Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning marriage equality, health care, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, extend the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act, and stop USPS Postmaster DeJoy’s plan to cut jobs and close down post offices. 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.

Both Daily Kos and Moms Rising help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act. Democrats have decided to hold a vote on this bill after the midterms, perhaps figuring that the voters will give them a sort of mandate at the midterms, but they’ve been wrong about that before – not too long ago, in fact! – and anyway our job isn’t to align with Democratic Party aims but to press all of our elected representatives to do our will. And I think it’s pretty clear by now that very few people still have a sad over a gay couple getting married – and even fewer folks still get mad over interracial marriage. And the Respect for Marriage Act would protect both. So let’s not let a tiny, whiny minority have all the say about everything.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act, which provides compensation and health care to folks exposed to nuclear testing and uranium mining. These folks are disproportionately Native Americans, by the way, in case you thought environmental racism was a recent phenomenon. We stopped testing nuclear bombs in 1992, but that was only 30 years ago, so quite a few of the folks who got sick off that test (and others) are still with us and still need our support. Sadly we’re still mining for uranium, despite all the evidence telling us it pollutes our water and makes us sick, so we’ll need to keep this program around for longer yet. But we won’t, unless we get in our Congressfolks’ grills about it.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our Congressfolk to stop Postmaster DeJoy’s plan to close post offices and slash jobs. Our Post Office isn’t some corporation for banksters to drain; our Constitution actually mandates that our government run it, and run it well. Also, our Post Office is all some rural and urban folks got, and cutting jobs and services will make it harder for good Americans to get the life-saving medicines they need. Our USPS delivers a lot of that now, and who’ll do it if they don’t? Some private corporation that’ll charge you an arm and a leg? No thank you, I’ll take the Postal Service that belongs to us, not because we’re shareholders or customers, but because we’re Americans.

Action: concerning mass murder, education, monopolies, nukes, corruption, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to invest in counselors-not-cops in schools, pass the College for All Act, the American Innovation Choice Online Act, and the Open App Markets Act, reject funding for certain nuclear weapons programs, pass the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. 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 National Campaign for Justice helps you tell our state, local, and federal governments that we need to invest in counselors and service workers in our schools — and not cops. The right-wing solution to every problem is “more cops,” but we live in a world where more teachers have foiled mass murderers in schools than cops have. And we just witnessed a mass shooting where police arrived but didn’t engage the shooter! And that’s not a good argument to put more cops in schools. I hope America has learned its lesson about making cops do every damn thing, but if not, I’ll keep teaching it.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2730/S. 1288, the College for All Act, which would eliminate tuition and fees at for all students at two-year community colleges, and for all working- and middle-class students at four-year public universities. (The bill would also eliminate tuition and fees for some students at private, historically Black universities.) This would be the way to do “free college”: by giving the most help to working families, who are most of the folks attending community colleges and public universities. If you’re an upper-class dude who wants to go to Harvard, you still can — and if you need financial help, this bill will do that better, too.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, and H.R. 7030/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act. The former bill would cover online platforms with more than 50,000,000 active monthly American users, and would prevent them from discriminating against competing products on their platforms and selling your private data willy-nilly; the latter bill would prevent app stores from discriminating against competing products or forcing app makers to use certain payment systems as a condition of using the market. Big tech corporations hate these bills, but what offends them doesn’t necessarily offend regular people, so let’s not let that stop us.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject more funding for the SLCM-N and B83 nuclear weapons. How useless are these weapons? So useless that President Biden, no great friend of reduced defense spending over the last half-century, has requested that our Congress not fund these weapons! The SLCM-N is a nuclear, sea-launched cruise missile, but our Navy already has conventional cruise missiles on its subs; would you like to be the one who launched the wrong missile? The B83, meanwhile, has the biggest yield of any nuclear weapon, but how well does “high-yield” do against IED-wielding terrorists? And remember: the first one to drop the bomb always loses.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7706/S. 4177, the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, which would make our Supreme Court Justices follow the same Code of Conduct as all other federal judges and prevent federal judges from holding any investments except those in “non-conflicted” funds (i.e., funds diversified enough that a judge or Justice would gain little or nothing by ruling a certain way in a certain case). We talk about the first item in the context of Justice Thomas’s wife running around trying to overturn the election on January 6, but the second item is also important, corruption being evil and all.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner already. Our Senate let that nomination twist in the wind so long that President Biden had to renominate her, but they’re still letting that nomination twist; why, it’s like they want to make sure net neutrality never comes back but they don’t want the blame for it! Voters love that sort of courage. And Senators from West Virginia (you know who) and Arizona (Mark Kelly this time!) say they just haven’t evaluated the nomination enough. They can’t do in 18 months what I did in 10 seconds? Ms. Sohn is one of the architects of net neutrality; that should be enough.

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to support the Iran nuclear deal, lower gas prices, and pass the MAT Act, the Judiciary Act, and the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: Vlad the Bad as rational actor, and other horrible truths.

University of New Haven scholar Matthew Schmidt discusses the Russian war on Ukraine, and he makes a lot of sense: the Russian military ain't so hot, the Ukrainian military is very, very good, Vlad the Bad tried to win the war in the first week and doesn't seem prepared for failing in that, and yes he might use nukes on the battlefield in order to break the stalemate. Even so, Mr. Schmidt tells us Vlad the Bad is a rational actor, "following his own system of logic" where Russia is "the center of this geographic and cultural and spiritual space known as Eurasia," and Ukraine becoming more "Western" threatens that space. Where does it end? Likely with "the destruction of the Putinist regime," perhaps years from now.

Former Missouri half-term Governor Eric Greitens, now running for Senate, doubles down against his ex-wife's allegations of physical abuse (against both her and their children) in their custody battle, saying "truth will always prevail." He can ask Sean Parnell about that! Of course, Mr. Parnell had basically lost his custody battle when he bowed out of the Pennsylvania Senate race; the Greitens' battle isn't nearly as far along. But I can't help but think that that Eric Schmitt's $1.6 million fund-raising haul at Mar-a-Lago is more on his mind as he calculates all his denials -- and he calculates them to reach Trump votaries, who respond viscerally (and supportively!) to men who deny serious wrongdoing.

ProPublica finds the famous St. Jude's Children’s Research Hospital actually trying to muscle donors' families for bequests -- occasionally trying to get of children and other relatives disinherited in court! -- and that's a far more scathing indictment of their corporate character, I think, than their irregular-but-not-nonexistent support for parents visiting their kids. Says one person who actually beat St. Jude's in court over his father's estate: "Think of all the fees for lawyers that didn’t go to St. Jude, not one child, not one cancer patient." Maybe St. Jude's will respond that it's worth it because they get around double the national average in donations from wills and they use that money to keep massive medical bills from destroying families, but using probate as a weapon toward that end is evil, and anyway it should be civilization's aim to keep massive medical bills from destroying families, not St. Jude's.

When I hear that politicians like Blake Masters (running for Senate in Arizona) and J.D. Vance (running for same in Ohio) get their talking points from Tucker Carlson rather than Donald Trump, I question whether Mr. Carlson will ever have the same power as Mr. Trump, since Mr. Carlson projects neither the self-made myth or the tough-guy myth as well. And when I hear that all three gentlemen "sympathiz(e) with Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical worldview," I'd say Democrats have an easy retort, if they have the guts to use it: I'll take American values over Putin's anytime. I don't even care that they pretend to be economic populists, because so did Mr. Trump, and that did very little for us. (Hate to pile on, but if Blake Masters really can't imagine a liberal driving a logging truck, that's a failure of his imagination.)

In the wake of record-high gas prices, a Hart Research Associates/League of Conservation Voters/Climate Power poll finds that 87% of Americans think Congress should do something about oil corporation profiteering, with 80% specifically endorsing a windfall profits tax. 80% of the people support it, you say? You know what that means: Kyrsten Sinema will soon come out against it, because "bipartisanship"! And Joe Manchin will come out against it, because I just can't get there. But you know, folks like the Joker and the Penguin are playing the game like it's 2011, when that "we can't raise taxes on the rich because it'll hurt small businesses" lie still had a bit of cred; they now operate in a world where virtually everyone thinks oil corporations raised gas prices just because they could.

Finally, voting rights groups have sued a group that's named themselves the U.S. Election Integrity Plan for sending armed members into Black and Brown neighborhoods in Colorado to "question" them about their voting habits. Occasionally, they wear badges, pretend to be from "the county," accuse folks of voting illegally, and take photos of their houses, but I question the Bannon/Lindell axis's wisdom in choosing Colorado for this little adventure -- they're a lot more likely to run into armed liberals there than, say, Connecticut. I'm also bummed this is a civil suit, because I'd rather these clowns go to jail for a long, long time. I mean, c'mon, law and order, folks!

Around the table: concerning forced arbitration, Russian nukes, and other burning issues.

Let's lead with good news: late last week President Biden signed H.R. 4445, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, a bill for which you and I agitated and a bill representing a major accomplishment of the 117th Congress. Less than half the Republican House caucus voted against the law, and the bill sailed through the Senate on a voice vote, so one might even call it a bipartisan accomplishment, though it's only a bipartisan accomplishment because an actual bipartisan coalition of Americans wanted it. This isn't just a major step forward for sexual harassment victims; it's a major step forward for those of us who want to end forced arbitration entirely. I long to live in an America where we can all get the day in court we deserve when we're wronged, and not some artificial "day in court" where the corporation usually wins.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch tells us that "(t)he decision by President Vladimir Putin to put Russia’s strategic nuclear forces on high alert is even more dangerous than it looks because it is an act of desperation." True, but we're doing the right thing by not raising our own nuclear warning, because why let assholes hold the world hostage? If we do that, we're pretty much declaring that we will not defend civilization, and we'll make such a declaration over my dead body. Yes, I'm aware it may come to that if Mr. Putin winds up using his nukes. (It may not come to that at all, of course, if we're doing what I hope we're doing in Venezuela.)

In a related but important matter, our sanctions against Russia seem to be missing a lot of very rich Russians who have invested a lot of their money in Western nations. You might be tempted to nod at this information if you were an adherent of realpolitik, but note well that many of the actual targets of sanctions have hidden their money with their wealthy pals, who've invested it westward. Some folks have irresponsibly talked of giving Mr. Putin an "off-ramp"; maybe this is one plank of that ramp. But we shouldn't give assholes off-ramps. We shouldn't be adherents of realpolitik, either; it's a game for the cynical, and the cynical can only play games.

Half of Americans prefer the Biden tax plan (which really isn't that much of an improvement over what we've got) to two recently-touted Republican tax plans (which are both abominations unto the Lord). 50% doesn't sound like much, but somewhat less than 32% would get rid of the income tax (Madison Cawthorn's plan) or make poorer working families pay more taxes (Rick Scott's plan); that number doesn't map too well onto my old saw that 25% of the electorate is bat-guano insane, but I've heard plenty of non-insane people embrace insane tax plans. They're easier to convince than the nutjobs, obviously, and together we still outnumber the nutjobs, which means we should lose zero elections to nutjobs.

I fear that when our establishment media notes that Donald Trump endorsements don't necessarily win Republican primaries, they're not quite getting how a Trump endorsement is really supposed to work. I don't really blame them, I suppose. But the day a Trump endorsement matters most is the day after the primary! Look at how it helped Glenn Youngkin in Virginia -- he was able to get a Trump endorsement and then could pretend convincingly to keep him at arms' length! The ideal plan for both Republicans and Mr. Trump would be a) for someone "electable" to win the primary and b) for Mr. Trump to then endorse that candidate; at this point the Trumpholes will "know" they can "trust" these candidates no matter what they subsequently say to "appeal to the center." I'd call it a clever stratagem, except that only evil will result from it.

Finally, why is Tucker Carlson's sudden demand for Judge Jackson's LSAT scores racist, as opposed to merely partisan hackery? Look past his utter disinterest in the LSAT scores of Messrs. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett (or, for that matter, Elena Kagan); look past, even, his own inability to get through college without being soused much of the time. He says Ketanji Brown Jackson's name is "a name that even Joe Biden has trouble pronouncing," and I would hope we would all recognize by now that making fun of a non-white person's name is a pretty standard racist attack. Even if you "don't mean anything by it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning 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 worker rights, taxes, farming, social media, voting rights, and nuclear weapons.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass the Farm Systems Reform Act, the Algorithmic Justice and Online Transparency Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and stop funding new nuclear weapons. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your 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, stop employers from requiring workers to attend anti-union meetings or sign forced arbitration agreements, would stop employers from retaliating against employees (including managers) who blow the whistle on labor law violations, and would let employees determine how to conduct a union election. You didn't know that from your right-wing Congressfolk, did you? They'll tell you that the bill would injure "your right not to join a union," but that's not what "right-to-work" laws are all about: they're about employers choosing for you not to join a union! And that's not the same thing.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. Those $250 or $300 checks have started coming, and since I'm not an evil bastard, I have trouble imagining how the right will portray this as an "evil" -- they could call it "fiscally-irresponsible," but we all know by now that Republicans only care about "fiscal responsibility" when the other party control Congress and the Presidency. But then I realized they could call it "buying votes"! They never call it "buying votes" when Republicans cut corporate taxes and taxes on rich folks -- though, by the evidence of the 2018 elections, that stratagem doesn't buy as many votes as it used to! Anyway, all Democrats need do in response is cut ads portraying fat-cat Republicans taking your $300 checks right out of your hands, and then the "vote-buying" accusation would become irrelevant.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4421/S. 2332, the Farm System Reform Act. One of the biggest problem with farms is how big factory farms are -- they use their outsized influence to make us less safe, thanks to their antibiotic abuse (which helps create superbugs) and the pollution they unleash upon local water tables. But the Farm System Reform Act would ban construction of new factory farms and expansion of existing ones, plus it would close down the existing ones by 2040. How will we get our food, then? Through the multitudinous smaller farmers who will better be able to thrive, now that factory farms aren't in their way. Remember: the "problem" isn't government -- it's the big corporation.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3611/S. 1896, the Algorithmic Justice and Online Platform Transparency Act. Even President Biden has lately lamented how easily social media corporations can disseminate lies, but this bill would help put a stop to that -- first by requiring a crap-ton of transparency from social media corporations about their algorithmic processes and their content moderation practices (including whether people or machines do the moderating!), and then by making certain online practices illegal if said practices violate a user's civil rights (including their voting rights). The bill doesn't outlaw algorithms (which I'd happily do! I don't care if it makes cat videos harder to find!), but I bet the social media corporations will whine about being made to disclose exactly how they use them, in plain language. They can cry into all their hundred-dollar bills.

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Plus Daily Kos helps you sign up to call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator, Joe Manchin, to vote for the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. If you want to end gerrymandering, dark money, and racist vote suppression, you want these bills to pass. It doesn't matter that Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) make up stories about the "harms" these bills would do. You're right, and they're wrong. It's that simple.

Finally, Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop funding nuclear weapons. Are we so afraid some other nation will come up with a more efficient way of destroying the planet? Our current stockpile of nuclear weapons dopes that quite well, thank you very much! And once you've got the planet-destroying weapon, you don't really need to tweak it. Defense contracting corporations will claim that you do, but consider what they get out of it if we swallow their line of poop: money. They get money out of it. Lots and lots of money. I'm so old-fashioned I don't think money is a very good reason to do anything -- particularly if it's my hard-earned taxpayer money becoming someone else's corporate welfare. So don't believe the hype. After all, it ain't called "hype" because it's true!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning unconstitutional war-making, worker fairness, workplace violence, stupid nukes, and stupider Congressfolk.

Long story short: tell your House Reps to repeal the 2002 AUMF authorizing war with Iraq, pass the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Pregnancy Fairness Act, fight workplace violence, reject new sea-launched nuclear missiles, and censure Rep. Gosar and strip him of his committee assignments. You can find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page), but I'll also provide email/petition tools for all of these alerts below.

Both Win Without War and the Project on Government Oversight help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 256, which would repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force (or AUMF) Against Iraq. The Iraq war killed hundreds of thousands, displaced tens of millions, cost trillions of dollars, helped birth (in ISIS) something even worse than al-Qaeda, and of course Presidents have used it, and will use it, to justify even stupider adventures. And not for nothing, but it probably also cost Joe Biden Iowa and Ohio, if not also Florida and North Carolina, in 2020. I'm serious: Donald Trump looked like the anti-war candidate to a not-insignificant number of folks in those states. It's amazing how many supposedly politically-adept people still don't grasp the intensity of our feeling against that war. Well, we'll keep telling them.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Reps to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1065, the Pregnancy Fairness Act. These bills would help women in the workplace, the former by giving women more tools to fight pay discrimination, and the latter by forcing employers to provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers at the workplace. I say "reasonable" with the Italics Hammer because right-wingers love pretending that any progress, on anything, anywhere, will obliterate all boundaries everywhere. The bill would force bosses to give pregnant women more bathroom breaks; it would not force bosses to let them spend their entire shift in the bathroom. I mean, duh. As for Sen. Rubio's plaint that the former bill is just a sop to "trial lawyers": we wouldn't need so many trial lawyers if bosses would just pay their women workers what they've earned.

Prevent Workplace Violence helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1195, the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act. Why? Because it's a lot worse there than anywhere else! And also because right-wingers will probably find a judge who'll say the worker safety laws we've got don't apply to violence in the workplace. And also because corporations can ignore OSHA's 2015 guidelines without penalty, because they're guidelines. You shouldn't let guidelines do the work of regulations -- governments tend to cast this as a compromise with corporations, but then the corporations whine about how guidelines always become mandatory sooner or later. But we don't let corporate whining stop us from doing what's right.

Win Without War helps you tell your Reps to pass H.R. 1554/S. 595, the Nuclear SLCM Ban Act. SLCM stands for "sea-launched cruise missile," and if there's anything we don't need more of, it's a nuclear weapon, particularly one that even both Presidents Bush wouldn't green-light. Neither would President Clinton nor President Obama. So why are we even talking about it? Because of President Trump, of course, whose "bold thinking" led him to embrace a weapons system nobody else would, without asking, apparently, if everyone else had reasons for rejecting it. We already have way too many nukes on seacraft, and certainly we shouldn't be putting nukes alongside non-nukes. So, yeah, let's strangle this weapons system in its crib.

Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Reps to censure Rep. Paul Gosar and strip him of his committee assignments. I have no patience with folks who still associate with white supremacists -- who openly want to destroy our government, and sure did help try that on January 6 -- and anyway Republicans stripped former Rep. Steve King of all his committee assignments in 2019, so it's not like this is unprecedented punishment. Rep. Gosar (E-AZ) has walked back his support for white supremacists, but only when confronted by media outlets, and then not on Twitter, so let's not believe that line of BS. Maybe he thinks, like Rep. Greene of Georgia, that getting punished will just make him stronger. But in a thousand years no one will remember the name of either one of them.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning 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?

Action: concerning war with Iran, the Equal Rights Amendment, and hidden ticket fees.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our Administration from starting a war with Iran, then Greyroots Action still helps you do that. We have good reasons for not going to war with Iran -- like, that we'll utterly fail at "regime change" like we always do, and that we'll help create more terrorists from the ranks of regular Iranians who watch what we do. Also, we already had the nuclear weapons problem under control until our Administration pulled out of it; why should we reward their stupidity and venality with the war they want? Don't believe the hype that our President is furious with Messrs. Bolton and Pompeo for wanting to "push us into a war." Nobody put a gun to his head and made him hire those guys, particularly when he already had people in those jobs! He put them in those jobs either because he really wants to go to war with Iran or because he wants to look like the guy who prevented with Iran; either way, it's drama, and it's not even good drama. So let's not reward drama anymore.

Meanwhile, a consortium of good government groups (including People for the American Way and Progress America) helps you tell Virginia state legislators to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (or ERA). What's that, you say? The expiration date for ERA ratification was 1982? Tell that to the Nevada and Illinois state legislatures, who ratified the ERA in 2017 and 2018, respectively, meaning that 37 of the required 38 states have ratified it. And tell that to the good citizens who have been petitioning their Congressfolk to repeal the 1982 expiration date, expiration dates not being particularly common in Constitutional amendments in the first place. While you're at it, tell that to the women who've been waiting for justice all their lives. If Virginia ratifies the ERA, only one more state has to do it, and then Congress has to repeal the expiration date, and voila! The ERA becomes the law of the land. But none of that will happen if we don't speak out.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell Ticketmaster to stop springing hidden fees upon ticketbuyers. You look at ticket prices and they're already too damn high because bands don't have to put the effort into touring that they used to -- not that very many older bands will tell you they really enjoyed being on the road! -- but then Ticketmaster heaps on an average of 27 percent of tickets' face value in stuff like service charges, processing charges, and convenience charges! And lately Ticketmaster has announced that it won't give its customers honest, up-front pricing, unless our government tells them to. Didn't they take Corporate Propaganda 101? You're supposed to promise to do better in order to forestall government action, and then when you utterly fail to deliver on that promise, you say "well what are you going to do? Not see Thom Yorke? Hahahahaha!" But, actually, they're not the only game in town anymore, so maybe they'd do well to get ahead of the curve here.

Action: concerning Iran and "usable" nukes.

The government of Iran has sentenced Nasrin Sotoudeh to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes, for (among other "charges") "being a member of a human rights organization" and "encouraging corruption and prostitution," which you no doubt recognize as BS charges concocted by a government that's insecure in its power. And what has Ms. Sotoudeh, a human rights lawyer, actually done? Advocate against Iranian law mandating that all women wear the hijab, or head covering, for one thing. What's wrong with wearing a hijab? Absolutely nothing! What's wrong with threatening to imprison women who don't wear it? Absolutely everything! But no doubt she's also in prison for spending most of her career representing minors facing death sentences, opponents of the Iranian government, and abused children threatened with going back to their abusive parents. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the Iranian government to free Ms. Sotoudeh.

Meanwhile, our government deployed a carrier "strike group" and a "bomber task force" to the Middle East last week, purportedly as a "warning" to Iran, but the Navy said the deployment was "regularly-scheduled," so our Administration's posturing about it sure smells like a false flag operation. But, as Zombie Lyndon Johnson would tell you, false flag operations work far better when Americans aren't so cynical about our President. A false flag op is about all our Administration has left, though -- pulling out of the nuclear deal which was working! may have induced Iran to demand more from the deal's European partners, thanks to the sanctions our government reinstituted after pulling out, but everyone remembers that our President only pulled out of that deal because he felt like it. Still, we might need to head off yet another stupid war, so Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation mandating no military action against Iran without Congressional approval.

Finally, our President's 2020 budget has so much to recommend it, and one of those things is, yes, the "low-yield" or "usable" nuclear weapon, which he'd like to put on our submarines. What an idea man! It's like he didn't grow up in a time when folks worried more about nuclear annihilation than anything else! It's like he has no idea that a "usable" nuclear weapon suggests that all the other nuclear weapons we have in our arsenal are completely useless! And it's like he thinks this is a bad thing! Happily, H.R. 1086/S. 401, the Hold the LYNE Act (thought of this, didn't you? I can't help it either), would prevent our government from researching, developing, or producing the Trident D5 low-yield nuke, so Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep "usable" nukes out of our President's hands by passing the Hold the LYNE Act. No, it really doesn't matter that this President is the very image of the person who should never have any weapons ever. He ain't the first, and he won't be the last.

Around the table: concerning government spying, taxes, private prisons, "right to work," and "socialism."

Apparently now our government is tracking journalists and refugee advocates with a secret database run by the Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic), which of course doesn't have the legal authority to do such things. A Customs and Border Protection spokeshack says they're targeting these folks because of alleged violence at the border in November, and how do you know that's bullshit? Because that wasn't what they told NBC7 a mere five days earlier. Tha Bush Mobb would have given us the bullshit explanation right away, which is yet another reason they're worse than this clown car of an Administration.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy offers "Fairness Matters," a chart book showing who pays state and local taxes these days. Long story short: lower-income working families pay a bigger share of their income in state and local taxes than the rich do, and states that call themselves "low-tax" because they don't have an income tax tend to fill revenue shortfalls with the kind of regressive taxes and fees that hit working families a lot harder. Some rich folks think that's the way it should be, because they think they're better than you. But they don't get all the say in America.

Here's some good news: big banking corporation JP Morgan Chase has announced it will no longer underwrite bonds and loans for private prison corporations. If you have agitated for this very thing, go reward yourself a Buffalo chicken cheese steak, or what you will. (Also, too, you think this might have had something to do with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's call for oversight hearings on the relationship between banksters and private prison corporations? Of course it did, and there's another lesson in the importance of pushing to get people in office who'll do good, rather than merely settle for people who won't literally burn down your house.)

Kenawha County (WV) judge rules that West Virginia's "right to work" law actually violates workers' First Amendment rights to free association. It's similar to the Dane County (WI) judge's decision against Wisconsin's "right to work" law in 2016, which the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court reversed because of course they did -- and, lo and behold, the Republican-dominated West Virginia state legislature is at this moment trying to impeach every member of the Democratic-leaning state Supreme Court. It's like they can't win unless they set everything on fire. Why do we, as civilized people, tolerate such insanity?

Finally, when you hear Sen. McConnell (E-KY) suggest that the now-passed-in-the-House For the People Act is a "radical" and "socialist" bill, you are reminded that all they can do now is call what they don't like "radical" and "socialist." And when Mob Boss Mitch has to call it that -- rather than farm out the remarks to some hungry youngster like, say, Tom Cotton -- that means the forces of evil are even more desperate. I'd call that good news, except that we all know what desperate people are like -- they're the kind of people who throw nukes at Venezuela and Iran to keep power.

Action: concerning nuclear weapons, pollution, and paid family leave.

Our Administration plans to withdraw from the INF Treaty, which has kept intermediate-range nuclear missiles from proliferating for over 30 years, and at least one result of that, the latest email missive from Just Foreign Policy reminds me, is "yet another corporate welfare gravy train entitlement for the Pentagon-industrial complex," and I count at least three instances of turning right-wing tropes against the right wing in that phrase alone. But a "corporate welfare gravy train entitlement" will result if and only if Congress funds said gravy train, hence H.R. 1249, which would prohibit spending on any weapons that would violate the treaty, and which its main sponsor, Rep. Gabbard (D-HI), says she'll force a vote upon if it gets enough support. Hence Just Foreign Policy and Change.org help you tell your House Reps to stop our President's efforts to nullify a treaty that's done us, and the world, a considerable amount of good by passing H.R. 1249.

Meanwhile, our EPA will be taking comments until March 25 on its nefarious plans to roll back mercury pollution standards from power plants. It's like they've never heard the phrase "mad as a hatter," or know that it derives from the use of mercury in hatmaking, or know that mercury causes serious developmental disabilities in children, or know that mercury used to be so prevalent in our fish that just about every state told its citizens not to eat local fish! It often seems, in fact, like our Administration doesn't know anything about anything except how to cripple our government's ability to work on the people's behalf. That being said, our EPA is at least aware that they have to take public comments on its regulatory proposals (or, should I say, anti-regulatory proposals), and Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to protect our health, rather than executive bank accounts, and leave mercury standards the way they are.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to create a real paid family leave program in America by passing S. 463, the FAMILY Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The FAMILY Act would fund 12 weeks of paid family leave for all workers (including part-time and self-employed workers) from an 0.4% payroll tax, half borne by the employer and the other half borne by the employee. Thus a worker making $50,000 annually would pay $100 annually, or less than $2 per week, for the peace of mind of knowing that they'll still be able to pay the bills if they have to take a few days off to care for sick kids or sick parents. That's certainly better than Sen. Rubio's profoundly offensive plan to pay for family leave by using future Social Security benefits! Seriously, if you love freedom, and believe that a lifetime of hard work ought to earn you a dignified retirement, you have no business supporting such a noxious idea. The FAMILY Act is far, far better.

Action: concerning nuclear weapons, antibiotic abuse, and the minimum wage.

You've no doubt heard that our President has declared that he'll withdraw the United States from the famous Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (or INF), and we've already advocated against that foolish move. There is some doubt that a President can simply nullify a treaty, since it becomes law upon Senate ratification, but we can fight on other fronts, too, as both Roots Action and Win Without War help you tell your Congressfolk to stand for nuclear disarmament by supporting S. 312, the Prevention of Arms Race Act, which would prohibit funding of nuclear weapons banned by the INF. The bill would only allow funding and development of weapons that would violate the INF if our President jumped through at least seven flaming hoops (for example, he would have to prove that we simply have no INF-compliant weapons that could adequately defend our country); of course, our President's impatience with negotiating the finer points of law has already cost him virtually every significant effort to rewrite our clean air and clean water regulations, so if he interprets it as an outright ban, I wouldn't mind.

Meanwhile, Penn PIRG helps you tell pizza chain corporation Domino's to get antibiotic abuse out of its supply chain. Why Domino's? Same reason as "why McDonald's" -- because it's the biggest, and if it sources its meat more responsibly, others will follow. And Domino's has already committed to getting antibiotics out of its chicken supply; now it must follow with the meat we're all more likely to put on pizza, that being beef. In a land where seven out of 10 antibiotics go, not to sick people or animals, but to healthy animals so they can beef up (so to speak) and better endure the squalid conditions of factory farms, we have the right and the duty to attack the problem any way that'll work, and giving Domino's another good PR opportunity is certainly one of those ways. It is sad that we don't have a federal government that'll attack the problem, and that's been true regardless of which party runs things. But we're Americans, which means we're not prisoners of our government's inaction, either. So let's get to work.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then Progress America still helps you do that. The Raise the Wage Act, as you know, would raise the minimum wage gradually to $15/hour over the next five years -- which right-wingers wailing about the "shock to small businesses" should duly note -- and would also raise the wages of tipped and disabled workers so that they ultimately achieve parity with the minimum wage for everyone else. The bill would also mandate annual increases to the minimum wage in line with increases in national median income, though it wouldn't allow the minimum wage to fall if median income also happens to fall. The current minimum wage of $7.25/hour, as you know, actually represents a wage cut from 50 years ago, when the $2/hour minimum wage actually had over $13.50/hour in contemporary purchasing power, so raising it to $15/hour not only wouldn't wreck our economy, but it would give our working families more of a fighting chance in making better lives -- the kind of fighting chance baby boomers had.

Action: concerning nuclear weapons, climate change, and self-driving cars.

Our President has declared he'll withdraw our nation from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (or INF) Treaty, which was one of the signal foreign policy achievements of President Reagan's second term. Observers disagree as to whether our President can actually pull us out; the Senate did ratify the treaty, which makes it American law. But here's one thing we can more easily agree on: whining about other nations getting to "do" weapons is no reason to abandon international treaties that actually help keep us safe. And here's another thing we can more easily agree on: either House of Congress can simply refuse to fund the "doing" of intermediate nukes. Don't get too hopeful now that one of those Houses will be in Democratic hands in January; you know how Democrats like to prove they can be just as "tough" in foreign policy as right-wingers. So Roots Action helps you tell your Reps and Senators to refuse to fund intermediate nukes.

Finally, in the wake of our Administration's National Climate Assessment concluding that, basically, climate change will wipe us out unless we act, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to take serious action on climate change. Their actions could include, but would not be limited to, the OFF Fossil Fuels Act (current bill number: H.R. 3671) or the 100 By 50 Act (S. 987), both of which would begin the work of weaning us off fossil fuels, while helping fossil fuel workers retrain to work on the new power grid. Don't believe our President's various dismissals of his Administration's NCA -- for example, retorting that our water and air are cleaner than ever a) underscores how unsuccessful his efforts to gut clean air and clean water regulations have been and b) actually has nothing to do with climate change! And certainly don't embrace cynicism and fatalism, because these are not the attitudes that ended slavery.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject S. 1885, the AV START Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. S. 1885 would let corporations sell self-driving cars without meeting federal safety standards and would prevent states from passing their own laws regulating self-driving cars; given that self-driving cars have killed two people and injured another this year, do either of these things sound like good ideas to you? I'll tell you what they do sound like: they sound like corporate welfare given to self-driving car manufacturers that haven't done the work to ensure their products are safe for people. Why, it's like our government is picking winners and losers with the AV START Act. And the losers? Folks who don't want to get run over by self-driving cars. Seems like our government always wants to make us the losers. And that's why we fight.

Action: concerning nuclear weapons and immigration.

Our President has announced his intention to withdraw from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987. Why? Partly because our NSA chief, John "The Mustache of Evil" Bolton, hates all arms treaties, and also partly because our President hates any and all constraints on what he perceives to be his rightful absolute power as our 46% President. Hence his whining that Russia and China (the latter not even a party to the INF) get to "do weapons" while we don't, though you don't necessarily throw up your hands and build "usable" nuclear weapons just because someone violates a treaty. But luckily for us, our President can't build "usable" nukes without our Congress funding it, and our Congress wouldn't even fund Mr. Bush's bunker-buster nukes in the afterglow of his 2004 election victory, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk not to fund our President's latest wet dream of "usable" nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, Demand Progress helps you tell Amazon to stop trying to sell its facial recognition software to our Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) agency. ICE's separate-all-the-families-at-the-border approach is notorious enough, but Amazon's Rekognition software, like some white folks, can't even reliably tell folks of color apart from each other; now imagine the two joining forces! Look, reducing illegal immigration to America is actually pretty easy: you make it impossible for big corporations to exploit immigrant labor, you amend the National Labor Relations Act to let farm workers unionize, and you adjust immigration quotas so that they acknowledge the reality that nations closer to us are going to send us more immigrants. But I guess Amazon would rather make money off of immigrant detention camps, and thus (like some Amazon employees have already done, and good for them!) we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR.

Action: three alerts concerning *real* national security.

Our Administration plans to admit only 30,000 refugees into America this year; recall that refugees are running from terror and are thus far less likely than everyone else to commit terror and you'll see their plan as the grandstanding cruelty it is -- unless, of course, you're a rage addict. But our ministry is not for rage addicts, but for those who may be thinking "we need to do something," when the whole point of living in this world is not to do "something" but to do the right thing. I will say we would find it a whole lot easier to do the right thing in re refugees if we a) stopped treating the world's citizens as impediments to resources we could take for ourselves and b) stopped letting corporations import workers willy-nilly so they can pay workers less and keep more money for themselves. In the meantime, we still have to do the right thing, hence Amnesty International helps us tell our Congressfolk to welcome more refugees to America.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6534, the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, would ensure, within six months of its passage, that employees of our government, and not private contractors, perform essential diplomatic and consular security functions in those areas of the world we're fighting. The bill would then give our President a little over a year to get rid of private contractors in other war-making functions. If you recall how Tha Bush Mobb tried to win the Iraq war with too few soldiers, and then recall how much they paid Blackwater private contractors to perform security functions in Iraq, then you no doubt see how fiscally responsible it would be to ensure we don't privatize so much of our war-making. And if we can't fight or win wars without privatizing some part of them, well, that may just be an indication we shouldn't be fighting the war at all. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop privatizing our wars by passing H.R. 6534.

Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 6840, the Hold the LYNE Act, and thus stop our Administration's efforts to build so-called "low-yield" nuclear weapons. ("LYNE" stands for "low-yield nuclear explosive." I know, you also thought of this, too.) Anyway, we're already capable of destroying the world hundreds of times over with the nuclear weapons we already have, so you have to wonder why we'd consider building more. I'm sure LYNE advocates try to tell us that we need to have nukes that can cause less damage and give us more military flexibility. But setting aside the notion that we'd ever want to make nuclear war easier to fight: while there's a difference between a handgun and a semi-automatic rifle, there's really not very much difference between a low-yield nuke and what we're used to -- they both kill, they both make survivors very sick, and they both make worlds uninhabitable. It's enough to make you think LYNEs exist merely to make defense contractors rich.

Around the table: what we must do when the next financial crisis hits the fan, and other lessons.

Thomas Hanna at In These Times reminds us that the next time the banksters collapse the economy, we'll need to have a better response than "save the banks" -- like "require a public ownership stake, with full voting rights, in any financial institution that has to be bailed out due to its own fraudulent or speculative activities." I'd just say "nationalize the banks," and anyone who responds by calling that a BIG GUMMINT TAKEOVURZ!!!! ought to take a good look around and see what all that "freedom" for banksters has done for us. And public banks now make up about a fifth of the banks in Old Europe, while the Bank of North Dakota made sure that state didn't go in the tank after the oil and gas bubble burst there (oh, and North Dakota weathered the 2008 economic armageddon pretty well, too).

Chinese government bans one of its many non-state-sanctioned Protestant churches, for, you know, refusing to allow the government to install closed-circuit cameras within. The Zion church is one of China's many "black market" churches -- or, as we'd call them in America, churches. Memo to right-wingers still gnashing teeth over transgender folks in their bathrooms: this is what government oppression of religious freedom actually looks like. Then again, the lesson may be lost on them, since this tale also has actual Communists in it, rather than the "Communists" in America whose main crime is "not being a cruel and heartless Republican."

Surprise, surprise, North Korea still seems to be going to some trouble to conceal its nuclear weapons program. Also, North Korea doesn't appear to have gotten rid of any of its nukes, and appears to have made new ones. But what happened to we don't have to worry about it anymore? We must remember that all of our President's pronouncements have an expiration date, and that expiration date is generally "just after now."

Ho hum, Dept. of Treasury Inspector General finds that the outsourcing of IRS functions to private corporations is going very badly. Not just because they've only collected one percent of the money these deadbeats owe, but also because the IRS isn't holding these corporations accountable, and because private corporations are contacting taxpayers over the phone, just like pretty much every identity thief (and precisely unlike the IRS). This is the third time we've tried to privatize IRS debt collection; when will we learn? When we stop electing politicians whose one dream is to destroy everything about government that works, that's when.

Finally, Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis spoke to the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2017, which has, over the years, hosted a flotsam of racists and other unjustifiably aggrieved speakers. Naturally Mr. DeSantis calls the Freedom Center's apparent obsession with multiculturalism and diversity straight-shooting and truth-telling. But why would anyone expect any differently from a teabagger who has so obviously (and successfully) courted our President's support? And I wish I could say associating with this crowd would hurt him in Florida, as it would in, say, New Jersey.

Around the table: in which our Administration starts yet another long game against the American people.

U.S. State Department starts denying passports to Americans born to certain midwives who practiced in Texas's Rio Grande Valley during the second half of the 20th century, declaring that they can't verify those Americans' citizenship after said midwives admitted forging a handful of birth certificates. Didn't know being born poor and Hispanic just inside our borders was a crime, did you? Didn't know a midwife forging one or two birth certificates made thousands more birth certificates suspect enough to provoke criminal investigation, detainment, and even deportation? It's exactly as simple as this: if you disagree with our Administration, they want you gone -- unable to criticize them, unable to shame them, and certainly unable to vote them out of office. And this is only the beginning: the mostly black, brown, poor, and old folks born outside of hospitals at any time over the last 80 years are next.

So what happens when our Federal Trade Commission installs a Bureau of Consumer Protection Chief who used to represent corporations being investigated by the FTC, and Public Citizen files a Freedom of Information Act request to discover his conflicts of interest? The FTC pumps out almost 500 pages of documents and redacts nearly all of it. Because the documents don't relate to specific lawsuits, and also because trade secrets. Should I praise them for resisting the urge to declare BECAUSEZ TEH NASHUNUL SECURITEEZ!!!! No, I should not. I doubt our laws allow this sort of chicanery, so I suppose the FTC is just following the example of our President and his Cabinet, by daring you to stop what they're doing.

Ho hum, our Administration creates a special "Marijuana Policy Coordination Committee" dedicated to persuading the public to abandon its will to legalize pot. And this Committee told other Administration departments to highlight "the most significant data demonstrating negative trends," while apparently avoiding finding anything out about how often folks consume pot or whether legalized pot reduces other drug use. Recalling that our Attorney General has a zeal for criminalizing pot should also remind you that criminalizing pot is mostly a way of putting more black people in jail. (No, John Ehrlichmann spelled that out for us years ago.)

I'm not sure that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals actually said you have a First Amendment right to feed the homeless. Their ruling actually says that Food Not Bombs has a First Amendment right to feed the homeless during their community organizing events in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, since feeding the homeless, in this context, comprises "an act of political solidarity meant to convey the organization’s message." So it doesn't appropriately shame governments that would issue thousand-dollar permits to individuals who give food to the homeless -- although I suppose we could all go out in well-named and well-promoted groups to feed the homeless. It'd be a whole lot simpler if we'd just stop pretending that our only obligation in America is to ourselves.

Kudos to Jake Johnson at Common Dreams for noting that our President has declared a pay freeze for 2 million of our federal employees while at the same time proposing a capital gains tax cut that would benefit the super-rich and virtually no one else. It is odd, isn't it, how they always say "we can't just keep spending money we don't have" when talking about paying workers, and never about, say, building nukes we don't need or giving the rich more tax cuts or handing out more "research and development" corporate welfare? OK, maybe it's not odd, per se, once we accept the fact that we are ruled by vampires.

Finally, maybe we shouldn't rush to celebrate Rep. Beto O'Rourke's challenge to incumbent Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as an "Obama-like" campaign. Mr. O'Rourke has a gift for speaking well, but so did Barack Obama, and we all know how his Presidency went: he coddled Our Glorious Elites instead of giving them the bitter medicine they earned, he extolled bipartisanship while half of the partisans tried to burn everything down, and he helped prepare the ground for a new President who seems to hate all the good and love all the evil in our world. So if Robert Rubin and Larry Summers have already gotten to Beto O'Rourke, we could be in for another turn of the vicious Republican/weak Democrat wheel, and as I've said, we've got to break that wheel.

Around the table: news about nukes, monopolies, and right-wing snowflakes.

I've been quite patient, but since our President is doing the dance-with-no-pants about it, I'll say it: this nuclear "deal" between our President and North Korea is a nothingburger on a dung bun. I'd ask how any sane person pulls out of an Iran deal that actually keeps Iran from making nukes and then signsa "deal" with North Korea that only gets "assurances" that North Korea will denuclearize, but I know that question answers itself. Could this be the moment when we finally -- finally! -- see significant numbers of mainstream Republicans breaking off from our President? I mean, they're all proud of what defense hawks they are, and while the President's votaries love him, he can't get re-elected without the support of those other Republicans. If they keep mum through this, I shudder to think what will shake them out of their stupor.

John C. O'Day at FAIR notices that the "liberal" media seems happy to report on our President's authoritarian tendencies, but then goes blind about them when they have to confront the fact that we wage war all over the planet and have enough nukes to destroy the world 200 times over. (Dig especially the narrative twist at the end of the third paragraph.) Now, maybe the "liberal" media think that's "balance." You know what I think -- that symmetry isn't balance, and balance isn't fairness. Fairness doesn't obsess over whether all the negative columns are the same size; fairness gives everyone their due, as they've earned it. Yes, I am a little impatient about these matters.

The incomparable David Dayen explains why "The AT&T-Time Warner Merger Ruling Is Bad for the Country." Long story short: modern thinking about antitrusts (first developed during the Reagan era, of course) posits that judges should only evaluate big corporate mergers on the literal dollar-and-cents cost to consumers, "when common sense clearly demonstrates the dangers of concentration." You know, the more power concentrated in the fewer hands, the worse off we all are? You knew it before I said it, but contemporary judges, who study for years to get where they are, pretend they don't know it. It's a damn shame. (Dear trolls: don't spout off about "precedent," since there's plenty of actual precedent -- not to mention the plain text of antitrust law! -- to do antitrust protections the right way, too.)

Virginia Republicans send 2017 almost-gubernatorial nominee/Confederate flag-hugger Corey Stewart up against Democratic incumbent Tim Kaine in this year's U.S. Senate race. Mr. Stewart has promised a "vicious" campaign against Mr. Kaine; maybe he'll outdo Ed Gillespie in that regard. But do you suppose Mr. Stewart will have the smarts to challenge Sen. Kaine on his support for giving the President even more war-making power? After all, wrapping yourself in the Confederate flag will only take you so far, even in Virginia. (Mr. Kaine, for his part, would do better to put "taking health care away from folks" first in any list tabulating Mr. Stewart's bad ideas.)

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) -- the man who gives empty suits a bad name -- not only calls criticism of Twitter's CEO for ordering from Chick-Fil-A during Pride Month "bullying" but is even fundraising off it. Ugh, one more time: criticism is not bullying. Gosh, does Mr. Rubio ever hear criticism from any of his friends? Or are they all tired of how he acts when he does? If he really thinks folks are being "bullied" every time someone disagrees with their regressive views on homosexuality, then he's a damn snowflake. Snowflakes deserve representation, of course, but (like the rest of us) they deserve much better than to be represented by other snowflakes in Congress.

Finally, Democrats score yet another special election victory in Wisconsin -- in the Senate 1st District election that Wisconsin's snowflake Governor, Scott Walker, tried his damnedest not to hold! Republicans have held this Senate seat for 40 years, by the way -- and it's up again in five months, and a lot can happen in five months, so who knows, they might take it back. But probably not if now-Sen. Frostman foregrounds health care, tax cuts for the rich, and clean water as his main issues, as he does on his campaign website.

Action: farm policy, GMO labeling, and the Iran nuclear deal.

The House plans to vote on the nefarious H.R. 2, the "farm bill" that'll set farm policy in the United States for the next five years, and Moms Rising helps you tell your House Rep to reject the House Farm Bill. Don't worry about people suddenly having nothing to eat if the Farm Bill doesn't pass, not just because that won't happen (Congress will just extend the old Farm Bill for a while if they can't pass a new one, as they've done the last two times), but because Americans don't let themselves be taken hostage, do we? The current Farm Bill is a cornucopia of evil, not just in cutting food stamps and imposing work requirements on them (for people who very likely either already work or are children or seniors, no less!), but in giving more subsidies to big farms, less assistance to farms trying to get off chemicals and monoculture, and more loopholes to corporations trying to put out pesticides, and more welfare handouts to factory farms. This bill deserves a humiliating death, so let's give it one.

Meanwhile, the USDA is considering labeling requirements for foods made with genetically-modified organisms (or GMOs), and surprise, their draft rule sucks! The USDA's standard would basically exclude sugars and oils (allowing more than two-thirds of GMO foods to go unlabeled!), would require labelers to use the nearly-unknown initials "BE" (for "bioengineered") instead of the far more well-known initials "GE" or "GMO," and would allow corporations to use various electronic means of labeling their food, without just, you know, writing some variation of this food has GMOs in it on the food label you're actually holding. But the USDA still has to take public comments on the proposed rule -- which they'll do for 60 days, in the hopes that well-organized food corporations will swamp us out. Let's destroy that hope by letting Just Label It help you leave a public comment opposing the USDA's inadequate GMO labeling proposal.

Finally, our President may have removed the United States from the Iran nuclear deal -- remember, when they tell you he's acting crazy like a fox, that George W. Bush's "crazy like a fox" act got us ISIS -- but the other six signatory nations can still keep the deal going, hence Roots Action helps you tell the other signatory nations to keep the Iran nuclear deal together. It is actually working, after all, and our President can't say it's not working without telling bald lies about it. Some will tell you you're "undermining America" by doing this, particularly by contacting Iran; others will even call you a "traitor." They can all go diddle their rage glands somewhere else. You never "undermine" your country by speaking out about what you think is right, and anyone can call anyone a "traitor," instead of taking the effort to persuade people they're right. And if this Administration's defenders resort to name-calling, they won't convince anyone of courage and character that they're right.

Around the table: containing two of the President's best stratagems for winning the midterms.

With both parties of Congress anxious to give our President even more unconstitutional war-making powers, it's left to Pat Buchanan to remind us not only that Israel struck Iranian forces in Syria first last week, but that the neocons who supposedly hated our President so much now control his foreign policy. Mr. Buchanan rightly reminds us that the notion that "Iran is on 'a quest for nuclear weapons'" is a "Bush-like assertion," and that "the foreign policy that America Firsters voted for" is "being replaced by the Middle East agenda of Bibi and the neoconservatives," but I bet these "America Firsters" were never that committed to ending foreign wars, especially now that their Personal Lord and Savior seems to favor one. Who wants to bet that this Administration will start banging the drums for war right around a month before the midterms?

Administration spokeshack says opposing torture-approving Gina Haspel for CIA chief would be somehow anti-feminist, and our "liberal" media seems to agree. I presume that a real feminist would know that women are, being human, as capable of evil as men are, and a real feminist certainly wouldn't let someone else's bean-counting get in the way of the truth. And, seriously, the CIA doesn't employ a single woman who can lead and who opposes torture? That seems unlikely, not just because the CIA is now almost half female, but because the world is a big place, much bigger than torture apologists tend to imagine.

Our President rolls back transgender protections for prisoners, meaning transgender prisoners will have to use the bathroom of their birth gender and get the crap kicked out of them by other prisoners as a result. Also, too, federal prisons will have to use "biological sex at birth" to determine housing assignments, which will also result in a lot of beaten-up transgender prisoners. I guess our President really doesn't care who gets hurt, as long as religious bigots get to diddle their rage glands.

There's so much to say about Vice President Pence's statement that "in the interests of the country, I think it's time to" end the Mueller investigation into his Administration, but I'll just say this: Mr. Pence should not act like the Administration "fully cooperat(ing)" with the Mueller investigation is some great gift to the American people -- "full cooperation" with a criminal investigation is, frankly, the minimum we, as Americans, have a right to expect from our government. (Is this what moved George Will to declare that Mr. Pence is even worse than our President? I don't know, but that statement certainly merits further evaluation.)

New NRA President Oliver North claims his organization is a poor, poor victim of "civil terrorism" by the multitudinous political activists who now oppose it. And, he adds, the NRA faces even worse opposition than even the civil rights movement did back in the day, though I suspect marchers who got the crap kicked out of them by police will beg to differ. All together now: waaaaaaaah! Remember: folks who present themselves as tough guys are more likely the real snowflakes.

Finally, we learn that our President would like the upcoming midterms to be "a referendum on his Presidency" and that he's far more likely to talk about himself at rallies than the candidates he's nominally supporting. Of course our President loves talking about himself, but this instinct may also be the Republicans' best path to victory in 2018 -- talking only about him erases the hopes and dreams of good Americans from the conversation, after all, and surely we remember how he rope-a-doped the Clinton campaign into talking only about him as Election Day approached in 2016, until TV became an onslaught of two-sided negative advertising that kept a lot of Americans home. If Democrats make this midterm all about our President's bad behavior, rather than what good Americans deserve from their government, then they deserve defeat.

Around the table: in which another fight between right-wingers gets exposed as drama.

Our President pulls the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, incorrectly calling the deal "one-sided" and presuming that he'll get a "better deal" out of Iran than one that already verifies the absence of nuclear weapons development. Incomprehensibly he also seems to think this strengthens his hand with North Korea. The other five nations party to the deal have said they'll continue it (and Iran remains a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons), so it's just possible this is another meaningless ball-swinging exercise from our President. But the smarter bet would be to prepare for a PR offensive ending sometime in October with war against, ahem, regime change in Iran. This, after we all remember how regime change went in Iraq and Afghanistan!

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says the stock buybacks which are the main result of Republican tax "reform" are actually good for the economy, because they "return capital to shareholders," who then "recycle() that capital through the economy." Of course, we already know that corporations were already sitting on a ton of capital they weren't "recycl(ing) through the economy," and we also know that giving a shareholder a ton of money in no way guarantees they'll actually spend it, either on jobs or cheeseburgers. Is there a lie too evil for the Foreclosure King to tell?

In a related note, Dean Baker at TruthOut gives us some hope in These Interesting Times: with stock dividend yields falling, and with so much CEO pay tied to stock options, CEOs may -- just may -- be screwing themselves out of the absurdly high salaries to which they've become accustomed! And "the sight of top management getting rich while providing mediocre returns (for shareholders) may provide sufficient motivation for shareholders to organize." Ah, but I can just see Congress passing another stupid bailout if CEOs lose too much money. We should be out in the streets if that happens.

Don Blankenship's little "Cocaine Mitch" ad (in which he infamously talks about "China people") may have aided his effort to win the Republican Senate nomination in West Virginia, but Alec MacGillis at ProPublica reminds us that when one of Mr. Blankenship's corporations spewed out a larger-than-the-Exxon-Valdez coal slurry spill that polluted the water of over 25,000 good Kentuckians back in 2000, none other than Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell was there to help him avoid taking any significant responsibility for it. Which should remind you that a lot of these "outsider" candidates are really insiders, and a lot of their "fights" are just drama. And they're not even good drama.

Finally, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman quickly resigns his position after several women accuse him of sexual assault. They call it physical abuse, he calls it "role-playing," but with his resignation a mere three hours after the New Yorker's initial report of the accusations, I guess we know which one it was. What a damn waste -- Mr. Schneiderman's resignation won't make financial predation popular or anything, but folks who do good works in the public sphere need to stop making other people's lives hell in the private sphere. I really don't care how hard that is. Anything worth doing is hard.

Around the table: how Democrats will lose in 2018, and other lessons.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims to have evidence that Iran "lied" about the nuclear deal -- but only proves that Iran wanted to build a nuclear weapon before the deal, a fact no one has actually disputed. Iran's intentions aren't particularly relevant, after all -- Iran's actions are, and 55,000 documents from an apparently unlocked warehouse later, we can't say they're building nukes now. Which makes Mr. Netanyahu's address what, class? Drama, that's what. No wonder our President loved it.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (E-PA) guts yet another anti-gerrymandering bill in his committee, one that also had the support of more than half the members of the lower house. I was going to say he's left quite the trail of slime over the years, but then I realized how insulting that'd be to slime. Is it too much to ask that the man who talks like he's never going to lose an election again lose his next election? I don't care if Zombie Charles Manson beats him.

Branko Marcetic at Jacobin looks at the Democrats' "Red to Blue" list of approved Congressional candidates, finds it wanting. The woman who lost bigly to John McCain in 2016, the dude Steny Hoyer likes so much he told one of his primary rivals to get out of the race, the guy who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory against Sam Brownback in 2014, the woman who worked in Tha Bush Mobb's foreign policy apparatus, and so on -- it's bad when the guy running in Utah's 4th is one of the more courageous candidates. If Democrats can't win back the House despite all the wind at their back, this is why.

Former HHS Secretary Tom Price said that repealing the individual mandate penalty in the Republican tax "reform" will result in higher prices for those who use the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Because healthy people will drop out, you see -- gosh, where have we heard this before? Oh, right: from almost every single American who thought about the matter for 20 seconds. What a stalwart defender of the forgotten man he was, back when he had the power to do something!

Now Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) says "there's no evidence whatsoever" that the recent Republican tax "reform" bill -- for which he voted, because of course he did -- has helped American workers. He's not quite in Sen. Corker territory, I suppose, but The Economist really needs to attend Mr. Rubio's "ideas" more closely, so they could tell us that he would like to "increase()" the "child tax credit" so that very rich people could get it too, and that his "provision for paid family leave" would steal from Social Security to pay for it. Marco Rubio: he gives empty suits a bad name.

Action: clean water, renewable energy, paper ballots, and nukes.

H.R. 5609, the WATER Act, would help America rebuild our drinking water infrastructure, but right-wingers love seeing bills like this and asking BUT WHEREZ IZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!! One can, of course, answer that question in at least two ways. One, the bill pays for itself by expanding the amount of money made by controlled foreign corporations that can be taxed. Second, Flint still operates without a guarantee of clean water to its good citizens four years after the state of Michigan poisoned its water in a bid to save money -- and that very same state government has just agreed to let the Nestlé corporation pump out even more clean water per minute from the Great Lakes Basin at a pittance. If that doesn't register with you, then frankly your authority to complain about BIG GUMMINT SPENDINGZ!!!! is limited. Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support clean water infrastructure by supporting the WATER Act.

H.R. 3671, the OFF Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act, would, as its title suggests, help wean us off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy sources. The bill would mandate (among other things) that 80% of our electricity come from "clean energy" sources and 80% of our cars be zero-emission cars by 2027. But the bill doesn't just issue mandates that enterprising, can-do Americans should be able to meet -- it also offers the retraining and financial assistance that would help fossil fuel workers transition to a renewable energy economy. Other countries produce far more of their energy from renewable sources than we do; the only reason we lag is that we coddle fossil fuel corporation CEOs, who should, frankly, be leading the charge to renewable energy, not blocking it. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a renewable energy future by passing the OFF Fossil Fuels Act.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Public Citizen helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to fund a paper ballot voting system for Pennsylvania. We have reached an unexpected watershed in America, with our Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee actually calling for paper ballot elections in America (as a way of fighting Russian meddling, though it works just as well to keep computers from disappearing our votes), while Pennsylvania's own Secretary of State, Robert Torres, has mandated that the state phase out paperless voting machines by the end of 2019. You may have noticed that a major election year will be happening before then, and Pennsylvania will be many tens of millions of dollars short in its effort to replace paperless voting machines, so let's impress upon them the urgency of finding this money. Surely they can find some corporate welfare to cut.

Finally, Congress is actually contemplating building more "usable," "low-yield" nuclear weapons. To deter Russia, of course, although both Russia and America have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world hundreds of times over already; what more "deterrence" is needed, or even possible? Proponents also say "low-yield" nuclear weapons give us more flexibility, though we already have low-yield nukes, and "low-yield" sure doesn't mean harmless -- a low-yield nuclear weapon will still wreak far more havoc than any military objective could possibly be worth. (You see, if you poison someone's home, forever, they tend to stay angry at you, forever, and be a source of potential conflict, forever.) One should hence question the wisdom of making nuclear weapons more "usable." The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the construction of any new "low-yield" nuclear weapons.

Action: internet freedom, nuclear weapons, and fracking on public lands.

Stop the FCC still helps you tell your Reps and Senators to pass a "resolution of disapproval" reversing the FCC's recent anti-net neutrality order. It hasn't been hard finding 50 Senators who oppose the FCC's effort to put corporations, not you, in charge of your internet experience, but finding the 51st has been a bit tough; Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) has criticized President Trump for failing to discuss net neutrality in his State of the Union address, but hasn't committed to being that 51st vote yet, and I can't say why he's dithering. Meanwhile, in the House, Republicans have a bigger majority, so the road to passage there will be tougher. But not impossible! Not in a world where most Republican voters agree that the FCC should keep corporations from censoring web content, blocking and throttling websites, and giving preferential treatment to corporations that pay for it. Congress only needs do the will of the voters, which, not coincidentally, is their job, regardless of their personal ideology.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has released a Nuclear Posture Review that -- surprise, surprise! -- says we ought to spend nearly $60 billion annually over the next 30 years making new nuclear bombs. Recall that the ideal purpose of nuclear weapons is deterrence -- at least, that's what we have supposed for the last 70 years or so -- and we might well presume that having enough weapons to destroy the world several hundred times over is enough weaponry for that task. Folks say we shouldn't be building new nukes like this with a vicious, racist, sexist, self-absorbed manchild in the White House, but of course we should be just as careful of psychopaths who can do a much more passable impression of a sane person, because, up until now, that's been a good enough reason to give a President fewer nukes to play with. So the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Trump nuclear weapons plan.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the state legislature is trying its damnedest to expose yet more state forests to fracking. After all, what's more popular than polluting our clean water with carcinogens just so gas drilling CEOs can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes? Of course, it's not just water pollution, it's also air pollution, and it's also methane venting on public lands, which packs a climate change punch many, many times worse than coal emissions do, and which also represent money the Pennsylvania taxpayer could be making off methane just floating away into the ether. Gov. Wolf imposed a moratorium on new fracking leases not long after taking office a few years back, but that hasn't stopped gas drilling corporations from trying to grab everything. It's enough to make you think only an outright ban would work! But for now, Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania state Senators to reject efforts to open up even more public lands to fracking.

Around the table: tabulating threats foreign and domestic.

Brian Barrett at Wired finds the threat of an electro-magnetic pulse from North Korea "overhyped." The 90 PERCENTZ DEADZ IN A YEARZ!!!! number you've heard actually comes from science fiction, not science -- EMPs are real, as you know if you've ever lost a radio signal while driving under a power line, but the hysterical death/destruction numbers aren't, and they'd have to be for North Korea to even try blowing up a nuke over the United States, because if you don't take out our nation's entire counterstrike capability, well, you've lost.

Now Saudi Arabia wants to embark on an allegedly peaceful uranium extraction program, for the purpose of creating nuclear energy. Without even ruling out the possibility that they'll develop nuclear weapons, a prospect that doesn't seem to chill the hearts of American right-wingers as much as Iran developing nukes. Indeed, I've heard just about nothing from the right-wing usual suspects about the possibility that Saudi Arabia would develop nuclear weapons.

Workers at the Gothamist and DNAInfo voted to unionize, and then their owner, TD Banknorth CEO Joe Ricketts, shut them both the hell down, and thus Kate Aronoff suggests that Mr. Ricketts is a "Walking Case for a $1 Million Maximum Income." A 91% tax bracket on millionaire income would have essentially the same effect, and before your Tea Party uncle calls it "class warfare," remind him (as Ms. Aronoff reminds us) that the Republican tax "reform" plan would reduce Estate taxes on wealthy folks while restricting the ability of working families to take tax breaks on their property taxes and on state and local taxes, which is a better way of describing "class warfare."

It's entirely true, as Tegan Jones says at FAIR, that the "liberal" media have been making excuses for President George H.W. Bush's "cop-a-feel" attacks on women, but the really stunning thing, to me at least, is the excuses Bush the Better's handlers make -- that he's wheelchair-bound, that "his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures," that "he has patted women’s rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner." These sound totally like '80s excuses! Haven't they looked at the man currently occupying the Oval Office and realized that you can say fuck-you-I'm-the-President and get away with it?

In a peripherally-related note, Energy Secretary Rick Perry says that fossil fuels can help prevent sexual assault. Because they keep the lights on! Jesus Mary and Joseph is it possible he was actually trying to tell a joke? If so, it's nowhere near as funny as a Dad joke. (Right-wingers, don't object that he was really talking about energy problems in Africa, as he'd obviously stopped talking about Africa at the point he tried to make his attempt at a joke, or whatever that was. Juxtaposition does not automatically create context.)

Finally, Shoshi Parks at Yes! magazine tells us about the ancient acequias system of water management in the Southwest, which aims to distribute water resources democratically, in stark contrast to Colorado and New Mexico law, which allows water owners to sell their water to the highest bidder. That latter system, of course, favors big mining and big agriculture concerns over smaller farmers. And yet today's right-wingers, presented with these concepts, will not only conclude that the mammon-worshiping system is superior to the democratic one, but would scoff at anyone who thinks we should do anything for any reason other than money. They'll get their punishment at the Pearly Gates, but they'll punish us in the meantime, so let's keep fighting them.

Around the table: the subtle difference between "religious" and "moral" convictions, and other lessons.

You recall President Trump's executive order allowing employers with "strong religious convictions" to opt out of covering birth control in health care plans? Turns out Mr. Trump issued another order allowing non-religious organizations with "sincerely-held moral convictions" to opt out as well -- and he apparently crafted this order to satisfy a grand total of two anti-abortion groups. If the Supreme Court doesn't uphold this order, it may be because it's impossible to tell if an anti-abortion group is "closely-held" (which was their rationale for letting some corporations opt out of the birth control mandate in the first place) -- but by then the far-rightists who are Mr. Trump's true audience will be quite satisfied.

Two federal judges block President Trump's infamous Muslim Ban 3.0, this time because the ban "plainly discriminates based on nationality" without demonstrating that letting in folks from the countries listed on the ban would be "detrimental to the interests of the United States." Particularly all those nasty folks from Chad and all those politicians from Venezuela who aren't beating down the door to emigrate here anyway! If Mr. Trump's ban really does ban folks from Libya and Venezuela more or less randomly, it might not survive John Roberts's scrutiny. (Of course it'll survive Neil Gorsuch's scrutiny, such as that is.)

The EPA issues a guidance, mainly concerning communication during a nuclear meltdown or dirty bomb attack, which claims that first responders can tolerate radiation levels ten times higher than the standard the EPA previously set for drinking water. Now the EPA hasn't actually changed any of its standards, because doing so would require months of public commenting and be subject to other laws, but while this "guidance" may not have the force of law, it'll have the force of clouding up any lawsuit a first responder might file after getting cancer. Also, even Tha Bush Mobb's EPA never called any amount of radiation safe.

From Adam Johnson at FAIR, we learn that "Iran Doesn't Have a Nuclear Weapons Program" even though the "liberal" media "Keep Saying It Does." If you're thinking the constant reference to Iran's "nuclear weapons program" is just lazy wording on journalists' part, remind yourself that journalists and their editors are all super-proud of their writing acumen, and then ask yourself how likely it would be that they'd write something like that without knowing what they were saying. Also, a fatwa is serious business -- at least to the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran, who declared one against nuclear weapons in 2003, right around the time of the world intelligence community's last sighting of a nuclear weapons program there.

Finally, Activists in Maine try to get a universal home care for seniors and disabled folks -- to be paid for with a 1.9% payroll tax on income over $127,000 and a 3.7% tax on investment income above that same figure -- on the 2018 ballot. Why 2018? Probably because Senatorial and gubernatorial races will drive up turnout. The ballot initiative would also mandate that home care service providers receiving money under this plan will have to spend at least three quarters of that money paying their workers, which should help discourage fever dreams of executives aspiring to rip off the taxpayer. If this passes -- and though I'm sure the right will squeal about TEH TAXEZ!!!! it's obvious who's actually paying them -- it could multiply good works across the nation.

Action: fighting to strengthen Social Security, avoid nuclear holocaust, and shame Breitbart.

The good folks at Social Security Works inform us that today is the day you stop paying into Social Security if you make a million dollars per year, since the payroll tax that funds Social Security only taxes income up to $127,200. (If you make more than that, of course, you stopped paying into Social Security even earlier.) Hence they've called for a national call-in day today, demanding that Congress "scrap the cap" on payroll taxes so higher income can be taxed into the system; you can find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers, as always, using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page. If millionaires pay more money into the system, Social Security can not only be solvent into the foreseeable future, but can be expanded, so that good Americans who've worked all their lives can have a better retirement. And that sure would be a lot better than cutting Social Security benefits, which is the only policy Our Glorious Elites ever propose and the only policy the "liberal" media ever covers. As usual, we know better than they do.

Meanwhile, H.R. 903/S. 332 would zero out American funding for the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, as you may know, aims to stop nations from testing nuclear weapons, and our government currently funds about a quarter of the Commission's budget. The Senate never ratified the treaty after President Clinton submitted it, because TEH PREZIDUNTZ WUZ A DEMOCRATZ!!!!!, but the Commission still soldiers on. So why do Sen. Cotton (A-AR) and Rep. Wilson (R-SC) have such a hard-on for cutting their budget? I can't imagine it's over a philosophical question, i.e., "why do we fund a treaty we haven't even ratified and isn't even in full force?" And besides, that question has an answer: because monitoring for nuke tests makes us all safer. Once you're done telling your Senators to "scrap the cap" on Social Security payroll taxes, you can tell them to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty -- or, at the very least, reject H.R. 903/S. 332. They'll never see it coming.

Finally, over 900 corporations have ended arrangements with the far right-wing website Breitbart, but we still have a couple of holdouts, hence Sum of Us helps you Canadian corporation Shopify to end their associations with the racist tools at Breitbart. Shopify runs Breitbart's online store, so getting them to dump Breitbart would be a big deal -- and, as such, has also been quite difficult thus far, as Shopify's CEO has actually held a townhall with employees who are angry that Shopify continues to associate with Breitbart despite the blowback their employer has already received. And remember: there is no First Amendment right to make millions of dollars off your speech; there is only a First Amendment right not to be put in jail by your government for your speech. Besides, I'm sure Breitbart can figure out how to run their own online store if it comes to that. I mean, if you want to do that, you find out how to do that, don't you? You don't just get some corporation to do it for you all the time. You and I don't have that luxury.

Action: sane nuclear policy, and "free" trade.

The President's budget actually requests an increase in nuclear weapons spending, to $12 billion, and while that's small potatoes compared to other areas of the budget, we could spend at least some of that money a lot better than we do. Hence Sen. Markey has introduced the Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures (or SANE) Act, which would cut $10 billion annually in nuke spending. There is no reasonable way to argue against that goal by saying ZOMG TEH TERRURIZTZ WILL WIN!!!!! Terrorists use whatever's at hand to achieve their goals, and they usually don't have nuclear weapons lying around -- a terrorist might get his hands on a nuke one day, but that's an argument to build fewer nukes, not more. It's also an argument to strengthen programs that secure loose nuclear materials, programs toward which Congress has had considerable ambivalence lately. Finally, hitting a terrorist with a nuclear bomb is a bit like hitting a roach with a sledgehammer, and missing the roach. So Peace Action West helps you tell your Congressfolk to cut nuclear weapons spending.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that a "fast-track" bill -- one that would, as you know, permit little debate and no amendments on the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade agreement -- could be introduced into Congress any day now. Perhaps with Sen. Warren's Washington Post op-ed slamming the pact's "investor-state tribunals" -- the ones that would nullify American laws so that corporations could extract tribute from the American people at will -- our Congressfolk will get cold feet for a while, but eventually they will bring it forward, and so Public Citizen helps you tell your Representatives to reject "fast-tracking" "free" trade agreements. No one who has defended the TPP has yet bothered to explain why the bill needs less debate and speedier passage -- indeed, folks who defend the TPP seem to assume that defending it from criticisms alone argues for less debate and speedier passage, when any moderately accomplished student of logic would tell you it doesn't. What do they have to hide, you might wonder? "Free" trade's record of unsafe products, job outsourcing, and wrecked economies, maybe?

Action: nuclear non-proliferation, and getting Barbie out of the Girl Scouts.

The Council for a Livable World helps you tell President Obama to provide more funding for nuclear security and nonproliferation programs. Why? Because his last three budgets have cut funding for these programs that (among other things) help collect loose nuclear materials so that terrorists and rogue states don't get it first. And unlike a lot of defense spending, these programs don't actually cost a lot -- which you already figured out, right? A new weapon or weapon delivery system costs lots more money than paying people to make sure the world is safe from loose nukes. The latter item doesn't make big defense contractor CEOs rich, but it does make the world a safer place. And, until lately, nonproliferation was a fairly bipartisan cause -- but of 26 Senators who lately signed a letter urging Mr. Obama to restore these funding cuts, only two, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, were Republicans, and maybe Mr. Graham only signed it to be ornery. But the widespread abandonment of reason in this hyperpartisan age is no reason to stop doing the right thing.

Meanwhile, I passed along an action alert a while back asking the Girl Scouts to stop partnering with Mattel, the makers of the ubiquitous Barbie doll, since Barbie dolls, as you know, seem a bit incongruous with the Girl Scouts' stated goal of "build(ing) girls of courage, confidence, and character," but unfortunately the "synergy" between them continues, as Daisies and Brownies can now get a Barbie patch (how's that for branding?), and Girl Scouts can now visit at least two GSUSA web pages and be further branded. If this seems like nitpicking, remember: courage, confidence, and character. Barbie was just in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and British researchers found in 2005 that young girls exposed to Barbie dolls had a worse body images than young girls who didn't. That's character and confidence, respectively; now how about promoting the courage to be who you really want to be, rather than letting corporate advertising set false limits? The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell the Girl Scouts of America to disassociate themselves from Mattel and Barbie.

Action: net neutrality, organic standards, and nuclear non-proliferation.

As the Consumerist reminds us why we need the no-crippling-nor-prioritization-of-service network neutrality rules the FCC plans to gut, I have even more action alerts with which you may demand that you, not some ISP, determines what your internet experience will be like: one from Roots Action, another from CREDO, and a third from Free Press. That last one, from Free Press, is a phone-calling tool, so even if you've used any of the others, you can still use that one; FCC Chair Tom Wheeler needs to know he has nowhere to run. The Consumerist reminds us that if we let corporations run the internet, they will crush innovation, because it's really very easy right now to start an innovative website or application on the internet, but when we all have to pay out the ass to do that, it won't be easy to innovate anymore. And big corporations don't innovate -- small businesses innovate, and then big corporations gobble them up. And Roots Action reminds us, also, that on the very same day the FCC announced its plan to gut net neutrality, Brazil codified net neutrality provisions into national law. I'd hate to think our government was so addled by big corporate money that it couldn't do the right thing -- the thing that promotes innovation, the thing that promotes freedom, the thing that enjoys actual bipartisan support from left and right.

Meanwhile, you may recall that the National Organic Standards Board (or NOSB) banned the use of the antibiotic tetracycline in certified organic apples and pears after October of this year -- after your activism, no doubt -- but the NOSB hasn't banned the use of another antibiotic, streptomycin, in certified organic apples and pears, so the Organic Consumers Association helps you tell the NOSB to end streptomycin use on organic apple orchards the same day it ends tetracycline use. Why? Well, the more we overuse antibiotics, the more resistant the bacteria they target will become, until we're one day inundated by super-bugs everywhere that we can't kill. Orchards have used antibiotics to combat fire blight, a disease apple and pear trees get that makes the trees look like they've been burned and which ultimately kills the tree. But the best way to fight fire blight is to prune the blighted areas of the tree before they spread to the roots (which, I know, requires more workers, but hey, our U6 unemployment rate is still nearly 13%). And some scientists have also had success using bacteria and yeasts to take down the fire blight bug. So it's not exactly antibiotics-or-die for the organic apple and pear industry.

Finally, President Obama has, in the past, been a staunch advocate of securing "loose nukes," but his 2015 budget makes big cuts to programs that find and secure loose nuclear weapons and material. For the third year in a row, I should add. And the 2015 budget actually increases funding for nuclear weapons! That's getting it precisely backward -- does this mean we're going to just fire more nukes at terrorists and rogue states that get their hands on nuclear weapons? Seems to me we're much better off getting hold of those nukes before anyone else can. Seriously, I'm boggled at the priorities Mr. Obama has put on display here. Mere pretend deficit-hawkishness doesn't explain it -- you have to wonder if nuclear non-proliferation programs are "unpopular" now merely because Mr. Obama embraced them. Of course, if that's the case, then appeasing these fair-weather opponents isn't the right thing to do. You also have to wonder if Mr. Obama simply means to embrace good ideas in public and kill them in private. Hell, that's how it seems to have worked on network neutrality and the financial transaction tax! But if that's the case, then he needs to hear from us, so the Council for a Livable World helps you tell Mr. Obama to restore cuts to nuclear nonproliferation programs.

The Council for a Livable World helps you tell Congress to reduce our nuclear weapons budget. Why? We should be reducing our defense spending, generally -- our defense spending has grown by 50% over the last dozen years, which doesn't even include the cost of two wars. And though you may have heard about our "need" to update our nuclear weapons capability, last I looked the planet didn't grow so big that we can't destroy it 200 times over anymore. And the world has changed in other ways: our enemies will more likely attack us with car bombs and weaponized household appliances than with nukes, because they're not out to destroy us, but to make us destroy ourselves. I don't call for an end to nuclear weapons or defense spending but an end to the mania surrounding them, a mania that prevents our elected leaders from cutting them when most Americans would.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to submit public comments about the EPA's proposed tailpipe emission standards, the Sierra Club still helps you do that. These standards, as we've previously discussed, would essentially implement California's tougher emissions standards nationally; most automakers are actually onboard with that plan, as it would mean they'd no longer have to make one version of a car for California and another for the rest of the country. But oil corporations, who stand on the wrong side of history more and more often these days, stand opposed to cleaner tailpipe emissions. I don't know how many flacks they'll get to send public comments screeching JOBZ!!!!, as if making cars cleaner somehow doesn't create jobs for the people who have to figure out how to comply with regulations. But one thing's for sure: we'd better outnumber them.