzzled as I am that anyone could call this "protecting Utah's rural economy." It's rather like letting foxes have free reign over the henhouse and calling that "protecting our chickens." So let's kill this particular slab of stupid.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our EPA to get the lead out of our water pipes. Specifically, you'd ask our EPA to update its Lead and Copper Rule so that it gets lead pipes out of our water systems, since any amount of lead in your water can cause brain damage, particularly to children. Some Republicans probably want that, since it's their best show at ensuring future generations vote for them, but, luckily, they get literally no say in this matter. Well, they could pass a resolution of disapproval later on, but how would that make them look? It'd make them look objectively pro-dirty water and objectively pro-brain damage, and those aren't good looks. This should be a layup for our EPA, but we still have to tell them to go to the rim.

Action: another exciting edition of "all jobs, all day."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass better tax policy, better climate change policy, better clean water policy, better broadband policy, and better care economy policy, all so we can get good jobs legislation. 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.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy assures us that Joe Biden's tax proposals would do us all a lot of good, and I agree that they would -- particularly getting rid of the lower tax rate for capital gains and dividends, one of the most grievous injuries inflicted on the American people by the Bush Administration and that's saying something. So go ahead and call your Congressfolk and tell them you want capital gains and dividends taxed like income, since, you know, they are income. It couldn't hurt to remind them that the resulting revenue would help pay for jobs legislation. Don't brook any silliness from your right-wing Congressfolk about "dangerous tax increases." They act like all tax increases are dangerous. Tax increases on the rich aren't -- they help us restrain the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us.

You'll also want to remind your Congressfolk of the other ways we could fund jobs legislation. Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Wealth Tax on millionaire and billionaire estates, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a "millionaire's surtax," and the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act. Also, too, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Lower Drug Prices Now Act, since that would give Medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices, which would save upwards of $80 billion annually, which could also very easily fund jobs legislation. If you want to tell them to bring back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income -- you know, instead of telling them to institute the "millionaire's surtax" -- then go right ahead! If we all demand the 91% tax bracket, we may not get it -- but we'll certainly be more likely to get the millionaire's surtax.

Both Progress America and the League of Conservation Voters help you tell your Congressfolk that they must include better climate change policy in jobs bills. And what do you know? Better climate change policy not only fights pollution, but creates jobs. And prioritizing renewable energy over fossil fuels not only means fewer droughts and wildfires and hurricanes and heatwaves but less filth in our air and water. And we're going to need people to help us build a better way. No, "liberal" media pundits, we're not going to build a better way with robots! Too many people think robots are really far along in development, which is to laugh. But I'm one of those who think people are considerably more advanced than we used to be. Laugh if you like; we will move past you, and your cynicism will be cold comfort in your lonely old age.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to include funding for getting rid of lead pipes in any upcoming jobs legislation. You'd think Republicans would consider replacing poisonous lead pipes in our sewer systems "real" infrastructure spending, but they don't seem to care very much about that, even though lead poisoning equals brain damage in any child whose drinking water comes from a lead pipe. Maybe they don't care about it because That Only Happens to Those People, but clean water is actually fairly popular among Americans of all races and creeds, and dooming folks to poisoned drinking water should be electoral suicide. It'll only be so if we fight to get the lead out of our drinking water, and Democrats actually follow our lead.

Moms Rising and Social Security Works help you demand paid family/medical leave and better care economy funding, respectively, from upcoming jobs legislation. The United States is approximately last in the world in mandating paid family/medical leave for good Americans, and the care economy will be our future to a large degree, so we might as well ensure that jobs in the care economy are good jobs. Many Americans (and perhaps many more American politicians) still think taking care of the sick and infirm isn't "real work," when it's about the realest work you can imagine, and yes we deserve an America that rewards real work. You know, versus rewarding money machinations that just redistribute worker wealth upward to hedge fund managers. But we won't get that America unless we fight for it.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund expanded broadband in upcoming jobs legislation. We all saw how much we need high-speed broadband during this pandemic -- not just to keep working, but also to keep our children learning. Clearly it ain't just for streaming movies and TV shows anymore, and our government needs to start approaching it that way. And we're probably going to need high-speed broadband for work and school again, as roughly half the country continues to throw a tantrum about getting vaccinated. Nearly 70,000 new cases on Friday! Just like it was precisely one year ago, when they were throwing a tantrum about wearing masks. I'd prefer not to have a resurgent pandemic prove to our politicians how badly we need expanded broadband. But we should at least tell them, or they'll continue pretending they don't already know.

Finally, I'd like to say a few words about how I think the Biden Administration might really want this to play out -- not to demoralize you, but to prepare you. I think the Biden Administration split the jobs bill in two to split us in two, much as the Obama Administration held out the public health care option in 2009 in order to forestall any talk of expanding Medicare to include everyone. And just like they yanked the public option back when it came time to pass the Affordable Care Act, I also think the Biden Administration really wants the far more desirable reconciliation bill to fail, which also means they really want to lose both houses of Congress in 2022 so they can keep this interminable (but very lucrative, for some people) drama going between insane Republicans and spineless Democrats. You'd think Democrats would take a different lesson from recent events -- like, that Republicans are far too dangerous to ever have any kind of power again, anywhere. But if they won't, we have to make them learn that lesson, and we'll only do that if we speak out. We are the only people standing between America and oblivion. And we always have been. So let's step up and be heroes, today and every day.

Action: concerning jobs legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY) plans to move jobs legislation this week, so now's a good time to tell (or remind) your Senators what you want from jobs legislation. There'll be a lot of links today, so I'll keep this post relatively short, and of course you can simply use this post to make a list to your Senators in a phone call. First, we want to remind our Senators that we want to do the right thing with jobs legislation, so Daily Kos helps you tell Democrats to go big on jobs legislation, while Food and Water Action helps you tell your Senators to reject any privatization of public services in that legislation.

Next, we move to paying for the legislation, since right-wingers pretend to wring their hands over it and moderates pretend that you can pay for everything with "user fees." Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to make rich folks and corporations pay at least $4 trillion more in taxes over the next 10 years, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Wealth Tax on millionaire and billionaire estates, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a "millionaire's surtax," and the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act, which would free up some more money to pay for the projects we're going to describe in the next paragraph.

Finally, we move to the things we want jobs legislation to do -- things that will actually create jobs for people, even if they don't meet the Republican definition of "real infrastructure." Both Social Security Works and Public Citizen help you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare so that it covers vision, hearing, and dental care and also so that it covers folks from the age of 60, not 65. Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices -- which, since it would free up an extra $85 billion annually, would also count as a "pay-for." The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure renewable energy funding is a big part of jobs legislation. And both the League of Conservation Voters and Penn PIRG help you tell your Congressfolk to invest in getting the lead out of our water pipes. Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that jobs legislation includes funding for home- and community-based care and paid family/medical leave. And Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to include expanded broadband funding.

We should ignore the machinations our politicians have foisted on us -- how much of the legislation should be "bipartisan" and how much not, for example -- and simply communicate our will, in numbers they can't deny. Then we'll start to get what we want. People tell me I'm naive for believing this, but I've seen it happen many times. And when you see it happen even once, you want to see it happen all the time. Certainly as Americans we deserve to have it happen all the time. It's a lot better than politicians selling us out to their big donors like they usually do. But we won't get a thing if we don't speak out, and this is the week we absolutely must speak out, because if we do, we might get the best legislation we've seen in decades.

Good luck, and God bless.

Action: concerning voting rights, jobs, drug prices, the Child Tax Credit, Guantánamo Bay, and our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, go big on the American Jobs Plan, lower drug prices, and make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, and tell President Biden to close the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention center and fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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. Our Supreme Court blew a hole open in the Voting Rights Act, with their, shall we say, sunny claim that vote suppression isn't an issue in the South anymore, but our Court also said the Voting Rights Act's pre-clearance formula (which they struck down) would be OK as long as it didn't "discriminate" against the South. Hence the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would install a formula requiring any state or locality, anywhere, with a history of vote suppression to submit its voting rights law changes in advance to our Justice Department for pre-clearance. That would have stopped a lot of right-wing state legislative efforts to restrict the vote, though not all of them. Anyone who votes against this bill -- or worse, won't let it come to a vote because they don't even have the courage to vote against it -- deserves defeat, dishonor, shame, and shunning. We might as well make them mark themselves off.

Daily Kos helps you tell Congressional Democrats to go big on jobs legislation. We say this as Republicans are pretending they have qualms about a "bipartisan" bill they intend to kill anyway, and as moderate Democrats are trying to reduce the size of the reconciliation bill as close to nothing as they can. You can say to Democrats: why do you think "not doing too much" will save your job? If you have a chance to rebuild broken bridges and replace lead-lined water pipes and your response is well, I wouldn't want to do too much, why do you think voters will respect that? Democrats moved cautiously in the face of the 2008 bankster Armageddon, and over five dozen House Reps and six Senators lost their jobs in 2010. If they don't learn from that this time, they not only deserve to lose, they deserve to be remembered as folks who pretended to be good but were actually evil. Hey, my goodwill only lasts so long. I'm getting old.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to (perhaps not surprisingly) lower drug prices this year. To sum: big pharma charges more for drugs here in America than they do in other countries because they can, socializes the risk but privatizes the profits because they can, charges absurdly high amounts of money for lifesaving drugs because they can, claims their main expense is "research and development" when they spend far more money on stock buybacks because they can -- there's a solution to all these problems in there somewhere, and that solution is to make it so they can't do any of those things. Let right-wingers call all that "socialism." Again, they never whine about "socialism" when taxpayer money funds the entirety of the Moderna vaccine, for example, but if "socialism" makes life-saving drugs more affordable, that'll just make socialism more popular.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The first of many monthly $250 or $300 checks for American families will start coming out approximately now, and they'll run until the end of 2021; the expansion itself will run through 2022, but families will get that expansion in one lump sum (that's not very smart of Democrats; wouldn't they want a monthly campaign ad in millions of houses every month until the midterms?) and then in 2023 it'll go away. There's no good reason it shouldn't go away, though. I mean, I guess Mob Boss Mitch will say "raging" inflation is a good reason, though he's old enough to remember what "raging" inflation was really like. But fear-mongering over inflation is a bad reason to put millions of children back into poverty.

Daily Kos also helps you tell President Biden to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center with a quickness. And not to listen to the not-in-my-backyard cowardice from Congressional Democrats this time! Guantánamo doesn't hold "the worst of the worst" -- if it did, they'd all be in jail now! Make no mistake, Guantánamo holds political prisoners, and why would we want the country we love to act like the dictatorships we look down on? Not just by holding them without charge or without access to a fair trial -- and as the greatest country on Earth, we're able to give "the worst of the worst" a fair trial without being afraid, right? -- but by torturing them. Almost 800 folks have passed through Guantánamo; now, 40 remain, and that's 40 too many. Our shame is nearly two decades old now. It's well past time we started to make amends, by closing Guantánamo Bay.

Finally, both Common Cause and Progress America help you tell our USPS Board of Governors and our President, respectively, to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who first tried to help Donald Trump win re-election by slowing down mail service, and who has lately proposed higher rates and lower service as the solution to all of our Post Office's problems. That's some real bold thinking, there! As usual, the American people have actual bold thinking -- we want to end the crippling pre-payment mandate Congress foisted on our Post Office in 2006 and restart postal banking for the first time in over 50 years long, long before we want to pay higher prices for worse service. I mean, this is America, and we deserve better than Louis DeJoy.

Action: all jobs, all day.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk you want renewable energy, lead-free water pipes, paid family/medical leave, and Medicare drug price negotiation in the American Jobs Plan -- and no military spending! And then tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the wealthy and on corporations to pay for it. 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.

Today would be a good day to call your Congressfolk and tell them you want renewable energy in the American Jobs Plan that President Biden is inexplicably trying to pass in a "bipartisan" manner. Again, it doesn't matter that he wants the two sides to work together; it only matters that your Congressfolk do your will, and the more we keep our eye on the latter item, the better. You may mention that the OFF Fossil Fuels Act, introduced in previous Congresses but not this one, remains a good blueprint for what the American Jobs Plan needs. It would have mandated 80% renewable electricity and 80% zero-emission cars by 2035, and it would also have funded retraining for fossil fuel workers. And not as computer programmers, either! Jesus Mary and Joseph why insist that everyone learn to code when you can retrain the folks who work in coal mines to install solar panels and wind turbines? Of course, Republicans don't think any of that is "real infrastructure" either. But they're a party full of seditionists and whiners, so why do we listen to them?

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in getting the lead out of our drinking water. That is literally an investment in our future, since lead from lead pipes causes brain damage in children, and it would be entirely appropriate to put such investment in the American Jobs Plan that President Biden is inexplicably trying to pass in a "bipartisan" manner. If you want to support specific legislation that would reduce lead in our drinking water, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1376, the GET THE LEAD OUT Act (the acronym isn't as bad as it looks), which would fund lead-free pipes all over America by hiking the number of estates subject to the Estate Tax and closing the "carried interest" loophole that allows hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate than bus drivers. Hard to imagine people being against those things. Then again, it's hard to imagine people being against clean water!

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a paid family/medical leave bill. It would be entirely appropriate, etc. to put this in the American Jobs Plan, etc., and though our law does grant 12 weeks of unpaid family/medical leave annually, we're just about the only "wealthy" nation on Earth that doesn't grant paid leave, and as I always say, that's not a thing you want to chant WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. And, you know, our Congressfolk act like they know everything, when all they do is say "that won't work" whenever we tell them what they should do. But that's a damn un-American attitude, if you ask me. Isn't this the can-do nation that always finds a way? And hasn't every bit of progress we've made met with "that won't work" at the beginning? It works just about everywhere on the planet, so it can work here -- if our politicians would just grow a spine.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to include H.R. 3, the Elijah Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act, in the American Jobs Plan. Not just because letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would, well, lower drug prices across the board, but because it would save the taxpayer money, which means it could well help fund all the other good works we've been talking about, like renewable energy, clean water, paid family/medical leave, and the like. What will Republicans say in response? It's not "real" infrastructure? What a weak response -- they're like the kid you knew in junior high who was always correcting the tiniest grammatical errors you'd make. So, yeah, it would help now to think of that kid growing up to be a Republican Senator, just trying to find a reason, any reason, to piss on whatever the American people want.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any new military spending in the American Jobs Plan. Because they love to hide defense spending wherever they can! And because we already spend more on "defense" than the next 12 nations on that list combined. Why, you'd never know we had an ocean on either side of us! But spending on defense deprives us of spending on clean water, renewable energy, etc., and not because federal spending is a zero-sum game (just ask the folks who passed the 2017 tax "reform"!), but because politicians always use "defense" as an excuse not to spend on the things we actually need. Seriously, we can already destroy the planet 300 times over; what, we won't be safe until it's 400?

Finally, in case you thought I forgot about funding the American Jobs Plan: Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a "millionaire's surtax" that would raise the top tax bracket from 37% to 47%, Inequality.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, and Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the corporate tax rate. Does that all sound too tax-the-rich for you? Well, they've spent the last 40 years demonstrating that they deserve to pay higher taxes! And the smoke-and-mirrors pay-fors Republicans prefer -- user fees which always fall on working people, and "asset recycling" that's just a fancy-schmancy name for "selling off public works to build other public works" -- won't get the job done. Why do we listen to Republicans again? I mean, just six months ago they were trying to literally nullify the 2020 election. When will Democrats learn? When we speak in numbers they can't deny.

Action: concerning foreign policy, vote suppression, fuel efficiency, clean water, airline refunds, and pipeline pollution.

Long story short: tell our government to stop training Saudi killers, tell big corporations to stop funding ALEC and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, tell our EPA to strengthen fuel efficiency standards and get the lead out of our water pipes, tell the big airlines to refund all those tickets cancelled because of the pandemic, and tell President Biden to stop the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

In light of the news that an American military contractor trained several of journalist Jamal Khasoggi's killers, Win Without War helps you tell Secretary of State Antony Blinken to halt all American training of Saudi paramilitary operatives. I mean, when they turn that training into sawing up a journalist into little pieces, I wouldn't blame you for feeling a little responsible. Of course, you shouldn't feel as responsible as those handling the bone saws, but we shouldn't be enabling the murder of journalists, either. Certainly not because "the world is a dangerous place!" That's a quotation from former President Trump (yes, exclamation point in the original), and it doesn't justify just letting anything happen.

MoveOn helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (or ALEC), while Daily Kos helps you tell big corporations to cut ties with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Both ALEC and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have pushed reactionary right-wing policies at the state and federal levels for years, but now both organizations have pushed vote suppression in the name of fighting "voter fraud," which no reasonable observer has found in the 2020 election results. You would think big corporations wouldn't want to be associated with the Big Lie, but the truth is they want it both ways -- they want the good press of saying they're against voter fraud but they want to keep ties to organizations that promote it. We're here to tell them they can't have it both ways.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to roll back Donald Trump's roll back of Barack Obama's clean car standards, while the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to restore the waiver they used to grant to California to set stronger fuel efficiency standards than the rest of the nation. Which meant cars generally built their cars to California standards -- rather than have two sets of cars, one for California and one for the rest of the nation -- but so what? The end result is better cars that go farther on a gallon of gas and thus not only pollute our air and water less but also cost good Americans less money at the pump. It takes a special talent like Donald Trump to look at all that and say nah, Americans don't deserve that! But he's gone, for now, and restoring better gas mileage standards is one of the things we need to do to keep him gone.

Daily Kos helps you tell our EPA to require that our government remove all lead pipes from our sewer system. Recall that no amount of lead is safe to drink, that any amount of lead can cause brain damage in children, and that more than half of all Americans still drink water from systems containing lead, and you'll see the urgency of this matter. And, not for nothing, but if you're poor or Black, you have a much higher chance of drinking from contaminated lead pipes. Turns out Donald Trump tried to weaken EPA rules governing lead pipes on his way out of office -- like a mustache-twirling villain who's tied you to the tracks! -- but the Biden Administration paused that effort. Now we need to tell them to do better.

Consumer Reports helps you tell big airline corporations to pay the refunds they owe good Americans for all those trips that the pandemic cancelled. That's some $10 billion, which ain't chump change, and they're doing pretty good at the moment, what with all the reopening and the $50 billion in bailouts they got via the CARES Act, so they don't really have an excuse not to reimburse good Americans for the travel they weren't able to do because of COVID. Hell, I'm old enough to remember when a big corporation would go out of its way to make refunds like this just to look better than anyone else. Corporations have so much power now they don't have to do things like that. But good Americans still deserve their refunds, and we ought to help them get them.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell President Biden to stop the construction of the notorious Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. You no doubt know the reasons: transporting tar sands oil is fundamentally dirty, pipelines tend to break and pollute everyone's drinking water, pipelines somehow seem to find their way through Native American holy lands. But here's another one: the Trump Administration approved this pipeline without doing a proper environmental review, too, just like he did with the Keystone XL pipeline, a project for which President Biden revoked the permit on the first day of his Presidency. Let's not let him think his work is done here, of course. The work of the righteous is never done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning lead in water, big inauguration donations, and war on Yemen.

A Virginia Tech-led study found that nearly 80 percent of homes across America have detectable levels of lead in their water, with 40% surpassing the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommended limit, and 15% with enough lead to cause brain damage in bottle-fed babies. This is five years after the problems suffered by Flint, MI residents made national news. And lead accumulates in your body, so any amount of lead can cause you serious harm regardless of your age. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell your U.S. House Reps to pass legislation that would fund the replacement of lead service pipes, which still serve at least nine million homes in America, even though they've been outlawed since 1986. It takes time and money to replace these things, it turns out, but not necessarily 34 years, and the money we'd spend on replacing them would create jobs for a lot of good Americans. Funny how often doing the right thing creates jobs, while the schemes of the politicians don't. So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, President-elect Biden's inaugural committee plans to accept donations of up to a million bucks from corporations and about half that from individuals -- this, even though we hardly expect the usual inaugural spectacle in the face of a pandemic. Need I mention that our soon-to-be-ex-President faced quite a bit of scrutiny over the $100 million-plus in donations his inaugural committee received? People don't give money to an inaugural committee out of the goodness of their heart; they give it so that our President will give them something back. No donation needs arrive with a specific quid pro quo attached; everyone knows how this works, and it leads to corruption. Perhaps more importantly, any big donation, of any kind, tends to drown out the real grievances of real Americans who deserve a hearing just as much as any rich person does. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our President-elect to reverse course and refuse to accept this absurdly large donations.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject our Administration's proposed $23 billion sale of weapons to the United Arab Emirates, then the Friends Committee on National Legislation still helps you do that. Why? Because the UAE will use them in its war on Yemen, that's why, and we've gone into why that's a terrible idea more times than I can count -- it commits America to an unconstitutional war, Yemen is already on the point of famine, and the Houthi rebels targeted by the Saudi/UAE coalition are some of the best fighters against al-Qaeda in the world. Odd how we don't protect those folks, and I'm sure the Turkish Kurds, however many of them remain, will agree. You'll no doubt have picked up that our Administration isn't selling these weapons to Saudi Arabia; why, it's almost like they know that's a toxic PR move or something. But, hey, we're not stupid -- we know who'd benefit from this proposed arms sale, and it sure ain't the good citizens of Yemen. And it also sure ain't us.

Action: concerning good House bills, clean water, and anti-Semitism.

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

Meanwhile, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) contemplates updating our Lead and Copper Rule (authorized by the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1991), which limits pipe corrosion as well as the amount of lead and copper at the tap -- and with this EPA, you know which way they want to "update" the rule! That's right, they want to update it so that it allows more lead in your drinking water, even though lead causes brain damage in everyone who ingests it, which (not to give our EPA any ideas!) is why we don't allow lead in gas emissions anymore. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to make the Lead and Copper Rule stronger, not weaker. Like, for example, let's get the lead out of the service lines that connect houses to water mains, since that's usually the biggest source of lead water contamination, and those lead service lines still serve over nine million homes and businesses. And some of those customers are child care centers, so, like, let's do that now. It would create jobs for people who refit the lines, after all. Even though right-wingers will call that "socialism" as they drive roads, call cops, and use libraries.

Finally, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell our government to stop calling organizations "anti-Semitic" merely because they advocate for Palestinian rights. Why? Well, partly because it's not true, and partly because the resulting PR hit from being called "anti-Semitic" can be very damaging (just ask Jeremy Corbyn!), but also because calling organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International "anti-Semitic" is a profound insult to all those who suffered and died -- and who continue to suffer and die -- from real anti-Semitism. And it is a bit rich to watch this Administration pretend to be concerned about anti-Semitism after openly cultivating supporters from the ranks of America's Nazi wannabes. We are, all of us, friends of Israel, and we are, all of us, fully aware that being a friend doesn't mean blindly supporting whatever our friends do, but calling them out when they do wrong, so that they (and we!) can be better friends. But too many folks call people who don't agree with them "anti-Semitic." We should stop listening to such people, since they act like they don't understand that civilization is actually pretty hard work.

Action: concerning redistricting, clean water, and saner drug policy.

First, some good news for Pennsylvania residents: SB 1242, the Legislative and Congressional Redistricting Act (or LACRA), passed out of the Senate State Government Committee last week, and while Pennsylvania's state legislators have managed to get rid of the independent citizens' commission that characterized the previous redistricting bills we've championed here, LACRA still accomplishes a lot of what those bills would have done: Sec. 504, for example, would prevent redistricting plans from favoring particular incumbents, candidates, or political parties, while Sec. 703 (a) would make it substantially harder for any redrawn districts to divide towns and counties up in the Rorschach blot-districts that blighted our state for so long. Sadly, the House version of LACRA, HB 2638, hasn't even received a committee vote yet. Hence Fair Districts PA helps you tell Senate Majority Leader Corman to schedule a full Senate vote on LACRA, tell House State Government Committee Chair Everett to hold a committee vote on HB 2638, and tell House Speaker Cutler to hold a full House vote on HB 2638. Each of those links contains the officials' phone numbers, so feel free to call them, too.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund lead pipe replacement. Getting rid of the lead service pipes that still plague over nine million American homes would do a lot of good things -- like getting the lead out of our drinking water so that children don't suffer brain damage, or like creating jobs for the workers who would change out those lead pipes, or like making it easier to accomplish all the other necessary infrastructure improvements we'll need to make over the next few years. I know, I know, doing it with tax money is "communism" or something, except, of course, that it's not -- it's good Americans chipping in for a better future for all of us. The pipes will pay for themselves in time, not just from reduced health care costs associated with lead in our drinking water, but also in the healthier, more accomplished human beings we'll have doing great things in America once they're no longer saddled with brain damage through no fault of their own. And not for nothing, but folks in low-income areas deserve clean water just as much as the rest of us. If we didn't believe that, how could we look ourselves in the mirror?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3884, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. Our House was all set to vote on this bill -- which would essentially legalize pot and fund help for communities ravaged by war-on-drugs policing -- and then decided not to vote on it. Why? Because they were afraid that Republicans would go all nyah-nyah on them for passing that instead of, say, a COVID-19 relief bill. Republicans will go all nyah-nyah on you for anything, of course -- because what else can you do when you can't win arguments on the merits? -- and the House did pass a COVID-19 relief bill over four months ago, so there comes a time when you have to, you know, adult up. And if House Democrats won't do it, we will have to do it for them, by reminding them that the time to do the right thing is always now and the MORE Act is actually rather popular. So, yeah, let's do that.

Action: concerning good House bills, good housing policy, and bad Justice Department behavior.

Happy Monday, good folks! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: 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; and 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. Don't worry about giving your Senators' staffers too much to write down, because if they truly aimed to do the people's will, they'd have debated and passed these bills already. After all, it's been over a year since all Senate clocks got set to "Mitch McConnell Time" -- i.e., "never" -- and we're on Do the Right Thing Time, which is now, and our Senators should set their clocks like we do.

Meanwhile, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has introduced H.R. 5072, called A Just Society: A Place to Prosper Act. The Place to Prosper Act would institute several necessary housing reforms: it would establish a national rent control program prohibiting landlords from jacking up rent higher than inflation (unless inflation is under three percent, in which case they could increase rent by three percent); it would amend the Fair Housing Act by preventing discrimination on the basis of income; it would fund removal of lead paint from public housing; and it would keep landlords who routinely abuse tenants out of the running for various forms of public funding (including public mortgages and public housing insurance). If you cringe at the words "rent control," just ask yourself: should landlords be allowed to squeeze tenants with virtual impunity? Particularly in areas of the country (cough California New York City cough) where housing prices are absurdly high to begin with? The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Americans from predatory landlords by passing the Place to Prosper Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Justice Department's Inspector General to investigate the apparently pro-Presidential machinations of Attorney General Barr, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. I mean, we ought to use Inspectors General while we still can -- our President has already tried to get rid of all the Inspectors General in our government, and if he gets re-elected, he'll no doubt feel emboldened to try again. And our Inspectors General have long done good, independent work on our behalf, and the DOJ's IG would have quite a hornet's nest to probe where Mr. Barr is concerned -- he intervened to demand a lower sentence for Presidential crony Roger Stone, which action prompted four DOJ prosecutors to resign; he tried blocking an investigation into a money laundering case apparently at the behest of our President; and he used outside lawyers to review various DOJ actions our President opposed, including the indictment of then-NSA chief Michael Flynn and the non-indictment of former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe. Ain't none of this a good look for the President who constantly yells about "law and order," and we deserve real law and order in America.

Action: concerning campaign finance, FGM, and clean water.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Rep to pass a Constitutional amendment allowing our government to regulate campaign finance again, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Our Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United v. FEC ruling in 2010 has opened the floodgates of corporate campaign spending, even though good Americans get more and more disgusted with all the money blown on campaigns, too often for politicians who shouldn't be elected dog-catcher. Proponents of campaign finance spending tell us that it takes money to get heard, etc., but that statement does not justify allowing people or corporations to spend virtually any amount of money to "get heard." In fact, we can reasonably suppose that when a few people or corporations drop hundreds of millions on a campaign, they actually prevent other good Americans from being heard. So let's bring back campaign finance reform in America.

Meanwhile, Washington is one of 15 American states that somehow do not ban female genital mutilation (or FGM), so a Change.org petition helps you tell Washington state legislators to ban FGM. Some religious sects claim our First Amendment protects FGM, though reasonable people would conclude differently -- if your rights end when they trample on other people's rights, then reasonably your "right" to mutilate a young girls' genitals would end with her right, you know, to not be fucking traumatized for life. Congress banned FGM at the federal level over 20 years ago, but a Michigan federal District Court judge overturned the ban, saying that FGM is a "local criminal activity" and that "Federalism concerns deprive Congress of the power to enact this statute." That should warn you against imbibing too much Federalism! And our Justice Department won't appeal the ruling, so whom does that leave? That leaves us! You know, like always.

Finally, our EPA has proposed a new Lead and Copper Rule, but won't mandate the replacement of lead-lined service line pipes, which does kind of defeat the purpose of a new Lead and Copper Rule, doesn't it? Unless our EPA's "purpose" is actually to pretend to protect our clean water while utterly failing to do so! Hence Environment America helps you tell our EPA to make sure we get all the lead pipes out of our water infrastructure within a decade. Our EPA is only taking comments until tomorrow, though, so get cracking. At least six million homes in America still get water from lead-lined service lines, meaning at least six million homes remain at risk for lead contamination and all the neurological problems it brings, especially for children. Cities like Madison, WI and Lansing, MI have replaced all of their lead service lines, so it's not like replacing their lines would be a "burden." You know what would be a burden? The increased health care costs from lead poisoning, which we all must bear.

Action: concerning lead poisoning and obnoxious racism.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 930 would protect Pennsylvania's children against lead in their schools' drinking water, by requiring testing, mandating testing result disclosure to parents, and keeping lead levels in school drinking water below five parts per billion. We're now five years after the Flint drinking water crisis, and residents across Pennsylvania are finding lead in their school drinking water, but we still don't have vigorous standards against lead, though any amount of lead causes brain damage in children, and they don't exactly grow out of that. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Reps to protect our children by cosponsoring and passing HB 930. What's the argument against testing our schools' water for lead, I wonder? That "we don't have the money"? If a civilization accepts that as a reason for failing to protect our children, then that civilization deserves to die -- particularly if it keeps handing out endless welfare to corporate cronies.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Twitter to do a much better job policing hate speech on its site, then Color of Change still helps you do that. And to those who squeal TEH FREE SPEECHEZ!!!!, recall that our First Amendment protects us from our government, not from commercial media -- just as your local newspaper is under no obligation to print your neighbor's rants about black folks merely because he wants to be heard, Twitter can ban any speech it likes, and its executives need only worry about whatever PR backlash might result. And if (as Dean Baker said not long ago) Facebook is a publisher and thus should be held to the same standards to which we hold other publishers, then so is Twitter. Twitter's CEO, unfortunately, seems to think obnoxious racism is difficult to define. Here's a clue: when they start putting up swastikas, it means they're obnoxious racists. I mean, you'd have to be, to take up the banner of a nation we defeated in war over 70 years ago.

Around the table: how Tammy Baldwin won re-election, and other lessons.

David Rosen at TruthOut reminds us that "Regulations Protect Us All." He not only lists the various crises brought about or helped along by lax regulatory oversight (the bankster meltdown of 2008, the Spillageddon in the Gulf of 2010, the Flint lead poisoning crisis of 2014) but he reminds us that our "liberal" media too often buy what anti-regulatory groups are selling without being too critical of it. Regulations actually save money, after all -- they just don't deposit that money directly into CEO bank accounts, as anti-regulatory efforts tend to do. Also, too, "(i)t’s pretty rich for corporations to demand longer, more nuanced, more detailed rules full of loopholes and exceptions to boost their bottom lines, and then turn around and whine about how complicated the rules are."

Mary Bottari at the Center for Media and Democracy describes how Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin fought off $14 million in outside spending attacking her and defeated her far-right opponent by 11 points. How did she do it? She punched back hard against an early attack ad, she defined her opponent as a corporate shill, defended popular causes like fair trade and expanding access to health care, and made those causes personal for her (she lost her mother at an early age to opioid addiction and got seriously ill as a child) and for Wisconsin voters (explaining how "free" trade hurts Wisconsin's massive paper industry). It didn't hurt that her opponent ran truly awful attack ads unbecoming a civilized person, let alone a nurse, or a candidate for U.S. Senate.

Investment bank study finds that building a new utility-scale wind or solar farm costs about as much as running an existing coal power plant. And, you know, eventually we'll run out of coal, but the sun rises every day and the wind always returns (and, ah, there is such a thing as battery storage for relatively lean times). But please, right-wingers, let's hear more bogus stories about "wind turbine syndrome" and "piles of dead birds," and let's pretend that coal miners couldn't possibly adapt to a more renewable future.

And on cue: our "liberal" media stops covering the caravan coming up from Honduras, and now our President is pulling troops from our southwest border. Remember how much ebola was in the news before the 2014 elections and then wasn't in the news at all after that? Good times! But seriously, you can't pull out before an "invasion," can you? Our brave and bold President can. And of course his votaries will tell the story that their Personal Lord and Savior put troops on the border and scared the caravan away. I can't even dismiss the possibility that they'll say he did it with dust from his magic horn.

Finally, it's bad when my veteran co-workers are bringing up our President's statement that the retired Navy Admiral who got Mr. bin Laden -- and who's been very critical of our President lately -- maybe should have gotten to Mr. bin Laden sooner. I have three things to say about that. One, if you can't ever concede even a relatively unimportant point in an argument, you're not being tough so much as you're being weak. Two, a big reason we "didn't get bin Laden sooner" was that George W. Bush didn't "lose a lot of sleep" over it -- or, you know, preferred him alive so he could be a villain in future election campaigns. And three, our President isn't popular with our military so much as he's popular with folks who need everyone to watch them worship our military, and you remember what Jesus said about people who pray in public.

Around the table: our Constitution may not save us! And other sad truths.

Heritage Action executive director pens editorial explaining why we should all vote for Republicans this year. Your jaw will hit the floor when he says electing Democrats will increase partisan bitterness, as if Beltway partisans like him don't already look for any excuse to ratchet up the bitterness; most of the rest of it is better, I suppose, but it'll only move you if you already believe it, and three paragraphs of pablum about health care reform being better at the state level is no answer to the reality that Republicans tried to take away our health insurance. The worst thing about this op-ed, though? How the last paragraph suggests that the "noise" in American politics comes from anywhere other than our President and his votaries. That's some hardcore gaslighting there.

Green Party candidate for state auditor of Missouri writes damning piece about how "liberal" media reporting -- at least as far as his own race is concerned -- only covers "Issues That Don't Matter." Worse than the big media organs' refusal to cover issues brought up by him (and his Constitution and Libertarian cohorts), worse, even, than those organs' fascination with the Democrat and Republican candidates exchanging "jabs" and "harsh words," was the journalist telling him that there just "wasn't room" for discussion of issues in his article, and anyway "we need to write about what interests our readers, and they just want to know what the Democrats and Republicans say." Typical, how journalists think so little of us! They can rest assured that most readers (definitely including myself!) return their contempt in spades. There's a solution in there, somewhere.

Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs warns us to "be careful" about assuming our Constitution will save us from things like our President's efforts to end birthright citizenship for certain brown-skinned babies born on American soil. Long story short: "(c)onstitutions are very important documents," but "(t)heir words do not mean anything, though, if there is nobody in charge who is willing to uphold them," like, you know, the five right-wingers on the Court right now (not to mention the sixth or seventh, if Justices Breyer and Ginsburg pass). Thus even an abjectly stupid argument about what one of the original writers of the 14th Amendment "thought" it meant (an argument Antonin Scalia would have rejected!) could become "precedent" in the hands of unscrupulous folks like Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

How about some good news? a U.S. District Judge rules that Wyoming's ag-gag laws are unconstitutional. This means not only that folks working to expose animal abuse at factory farms can breathe a little more easily now, but folks testing water downstream from factory farms to expose pollution can also breathe a little more easily, since Wyoming's ag-gag law prevented that, too. One day we'll all take for granted that corporations shouldn't have more rights than people, and this ruling helps bring us one step closer to that day.

Finally, how about some more good news? Our FDA has banned the use of lead acetate in hair dyes. Responding to a petition filed by several groups including Consumers Union and the Environmental Defense Fund, our FDA found the 1980 study allowing lead acetate in hair dyes to be scientifically deficient, but note well that scientists have said for years there is no "safe level" of lead in just about anything. Hair dye may not sound like such a big deal, but a lot of people use it, and you probably don't even know how many! So this is a big deal, and kudos to our FDA for doing the right thing.

Action: concerning pollution, lead poisoning, and food safety.

Our President tried to ram through Keystone XL pipeline approval early in his term, but a U.S. District Court judge ruled in April that our State Department had to complete a lawful environmental review before issuing any permits. So now our Administration has apparently issued a draft of said environmental review that fails to fully evaluate the environmental impacts, not least of which is a proposed alternate route through Nebraska. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration to do a lawful environmental review before committing to build the Keystone XL pipeline. And if doing a lawful review means they can't build the pipeline, well, that's just too bad! Our President doesn't care about climate and clean water; he only cares about swinging his balls in everyone's faces -- which, sadly, resonates strongly among those Americans who blame everyone but themselves for their problems. But they're not a majority, and they don't get all the say about everything.

Meanwhile, as schools are finding lead in their drinking water all the way up and down the state of California -- including half the schools in San Francisco, which really should be collecting enough money in property taxes to fund solutions to this problem -- Cal PIRG helps you tell your local school boards to protect our children from lead in drinking water. The state of California allowed lead in plumbing fixtures until the year 2010, which wasn't that long ago, even if it feels like it. That means a lot of schools there (and plenty of other states!) still have lead in their water pipes, and if you've got lead in your water pipes, you're probably going to have lead in your water sooner or later. And, as you know, any amount of lead in drinking water can cause brain damage in children. And children are literally our future! It wasn't just a Whitney Houston song! So let's tell our school boards to get on the stick with getting the lead out.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big food-producing corporations to get the glyphosate out of their food, then Only Organic still helps you do that. As you may know, the Environmental Working Group found the cancer-linked glyphosate (the main ingredient of Roundup, Monsanto's most famous herbicidal product) in two out of three of the oat-based foods it tested, and at a much higher level than scientists would call safe -- and a lot of our biggest food-producing corporations, like Quaker, Kellogg's, and General Foods, make these foods. And kids eat them in cereal and oatmeal and granola bars! The World Health Organization and the state of California have declared glyphosate a possible carcinogen, and the European Union has banned it from their crops entirely -- and yet our society just chugs along, our leaders in business and government saying their hands are tied. So let's give them some incentive to untie them.

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

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

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

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

Action: three alerts about pollution.

Flint isn't the only city in Michigan still suffering with poisoned water: now Detroit has lead and copper in its water at its public schools. And Detroit only began testing its public schools' water for lead this past year! Who knows how long its water has been tainted, or how many good Detroit kids got their brains permanently warped by lead? Hence Color of Change helps you tell Michigan's government to get the lead out of public school plumbing. Knowing Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a notorious right-winger who thinks corporations know everything and government knows nothing, he'll probably force Detroit to contract with Nestlé to get clean water or something, but the only way to really fix the problem is to replace the lead pipes out of public schools and then install filters to keep lead out. Why, that's the kind of infrastructure our President is supposedly all about! And it's about time our governments actually supported it, on their bosses, the people's, behalf.

Meanwhile, our Administration got its rocks off by shrinking the size of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, and now our Bureau of Land Management is opening up what used to be part of Bears Ears to uranium mining corporations, hence Penn Environment helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to keep uranium mining away from the Bears Ears area. Uranium mining not only pollutes nearby water tables, but leaves a lot of radioactive sludge everywhere it goes, and for what? So uranium mining CEOs can make even more money? So we can prop up a nuclear power industry that's never made money no matter how much corporate welfare we've thrown at it? So we can build nuclear weapons when we already have enough of those to destroy the world hundreds of times over? So we can stick it to the Obama Administration for letting Native American nations have some control over the Monument? None of this sounds very respectful of the traditions that sustain us as a civilization.

Finally, get your surprised face ready, as our Administration plans to delay implementation of the EPA's 2015 coal ash rule -- the one that would prevent coal ash, the waste from burning coal, from seeping into groundwater and thus putting good Americans at a higher risk of getting cancer -- so Environmental Action helps you tell the EPA to implement the damn rule already and start protecting people from this kind of pollution. Our Administration will be ready to respond that WE'RE PROTECTINGZ TEH COAL MINURZ!!!!!, but of course they're not -- not unless they're giving coal miners magic suits that protect them against carcinogens! No, they care only about other bosses, and not their real bosses, i.e., us. Our Administration has had several of its previous attempts to delay regulations struck down in court, but lawsuits take time to wind through courts, and in the meantime, people get hurt. If we act, we can stop that.

Action: concerning "free" trade, lead poisoning, and campaign finance disclosure.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk that any renegotiated NAFTA must put people before corporations, then Sign for Good still helps you do that. "Putting people before corporations" is a pretty simple principle, really, but right-wingers love to muck it up by suggesting that people can't live without corporations. And some tell you that having corporations around is much better than living in a feudal society, which I suppose it is, but of course the choice we actually face is not between "corporations controlling everything" and "literally being a serf," particularly when the first could bring back the second if we're not careful. These "free" trade deals sure do bring out the worst in Our Glorious Elites, who constantly use misdirection and absurd claims like "you can't fight globalism." But we're not fighting globalism so much as fighting evil -- and yes, evil is the word to describe trade pacts that nullify our laws and outsource our jobs.

Meanwhile, S. 3192 is named the CLEARR Act, which is unfortunate, not just because "clearr" isn't really a word, but because there's another CLEARR Act out there, an pro-bankster bill numbered H.R. 2133. S. 3192 isn't about banksters, but about getting lead out of our water -- the bill would help communities replace lead pipes, mandate our EPA to report results of lead tests online, and more stringently punish municipalities that don't get the lead out of their citizens' water. As you know, there is no "safe" level of lead poisoning, and lead poisoning causes irreversible brain damage in children, brain damage you may not be able to spot for yearss. And with lead pipes still being used all over America, all it takes is another unaccountable smartypants to decide to use cleaning chemicals that just so happen to corrode lead pipes to cause another Flint. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight lead poisoning by passing S. 3192.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6239/S. 3150, the DISCLOSE Act, then a consortium of good government groups (including Common Cause, Roots Action, and People for the American Way, among others) still helps you do that. Super PACs and dark money groups spent upwards of $1.4 billion in the 2016 election, and almost none of the groups that spent that money had to reveal their funders. And though we all fancy ourselves the kind of people who don't believe anything we see in campaign ads, we also know that a group with a lot of money can dominate the national conversation on TV, print, and radio. The DISCLOSE Act would actually shine some sunlight on the folks who are so determined to get their cronies elected that they'd spend millions of dollars doing it. As long as folks can spend millions without accountability, we're more likely to be stuck with bad leaders. And we, as Americans, deserve better than bad leaders.

Action: freedom of the press, payday lenders, and safe schools.

Amnesty International helps you demand that the Burmese government release journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. The government has charged them with violating Burma's Official Secrets law, after they met two police officers in a restaurant who handed them rolled-up papers. Sound like a set-up to you? And certainly such a set-up would have absolutely nothing to do with their ongoing investigation of the murder of ten Rohingya Muslims in western Burma! The government detained the two reporters for over three months before their first court hearing, and oh, the police said they presented a warrant to Wa Lone's family in order to search his house the day after the arrest, but the family says they didn't. Whom to believe? The family who has every reason to fall in line behind the government's official story, or the government that has every reason to lie? Their Rohingya massacre sure hasn't gotten them the best PR, after all.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, under former Director Richard Corddray, put together some regulations that do more to prevent payday lenders from trapping people in a downward spiral of debt. So naturally Congress is grateful that the CFPB actually did something to protect consumers, something Congress itself hasn't seen fit to do over the years. I kid, of course -- whether they find intolerable the mere existence of a single regulation that might actually help people or whether they're as mad as their President to undo anything that might have the name Obama on it, Congress has introduced H.J.Res. 122/S.J.Res. 56, another "resolution of disapproval" that would nullify the CFPB's payday loan rules. Why on Earth would you want to be pro-financial predator? Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to support consumer protections by rejecting H.J.Res. 122/S.J.Res. 56.

Finally, on the heels of several local reports detailing the various health care risks Philadelphia children still face in their schools -- like asthma and lead poisoning -- Penn Environment helps you tell Philadelphia's Mayor and City Council to get rid of health care hazards in schools. You can still find lead in paint in Philadelphia public schools, and in some rooms lead dust levels were 150 times higher than federal standards allow. You can also find lead in outdated water fountains, asbestos in ceiling tiles, and mold and rat poop in classrooms, and these are not things we should tolerate in the Birthplace of Freedom, because they help cripple our future. Ultimately, as I've long said, Philadelphia property taxes are going to have to go up if we want to make our schools safe again. In the meantime, cleaning up the toxins and hiring more custodial workers sure won't hurt.

Action: government spying, clean water, and war in Yemen.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 4943/S. 2383, the CLOUD Act. Why? Because the CLOUD Act would let American police grab your private data -- your emails, your videos, your online photos, your chat logs -- no matter where it's stored on the planet (and it could be anywhere!), and it'd also let foreign police get your private data from American corporations. Never mind a little thing called a warrant. And it'd allow our President to enter into "executive agreements" with other nations that would let them ignore our privacy laws while presumably following their own, weaker ones, never mind a little thing called foreign entanglements. This is the kind of thing that has historically gotten conservatives very upset, but with today's "conservatives" little more than shells of their ancestors, you might be tempted to hope right-wing suspicion of foreigners helps defeat this bill. But we're better off hoping our own activism kills it.

Meanwhile, closer to home, we learn from a USA Today investigation Pennsylvania has more schools and learning facilities with lead in their drinking water than every other American state, and since any amount of lead causes brain damage in children, that's nothing to crow WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. But HB 2025 would mandate that every state public school test its water for lead every two years, make the results of those tests public, and cut off any drinking water sources with more than 5 ppb of lead. This'd seem like a no-brainer, but too often our leaders seem like they're the ones who've spent their whole life drinking lead-contaminated water, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to support clean water and healthy child development by passing HB 2025. It's well past time we were able to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about something good our politicians have done, but we won't be able to, unless we speak out.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to support S.J.Res. 54, the resolution that would end American war-making in Yemen without Congressional authorization, then Defending Rights and Dissent still helps you do that. Word on the street is that the Senate will vote on S.J.Res. 54 this week, so you want to get a word in before that vote. To sum: Saudi Arabia has been waging war, with our help, on the Houthi rebels in Yemen for years, and though you may debate the wisdom of that -- personally, I think waging war on the Houthi rebels who are some of the best fighters against al-Qaeda on Earth is a bad idea, and that overplaying alleged Houthi ties to Iran is mere fearmongering -- you can't challenge the fact that Congress never declared war on Yemen, nor did Congress grant power to the President to act via the War Powers Act. Nor should you object that S.J.Res. 55 "hamstrings the President from acting," because, well, that's the idea.

Action: cellphone privacy, harmful chemicals, and Social Security.

H.R. 1899/S. 823, the Protecting Data at the Border Act, would make law enforcement officials get a warrant when they want to search your cellphone at the border. The bill would also prevent our government from denying entry to you just because you won't let them search your cellphone without a warrant. You'd think all this would be common sense, but, sadly, it's not, not when your government is so anxious to take away your freedoms in the name of fear -- fear of something that's less likely to kill you than a bathtub accident, I feel compelled to mention. The bill has some bipartisan support -- its sponsors include Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX), of all people -- and though that doesn't necessarily bode well for its chances of passage, the way folks value their cellphones in contemporary America does. Even Chief Justice Roberts, no great friend of citizen privacy, wrote the majority opinion in Riley v. Califonia ruling that law enforcement has to get a warrant before looking at a cellphone, and he seemed quite in awe of the power of a cellphone, appropriately so, I think. So use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone as we speak, on the bottom of this page) to call your Reps and Senators and urge them to support the Protecting Data at the Border Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you submit a public comment to the FDA as to whether it should allow cosmetic corporations to use lead acetate in their hair dyes. I'm guessing the word "lead" might have led you in a particular direction on that question, and it should have: lead acetate (a color additive in hair dyes) is a "possible carcinogen," per the Centers for Disease Control, and the CDC also strongly recommends that one keep children away from any hair dye that contains lead acetate. Scientists have also linked lead acetate to kidney troubles, reproductive toxicity, and nervous disorders, which last item makes sense, since lead acetate is also a neurotoxin. Also, both the European Union and Canada have banned lead acetate in hair dyes, and (this is important) corporations still sell hair dyes in these areas of the world, which you should remember when their PR hacks complain that YOU CANTZ MAKE TEH HAIR DYEZ WITHOUTZ TEH LEADZ!!!!!! The FDA actually seems inclined to agree with cosmetic corporations on this matter, but c'mon, America is the can-do country -- surely we can figure out a way to dye our hair and look nice without causing ourselves all kinds of health problems.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Reps and Senators to reject the Trump proposal to get rid of the payroll taxes that fund Social Security, then CREDO still helps you do that. (Alternately, you can urge them to do so while you have them on the phone about warrants for cellphone searches.) Mr. Trump has apparently floated getting rid of FICA taxes as a "middle-class tax cut," since FICA taxes only apply to the first $127,200 of one's income, but those taxes fund Social Security, which means they fund the retirement you worked for, paid into, fought for, and deserve -- and, not incidentally, they're currently funding the retirements of good Americans who've already worked for it, paid into it, fought for it, and deserve it. You know what would be a far better idea? Lifting the ceiling on payroll taxes entirely, so that all income gets taxed into the system. The various bills floating around Congress now don't actually do that -- they tax high-end income, to be sure, but they leave a "donut hole" of untaxed income in the low six figures. I'd prefer getting rid of that ceiling entirely, and if you feel the same, you may want to mention that to your Reps and Senators.

Action: racial profiling, "natural marriage," lead bullets, and internet privacy.

H.R. 1498/S. 411, the End Racial and Religious Profiling Act of 2017, would do pretty much what its title suggests. I wouldn't blame you for flinching at Sec. 102(c), which says proof of law enforcement activities having "a disparate impact on individuals with a particular characteristic" is enough to "constitute prima facie evidence of a violation of this title." We do, for example, demand that prosecutors produce more than the fact of an unnatural death to convict a defendant of murder -- we also demand they prove the defendant intended to commit murder. But racism isn't murder -- you can commit racist acts without conscious hatred, and many folks hide their racism even from themselves. And racist practices can continue long after anyone feels strongly about them, and other institutional pressures can help perpetuate them. Hence the Bill of Rights Defense Committee and the Defending Dissent Foundation help you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1498/S. 411.

Meanwhile, because the Tennessee state legislature never seems to let up, their House Civil Justice Subcommittee will consider HB 892, the so-called Tennessee Natural Marriage Defense Act, which would, guess what, aim to outlaw same-sex marriage there. Now you may well be saying to yourself, self, didn't the Supreme Court make gay marriage legal all over America? Well, yes, they did. But HB 892 would try to do it anyway, even though a state can't just nullify a Supreme Court decision in this manner, and would sound like a state full of whiners in trying to do so. And check out their big cojones in calling gay marriage "unnatural"! What, exactly, about love between two consenting adults is unnatural? Have they not considered that gay folks wanting to get married is a sign of gay folks wanting to strengthen the institutions that sustain us? The Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell the Tennessee state legislature to reject their so-called "Natural Marriage Defense Act.".

In other news, the very first thing new Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke did when he literally rode into office (because right-wingers aren't about drama at all!) was to roll back Obama-era rules phasing out the use of lead bullets on public lands. And thus Mr. Zinke did exactly the sort of thing that gives gun-rights advocates a bad name -- this whole "debate" is just more right-wing swordfighting, where one right-winger tells another he's "insufficiently conservative" because he never defended the "freedom" of gun manufacturing corporations to put as much lead into their bullets as they want! Trouble is that lead persists in public lands and waters, meaning more dead animals and more brain-damaged people, thus meaning less freedom for us. And hunters and fishers are fairly resourceful people, who can hunt and fish without enabling so much pollution. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell Secretary Zinke to restore this lead ban.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to protect your privacy by rejecting the "resolution of disapproval" that would overturn strong FCC privacy rules enacted late last year, then both the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation help you do that. Again I feel compelled to ask: who could possibly be against good Americans having the right to tell their internet service provider not to sell their private data if that's what they want? And again I feel compelled to answer: evil people, who only want what fills their campaign coffers, and for what? So that one day they might have enough seniority to finally do something good? That never happens: the time to do your duty to your constituents is always now, and not once you're "entrenched" or whatever. I'm aware that I'm being generous in assuming that Congressfolk do so much evil because they're trying to do good later. But it doesn't really matter -- all that matters is that they're doing evil, and we must stop them.

Action: EPA funding, consumer protection, and yet another "bathroom bill."

You've no doubt heard that President Trump's budget proposal would slash funding for just about anything good our government does, and now you can add "EPA funding" to that list, as Mr. Trump apparently plans to cut EPA staffing by a fifth in his first year and cutting overall funding by about a quarter. And his cuts include Energy Efficiency programs, Environmental Education and Environmental Justice grants, and other grants that help states and regions enforce environmental standards. Those poor, poor fossil fuel corporations, constantly under siege by the big, bad old EPA! That's the picture Donald Trump paints, and it's a ludicrous one -- fossil fuel corporations aren't in any danger of going down as long as our government hands out public lands for them to plunder, and Big Gummint EPA helps keep our air and our water clean on our behalf. And they're already understaffed and underfunded, so cutting these further would only put more lead in our water and more cancer-causing chemicals in our air. It'd also make certain CEOs richer, which I'm pretty sure is all Mr. Trump really cares about. So use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Reps and Senators, and tell them you don't want EPA funding cut, but expanded.

Continuing along this theme, PennPIRG helps you tell your Senators to reject any attempt to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It's appalling that you tell right-wingers about the $12 billion the CFPB has won back for consumers from banksters so far, or their rules restricting payday lenders' ability to trap folks in a cycle of debt forever, or their work exposing the Wells Fargo fake account scandal that Congressfolk from both parties condemned, and the only answer you get is TEH REGULASHUNZ ARE KILLINGZ TEH JOBZ!!!!! Why "job creation" should ever depend on a financial predator's ability to rip off as many consumers is possible is something the right should try to explain. But, as PennPIRG's email missive reminds us, "(b)eing able to save, invest and manage your money without fear of being ripped off isn't some wildly controversial idea -- it's a hallmark of a civilized society." Which must by why eminently uncivilized Republicans -- including their standard-bearer, Donald Trump -- are so hot to destroy it. But they don't get all the say around here.

Finally, today a Tennessee state House subcommittee plans to consider HB 888, yet another "bathroom bill" that would force transgendered students to use the restroom of their birth gender rather than the gender they're actually living. Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee legislators to reject HB 888, and thus protect the rights of transgendered students. Why bother with these "bathroom bills"? It can't really be out of a sense that transgendered students will molest children, because no right-winger has ever backed up such an argument with anything other than fear and emotional manipulation. So if "protecting children" isn't the point of "bathroom bills," what is? Ginning up rage from right-wingers so they'll vote against their interests, that's what. And I bet most right-wingers don't even hate transgendered folks, but they support these bills because they hate liberals and would do almost anything to piss liberals off. But that's not really better, because their hate won't make liberals suffer, but it sure will make transgendered kids suffer.

Action: drug sentencing, water pollution, and the Grand Canyon.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell President Obama to release thousands of low-risk prisoners who committed non-violence offenses in time for the holidays. Hopefully, folks released would include folks still serving crack cocaine sentences under the sentencing regime before it was reformed in the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. The Fair Sentencing Act reduced the disparity between crack and powder cocaine minimum sentences from a ratio of 500 to 1 to a ratio of 17 to 1, but quite a few folks are still serving time under the old ratio, and why do that? The newly emboldened racist right will squeal about TEH THOUSANDZ OF PREDATURZ ON TEH STREETZ!!!! -- and they may not even hide behind coded language anymore! -- but good Americans don't gin up drama like that, only bad ones do. Speaking of which, we sure ain't getting any clemency under a President Trump, who declares his Presidency will be a "law and order" Presidency. Of course, Mr. Trump only thinks of black people when he thinks of "law and order," not the corporate criminals he's putting on his cabinet. But we'll still be around to remind everyone of what mercy really means.

Meanwhile, investigators have found lead and copper in the water at the Eastham Unit Prison in Lovelady, Texas, and prisoners there have testified to the water's "sulfur-like smell," "offensive taste," and "gritty residue." The prison administration apparently knows about the problem, as it has provided its guards with clean water, but not their prisoners. I can already hear the Trump votaries rolling their eyes and saying so what? They're prisoners! But as civilized people, we keep the water clean for prisoners as much we do as for everyone else -- I mean, how can you rehabilitate prisoners if you're poisoning them at the same time? And why do we heap punishment after punishment upon prisoners when their sentences and prison rules (which surely do not say "poison the prisoners' water") already detail their punishment? Also, too, consider the quality of mercy, a matter Jesus said more about than he ever said about gay marriage. Roots Action helps you tell the U.S. Justice Department and the Centers for Disease Control to investigate the water pollution at the Eastham Unit Prison.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Obama to declare a national monument around the Grand Canyon National Park and thus protect it for future generations, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. You know why this is particularly urgent: partly because corporations want to get their grubby mitts on the uranium in the area, and they don't care if it pollutes the Colorado River or not, though the river provides drinking water to seven states -- but mainly because the Grand Canyon is a national treasure, part of that great American heritage we ought to be passing on to future generations, rather than digging into so we can get a little energy today for nuclear power plants that can hardly sustain themselves without massive welfare handouts from our government in the first place! No, really, they can't -- and we can't compare their reliance on government handouts to wind power tax credits, since a) wind power is a lot younger and b) fossil fuel corporations spend all their time trying to crush wind power, instead of embrace it.

Action: battling lead poisoning, undeclared wars, and racism.

Flint, MI isn't the only city suffering from lead in its drinking water -- Philadelphia suffers from it, too, at twice the national average according to recent reporting from our two local newspapers. Thus the Philadelphia City Council is this week contemplating legislation that would reduce the lead in our water, and PennEnvironment helps you tell the City Council to support these bills and thus protect our clean drinking water. These bills would, if passed, improve testing and (of course!) remediation of lead problems at Philadelphia's public schools, and would require that day care centers get lead-free certification before licensing; they would dramatically improve matters for Philadelphia's children, who stand to lose the most from lead poisoning, because their brains are still developing. Our federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has, of course, been finalizing regulations that would help fight lead poisoning nationally, but the incoming President has an avowed hostility to federal regulations, particularly the ones that protect our air and water, it seems. The good news? Donald Trump ain't the boss of us, particularly at the local level, and we can still do a lot to make things better.

Speaking of The Donald, he and his foreign policy advisors have said they want to avoid wars that don't actually advance the fight against ISIS and al-Qaeda, and though I'd respond that no war advances that fight -- that, in fact, the wars initiated by George W. Bush that empowered al-Qaeda and created ISIS -- I'm not averse to seizing an opportunity to stop another war. Hence Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you tell incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn to oppose our continued involvement in Saudi Arabia's bombing of Yemen. Bombing Yemen has stoked the growth of al-Qaeda and ISIS there, mainly by bombing the crap out of the Houthi rebels who despise al-Qaeda and ISIS. And, of course, our involvement in assisting Saudi Arabia's little Yemen adventure (which includes our drone fighters, naturally) has not been approved by Congress, unless you read the 2001 AUMF a lot more liberally than it's intended to be read -- and, of course, if you regard the AUMF as a legal document granting the President actual authority to make war, which I don't. No, I'm such a stickler I want Congress to declare war, per our Constitution, and the Founders wanted it that way precisely so we'd fight fewer wars and get less entangled in foreign affairs.

Finally, both CREDO and People for the American Way help you tell Senate Democrats (there are still 48 of them!) to block Sen. Jeff Sessions's confirmation as Attorney General. If Donald Trump was trying to convince you he deserved a "chance" to prove he wasn't the virulent racist he was when he ran for President, tapping Mr. Sessions to be our next Attorney General was the wrong move. We could tabulate the many, many issues that came up back in the mid-1980s when President Reagan nominated him to a federal judgeship -- issues including his "joke" about thinking the KKK were OKK until he learned they smoked pot or his statement that the NAACP were "Communist" and "un-American," statements with which he "meant no harm" -- but he's also established a record, as both U.S. Attorney and Senator, of anti-immigrant extremism, harassment of black activists, and (lest we forget!) selling out to big banksters and corporate power (with the exception of his opposition to the 2008 bailout). All of these are, frankly, more pertinent to his nomination as Attorney General, really. To think we were all fretting that Chris Christie or Rudy Giuliani would get the job! Not that either man is a peach, but Jeff Sessions would put civil rights law enforcement in for a world of hurt. Unless we stand up, that is.

Around the table: includes part 434 of "why the Trump infrastructure plan sucks."

North Dakota law enforcement personnel attack Standing Rock protestors with rubber bullets, water hoses, percussion grenades, and tear gas, injuring over 160 people and sending seven of these to the hospital. Protestors were attempting to remove two burned-out trucks police had put up as a barricade, forcing good North Dakotans to take a 20-mile detour; police, of course, justified the use of water hoses by saying the protestors were setting fires, though the proper term might be building fires, as in "to keep warm" or "make warm drinks," temperatures being well below freezing that night. (That means, yes, they used water hoses against protestors on a freezing night. Sad!)

The Institute for Southern Studies provides a Harper's Index-style list of voting rights problems during the 2016 election. The Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County v. Holder, of course, opened the floodgates for all kinds of crap, not least of which is the more than 860 polling places closed this year in states that used to have to pre-clear their voting law changes with the DOJ. What we have left, at this moment, is shame -- not for the folks who voted for Mr. Trump, necessarily, but certainly for the politicians who went to great lengths to silence the "wrong" kind of people at the ballot box and did more to enable this monster than even the "liberal" media did.

Michigan state officials ask federal court to block a federal court order to keep delivering bottled water to the beleaguered residents of Flint. Apparently Michigan feels that setting up emergency water distribution centers that not everyone can get to (particularly the elderly) is enough, and that actually delivering clean water to residents is too hard. It sure was easy enough to put lead in their water. And what happened to you-break-it-you-fix-it?

Paul Krugman at the New York Times also finds the Trump infrastructure plan wanting. "If you want to build infrastructure, build infrastructure," he says. "It’s hard to see any reason for a roundabout, indirect method that would offer a few people extremely sweet deals, and would therefore provide both the means and the motive for large-scale corruption. Or maybe I should say, it’s hard to see any reason for this scheme unless the inevitable corruption is a feature, not a bug." Surely, he reminds us, our government can borrow as easily as any private investor can, interest rates being (still) so incredibly low -- but of course Mr. Trump's fellow Republicans, who would squeal SOCIALISM!!!! at such a thing, will eat up the Trump plan, regardless of what they might tell you now.

Finally, from the "Party like it's 1999!" file: Sen. John McCain, famously tortured by the Viet Cong during his time as a POW, says Mr. Trump won't be able to torture people as President because "it’s specifically, in law, now prohibited" and ""a whole bunch of us that would have them in court in a New York minute" if they tried and "no judge in America" would side with them. Those are some big words there; now let's see action.

Around the table: which Presidential candidate has more "secret voters"? And other questions.

This time last week I said I found arguments about "secret Donald Trump voters" more persuasive than other observers have, but the incomparable Digby lets us know that Hillary Clinton may actually be more likely to have "secret voters" -- namely, women who live in fairly right-leaning households whose husbands are all voting for Mr. Trump and who have to "maintain their standing in their conservative communities." That's at least as persuasive as any Trump "secret voter" argument, I'll admit, but I still don't agree that the "secret voter" argument stands at odd with "the swashbuckling, politically incorrect, in-your-face ethos of the Trump movement" -- as I said, a lot of folks are with Trump precisely because he says the things they can't, and presumably don't, and I'll bet some of them are not only married to liberals, but live in liberal communities.

Julia Lurie at Wired tells the story of "How One Company Contaminated Pittsburgh’s Drinking Water" -- with lead, that is. Long story short: Pittsburgh's public water utility was doing a bad job, so the city turned to a private corporation to help fix their water infrastructure -- and wound up having safety and water quality managers laid off and replaced one corrosion control chemical with another, cheaper one that, well, didn't work. The Paris-based corporation "consulting" with the city perpetrated other shenanigans as well; the lesson seems to be that we have to watch our public agencies a lot more closely or we'll wind up with public-private partnerships (or totally privatized agencies!) that are even worse.

And now, from the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: the Obama Administration is telling federal agencies involved in counterterrorism to get involved in anti-bullying initiatives at local and state levels. Because they'd be so good at that! They're likely to tell us (though they seem unwilling to answer questions from journalists about it at present) that they can find future terrorists in today's bullies, which is, as usual, totally the wrong way to go about pre-empting terrorism. The best way to pre-empt terrorism? Stop trying to steal things that belong to other people, like oil.

The Trans-Pacific "Partnership" is wildly unpopular, thanks to popular pressure, but that doesn't prevent the "liberal" media from offering up things like this fluff interview with Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, in which she summarizes all the lame arguments favoring the TPP. America will lose face with the rest of the world if we don't follow through, the TPP will help fight violent extremism, China booga-booga, and by the way Ms. Pritzker doesn't really understand why people are so "anxious." Neither does the article's writer, who never asks about, you know, the investor-state tribunals that would nullify our laws.

Jean Trounstine at TruthOut introduces us to some family members of crime victims who work toward rehabilitation of criminals rather than punishment. I'm not anti-punishment, actually, but most politicians take it way too far, and not, I suspect, out of a sincere interest in justice, but out of a base desire to stoke rage in their supporters. And if the vast majority of crime victims say treatment and crime prevention are more important than punishment, can't the rest of us conjure up some mercy, too? Of course we can. (As an aside, I always like to see Mural Arts Philadelphia get press for its good works.)

Finally, Trump voter Terri Rote faces felony charges of voter fraud in Iowa after trying to vote twice, fearing her first vote for Mr. Trump would be changed because "(t)he polls are rigged." I wonder where she might have heard that? Of course, if we asked Ms. Rote if she was a good, law-abiding person, she'd say yes, and recent events notwithstanding we probably wouldn't doubt it. But this is what right-wingers have been doing to good Americans since time immemorial: convince them to do bad things because they "have to." Come to think of it, the only way to get a good person to do a bad thing is to make them think they have to.

Around the table: Trump supporters "fear" revolt, and other follies.

Various Trump supporters say they fear people will revolt if Mr. Trump loses the Presidential election. Other people, of course. It's not just the hostage-taking -- vote for the candidate I want, or the country gets it! -- or even the absurd fear that yet another center-right Democratic Presidency will bring about "socialism," it's the damn whining. When George W. Bush got re-elected, I didn't go into a "depression." I went to work.

EPA plans to overhaul regulations concerning lead in drinking water, which could lead to "proactive replacement of lead water pipes" and "beefing up mandates for corrosion control technology," among other things. And though you'll have less lead in your water, and thus less brain damage in your children, right-wing whiners will still call all of this "job terrorism," as if good health care is even possible without clean water.

A three-week strike of dining hall workers at Harvard University ends with workers winning increased salary and a five-year reprieve from health care copay hikes. Well-done, Harvard workers -- and well-timed, as classes didn't start that long ago. And if you think $35,000 a year is a lot to pay someone who washes dishes and tends the salad bar, please do two things: 1) slap yourself, and 2) consider that Harvard currently holds assets of over $35 billion.

A New York Times writer wonders if Republicans, with their likely reduced majorities in Congress, will try to get things done in an effort to "get past" Trump or if they'll double down on their obstruction of any Clinton agenda. Gosh, what about past Republican behavior would lead us to contemplate that they'll "dig in" against Democrats? You know, besides all of their past behavior?

In a related note, Sen. Ted Cruz suggests that the Republican blockade of that last Supreme Court seat could go on for a long, long while -- after all, we had fewer than 9 Supreme Court justices just 70 years ago! So, like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, first it was "the people need to have a voice" in the next Supreme Court nomination by electing a new President, and now it's nobody getting a voice but Republicans. Who'da thunk it?

Finally, filmmaker Michael Moore says that Trump voters are "legal terrorists." His subsequent explanation of a Trump voter's motivation for "blowing up the system" is apt, but I didn't like being called a "terrorist" for opposing the Iraq war, so why would I like it when someone calls Trump voters terrorists? And I can't shake the feeling he put it like that just to get heard above the din. But that's the post-modern way to get heard, and we must resist that.

Action: clean water, and internet privacy.

So here we are, a mere two and a half weeks from Election Day, and Congress still hasn't funded a response to the water crisis in Flint, MI. What's the rush? After all, good Flint residents have only had lead in their water for 2 1/2 years now! President Obama and Michigan Gov. Snyder have only declared a state of emergency for ten months now! And lead poisoning is only irreversible and poisonous at any amount! Last we heard, Congress didn't fund Flint water infrastructure funding in the bill keeping our government open through December 9, but Congressional leaders promised another vote on that matter during the lame-duck session. Of course, you know Congressional promises aren't worth the toilet paper they're written on -- unless we make them keep their promises, which is why Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass water infrastructure help for Flint and other cities post-haste. Clean water may be the most important health care innovation of the last century, and our leaders have absolutely no business pretending to be leaders if they won't fix what happened in Flint -- and won't prevent it from happening in other cities and towns across America. Really, investing in people is not too much to ask.

Meanwhile, the FCC may vote this week to put the brakes on big corporate ISPs selling our personal and private data without our consent -- but word on the street is that one FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel is on the fence about that. That can't be because big corporate telecoms have been lobbying Congress relentlessly over the last few months, can it? Or because the Senate has refused to consider her renomination to the FCC for a second term, even though President Obama submitted it well over a year ago? Here's the thing: if any of us cave to big corporate money, we teach future generations that greed is OK, and if a nominee bows before Republican pressure in order to get her renomination considered, we teach future generations that it's OK to play stupid playground games in order to get what we want. Why don't corporatists and Republicans ever try to win these arguments on the merits? Could it be because they can't reasonably oppose good Americans having more control over how their ISPs use their personal data? Don't let the haters have all the say about everything: let Free Press help you tell the FCC to do the people's will and allow us to have more control over our internet privacy.

Around the table: mostly cataloguing fraud, betrayal, and stupidity.

Uh oh: an EPA inspector general says the agency could have intervened in the Flint water emergency seven months before they did. I'd hate the think the EPA delayed action out of a belief that the state of Michigan should be given time to fix the problem in their own way -- or even out of a belief that Michigan broke it, so they should fix it. Sometimes, our federal government has to jump in and take control -- you know, like when kids have lead in their drinking water.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism describes how Hillary Clinton might gut Social Security. Long story short: Mrs. Clinton's plan would force employee contributions into "mandatory retirement accounts," run largely by hedge fund managers and other banksters, with workers getting little or no say over how their funds are "managed." Spoiler alert: they'd be "managed" into bankster coffers. Donald Trump could do worse than rant and rave about such a plan in the time left to him. And we would do worse if we didn't fight such a plan as hard as we fought Mr. Bush's privatization plan.

I tend to avoid articles with titles like "October 2016: The Month Political Journalism Died," and not merely out of a sense that entropy increases, but this article is a pretty damning indictment of our "liberal" media's Presidential debate coverage. That they prefer the "fatuous" over the substantive you already knew, but you may not know that it was not always thus: the late October 1980 Carter/Reagan debate, relatively substantive and conducted largely by print journalists, was the highest-rated Presidential debate ever, until the three most recent "pie fights."

A ProPublica analysis finds that some two-thirds of New York City landlords who have received tax breaks under a city rent stabilization program haven't even formally applied for the program and haven't registered specific apartments for stabilized rent -- meaning they can collect tax breaks while raising rent at will, which is kind of the opposite of how the program's supposed to work. So when right-wingers refuse to hire more workers to process the landlords' applications, we can accuse them of being objectively pro-fraud, right? (As an aside, I'd be a schmuck to think this results from mere "bureaucratic incompetence" -- what did we learn from George W. Bush, if not that incompetence always happens for a reason?)

Now here's a surprise: former Fox News punditoid Gretchen Carlson will testify before Congress against forced arbitration clauses in employment contracts. Seems Fox News tried to force her sexual harassment claim against Roger Ailes into arbitration, where she'd have had much less of a chance of success. Right-wingers will call her traitor, no doubt, but good liberals shouldn't demean her efforts against forced arbitration (or sexual harassment, for that matter) out of a sense that she only cares because they happened to her. We don't learn everything through thought experiment, after all; we learn a lot because things happen to us, and that's how it should be.

Finally, a Western Pennsylvania city council Vice President circulates a fake meme on Facebook suggesting that only Democrats will be able to vote online on Election Day, when in fact no one in America can vote online as of yet. Naturally he takes none of the blame for what happened afterward, saying it was "clearly a joke." You know what would have made it "clearly a joke"? If it was clearly funny, which it clearly wasn't.

Action: lead exposure, and copyright.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed updating the Lead Safe Housing Rule (for the first time in 17 years), and is now taking public comments on Sierra Club helps you tell the Department of Housing and Urban Development to issue the most vigorous new Lead Safe Housing Rule possible. HUD's proposal would reduce the allowable level of lead in publicly-assisted homes and apartments to the level recommended by the Centers for Disease Control (or CDC), and would automatically reduce that level further if the CDC recommended doing so. All this is important, since there is no safe level of lead, and since lead causes (among other things) behavior and learning problems in children. Our government banned lead paint in 1978, of course, but that doesn't mean lead paint still doesn't lurk in a lot of old houses -- think of areas like basements, generally the last to be repainted. (Remember: if you've already left a public comment about the Lead Safe Housing Rule -- at regulations.gov, for example -- don't sign this petition as well. Doing that muddies the data.)

Meanwhile, Section 1201 of the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 criminalizes the breaking or circumventing of digital locks, so as to prevent people from pirating VHS tapes and DVDs. Trouble with that is that these digital locks have expanded well beyond these media -- they now show up in appliances that use software, such as cellphones and refrigerators, and these locks make it a lot harder to tinker with them, repair them, or improve them. They also make it harder for security researchers to test whether or not hackers can break into them, which is something you'd want to know about before it happened. But now the U.S. Copyright Office is taking public comments on whether it should recommend to Congress that it create permanent exemptions to DMCA Section 1201 -- exemptions that could include smartphones, computer software, and technologies that assist disabled folks. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell the Copyright Office that copyright law shouldn't "punish research and repair," as EFF puts it (and it's a good way of putting it).

Around the table: taxes, "entitlements," "discrimination," evil, greed, and cowardice.

Sam Pizzigati at Inequality.org argues that we ought to put a 30 percent minimum tax rate for the wealthy in place -- but also urges us "not" to "stop there," since our wealthiest Americans used to pay much higher rates. You know those teabaggers who are always going around saying I just wish this could be the country I grew up in? Remind them that they grew up in an America that taxed millionaire income at 91% and didn't hand out corporate welfare like it was candy -- and that's how we grew the greatest middle class in history.

Dean Baker at TruthOut reminds us that "debt and entitlements" was one of the topics at last night's third and thankfully final Presidential debate, and that this terminology herds people into agreeing to cut Social Security and Medicare when they otherwise wouldn't. Why not shore up Social Security and Medicare by taxing the rich a lot harder? The rich don't want you to ask that question, hence their talk of "entitlements," as if you haven't paid into Social Security and Medicare all your life, or as if you don't deserve it. And also, why not "debt and military spending," or "debt and pharmaceutical patents"?

Trump advisor compares the Department of Labor's new "fiduciary standard" -- which mandates that a pension fund's financial advisors must put their clients' interests ahead of their own -- is "about like the Dred Scott decision." Lest you think he was merely saying that the DOL's standard is dumb like the Dred Scott decision was dumb, he went out of his way to say the DOL's standard was discriminatory like the Dred Scott decision was discriminatory -- discriminatory against bad financial advisors, I guess. And they say liberals are frail and weak?

Wisconsin Gov./Satan Incarnate Scott Walker solicited $750,000 in campaign contributions from a now-deceased businessman who used to manufacture lead-based paint -- right before lawmakers put a four-word change into a budget bill nullifying lawsuits against the businessman's corporation and other lead-paint makers. And Mr. Walker's winged monkeys, naturally, wonder why this is a big deal, since lead paint has been illegal since 1978. As thinking people know, however, the fact that no one has made lead paint for nearly 40 years doesn't mean all the lead paint is gone, nor does it mean lead paint manufacturers never harmed anyone before it was outlawed (and it certainly doesn't mean they didn't know what they were doing, since they knew by the 1920s that lead was toxic). The only good news? Federal and state courts declared the legislative rider nullifying the lawsuits to be unconstitutional. I do not presume that these courts also ruled it to be evil, but I will.

VoteVets puts out ad scorching Pat Toomey for serving on the board of a now-unaccredited for-profit school, and "try(ing) to turn our military benefits into his financial gain." In a close race like the one Mr. Toomey's in, an ad like this could be the difference -- a lot of good Pennsylvanians know someone who served our country and then got caught in the downward spiral of the for-profit college debt trap. (As an aside, Mr. Toomey's ad claiming that he's "independent" and would stand up to the bad ideas of "any" President should get a fairly easy response listing all the bad ideas Mr. Toomey didn't stand up to when he was in the House and George W. Bush was President. But I fear Katie McGinty's focus-grouped her way out of that one.)

Finally, a North Dakota District Judge dismisses rioting charges against Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman -- but "No Thanks to Corporate Media," notes Jim Naureckas at FAIR. A few "liberal" media journalists did cover it, but they're names you'll recognize -- Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News, Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times, and, of course, Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone -- and we didn't hear very much about it from our papers of record in New York and Washington. As an aside, I'd love to have seen the look on Judge Grinsteiner's face when he dismissed the charge.

Action: "free" trade, immigrant veterans, and lead poisoning.

A few dozen organizations have coordinated to make today "TPP Call-In Day" -- as in, call your Reps and Senators to tell them you don't want them to pass the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," a "free" trade deal the Obama Administration is still pushing. Americans across the ideological spectrum abhor the "free" trade deal that will outsource more American jobs and allow corporations unprecedented power to nullify American laws, via the "investor-state tribunal," through which corporations could allege that laws protecting air and water and workers cost them money, and thus exact a bailout from the American people. Most of our Congressfolk are actually talking a good game about this -- I was floored to hear from our state's junior Senator that he actually opposed it, because I'm old enough to remember when there wasn't a "free" trade deal Pat Toomey didn't like. But fact is, they're only talking a good game, and there's still plenty of time for them to pull a gotcha on the American people. So use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page -- or use this toll-free phone number, 888-659-7351 -- and call your Reps and Senators and tell them to reject the TPP.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5695, the Veterans Visa and Protection Act, would establish a visa program for non-citizen military veterans, so that those veterans will ultimately be able to naturalize as American citizens -- and so our government can stop deporting them. It's one thing to come to America to make a better life for yourself, but it's another thing entirely to come to America and risk your life to defend our country. A lot of these veterans, unfortunately, think that military service automatically confers citizenship, but it doesn't -- and our government hasn't always been clear about what a non-citizen veteran needs to do to become a citizen (and, in less sunny moments, I suspect our government deports non-citizen veterans because they won't be able to get health benefits once they're deported). Now I bet some folks would hear about H.R. 5695 and worry that a terrorist will use a veteran visa program to infiltrate our country and cause mayhem, but becoming a soldier to accomplish that? That sure is a long game. The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Veterans Visa and Protection Act.

Finally, the lead crisis in Flint, MI may have passed from the nightly news, but it's still a crisis for the good people of Flint -- the state of Michigan, as far as I can tell, has handed out water-testing kits and water bottles, and that's what they're bragging about, and Congress has done even less than that, although they have plenty of options, including funding relief, funding childhood lead prevention programs, establishing water testing programs at schools and child care centers, and reauthorizing the Drinking Water Safe Revolving Fund. Some Congressfolk will attempt to exact spending cuts elsewhere (and not in oil corporation subsidies, for example!) in exchange for these necessary programs. But when half a million children have lead in their blood, and any amount of lead causes brain damage, then treating emergencies like the Flint water crisis as opportunities to make pet spending cuts elsewhere is unconscionably cruel, and unworthy of civilized people. The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to do right by the folks in Flint, and stop lead poisoning in their drinking water.

Around the table: how vote suppression and "free" trade are *even worse* than you thought, and other hard lessons.

America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, describes "The GOP's Stealth War Against Voters." Yes, it's the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a.k.a. Crosscheck -- the database that pretends to identify "voters who've voted in multiple races across state lines" by matching fairly common names that just so happen to belong to predominantly black folk and folks of color. Plus, the database matches voters without checking their full Social Security numbers -- or, apparently, their middle names. Still not convinced? Out of over 7 million suspects flagged by the database, how many folks have actually faced voter fraud charges? Four. So, yes, Crosscheck is partisan and racist.

Chris Hamby at Buzzfeed reveals "The Court That Rules the World" -- and, spoiler alert, it's the "investor-state tribunal" created by "free" trade agreements. You won't just learn about the less-noxious origins of ISDS, and about corruption in Egypt and lead-laced water in El Salvador -- you'll also learn about "the system’s usefulness as a shield for the criminal and the corrupt," which "has remained virtually unknown." The ISDS virtually ended any attempts by good Egyptians and Salvadorians to clean up their countries; think that won't happen here if the TPP passes? (Of course, it already has -- Congress rushed to repeal country-of-origin labeling laws for meat late last year when the WTO ruled that such laws violated "free" trade deals.)

Louisiana 1st Circuit Court of Appeals panel rules that a Terrebone Parish sheriff violated the Constitutional rights of a blogger when he raided his house. The blogger, of course, had accused the sheriff and several other local officials of corruption. Turns out the alleged "defamation" perpetrated by the blogger wasn't a criminal offense -- because public officials can't be "defamed" in that manner -- and thus any search warrant procured by the sheriff lacked probable cause. The sheriff, at one point over the last month, referred to the accusations against him as "unsatisfactory." That's a pretty terrible way of saying people are wrongly accusing you. It's like he got lost in a thesaurus.

Washington Post writer Kent Babb chronicles the below-poverty-level life of minor league baseball players. If you're tempted to think that's an OK price to pay so you can one day get to The Show -- which plenty of poor minor league ballplayers also think! -- remember how few of them ever make it to the majors. And n.b. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred using the exact same excuse all corporate leaders use whenever they want to argue against the minimum wage: that "additional regulation could ultimately lead to smaller minor league rosters or fewer teams." You'll recognize this, of course, as a hostage situation: don't make me do the right thing, Mr. Manfred's really saying, or these jobs'll get it! But I think he's wrong -- I don't see major league ball clubs taking kindly to the suggestion that they can do without their rookie league or high A farm clubs.

Finally, Harry Boyte at Moyers and Company reminds us that "Consumer Culture is Killing Citizenship." Long story short: we care less about each other and more (or perhaps only) about ourselves. Long story somewhat longer: our commercialized culture, where city folks can see some 5,000 ads daily and children see 40,000 ads every year, stops us from being "makers of democratic society" and makes us instead into people who "brand() and sell() ourselves" and constantly ask "what's in it for me?" Will the Trump campaign, which "embod(ies) the logic of a culture where differences between salesmanship and leadership disappear," be America's wake-up call? Maybe, maybe not -- but we'll be out there banging our saucepan.