Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: featuring stories about the power of organizing.

When I hear that far-right Christians aim to redeploy the "Astroturf" stratagem that worked so well for them in Virginia in 2021, I feel compelled to remind everyone that once we reveal such a stratagem (and I'll continue to reveal it as often as I can!) it becomes less effective, and also that as even E.J. Jackson knows, running against Terry McAuliffe isn't the hardest thing a candidate can do. Their stratagem might succeed, though, if Democrats don't point out all the Astroturfing going on in these races. People are too quick to accept that someone they know personally couldn't possibly be part of an Astroturf group! But too many of them are, and borrowing a hedge-trimmer from one of them doesn't make them more "real."

Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone not only digs up evidence that our FBI did, in fact, know a lot about the January 6 attempted coup before it happened, but also reminds us that our FBI professes that it simply doesn't have the legal tools to detect right-wing agitation before it happens but can detect and disrupt more peaceful liberal agitation with laughable ease. Which further reminds us that law enforcement agencies always use events like the January 6 attempted coup to justify even more surveillance power over the American people, when they hardly need it! They just don't focus very much on right-wing protestors, for some reason. Also, they don't seem to need to get warrants very often; there's a reason we get warrants.

On March 29, wind power produced more electricity than either coal or nuclear power for the first time; though not as much as natural gas. I can already hear the right-wingers squeal that TEH BIG GUMMINTZ GIVEZ TEH WELFAREZ TO TEH WINDZ POWERZ!!!!!, as if either coal or nuclear power would be able to provide any power at all without massive federal taxpayer support. Think how much power wind could supply if big corporations had done the smart thing and embraced it long ago! Versus the dumb thing of clinging like grim death to fossil fuel technology that's going to make our planet unlivable. (No, they're not "smart" merely because they've made a lot of money. Try taking money with you to the Pearly Gates.)

Luis Feliz Leon at New York Focus reminds us that the Amazon Labor Union organizing effort in the Staten Island warehouse "broke many of the traditional rules of labor organizing, while making history." The ALU had virtually no funding, no prior experience organizing, and no support from other unions; they also made "amateur missteps" like filing for an NLRB election before having majority card-signing support and refraining from home visits and door-knocking. So how did they win? They organized by talking to workers in break areas and in the cafeteria rather than at home -- since, as one organizer suggests, most folks look at their home as a safe space from work -- and used social media apps to specifically to reach workers whose command of the English language wasn't that great face-to-face. Besides, they're not the first independent union to win! In the '30s, those unions won all the time -- and after ALU won, more established unions supported them.

Mark and Paul Engler at Waging Nonviolence interview Rebecca Tarlau about "What U.S. Organizers Can Learn From Brazil's Landless Workers Movement." "(W)e need to contest power in all spaces of social life" (i.e., not just in the political sphere), "whether that’s in the media or the schools or with the land," and Brazil's Landless Workers Movement has been doing that for decades, whether through gaining permanent settlements or through establishing and maintaining health care clinics, educational curricula, and food processing plants. So they've essentially seized power without very much compromise by providing for their own needs as much as possible and through that service "prefiguring an alternative way of being" -- though when the Black Panthers (among others!) tried something similar in the United States in the '70s, our governments demonized them and our law enforcement took them down.

Finally, Indonesia's Parliament passes a bill criminalizing many forms of sexual violence, the first of its kind in that nation. Many observers think it doesn't go far enough -- it tackles domestic abuse, child marriage, forced marriage, and sexual exploitation but not rape -- while the religious right there complains that it doesn't include proscriptions against extramarital sex (like those guys really want that!) and "deviant" sexual orientations. My father would say if all the extremists are upset, it must be a good bill; I won't go that far, but I will call it progress, even if, as I suspect, getting it passed was (in Ronald Reagan's famous phrase) like crapping out a pineapple.

Action: concerning taxes, social media, Saudi Arabia, and various forms of pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, tell our government to regulate Facebook more vigorously, tell your Congressfolk to void President Biden's proposed $500 million deal with Saudi Arabia, pass the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act, and ban cyanide bombs from the wild, and tell our Department of Energy to reject uranium mining. 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 raise all Build Back Better Act funding by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. If you're an Arizona resident, you'll definitely want to call Sen. Sinema, since she seems to be the one Senate Democrat who opposes raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. Stop me if you've heard this before, but over two-thirds of Arizonans support raising taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the Build Back Better Act. As usual, the "inscrutable" "iconoclastic" "maverick" "earns" her reputation by simply defying the will of her own constituents, in favor of the big corporate donors she seems to hobnob with every weekend. That's not very mavericky, frankly! And we shouldn't let her get away with it.

Free Press helps you tell our government to regulate Facebook a lot more vigorously than we currently do. Specifically, you'd urge Congress to pass data privacy and algorithmic abuse laws and tax social media advertising, and you'd ask various Executive branch agencies to crack down on abusive data practices. I've thought a lot lately about what the internet was like before Facebook; I visited at least four different social networks regularly in the mid-2000s, and visited half a dozen blogs and websites regularly for my news, but now we go to Facebook for all of that (and more -- remember Flickr?), and why should we? And why should they get to do whatever they like with our data, and why should they get to use algorithms to mindlessly ensure white supremacists feel less alone in the world? They've become a monopoly, and we know what to do with monopolies. Even if our politicians have forgotten.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to block President Biden's proposed $500 million weapons deal with Saudi Arabia. Yeah, I know, the money is supposedly for helicopter maintenance, but the Saudis ain't using those helicopters for humanitarian airdrops! The ongoing war on Yemen is just one reason to starve this particular beast, and using Saudi Arabia as a "hedge" against Iranian power in the region is not only a dumb idea but an immoral one, since the Saudis don't exactly use their power for good. Besides, if we didn't invade Iraq in 2003 for no damn good reason, we wouldn't need such a hedge against Iranian power! You look back over the last 20 years in particular and you begin to think we really have been conducting foreign policy for the express purpose of making the world worse. But we don't have to put up with what they do in our name.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4963/S. 2669, the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act. Much like the "forever chemical" PFAS, scientists have long linked phthalates to cancer, brain damage, and birth defects, plus they're everywhere in our plastic products and they get into our bodies to wreak havoc there. Our Consumer Product Safety Commission banned phthalates from children's toys back in 2017, which will protect kids a bit, but we all need that kind of protection. Hence the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act would ban phthalates in food packaging products outright and instruct our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to review the products our FDA typically regulates to see where else we can ban them. If you're worried that we won't have as many food prep gloves after this, remember that this is America, the can-do country, and we've adapted to worse.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell Congress to ban our use of cyanide bombs in the wild. You think it's inhumane when land mines planted 50 years ago in a foreign country blow somebody's arm or leg off decades after the war is over? Now consider that cyanide bombs kill pretty indiscriminately as well -- the bombs don't exactly wait until their target animal is near! In fact, the bombs lure animals in with a sweet scent, so they're actually worse than landmines, which don't exactly lure people to them with hundred-dollar bills or promises of free broadband. How we treat animals tells the world what kind of civilization we are. Yes, even if we raise animals for food, we can still treat them in a civilized manner. We should be able to report to future civilizations that we did a pretty good job at it, and getting rid of cyanide bombs is just one way to do that.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Department of Energy not to fund uranium mining. Uranium is, as you know, a radioactive element that too easily finds its way into our drinking water and into the bodies of wildlife. And of course we haven't figured out a way to store the waste yet. These days you'll mostly find uranium in nuclear weapons, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear power plants, and depleted uranium weapons; stop me if you hear anything you like in that list! Yeah, you'll also find it (in much, much smaller amounts) in wool, silk, stage lighting, photo chemicals, and even more rarely in glass, but ain't no mining corporation looking to make a killing in these markets -- they're looking for the big weapon money! And for these reasons we say no to uranium mining.

Action: concerning Guantánamo, student loan debt, uranium mining, cleaner cars, monopolies, and clemency

Long story short: tell our government to close Guantánamo already, fix the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, stop funding uranium mining, make cars cleaner, and break up Amazon, and tell the state of Illinois to show Christian Reichert some mercy already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both the ACLU and Amnesty International help youtell our government to close the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention center already. Opened by Tha Bush Mobb after 9.11, the Guantánamo Bay detention center has been holding decidedly non-threatening terror "suspects" for close to 20 years now, and if they were as "dangerous" as they were supposed to be, well Jesus Mary and Joseph we would have put some of them in jail, or, at the very least, charged them with something. What is the likelihood that the three dozen most dangerous people in the world are all in one spot? It's been one stupid and offensive lie with Guantánamo after another for two decades. We managed to get ourselves out of Afghanistan, painful and horrible as that was; getting out of Guantánamo should, quite frankly, be much easier. And when Lindsey Graham says this'll lead to another 9.11, he'll be wrong as usual.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Department of Education to fix the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. Authorized by Congress in 2007, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program aimed to forgive the student loans of good Americans who spent 10 years in public service (teaching, soldiering, volunteering in the Peace Corps, etc.) and kept up with their student loan payments all the while -- but only 2% of all applicants have ever gotten any kind of loan forgiveness from the program. And the failure happens for bad reasons, including both bad advice ("consolidate all your loans into one private loan whoops private loans aren't eligible") and the proverbial red tape (that somehow considers rounding up your loan payments to be "noncompliance" with your loan terms!) Could it have been designed to fail? Doesn't matter -- we can demand that it work, and we can make it work.

Penn Environment helps you tell our government to stop funding uranium mining. Why do we need uranium? Mainly to make weapons and nuclear reactors; nuclear power hasn't made money for decades, and we already have enough damn weapons. I know, we also use uranium for silk and wool dye and stage lighting bulb filaments, but gosh, should we pollute our air and water everywhere we mine for uranium so we can have those things? C'mon, this is a can-do country! But our government wants to create, essentially, a massive corporate welfare program for uranium mining corporations; does that seem like a good use of taxpayer money, i.e., your money? No, it does not. A better use of taxpayer money might be, oh, I don't know, creating public utilities that use renewable energy. They'd work, and they'd belong to us.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous fuel efficiency standards possible. What's that, you say? You heard that President Biden already did that? Well, our EPA proposed much tougher fuel efficiency standards than those adopted by the Trump Administration, but a public comment period follows every rule proposal, and our EPA reviews all those comments, and then adopts or adjusts the standards based on the comments. And you don't want all the pro-pollution commenters to drown you out, right? Because the big auto corporations are getting their PR flacks to do just that. Granted, their comments will suck, while our comments will be good -- no, it really will be pretty much like that, don't let big corporate PR hacks bamboozle you! -- but if we don't leave comments, we won't get heard. So let's get heard.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break up Amazon. Amazon has proposed buying MGM studios for $8.45 billion, and for once, our FTC is investigating the matter. And our FTC has some vocally anti-monopoly Commissioners these days, so this investigation might yield results! Still, if we-the-people don't communicate our will, they might get cold feet, as our leaders so often do these days in the face of corporate power. And we'll have plenty of good reasons to oppose the merger -- not just because it'll allow Amazon to prevent MGM from letting any streaming service other than Amazon Prime carry their content, but because of all the jobs and competition that'll get wiped out, since that happens every time we let big corporations merge. It's well past time our government actually enforced antitrust laws with some vigor.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell the state of Illinois to free Christian Reichert. Mr. Reichert somehow got 23 years in jail for pot possession, after what may have been his first significant encounter with law enforcement; I couldn't tell you how he managed to get such an overblown sentence, but I can tell you that you don't even need to believe he's been a model prisoner for the last seven years to think he should get out -- hell, you don't even need to think pot should be legal for him to get out. You don't even need to suspect his trial wasn't on the up-and-up to think he ought to get out! All you need know is that pot is now legal in Illinois, which makes his absurd predicament even more absurd. So letting Mr. Reichert out is a bank shot as far as doing the right thing is concerned.

Action: concerning government spying, immigration policy, paid sick leave, and corporate welfare.

Our Congressfolk hope to ram a PATRIOT Act reauthorization down America's throat this week, so Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop any extension or expansion of that law's abusing spying powers. I wish I could say this has been an exclusively Republican problem, but Democrats haven't been any better when they've been the gatekeepers -- two years of exclusive control of Congress and the Presidency yielded exactly bupkus as far as rolling back such abuses as warrantless wiretapping, and thanks to Edward Snowden we know that our government expanded its powers during the Obama years. Oddly, this President's NSA has declared it really doesn't need all that power to spy on American phone calls and emails, and historically it is odd for a government to give up a spying power it's gained. It's a lot easier for governments to give up the powers they use to restrain corporations and rich folks from abusing the rest of us, amirite? But let's keep working for a government that delivers the services we pay for with our taxes and then leaves us alone.

Meanwhile, our President has floated the possibility that he won't allow federal aid to flow to states with so-called "sanctuary cities"! Huzzah! Another right-wing hostage crisis! And another maneuver that makes our President looks like he's done something about the "scourge" of immigration when, in reality, he's done nothing, as usual. What is a "sanctuary city"? A city that won't cooperate with the feds on immigration matters unless the feds present a damn warrant; get a warrant and poof! No "sanctuary." You'd think right-wingers, who have swordfights all the time over who's "more conservative," would champion local control of law enforcement matters, but no -- instead, they make "sanctuary" just another cuss word! And our President benefits from undocumented immigrant labor as much as the next guy -- though his are "the best people," I bet! -- and has no interest in, say, letting farmworkers unionize under the National Labor Relations Act, which would actually result in fewer big ag corporations importing foreign workers to drive down everyone's wages. Anyway, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Congressfolk to prevent our President tying aid to "sanctuary cities."

In other news, the ACLU helps you tell big fast food corporation McDonald's to give all its workers paid sick leave now. Like we've been saying, if they want to do business, they need to take all the steps necessary to ensure that you don't die from your next Big Mac, and that includes giving their workers paid sick leave so that they don't come to work sick and make everyone else sick and, you know, unflatten the curve. McDonald's has almost a million employees, whom they already don't pay enough, such that nearly half of McDonald's workers who come to work sick do so explicitly because they can't afford the loss of money; McDonald's should be paying its workers a lot more (and some people need to get over the notion that fast-food workers "don't have skills," at least until they take a turn at the drive-in window), but getting them paid sick leave will help in the meantime. And boy oh boy McDonald's had better not try to say that kind of decision-making is "up to the franchises." The "franchise" is a fiction executives use to deny accountability for their own failures. And the way they treat their workers sure does count as failure.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to block any attempt by our President to give a billion-dollar-plus bailout to the uranium mining industry. Let's make a list of things you can do with uranium, shall we? Well, there's making nuclear weapons, and powering nuclear power plants, and not a damn thing else. No, we don't use it in yellow paint anymore, because it's freaking poisonous. Scientists have long linked uranium to cancer, it leeches too easily into the water table, and uranium ore gives off radon gas; you know we get houses checked for radon before we move in for a good reason, right? And not for nothing, but uranium prices have basically cratered over the last 40 years, basically because you don't need any more nukes when you have enough to destroy the world hundreds of times over, and also because nuclear power plants don't make any money no matter how many corporate welfare handouts it gets. So isn't it a bit late to be giving the uranium mining industry a bailout? And don't renewable sources of energy look a lot better?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning corporate transparency, nuclear power, racist enabling, and big tech monopolies.

H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, would (as its title suggests) force corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners" -- the folks who create the corporations and, presumably, benefit financially from their existence. Believe it or not, we don't do this in America, so skewed toward corporate power have our laws always been. And forcing corporations to disclose their owners will have real benefits: we'll better be able to stop the banksters, terrorists, tax-evaders, sex traffickers, drug money launderers, and big campaign donors who use shell corporations to hide their wrongdoing. Don't believe any don't-tread-on-me tantrums from the right -- corporations aren't people, and don't have the same rights as people, and corporation owners don't have a "right" to hide criminal behavior, either. Hence CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to crack down on corporate misbehavior by passing the Corporate Transparency Act.

Meanwhile, Environmental Action helps you tell the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems to scuttle its plan to build new and inadequately-tested nuclear reactors near the Grand Teton National Park and invest in renewable energy instead. I know, nuclear power plants, every one a potential Chernobyl or Fukushima, near public lands -- terrible idea, right? And you don't even need to see every nuclear power plant as a potential terrorist target, either, or as an almost-certain money-loser that the taxpayer will need to bail out, though both of these are true as well. Really, all you need know is that the price of solar and wind production has come down so far in the last 20 years that now homeowners can reasonably expect to be able to pay to solarize their houses with home equity loans. That has come about with very little corporate or utility help; think of what their help could do to push renewables across the finish line in America.

In other news, with the rise of white supremacist groups selling their disgusting wares online, Sum of Us helps you tell big payment-processing corporations like MasterCard, VISA, and PayPal to stop letting white supremacist groups use their services. What's that, you say? Isn't that denying white supremacists their right to have their views heard, as well as their right to make money as they see fit? Well, no, because neither of these rights actually exist -- white supremacists do have the right to believe whatever obnoxious and emotionally-cripped shit they want in the privacy of their heart, and they have the right not to be put in jail by our government for those beliefs, but they do not have a "right" to sell those beliefs on bumper stickers and T-shirts, nor do they have a "right" to make money however they like -- I mean, if that were true, we could never put a burglar or a bankster in jail. So trouble not your heart, if racists have to get real jobs. Work builds character, after all.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell investment management corporation Vanguard to support a shareholder resolution aimed at breaking up Google. You don't need to know about Google's inability to protect your privacy or their illegal tracking of your location or their complicity in Chinese government censorship or accusations of wage theft and sexual harassment against them to want Google broken up. All you need to know is that when we look for information online, we say we're going to "google" it, for Google has so much power over our lives that its name has become a verb. And any corporation that has that much power deserves to be broken up -- even if we can credibly say that Google has done a lot of good. You know what other corporation did a lot of good? Netscape. Seriously, they had the best browser/email application in the world in the late 1990s. But I don't mourn their oblivion -- and I would mourn if they'd wound up monopolizing the internet.

Action: concerning government spying, renewable energy, and food stamps.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Homeland Security to stop spying on reporters and refugee advocates, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. As you likely know, our DHS has kept fairly detailed records on these folks -- even going so far as to collect make and model info on their cars! -- and handed over that data to Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (or ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (or CBP). So did DHS get the warrants, or did ICE and CBP get the warrants? I kid, of course -- this Administration doesn't need any stinkin' warrants! Spying on folks who are fighting or recording your slow-motion train wreck of a border policy does not exactly demonstrate a whole lot of confidence in your border policy, does it? So let's remind our government (again!) that its political opponents have rights just like everyone else.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 11 would amend the state's Alternative Energies Portfolio Standard -- which requires utilities to get some of their power from renewable sources -- to include nuclear power. Recall how hard it is for nuclear power plants to make money without massive government handouts and you'll already see why folks call this the "nuclear bailout" bill. But then the bill's lead sponsor, Rep. Thomas Mehaffie (R-106), cites two nuclear power plants that'll have to close if his bill doesn't pass -- and one of them is Three Mile Island! Gosh, "pass my bill or the poster child for nuclear meltdowns will have to close" has to be one of the dumbest attempted hostage situations I've ever seen. But Republicans dominate the state legislature, and Democratic Gov. Wolf is no great battler of corporate welfare, so, as usual, it's up to us. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Pennsylvania legislators to reject HB 11.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our USDA to reject its proposed rule changes that would result in fewer folks getting food stamps when they need them, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. You'll recall our President saying that "good people need to stop paying for bad people," a statement of idiocy that rivals Paul Ryan saying "healthy people need to stop paying for sick people." You cannot reasonably divide a population into good and bad people on the basis of whether or not they receive food stamps! Why? Because everyone pays into the food stamp program with their taxes, and anyone could, at any time, hit a run of bad fortune that puts you in a position where you'll need food stamps to help make ends meet. Note well the words "everyone" and "anyone," both of which have received the blessings of the Italics Hammer, and let's stop with the real politics of division.

Action: concerning labor, bailouts, and genocide.

H.R. 6080/S. 3064, the Workers' Freedom to Negotiate Act, would amend the National Labor Relations Act to strengthen worker protections. The bill would (among many other things!) strike down "right-to-work" laws at the state level, keep taxpayer dollars away from corporations that violate worker safety laws, narrow the definition of "independent contractor" so corporations can't just willy-nilly reclassify their employees as such, and prevent corporations from using class action waivers as a condition of employment. That last item is important, since more than half of all employers now subject their non-union employees to these class action waivers, thus depriving them of their right to a day in court when these employers screw them over. ("More than half" should clue folks in that "just go get another job" isn't a good objection.) So the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Workers' Freedom to Negotiate Act.

Meanwhile, our Energy Department still thinks bailing out the coal and nuclear industries is a good idea, even though coal is dying out and nuclear has never made money. I can already hear the right-wingers squeal BUTZ WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH COAL MINURZ!!!!! How many times must I tell these pimps! This bailout ain't about coal miners; it's about CEOs, as it always is with this Administration. The Energy Department's plan to subsidize "reliable" industries has met with plenty of resistance already, so now they're claiming that we need to do it for national security reasons. Remember Dr. Johnson saying that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel? Well, squealing "national security" is the modern last refuge of politicians who can't win arguments on the merits. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to push back against our Administration's fossil fuel bailout plan.

Finally, Amnesty International helps you tell your Congressfolk to push the U.N. to bring the perpetrators of the massacre of Rohingya Muslims to justice. The Burmese military started ethnic-cleansing the Rohingya a little over a year ago, burning down villages and killing thousands, while spurring almost a million more Rohingya to flee to other countries, where they now live in (as you'd expect) wretched refugee camps. Hence we ask our Congressfolk to pressure our U.N. Ambassador, Nikki Haley, to bring the Burmese military to justice; she did call for a worldwide arms embargo of Burma last year, so she may be sympathetic. I do wonder how reasonable-sounding folks will argue that we should leave Burma's military alone. Because without their military, they'd collapse? That military is the very reason Burma can't succeed as a nation. And that military deserves no lenient treatment after committing genocide.

Around the table: starring unsolicited advice from an unwanted quarter.

Hoo boy: group of Nazi wannabes based in Alabama starts a Russian-language page extolling all the alleged similarities between Russia and the American South. You know, "same general gene pool," "similar values," and, of course, "our common faith," though I bet they'd be surprised at how they'd really worship in Russiabama. I can't dismiss the possibility that they started this page just to piss off liberals. I can, however, dismiss the possibility that I'll ever speak of this particular clown car again.

Our Administration's Energy Department places new restrictions on the oversight the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board performs. Worse, the order essentially mandates that Energy Department employees stonewall the Board -- how else to interpret an order to speak to the Board "with one voice," an order executives usually know better than to put in writing? The Energy Department says its order will "decrease costs," including, I would think, the "costs" of the problems advisory boards are always telling you to fix. But cleaning up a lab accident (or, heaven forbid, a meltdown) would cost a lot more.

From the "Dystopia is here!" file: a TruTV game show called Paid Off helps contestants pay off their student debt if they can answer questions correctly -- and helps losing contestants call their Congressfolk to tell them do something about student loan debt. I bet there'll be a hundred TV shows like this in the future; there should already be a game show for writing off your health care debt. I suppose Paid Off will do some good, but what a shame it's come to this. And note well that for many right-wingers this is exactly how the "free" market is supposed to work.

Former FBI Director James Comey, who had lately advised all Americans to vote Democrat this fall, now says we should avoid voting for the "socialist left" (presumably in Democratic primaries) and vote instead for "sensible, balanced, ethical leadership." Pardon me if I regard his counsel as yet another attempt to drag the center ever further right. After all, right-wingers call anyone to their left a "socialist" anymore, and suggesting that, say, a House candidate who supports Medicare-for-All and taxpayer-funded higher ed is by definition insensible, imbalanced, and unethical is a bit rich, particularly in a world where right-wing policy prescriptions are actually insensible, imbalanced, and unethical. But even more to the point: Democrats have spent the last quarter-century getting behind the kind of center-right Democrats who might best meet Mr. Comey's criteria, and what's that gotten us? It's gotten us a sick, immoral, and decadent society, and an insane Republican party. So, thank you for your input, Mr. Comey, but I think you've done enough.

Finally, after the Iranian President says, rather colorfully, that our President shouldn't "play with the lion's tail" with regard to possibly blocking Iranian oil exports, our President responds by twittering a lengthy threat to Iran in all capital letters. And I realize: this is how trolls do it! Trolls write in shouty caps whenever someone gets under their skin! And they must have been absolutely ecstatic to see their President "stick it" to Iran exactly the way they would! I just hope they wiped their screens off afterwards.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, family leave, and nuclear waste.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: we've told Gov. Wolf to call a special legislative session to pass redistricting reform, but that won't mean anything if the legislature screws up the reform process again, so Fair Districts PA helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to do the right thing during a special session on redistricting reform. One of those "leaders" -- House State Government Committee Chair Daryl Metcalfe -- gutted not one but two redistricting bills in his own committee, and when House leaders successfully kept future redistricting bills out of his committee, legislators from both parties swamped those bills with hundreds of amendments. So, yes, we're demanding they come back during their time off to do their job because they've done an abominable job so far. They could redeem themselves by doing a good job this month, however.

Meanwhile, as several right-wing Senators work on a plan to divert Social Security funding into a paid family leave plan -- anything not to raise taxes on their corporate paymasters! -- Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 337, the FAMILY Act. The FAMILY Act would finally bring paid family leave to America by establishing the Federal Family and Medical Leave Insurance Trust Fund within the Social Security Administration. Monthly benefits would range between $580 and $4000, depending on your income, and an 0.2 percent payroll tax (that's two-tenths of one percent, not "two percent," "liberal" media!) would fund it. So when your right-wing uncle says IZ TEH GUBMINT GOINGZ TO DO EVERYTHINGZ!!!!, remind him that our taxes pay for our benefits, which any of us could use. Just remember: you won't convince him you're right -- but you might convince anyone else who might be listening that you're right.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject the proposed placement of a nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, then Food and Water Action still helps you do that. If you're tempted to respond well, you gotta put the waste somewhere, then you should ask yourself which is worse: storing nuclear waste in hardened containers near nuclear power plants, or transporting that waste across 44 American states and thus risking contamination from the inevitable trucking accident. And there's yet another reason we should reject nuclear power as a nation -- you know, along with the fact that you can get low carbon emissions from solar and wind, and the fact that power plants that present such a high risk of contamination from accidents and/or terrorist attacks tend to be so unpopular that they need massive government handouts to build them and keep them running. So, yeah, let's stop doing that.

Action: internet freedom, corporate welfare, and workplace democracy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your U.S. House Rep to nullify the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal, then Stop the FCC still helps you do that. Net neutrality officially ended last Monday, as you know, and though the big telecom corporations haven't started censoring websites or slowing websites down or forcing you to watch junk news videos before your websites load or herding some of your websites into internet "slow lanes," but the only reason they haven't done these things yet is because they're not completely stupid -- they know it's better to take your freedoms away a bit at a time, rather than rush to take them all away at once. And net neutrality is about your freedom to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than have a bunch of big corporations tell you where to go. The Senate already passed a "resolution of disapproval" aiming to nullify the FCC's repeal; now the House must do the same. But they won't, unless we demand it.

Meanwhile, our Administration's Department of Energy has concocted a truly moronic scheme to force utilities to buy a set percentage of their electric power from coal and nuclear. Brought to you by the same people who call renewable energy standards "welfare handouts"! Coal corporations are failing, not because of some "war on coal" drama, but because natural gas is considerably cheaper, and solar and wind are price-competitive now. And nuclear power plants have never made any money. How do we know? Because our government keeps giving them "loan guarantees," which only "guarantee" that taxpayers bail them out when they fail! I wish I could believe that this chunk of corporate welfare is all about our coal miners, but it's not -- the only people our President cares about are other bosses, and he sees the rest of us as just tools. So the Sierra Club helps you demand that our Energy Department scuttle its plan to force utilities to buy more from failing fossil fuel corporations.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5728/S. 2810, the Workplace Democracy Act. The Workplace Democracy Act would amend the National Labor Relations Act to curb corporations mislabeling their employees "independent contractors," to keep corporations from forcing employees to attend anti-union presentations, to force more good-faith negotiating efforts between corporations and unions, to allow employees to choose a card-check election instead of a secret ballot election to join a union, and to repeal "right-to-work" laws at the state level -- among other things! The only other thing I would ask for would be to allow farm workers to organize. But this bill is the gold standard of labor legislation in these times -- and when we have strong unions, we have better wages and better working conditions. So don't believe the right-wing hype that unions "make us less free," because all they do is make corporations less free to hurt us.

Action: expanding Social Security yea, birth control "gag rules" nay, and corporate welfare for fossil fuel corporations nay.

You may have heard of the sure-looks-coordinated attacks on Social Security from various local Fox TV stations in late May, so now Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits, not cut them. If your right-wing uncle demands to know where they money for that is going to come from, remind him that income over $128,400 doesn't even get taxed into Social Security. And certainly push back against the Social-Security-running-out-of-money hysteria, because the Social Security Trustees report for 2018 tells us that Social Security will pay out full benefits up until 2034 (and then pay out almost 80% of benefits thereafter); if we taxed income over $128,400 into the system, we could make Social Security fully solvent even further into the future and expand benefits so our seniors can have more to live on. Why would we not do this? Because our leaders are worse than thieves? Should we really let that stop us?

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed a regulation that would deny federal Title X funding to any family planning organizations that provide abortions, or refer folks to other abortion providers. This would, naturally, have the effect of denying any basic family planning help (including birth control and STD testing) to poor working families, since they're the ones who most depend on the agencies that get federal funding. And these agencies would very likely stop referring families to a procedure that's, you know, legal. All this, so our Administration can keep diddling the rage glands of right-wingers! I still hope that pro-lifers will one day see how the right has used them all these years; if right-wing politicians really cared about abortion, of course, they'd put a Constitutional amendment up for a vote, but I guess they think it's better "politics" to keep pro-lifers angry than to work to give them what they want. In any case, the Administration "gag rule" is bad public policy, so the ACLU helps you tell our Administration to scuttle its "gag rule" proposal.

Finally, our Administration has also proposed forcing utilities to buy from coal and nuclear power plants. Does that sound like the "free market at work" to you? They're hoping it sounds more like "securing the electric grid" to you, and they're also hoping that solar and wind power -- which are starting to compete, price-wise, with the more traditional energy sources -- will strike you as "insecure" power sources. They're not, of course -- the coal industry is full of its TEH SUN SETZ TEH WIND DIEZ!!!! billboards, but the sun always comes up in the morning, the wind always picks up again, and there is such a thing as battery storage. Meanwhile, giving bailouts to industries that are flailing -- not so coal miners won't lose their jobs, but so coal CEOs won't lose their 19th vacation homes -- doesn't exactly testify to a commitment to national economic security. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our Energy Department to scuttle its plan to give welfare handouts to big coal and nuclear power corporations.

Around the table: describing yet another measure of the cost of this Presidency.

Ho hum, our Administration plans to try, again, to force utilities to buy their power from otherwise-failing coal and nuclear power plants, under the guise of "national security." You'd think a truly strong nation wouldn't be so reliant on power sources that are losing more and more money (particularly nuclear power plants, which rarely if ever make money and too often require "loan guarantees," which we might better describe as "taxpayer bailouts"). And no, this isn't about protecting coal miner jobs; it's about gilding the plumbing in coal and nuclear CEOs' 19th vacation homes.

Gregory Shupak at FAIR reminds us that our "liberal" media, when covering the Israel-Palestine conflict, just about never considers a one-state solution within which Israelis and Palestinians would have equal rights. No use telling me that these folks "just can't get along," when you know as well as I do that all kinds of folks get along quite well until some selfish actor starts blaring in their ear. Also, too, one side having vastly superior firepower and foreign economic support does tend to make conflicts "historic."

Beth Schwartzapfel at The Marshall Project explains why those $2 or $5 co-pays prisoners need to see doctors are actually quite onerous. Long story short: because they hardly make any damn money to begin with! Long story somewhat longer: when you make literally five cents an hour, as those at the bottom of the wage scale do in Oklahoma, a $4 co-pay is more like a $580 co-pay. And if you're tempted to say well, co-pays discourage unnecessary doctor's visits, you may want to consider whether it actually discourages necessary doctor's visits, and thus increases inmate health care costs, which of course are borne by the taxpayer one way or the other. How about that -- the compassionate solution is also the fiscally-responsible solution.

I'd taken it for granted that the NFL could force its players to stand and "respect" the flag and the national anthem, however stupid they'd look for doing so, but Kathy Wilkes at In These Times argues that the NFL owners' recent actions might actually be illegal. Suing our President for attempting to "influence or threaten to influence a private employment decision" might be an uphill battle (even on the merits!), but the players have a much better case against the NFL if it imposed its ban without bargaining with the players at all, as sure seems to be the case.

Finally, in a truly shocking development, we learn that the cost to the taxpayer of sending our President to his Mar-a-Lago resort has so far exceeded the cost to the taxpayer of Robert Mueller's investigation of said President's possible lawbreaking in re his ties to Russia. Now guess which "cost" our President has been whining about on Twitter. You may also recall that the cost of sending our President to Mar-a-Lago also dwarfs at least one other "cost" our President has found onerous -- that of taking care of the health care needs of our transgender soldiers. The good news? His venality, though it knows no bounds, doesn't reflect on the American people -- it reflects on American elites, who have spent the last several decades screwing everything up. They deserve each other.

Around the table: the challenge of being crazy in a crazy time, and other issues.

Trump Administration allows states to start imposing work requirements on Medicaid recipients. No use arguing that including various forms of "community engagement" in these requirements gives these Medicaid recipients a soft landing, because if you're too sick to work, you're too sick to take care of someone else who's sick, too. Also, most Medicaid recipients do work -- they just don't make enough money to afford private health insurance, because their bosses don't pay them enough, though they sure do pay themselves well enough. So Medicaid is not an "entitlement" -- and you or I might be a catastrophe or two away from needing it ourselves.

The next time President Trump calls some country that gives us a lot of immigrants a "shithole" country, he might do well to remember that to the degree that "Haiti and African nations" are unable to provide for their citizens to the degree that our government does, it may be because our government is among the many Western governments that have spent centuries plundering them. Yes, it's an unpleasant truth, but facing unpleasant truths is what helps folks grow and mature. Didn't conservatives used to say that all the time?

In the middle of a House vote rubber-stamping more government spying on good Americans, President Trump took positions both for and against the bill on Twitter. First he wondered if the Obama Administration had used these spying powers to go after him, then he said the bill was really about "foreign guys" on "foreign land" (which, uh, no) and that "(w)e need it!" Republicans have no standing to accuse anyone else of "flip-flopping" ever again -- though, having no shame, of course they will.

Good news, everyone! The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (or FERC) has unanimously rejected the Energy Department's plan to subsidize coal and nuclear power plants. The Energy Department proposed subsidizing these plants, supposedly as a way of making the electric grid more reliable, but -- as the article says repeatedly in a remarkable display of message discipline -- this was really a "coal bailout." I would have added that this was "our government trying to pick winners and losers," since solar and wind are starting to get competitive price-wise. A lot of Trump voters think this is the kind of bailout that's OK, because it'll put them back to work. But if we were to put them to work building out a renewable energy grid, they'd more likely see it for what it is.

Finally, infamous former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, now running for the open U.S. Senate seat in Arizona, still says Mr. Obama's birth certificate is a "forgery (sic) document" and that Congress should pass a "law" or a "regulation" requiring a background check of Presidential candidates. The most famous and obnoxious birther of them all may be President, but Mr. Obama has been out of office for almost a year now, and I'm not sure Mr. Arpaio will get people riled up enough merely by rehashing his greatest hits. You have to find new crazy, after all. Maybe Mr. Arpaio's past it.

Action: "free" trade, and corporate welfare.

Replace NAFTA helps you tell your House Reps to reject any trade agreement, including the currently-being-renegotiated NAFTA, that includes the nefarious "investor-state tribunal" as a mechanism for resolving trade disputes. "Investor-state tribunals" (a.k.a. investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS) allow foreign corporations to sue our government if our government passes laws that "hurt" those corporations' investors -- and if they win, they can exact tribute from the American taxpayer. If you're on the left, you may worry about foreign corporations suing over clean air and clean water laws, and if you're on the right, you may worry about foreign corporations suing to end "right-to-work" laws at the state level, but either way, you worry about submitting to international tribunals that can nullify our laws. "Free" trade deals tend to have an ISDS mechanism, and it gets abused -- witness the corporations rushing into Spain to "develop solar power" right before that country started scaling down its solar subsidies, merely so they could sue Spain and win money! It can happen here -- unless we fight.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reject Energy Secretary Perry's proposal to force taxpayers to subsidize aging coal and nuclear power plants. Specifically, the proposal would require utilities to fund any coal and nuclear plants, even those that should be retired, as long as they keep 90 days' worth of fuel on-site. Presumably, the Trump Administration would sell this plan as a) something that improves the reliability of the electric grid and b) something that would keep coal miners employed. Of course, if you've been sentient over the last half-century or so, then you know that the electric grid is already quite reliable, and doesn't need the help -- indeed, Mr. Perry's own Department of Energy recently came to this very same conclusion in spite of him! -- and employing coal miners in decaying and noxious coal plants isn't nearly as good an idea as retraining them to build and maintain solar and wind plants, though these items are the real enemy as far as the Trump Administration is concerned. But they don't get all the say in America -- we do.

Around the table: tales of privatization and corporate welfare, plus slim rays of hope in Appalachia.

Zachery Tracer at Bloomberg explains how Mr. Trump's ending of Obamacare subsidies will actually cost our government more money. Since other health insurance subsidies essentially limit how much folks who use the exchange pay out-of-pocket, our government will wind up paying even more of the cost of the now-higher premiums. Of course, since so many Trump votaries won't actually feel it in their pocketbook, they'll decide it either didn't happen or doesn't matter. I'd call all that clever of Mr. Trump, if I didn't insist that cleverness also work toward some greater good, rather than some selfish evil.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry wants to guarantee profits for coal and nuclear power plants in deregulated energy markets, as long as those plants keep 90 days' worth of fuel on site. Free markets! Seriously, this is a very edifying read -- among other things, it reminds us that cost-benefit analyses usually wind up ignoring most of the real costs, particularly the health care costs -- but it should be quite irritating navigating the excuses the right will offer in defense, from TEH OBAMAZ MADE TEH WARZ ON TEH COALZ!!! to PROTECTINGZ TEH PROFITZ PROTECTZ TEH WORKURZ!!!!! to TEH SUN SETZ TEH WIND DIEZ!!! to WHY DO YOU HATEZ TEH AMURKIAZ!!!!

The subheader on this William D. Hartung piece at The American Conservative reads thusly: "Your tax dollars support troops of defense contractor CEOs." Turns out about half of defense spending "goes directly to private corporations and much of it is then wasted on useless overhead, fat executive salaries, and startling (yet commonplace) cost overruns on weapons systems and other military hardware that, in the end, won’t even perform as promised." And of course the Pentagon doesn't hold them accountable, not when they can't even tell you how many private contractors they've hired. This sure looks like yet another argument against privatization.

In a related note, you no doubt heard that Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to remake Puerto Rico's entire utility grid into a renewable one, and though your heart may have soared in appreciation, Kate Aronoff at In These Times reminds us that it would likely come with a price -- the privatization of Puerto Rico's power grid. All the standard objections apply: the good citizens of Puerto Rico would have no control over what a private corporation does to them, and such private corporations will do what's good for shareholders before they'll ever do what's good for citizens. And even if you're fairly sanguine about Tesla, remember that Tesla could sell whatever it would own in Puerto Rico at any time -- and to multiple corporations, which would multiply potential problems.

And speaking of Puerto Rico's many other problems, the House has unveiled a Puerto Rico relief plan that contains $16 billion of debt relief -- but for the underfinanced National Flood Insurance Program, not the island. But wait, there's more! The bill would give Puerto Rico, which has already faced a financial crisis due to bankster manipulation and governmental corruption, $5 billion in loans. I bet the House calls giving them grants a "moral hazard;" clearly the real moral hazard of using a crisis to put people deeper in debt is invisible to them.

Finally, Catherine V. Moore at Yes! magazine discusses the various ways local Appalachians have taken to reviving areas where coal corporations use to conduct mountaintop removal mining. Note well that though invasive plant species have proven difficult to remove, and the cost of restoring the soil is steep (putting one foot of topsoil over formerly-mined land costs about $2,400 an acre), Appalachia area is actually fairly temperate, and could certainly support agriculture again. Not to mention a renewable power grid, but that may be a job for the next President.

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

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

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

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

Action: 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.

Around the table: nuclear winter, voter ID, dark money, Confederate "heritage," and a victory against coal pollution.

The most recent RetroReport video covers the theory of nuclear winter and how it affected nuclear arms issues, particularly during the Reagan Administration. Scientists are more likely to think the effect would be more like "nuclear fall" now than nuclear winter, but when even a drop of a few degrees across the planet could wreak havoc on food production (and, ah, indirectly lead to more war), that's not exactly a comfort. Time of video: 11 minutes, 58 seconds.

Ari Berman and Michael Waldman discuss, at length, how voting law changes (including Voter ID laws and the Supreme Court's invalidation of a critical part of the Voting Rights Act) could affect the 2016 elections. I'd say "good to know someone else has noticed," but I always hope I'm wrong about the worst. Among the things you may not know: Texas's Voter ID law considers a concealed-carry permit "valid ID" but not a college student's ID, wonder why that is. Mr. Waldman's book, The Fight to Vote, looks like a good one.

In a peripherally-related note, Eleanor J. Bader at TruthOut reviews Jane Mayer's book, Dark Money, which describes the decades-long plan by America's überwealthy to deform democracy along corporatist lines. Among the many items of note: the extent to which the Koch brothers literally funded the Tea Party movement, a fact missed by most of the "liberal" media at the time, though not missed by you or I. If Occupy had had that kind of money, the Democrats would have retaken the House in 2012.

Gov. Bryant of Mississippi has declared April "Confederate Heritage Month," which sadly is not in and of itself unusual in the South, but his declaration omits any mention of slavery, which actually is unusual. Hip revisionists are wrong -- the South seceded not over "states' rights" but over the "right" to own black folks, and President Lincoln fought the Civil War not just to reunify America but to end slavery. Naturally, Gov. Bryant's spokeshack says the Governor "believes Mississippi’s history deserves study and reflection, no matter how unpleasant or complicated parts of it may be," without mentioning that the Governor left the most "unpleasant" part of that history out.

Finally, Nick Engelfried, writing at Waging Nonviolence, describes "How Montanans Stopped the Largest New Coal Mine in North America." You'll recognize much of the story -- big government agencies plotting "coal sacrifice zones," coal-hauling railroads running through lower-income areas -- plus lots of direct action, including protestors chaining themselves to desks, sit-ins at the Montana state capitol building, protests and blockades on the rail lines themselves, and the 100,000 public comments activists were able to gather opposing the Otter Creek Mine. External factors also helped (China's declining coal demand, Arch Coal's bankruptcy), but what's the shame in that? Good Montanans did a good job helping to protect their air and water from pollution.

Action: fracking on public lands, banning gay adults from the Boy Scouts, and regulating nuclear power plants.

We've had good and bad news about fracking lately. The good news? New York banned fracking statewide, and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has lately imposed a moratorium on fracking in state forests. The bad news? Frackers still train their sights on many of our national treasures -- including the Otero Mesa in New Mexico. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated a Bureau of Land Management plan to let oil and gas corporations drill there in 2009, and the Department of the Interior (under Secretary Salazar, who was pretty good on environmental issues in that region) proposed making the Otero Mesa a national monument, but President Obama has done nothing about that proposal. Perhaps he needs some persuasion from the people: Penn Environment helps you tell Mr. Obama to ban fracking on federal public park lands. These are our lands, after all -- ours to enjoy, and ours to depend upon when we need it, because public lands not only supply some of our best hunting and recreation grounds, but also our clean water, which stands most at risk from fracking.

Meanwhile, you may know that the Boy Scouts of America stopped kicking out gay scouts merely because of their homosexuality back in January of 2014, but they have maintained their ban on gay adults as scout leaders. I guess that was a bridge too far for them, but bigotry expressed against only some people you don't like is still bigotry, and the notion that gay scout leaders would "indoctrinate" young kids is especially repugnant. First off, if you're not gay, no one can talk you into being gay. Second, does the Boy Scouts of America really think gays have nothing else on their minds besides gay sex? I mean, the Boy Scouts don't ban heterosexuals from their meetings because they think they're going to talk about heterosexual sex all the time. I come up against this notion again and again when confronting folks who hate gays, and I'm getting tired of it. But now two gay adults recently banned from the Boy Scouts hope to change that, by helping you tell the Boy Scouts of America to reverse their policy banning gay adults from being scoutmasters.

Finally, some four years after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan -- which caused the evacuation of 300,000 good folks from the area, some 120,000 of whom still haven't returned home -- our Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC) isn't working fast enough to prevent a Fukushima from happening here, which, given how many nuclear reactors just happen to be sitting on faultlines, is a near-certainty. And some one-third of Americans live near a nuclear reactor, so if any one of them melts down, the loss of life and livelihood will be intolerable. So Public Citizen helps you tell the NRC to get its act together and make nuclear power plants safer. The NRC has proposed 12 recommendations to make nuclear plants safer, but hasn't fully followed through on all of them, and hearing "these things take time" won't comfort anyone who loses a loved one if some reactor blows up between now and then. And the main reason it takes so long is that we still pay too much attention to the "needs" of the nuclear industry's biggest players, when they should be attending more to our needs.

Action: depleted uranium in Iraq, GMO vaccines in organic food, and the EPA's climate change plan.

What's yet another outstanding legacy of our little adventure in Iraq? Increased incidences of cancer and birth defects due to depleted uranium shells, that's what! Scientists have found uranium in the urine and semen of 1991 Gulf War veterans, and since the half-life of depleted uranium is 4.1 billion years, Iraqi citizens stand a very good chance of experiencing the ill effects of depleted uranium for, basically, ever. The U.N. has tried to pass resolutions since 2007 aiming to discover where depleted uranium weapons have been used and find out more about what their long-term harmful effects will be -- but the U.S. belongs to the U.N. Security Council, composed of the five most powerful nations on Earth, and so the U.S. essentially has veto power over any such resolution, and hasn't been afraid to use it, whether its President was Mr. Accountability None or the Nobel Peace Prize winner who has actually outdone his predecessor in launching unconstitutional wars. Hence Roots Action helps you tell our government to stop opposing such resolutions and face up to at least some of the harm it's caused in its Iraq adventures.

Meanwhile, we've spoken a bit about organic food labeling lately -- specifically about the possibility that loopholes in organic food standards could allow genetically-modified vitamins into organic food -- but the organic food standards do have one pretty outsized loophole: they allow genetically-modified vaccines in livestock. And while the standards require the NOSB to review any proposed use of GMO vaccines and only approve such vaccines where non-GMO alternatives don't exist, and while the NOSB hasn't approved a single such vaccine for that use, no one has even submitted such a vaccine for review -- and yet the NOSB admits that GMO vaccines find their way into organic food! How could such a thing happen? If you answer "because the NOSB hasn't been doing its job," you win first prize. But you know what a better prize would be? A better prize would be to outlaw GMO vaccines in organic food entirely, and then get all up in the NOSB's grill to actually enforce the standard this time, and so the Organic Consumers Association helps you do that. It's a tough job, but so's anything worth doing.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA's to propose the most vigorous carbon emissions standards possible, then Public Citizen helps you do that. But I warn you: if you use Public Citizen's tool, you'll be asking for more vigorous standards than the EPA has actually proposed. In what areas could the EPA's Clean Power Plan be improved? The Clean Power Plan could demand more renewable energy from states, it could stop pushing natural gas as an alternative to coal (especially since gas drilling leaks methane, which traps 80 times the heat that carbon dioxide does), and it could eliminate nuclear power, which does pollute less than coal or gas but which has never been economically viable without massive government handouts. And don't believe the hype that wind and solar "cost" more than coal. First, any new technology costs less as it's deployed more, and second, they only "cost" more to the corporations that would make them -- when you add in the health care savings and the climate change savings, they cost less to our civilization.

Action: corporate taxes, nuclear power, and corporate accountability.

You may have heard that Burger King plans to "move" to Canada -- in the sense that they'll merge with Canadian donut/coffee chain Tim Hortons and reincorporate in Canada -- so they can evade American taxes. Hence The Other 98% joins with MoveOn to help you tell Burger King not to go through with, in the petition's words, "This Whopper of a Tax Dodge." Why are Burger King's majority owners at 3G Capital contemplating this move, when both President Obama and Treasury Secretary Lew have both not only spoken out against such corporate inversions but have openly contemplated action against them? And when just about zero American citizens really, really appreciate it when an American corporation moves somewhere else to avoid paying taxes -- taxes that pay for things, after all, things like police and firefighters and libraries and roads and bridges? Perhaps 3G Capital's decision-makers think Mr. Obama will really do something soon (which is a bet I'd never take!), and so they're trying to get it done before he does; possibly they also think most folks don't really understand what a "corporate inversion" is. But I suspect most folks understand it perfectly well.

Meanwhile, Friends of the Earth helps you tell the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to shutter the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California until it can prove the reactor can operate safety. Sitting as it does on not-one-not-two-but-three faults in a fairly earthquake-prone state, you might see where the Diablo Canyon plant might be in some danger of causing some serious harm to nearby citizens on the central coast of California. And the NRC's own inspector at Diablo Canyon testified to the NRC a year ago that he thought the plant should have been shuttered, an action that by law should have prompted a response from the NRC within 120 days, which (get your surprised face ready) never arrived. Those who argue that we should encourage nuclear power so as to wean ourselves from foreign oil should contemplate two matters: one, whether our need to wean ourselves from foreign oil demands that we break our own laws in order to do it, and two, how it will feel if we're a little freer of foreign oil but several thousand good citizens die in a Fukushima-style accident. I imagine it'll feel rather Pyrrhic, to say the least.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to support S. 2615, the Hide No Harm Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. Currently corporations hide behind confidentiality agreements in lawsuits, which is why GM didn't have to say anything about the faulty ignition switches in their cars that may have already claimed a dozen lives, though a lot of GM owners might have wanted to know about that. But S. 2615 would mandate disclosure of such "serious dangers" to federal agencies, and would also mandate jail time for CEOs if they fail to comply. Some folks would argue that breaching such confidentiality agreements would put us on a "slippery slope" that would ultimately threaten all privacy everywhere. But it's not enough to retort that you'd feel differently if it were your kid. Fact is, a civilization constantly weighs the balance between privacy and disclosure, between the individual good and the greater good, and folks who resort to such slippery slope arguments (arguments that conveniently benefit corporations at the expense of actual people, I feel compelled to add) essentially announce their abdication of that duty. And I don't want folks like that in my foxhole.

Action: torture censorship, nuclear danger, and "free" trade.

Incredibly, the President has said that the CIA will get to redact a Senate summary report on CIA torture. In other news, all accused criminals will now get to decide what evidence can be presented against them in court! If, in fact, the Senate torture report contains sensitive information that we wouldn't want the terrorists to know -- which is a big "if," frankly -- then maybe someone other than the agency accused of the torture can do the redacting. But giving it to the CIA? There's a little fox-henhouse problem there -- and we're in the henhouse, since our government could just decide to torture any one of us someday. Media reports tell us that this Senate report discloses that the CIA told a full American crapload of lies -- to Congress, to the Department of Justice, to the Bush White House -- and not just about how exactly it tortured people, but also about how useful that torture even was in preventing terrorist attacks. Hence the ACLU helps you tell Mr. Obama not to let the CIA redact the Senate report on CIA torture. Really, I'm not sure how I can put this any more plainly.

Meanwhile, New York state activist Judy Allen has begun a petition on CREDO which helps you tell certain well-placed Congressfolk to prevent the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC) from relicensing the Indian Point nuclear power plant. Why? Not just because Indian Point happens to stand about a mile away from where two earthquake faults meet, because a lot of nuclear power plants just so happen to stand very close to faultlines (which doesn't make it alright!); Indian Point has also leaked radioactive water from spent fuel pools (which should be stored in dry casks, but obviously aren't) into the Hudson River for several decades now. The NRC apparently seems awfully willing to extend Indian Point's licenses, possibly because New York state is awfully dependent on nuclear power, and even if the "safety culture" there has improved over the last decade or so, some 20 million people (including, well, everyone in New York City) happen to live within 50 miles of Indian Point, and if things happen, as they often do, all of them could be at risk of illness and death. Saying we were able to save New York's power grid from too much upheaval ain't gonna mean very much in that case.

Finally, word out of China -- where President Obama is trying to kick-start negotiations on the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," a "free" trade deal often described as "NAFTA on steroids" -- is that the TPP's long-threatened internet censorship plank may be about to be finalized as we speak. From leaks we know that a TPP internet plank would be bad: it would essentially force ISPs to censor and remove websites accused -- not convicted! -- of copyright infringement. Making ISPs do law enforcement is a terrible idea -- I'm a law-and-order guy myself, but I think law enforcement should do law enforcement, so that everyone doesn't become a damn tyrant. In the meantime, say so long to your blog (or your Facebook newsfeed!) if you've ever linked to someone else's site! And much worse would also happen if the TPP passed, of course -- corporations could dump all kinds of Frankencrap in our air and water and petition to "investor-state tribunals" to overturn our nation's environmental laws! Hence a slew of organizations -- including Roots Action, Avaaz, Public Citizen, and Sum of Us -- help you oppose the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" and its freedom-strangling ways.