Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: featuring the usual gang of tax avoiders, bad leaders, and empty suits.

I don't have much to say about the ProPublica report revealing tax evasion by famous high-income folk. We learn that Jeff Bezos paid zero dollars in income tax in 2007 and 2011, and that Warren Buffett, despite talking a good game about taxing the rich harder, hardly pays any income tax generally. Right-wingers will no doubt have a circle jerk over George Soros's tax-avoiding ways, though right-wingers talk about George Soros much, much more than we liberals ever do. And to those who'd say well, they pay themselves in property that doesn't get taxed until they sell it, what did you expect, we can only say that doesn't make it right. And, you know, imagining a better world is a worthwhile endeavor, even if it's hard.

We learn from Sharon Zhang at TruthOut that the nefarious Koch network and the nefarious Heritage Foundation have been influencing putative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, mainly by organizing his more right-wing constituents. We all breathed a sigh of relief when Republicans seemed unable to articulate a reason to oppose the American Rescue Plan, but that's apparently because they were organizing around influencing Mr. Manchin better than we were. Some liberals are starting to organize around influencing Mr. Manchin, as in yesterday's rally in D.C. supporting the For the People Act and the Common Cause effort to rally his constituents around same, and that's a good thing, because in America, having the better argument only takes you so far.

Republicans filibuster the Paycheck Fairness Act, and, as usual, their counterarguments are weak. I've given "frivolous lawsuits" so many headshots already I'm annoyed it's still coming, and you could also have predicted "a boon to trial lawyers," though it's telling that Mob Boss Mitch had to utter it, rather than farm it out to some eager young'un in his caucus. And "we've got three laws on the books, why do we need four?" is profoundly illogical; the number of laws doesn't matter so much as their quality, or, more specifically, how well they anticipate the ways corporations will try to work around them. Why don't they just admit that they'd rather have bosses fire workers for talking about their pay with their co-workers?

Siyanda Mohutsiwa at FAIR writes about the New York Times's reflexively grim coverage of COVID in Africa even though infection rates are actually fairly low there. We Westerners have, for decades, reflexively thought of African nations as "corrupt" and "miserable," perhaps even "ungovernable," and even when we assume 150 years of Western interference has made it so, we still fail to imagine Africans as the protagonists of their own nations -- in this case, we fail to imagine them as "epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists," "academics," or "journalists" -- and that failure is also pretty racist. Read the entire article, though, because I can't list all the persuasive (and damning!) arguments in one paragraph, and also because it'll lead you to Binyavanga Wainaina's "How to Write About Africa," one of the most devastating satires ever written.

Georgia's state Board of Education not only approves a measure aiming to restrict teaching of American racism in public schools, but shuts off comments on the live YouTube feed of the meeting in which they did that nefarious deed, and that sure ain't a good look. Right-wingers have been strutting about their "toughness" for decades, but can't even hear an opposing argument? Why can't such basic failures of leadership be a Democrat attack point? I mean, we just got a four-year seminar in Why Republicans Can't Lead, not too long after George W. Bush's double seminar in that same subject. Maybe Democratic politicians don't do that because they're evil. "Gosh, win an argument, instead of stand around while Republicans lose them? Then we'll have to do things with our power!"

Finally, as Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) declares her candidacy to oppose Sen. Marco Rubio in 2022, Mr. Rubio himself opines that "(n)one of them (i.e., Democratic politicians) will admit to being a socialist. She probably won’t. But she certainly has voted for socialist things." So, Sen. Rubio, ever driven a car on a road? Ever taken out a book from the public library? Ever called a cop? If your answer to any of these questions is "yes," then congratulations, Sen. Rubio! You're a socialist, too.

Action: concerning "bipartisanship," voting rights, discrimination, paycheck fairness, and Muslim bans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to injure infrastructure/jobs legislation just to attract a few Republican votes and look more "bipartisan," and tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and the NO BAN Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

The Washington Post reports that both President Biden and Congressional Democrats might make significant concessions on the coming infrastructure/jobs bill to attract a few Republican votes and look more "bipartisan," so it's time to get on the phone with your Reps and Senators and tell them, again, that you don't care about "bipartisanship"; you only care about good legislation. And the Biden jobs plan is already a compromise! Most folks would want higher corporate taxes and more public investment! And, again, why on Earth are we valuing "bipartisanship" with the party that tried to overturn the election? You should never "work with" people who tell we-the-people to go fuck ourselves like they did on January 6. So get on the horn with your Reps and Senators and tell them to wake up already.

Bold Progressives helps you tell your Senators to pass both the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act -- even if it means ending the filibuster to do it. The former bill would end partisan gerrymandering, guarantee 15 days of early voting in every state, automatic registration, and same-day voter registration all across America, end racist vote suppression practices including the notorious Interstate Crosscheck, and mandate disclosure of anyone who donates more than $10,000 to campaigns. The latter bill would restore the Voting Rights Act's legal protections against states continuing to suppress the vote. And don't listen to Joe Manchin's foolish ramblings about how even forcing Senators to earn their filibuster by talking through it would "weaken" the filibuster. Right now weak people use the filibuster stop any kind of progress from happening anywhere in America. And I call that un-American.

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. Don't be dissuaded by right-wingers' hysterical fantasies of boys playing girls' sports, or ridiculous claims of the bill being an "assault" on religious freedom. Instead ask yourself: why does a bill that would prevent bosses, banks, and landlords from discriminating against gay and transgender folk constitute an assault on religious freedom? And ask yourself what teenage boy would undergo a sex change just to dominate girls' sports! Not just because professional women athletes make a pittance compared to men, but also because you don't just become a girl and then try to hang out with your buddies and talk about girls! Yikes, it's like they don't understand people.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act would make penalties for gender-related pay gaps more costly, expand the Fair Labor Standards Act's sex discrimination proscriptions to include pregnancy and gay and transgender statuses, and prevent employers from instituting rules preventing workers from talking about their pay with their co-workers, since that, sadly, is how most women find out they're getting discriminated against. The bill would also narrow, but not eliminate, the employer's ability to claim that any pay differences are due to bona fide factors such as experience and qualifications, as H.R. 7 says: "Such defense shall not apply where the employee demonstrates that an alternative employment practice exists that would serve the same business purpose without producing such differential and that the employer has refused to adopt such alternative practice." This all sounds like common sense to me.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1333, the NO BAN Act. The NO BAN Act would prevent future Presidents from issuing anything like Donald Trump's infamous Muslim ban, partly by explicitly preventing religious discrimination in such travel bans, and partly by making the Executive branch report to the Legislative branch within 48 hours after imposing any travel bans. The NO BAN Act passed the House with exactly one Republican vote in favor -- of course it was Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania's 1st; think the state legislature will try to gerrymander him out? -- but that does not prove that "the bill isn't good enough" because it "isn't bipartisan," but rather proves that trying to attract Republican votes, in this day and age, is a fool's errand. I mean, at the risk of beating a dead horse, this is the party that tried to overthrow the government because it didn't like the 2020 election results; why wouldn't you feel tainted if any of them voted for your bill?

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, paycheck fairness, Muslim bans, and D.C. statehood.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, the NO BAN Act, and the D.C. Admission 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 contact your Senators -- or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

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. I've heard little from right-wingers about the For the People Act lately, but I doubt that's shame -- it's more likely the complacency of knowing Republicans will filibuster it and Joe Manchin won't let the Democrats overcome such a filibuster. So what would we be missing out on, so Joe Manchin can preserve the "sanctity" of Senate "process"? An end to partisan gerrymandering, 15 days of early voting in every state, automatic and same-day voter registration all over America, and an end to certain racist caging practices including the notorious Interstate Crosscheck. So that's what we'll lose by keeping the filibuster as a tool of wanton obstruction.

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. As you know, our Justice Department can't stop Southern states from passing restricting voting laws, thanks to our Supreme Court's ruling in Shelby County v. Holder -- that would be biased against the South, they said, but they explicitly said that our Justice Department could have that power if it applied to all states and localities. Well, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would enact that very thing, and then we could stop any state or locality with a demonstrated pattern of vote suppression from passing more vote suppression laws. I'm looking at you, Ohio!

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. My state's junior Senator writes that H.R. 5 "would eviscerate religious liberty protections." Guess what? That's complete rubbish! In H.R. 5 amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that it includes gays and transgender folks in its protected classes, but the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already gives fairly broad exemptions to religious organizations, and H.R. 5 doesn't change that! So, either they know they're lying, or they don't know when it's their damn job to know. I don't know which is worse; I'm not sure finding out matters.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Congress passed an Equal Pay Act in 1965, which nominally makes it illegal to pay women less than men for the same work, but the pay disparity still exists, because (for example) employers still get to threaten employees with termination if they discuss their pay with each other, even though that's often the only way workers figure out they're getting screwed over. The Paycheck Fairness Act would prevent employers from doing that, among other good works. Do not admit any objections with the words "trial laywers" in it. If employers didn't try to get away with so much shadiness, we wouldn't need so many trial lawyers.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1333, the NO BAN Act, which our House passed last week. The NO BAN Act would prevent future Presidents from passing Trumpian travel bans obviously aimed at Muslims, even if our Supreme Court ignored Mr. Trump's words to that effect (he wanted to enact "a Muslim ban, but legal," according to his wingman, Mr. Giuliani). The bill would not "open the floodgates to terrorists" or whatever right-wingers say it's about, since our President would still have the ability to keep folks from entering, but our President would have to restrict folks based more on facts and laws than on the need to keep rageheads raging. The less say rageheads have over American policy, the better, that's what I say.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 51/S. 51, the D.C. Admission Act, and thus make Washington, D.C. a state. D.C.'s netherland status continues to hurt its citizens -- over 700,000 American citizens have no voting representation in Congress, while they pay more taxes than the citizens of at least a dozen American states while facing more direct Congressional meddling in their affairs. Plus, of course, we just had an attempted coup on January 6; think a Washington, D.C. National Guard unit might have helped deter that? I think so, and the good citizens of our nation's capitol deserve so. And to those who whine that Democrats will get two more Senators: try persuading people to vote for you!

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

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

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. You've heard a lot about Republican vote suppression shenanigans lately, but you may not have heard that "blue" states have fairly restrictive voting laws as well! We notice it less, because crazy Republicans tend to lose elections there, but Rhode Island (for example) has a strict Voter ID law, Connecticut doesn't offer any early voting, and New York makes you jump through flaming hoops to change your party registration in advance of a primary. These states have poor folks and folks of color, too; why should we leave them behind?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning taxing the rich, clean water, demilitarizing our police, paycheck fairness, corporate taxes, and whistleblower rewards.

Long story short: Tell your House Reps to pass the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, the WATER Act, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act; also tell your Congressfolk to close big corporate tax loopholes and strengthen whistleblower rewards. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to get your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links provided below.

H.R. 1459/S. 510, the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, would assess a tax on wealth over $50 million for the first time in America -- households and trusts worth more than $50 million would pay 2% on all their assets over $50 million (meaning the tax would leave their first $50 million alone -- but you know they'll whine about it nonetheless!) and then 3% on assets over $1 billion. Sen. Warren (D-MA) says it'll raise $300 billion annually, and given that billionaires alone have amassed another $1.3 trillion in wealth over this last pandemic year, really, this wealth tax ain't too much to ask of people who should be paying 91% of their income to Uncle Sam. The Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund provides a petition.

H.R. 1352/S. 916, the WATER Act, would start rebuilding our water infrastructure, which would represent a solid investment in one of our most important natural resources, clean water, without which, it's safe to say, we'd have no decent health care in America at all. You can't wash or bathe or disinfect or sterilize with polluted water, after all! Not to mention getting the lead out of all our water pipes will create a lot of jobs for people! I guess Republicans will retort TEH DEFICITZ!!!!!!, but they didn't give one rat's hind quarter about when they were cutting taxes for the rich and for corporations, and whiners always have excuses to avoid doing the right thing. Food and Water Watch provides an email contact tool.

H.R. 1694, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, would limit transfer of military equipment from our Department of Defense to local police departments. I've said this many times: you don't need a drone or a grenade launcher to find murderers and drug dealers -- but you do "need" these things, apparently, to put down protests about your own brutality. Particularly if you're Donald Trump and you want to do a photo-op in front of a church with a Bible in your hand! Seriously, the fact that that moment didn't make 75 million Americans turn against him is our shame as Americans, although admittedly it's more their shame as Trump votaries. And just as we shouldn't try to turn police officers into social workers, we shouldn't turn them into soldiers, either. Restore the Fourth provides the email tool.

H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, now awaits a full House vote; the bill would, like its previous iterations, give women more tools to fight paycheck discrimination, which (despite the Equal Pay Act of 1965) still runs rampant in America, such that women make about 81 cents for every dollar a man makes, when it really should be a dollar for a dollar. The Paycheck Fairness Act would, among other things, prevent employers from disciplining workers for discussing their pay, since that's usually the only way employees find out they're getting shafted. I bet Republicans defend the "free speech" right of bosses to tell their employees what they can't talk about, but do we really want employers to be able to make their employees accomplices in their wage theft? Daily Kos provides the petition.

Did you know that big corporations can pay large amounts of money in class action settlements when they hurt people -- and then turn around and deduct those settlements from their taxes? Yes, this really happens, and it sure hampers us from being a law-and-order nation now, doesn't it? We generally regard punishments as more effective if they hurt, and don't think it's OK because the injured parties are still getting their money, because when corporations get to use their wrongdoing as an excuse to skimp on what they owe on their taxes, we all become injured parties, because that's money that ain't paying cops and ain't keeping the libraries running. So that $26 billion big pharmaceuticals are planning to pay for keeping good Americans addicted to opioids will wind up being yet another windfall -- for them. Penn PIRG provides the email tool, if you don't call your Congressfolk.

Finally, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your House Reps to strengthen the whistleblower protections in the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement (or FIRREA) Act. Currently the law caps whistleblower rewards, which means more whistleblowers won't come forward, and the CARES Act just gave away a couple trillion bucks of our hard-earned taxpayer money -- quite a lot of "small business" money went to national restaurant chains! -- so we've got a more immediate incentive to root out corruption. Don't let your Tea Party uncle describe whistleblowing as a "way for scammers to make money," because whistleblowers go through absolute hell for years while the courts evaluate their complaint -- they usually never work in the same field again, and more than a few don't work at all. They deserve our support.

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 COVID relief, endangered species, paycheck fairness, and corruption investigations.

Our House may vote on the Senate-passed COVID relief bill as early as today, so now's the best time to call your House Reps and tell them to pass it. (The Senate amended the bill somewhat, and stripped out the $15/hour minimum wage at our Senate Parliamentarian's direction, so our House has to vote on it again.) Now it's not quite the bill our House passed the first time, and even without our Senate Parliamentarian's ruling, I'm pretty sure Sens. Manchin and Sinema would still have acted like they got 81 million votes for President and Vice-President and shot it down. But the bill still does a lot of good works, and I don't just mean stimulus checks, an unemployment benefit expansion running for most of the rest of the year, and actual assistance for states, localities, and folks who can't pay their rent and utilities. I also mean expanded food stamps and expanded EITC and CTC tax credits, which latter item will result (per the Coalition on Human Needs) in the equivalent of a 29% raise for the bottom 20% of working families. And I also mean help for multiemployer pension plans and tax-free student loan relief through 2025. These are all good works, and worth your support; now's not the time to let the perfect murder the good.

Meanwhile, President Biden's rolled back a lot of former President Trump's noxious Executive Orders, but he hasn't rolled back endangered species-related orders yet, so WildEarth Guardians helps you tell our President to use his power to protect endangered species. Specifically, you'd ask President Biden to roll back Trumpian orders allowing developers to injure more endangered species' habitats, tell federal agencies to take climate change into account when listing endangered species and protecting habitats, and instruct our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to be more proactive in evaluating endangered species generally. I'm not sure what objections reasonable folks could have to any of these, unless "I want big fossil fuel CEOs to make more money" counts as a "reasonable objection." (Spoiler alert: it does not.) You'll also advocate that Mr. Biden work to pass the PAW and FIN Act into law, once Congress re-introduces that bill; the PAW and FIN Act, as you may remember, would prohibit our government from considering "economic factors" of endangered-species regulations, since, as you know, when an endangered species dies, it's gone forever, and squeezing money out of a species' death is an offense before God. I mean, doesn't it sound like one?

In other news, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7/S. 205, the Paycheck Fairness Act. As you know, the Paycheck Fairness Act would give women more tools to fight the pay inequities that have, sadly, become their lot in life -- Census data from 2018 tell us that women still make 82 cents for every dollar a man makes, and that number should be one dollar for every dollar a man makes. No use complaining that qualifications and experience account for the gap, not when bosses go out of their way to deny women the chance to demonstrate those qualifications and accumulate that experience in the first place! Seriously, don't describe the world as if it's the only world that could possibly exist. And don't believe the hype that the bill would make it illegal to pay women differently for having fewer qualifications, because Sec. 3(a) of the bill directly refutes that claim. Certainly don't believe the hype that the bill would be a "boon for trial lawyers," as if the phrase "trial lawyer" is some kind of epithet, like "big corporate CEO." If big corporations would just do the right thing in the first place, as our parents all taught us to do, then we wouldn't need so many trial lawyers, would we?

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate allegations that former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao abused her office for private gain. Is this a mere attempt at political retaliation against Mitch McConnell's wife? No, it is not, or else we wouldn't have a 44-page report from a federal Inspector General detailing allegations that Ms. Chao used her office to promote her father's shipping corporation, the Foremost Group. Certainly they were Foremost on her mind! The IG report alleges that she used the Transportation Department to update her father's Wikipedia page, promote his public appearances, and even arrange a trip for him and her sister to China. Possibly we'll find that she did nothing wrong (or, more likely, that she was clever about not actually breaking the law), but the previous Administration (which, ah, employed her as Treasury Secretary) didn't even try to investigate the IG's findings. Also, you know, let things like these go and they'll keep happening. Personal to those morons who'd retort THENZ LETZ INVESTIGATEZ TEH HUNTERZ BIDENZ!!!!!!: uh, that's already happening. Most of us have found that paying attention to the world is the best way to learn about it.

Action: concerning good House bills, election ethics, and drilling on public lands.

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! 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. Remember: don't get discouraged, because that's how they want you to feel. Indeed, the only reason they have the power they do is because so many Americans are discouraged. But when we fight through our discouragement, and we act, we make good things happen.

Meanwhile, People for the American Way helps you tell our Senate Ethics Committee to investigate Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for allegedly trying to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to throw out legally-cast votes in that state. Joe Biden won Georgia by a slim margin, as you know, but Sen. Graham sure seems to have done his part to contribute to all the tall tales about "voter fraud." How did Jaime Harrison raise $100 million and still lose to Mr. Graham by 10 points, huh? Should we take that result as evidence of actual voter fraud in South Carolina? Of course not (we should take it as evidence that Mr. Harrison wasn't such a good candidate!), so let's not imagine that any result we don't like must be "fraud," certainly not without evidence, which Mr. Graham has not provided. Our soon-to-be-ex-President sure does turn everything he touches to dung, doesn't he? Mr. Graham, once upon a time, was the first Senator to condemn the abuses at Abu Ghraib, but now he sucks up to a man he derided not too long ago.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President-elect Biden to keep his promise to ban fossil fuel drilling on public lands, then Wild Earth Guardians still helps you do that. Yes, Mr. Biden did promise to ban fracking and oil drilling on public lands, though not private lands; I suppose he could work around his promise by selling off as much public land as he can to oil and gas drilling corporations, but we'll deal with that if it comes to that. And certainly we should concentrate on renewable energy production, not fossil fuel production that pollutes our air and water. I would advocate that our government get back into the utility business by creating renewable energy utilities that can compete with the privately-held utilities that won't do what's necessary to fight pollution and climate change. Maybe Joe Biden doesn't want to do that; certainly Mitch McConnell doesn't want to do that. But when we make our will unmistakable, it doesn't matter what the politicians want. So let's get to it.

Action: concerning good House bills, bad bureaucrats, and bad pro-pollution bills.

Happy Thursday, good Americans! Now's as good a time as any to 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. Doesn't matter that they don't want to do it, or would rather confirm more right-wing judges -- all that matters is that we want them to do it, and if we speak out enough, they'll be afraid not to do it. Don't laugh; I've seen it happen.

Meanwhile, Roots Action helps you demand that our government abolish the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. If abolition seems a little extreme to you, I wouldn't blame you -- I'd vastly prefer to reform government agencies before abolishing them myself. But I don't blame the folks who get beaten up by ICE officers for wanting it abolished, either. And, ah, one other thing to consider: our soon-to-be-ex-President used ICE officers this year essentially as a brownshirt force to beat up protestors at otherwise peaceful protests this year, and anytime a President decides to use law enforcement for his own purposes, rather than the ones mandated by our laws and our Constitution, well, that's a tool we've got to take out of the toolbox right quick. Recall, also, that our Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, under which ICE operates, ain't been around that long -- our government created it out of anti-immigrant hysteria during Tha Bush Mobb years, so it ain't like we just don't know how to live without it.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 619 would, and I can't believe anyone thinks this is a good idea, exclude from the Clean Stream Law's definition of pollution any "accidental discharge, spill or release that does not cause a violation of any of the numeric water quality criteria under 25 Pa. Code Chapter 93 (relating to water quality standards)." The kicker there, of course, is that Pennsylvania law doesn't define water quality standards for every conceivable pollutant, so SB 619 would essentially redefine pollution to exclude pollution. And SB 790 would do even more damage, by increasing pollution, lowering clean drinking water standards, and handing out big chunks of corporate welfare to big gas drillers. Always they hand out the welfare to those poor, poor big corporations, and never to the needy, so once again, we must remind our legislators that they work for us, not just their big donors. Hence the Center for Coalfield Justice helps you tell your PA state House reps and your PA state Senators to fight pollution by rejecting SB 619 and SB 790.

Action: concerning good House bills, war on Yemen, and racism on social media.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now's as good a time as any to 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. Doesn't matter that an election just happened; duty is duty, and our Senate should at least vote on bills that promote voting rights, internet freedom, justice for immigrants, good health care policy, and job creation, among other good works.

Meanwhile, our current Administration lately told our Congressfolk that it would sell at least four dozen F-35 Lockheed Martin fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates (or UAE) -- which, as you know, is one of the leaders (Saudi Arabia is the other) in the coalition that's been fighting a decade-plus war against Yemen for no particularly good reason. Seriously, I'd say the "reasoning" for this war is total inside baseball, but that would be an insult to all the analytics-heads who populate baseball's front offices, and the bad reasons to fight the war -- that it's putting Yemen on the brink of famine, that it's actually fighting against the folks who've fought al-Qaeda best, that the weapons we sell over there too often wind up in al-Qaeda's hands -- should be more convincing. But there's hope: our Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees have the power to block the sale, so Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to actually advance the cause of peace by blocking the sale of F-35s to the UAE.

Finally, we asked Facebook to stop letting its algorithms promote fascism, racism, and violence last week, but we were just being nice: today we tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to hold Facebook accountable for its actions, as the National Whistleblower Center helps us do. As I said on Monday, this isn't even about Facebook publishing racist and violent content so much as Facebook promoting racist and violent content, in this case by allowing its own algorithms to collect racist and violent content into "pages" that otherwise wouldn't exist. Algorithms may be a useful tool, in a very general sense, but Facebook uses them so it can avoid having human beings moderate content; after all, you don't have to pay an algorithm, nor does an algorithm use family medical leave. If you grew up dreaming about how cool the future would be, like I did, you'd have to be pretty disappointed with the future as it's unfolded -- we don't have space exploration, a renewable energy grid, or a cure for cancer, but we do have computers repeating racism all over the place.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning good House bills, internet privacy, and methane emissions.

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

Meanwhile, if you're wary of how much personal data big tech corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple collect from you, and you should be wary, then Consumer Reports helps you tell your legislators and regulators to do a much better job protecting our personal data. You'll recall that our FCC actually issued pretty good regulations that protected consumer privacy on the internet, but the last Congress couldn't crap all over that effort fast enough, moving quickly to repeal those regulations via the notorious "resolution of disapproval" process. The Consumer Reports petition asks that consumers get more control over their personal data, that corporations be more transparent about their use of that data, and that corporations don't get monopoly control over our internet. Our FCC may not be able to issue new regulations about the matter (yet another unfortunate aspect of the "resolution of disapproval" process), but nothing prevents our Congressfolk from passing bills about the matter. Well, nothing but their own cowardice or avarice, but what else is new?

Finally, our EPA just rolled back Obama-era regulations preventing big oil and gas drilling corporations from leaking methane into the air, and this rollback offends on so many levels -- it causes more pollution, it makes climate change worse, it wastes usable energy, and it deprives good Americans of royalties when it occurs on public lands. But, hey, some bossman somewhere gets to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, so it's another round of "screw the people" for this Administration. And you know how right-wingers always say they'll just pass the costs of regulations on to the little guy? Well, the "little guy" winds up bearing the costs of methane emissions in all the ways described in the first sentence -- we lose royalties, we pay more for health care because of pollution, and we eventually don't get a livable planet to inhabit because methane emissions pack a much, much higher climate change punch than even coal emissions. That never makes it into the right's "cost-benefit analysis"; as I've said, they only care about the "cost" or "benefit" to executive paychecks. Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to do whatever it takes to roll back yet another Administration rollback.

Action: concerning good House bills, working families, and spy drones.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Our Senators have all kinds of dumb ideas about what's important to good Americans, so we've got to be there to remind them of what's really important to us. And we keep reminding them until they get it. Even if it takes a very, very long time.

Meanwhile, our Department of Labor, apparently confused about its mission and legal mandate, plans to let corporations classify more of their workers as "independent contractors," and you know what that means: it means they won't have to pay minimum wage, obey child labor laws, or pay overtime when workers work more than 40 hours in a week. They always say they do it for "jobs," or for the cleaning worker in Detroit or the Grubhub driver in Pittsburgh or home health aide in Columbus, but that's a load of rubbish: they always do it for their rich cronies who whine about having to pay people in more than dung pellets. And, you know, the whole purpose of overtime is to stop corporations from trying to get by on too few workers (who are no doubt overworked!), so certainly we shouldn't give corporations yet another way out of their responsibility to their workers and to the American people. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Labor to scuttle its own proposal that would injure working families further.

Finally, Amazon clearly hasn't had enough of spying on you -- Alexa listens to your private conversations, and Ring enables bad police work, but now Amazon wants to foist upon us the Ring Always Home Cam, a drone that not only flies around your house but spies around your house. Think there might be some domestic abusers who'd use that on their partners? Or homeowners who'd use it on their AirBnB patrons? At this point we're far past if-you've-done-nothing-wrong-you-have-nothing-to-fear. And of course Amazon won't rule out letting the police capture all that drone video; you'd like to think they'd have to get a warrant first, but as you know our politicians haven't been real steadfast about our Fourth Amendment lately. Luckily Amazon has to get permission from our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to sell the drone, and they might find that difficult, since the drone doesn't satisfy FCC privacy protections as mandated by law. Hence Fight for the Future helps you tell our FCC to reject Amazon's proposed sale of its flying spy drones.

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 good House bills, consumer protection, and product safety.

Happy Tuesday, good peoples! 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. Don't believe the hype that our Senators have a lot on their plates right now! If they'd have passed these bills earlier, they'd have less to do now. Besides, you don't get to make excuses when you don't do your job, so why should they?

Meanwhile, you probably have some experience with price-gouging during this pandemic, so along comes H.R. 6450/S. 3853, the Price Gouging Prevention Act, which would (as its title suggests) prevent sellers from using an emergency to jack up prices more than 10 percent over the average price over the previous 120 days. If you're concerned about the rights of the accused, note well that Sec. 3 (b) (2) gives sellers the opportunity to rebut any presumptions of price gouging by providing "clear and convincing evidence that the increase in price of the consumer good involved is directly attributable to additional costs paid by the seller in procuring, acquiring, or providing the consumer during the emergency period." Seems fair, though "free" market votaries won't think so. And I'm old enough to remember when they would, though whether they were just fronting then or have simply devolved into morons now is a question historians will have to answer. The bill would also empower our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enforce its provisions and would not preempt stronger state laws against price gouging. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect us from financial predators by passing the Price Gouging Prevention Act.

Finally, Johnson & Johnson has announced that it'll stop selling talcum-based baby powder in most of North America, supposedly because demand has declined, but one must wonder if the many thousand complaints consumers made about asbestos in their talcum powder (apparently it's hard to find talcum in nature without tripping over asbestos) had more to do with it. And, sadly, despite their declaration, talcum-based baby powder remains on your local shelves, because J&J didn't issue a recall, which would kinda be the next step. If you're worried about J&J being able to sell down its stock of baby powder already on the shelves, consider more carefully whether we should expose our babies to cancer and mesothelioma, two common health problems scientists associate with asbestos. Really, the right answer is never "take care of corporations first," and the right answer is always "take care of people first." Gosh, when I was a youth, I thought moral questions would be thornier than this. They're not, so U.S. PIRG helps you tell J&J to put people first by recalling its remaining stocks of talcum-based baby powder.

Action: concerning good House bills, bad methane regulations, and bad corporate acquisitions.

Happy Tuesday, good peoples! 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. Do I "keep saying the same thing"? Yes, I do, if what I keep saying is the right thing. Let our Senators listen to anyone but their big donors for once, and then I'll count the colors in my garden. Until then, it's hammertime.

Meanwhile, our Administration has formally weakened methane emission regulations, by repealing requirements that oil and gas corporations install the technology that would detect and repair methane leaks. Ugh, one more time: methane packs a much bigger climate-change punch than even coal emissions, leaked methane is a waste of usable energy, and leaked methane also deprives the taxpayer of royalties if said leaking occurs on public lands. But what's all that pollution and waste and lost revenue next to gas drilling corporation executives being able to gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes? Seriously, that's all our Administration's new rule does: hand out welfare to corporations and rich people. Like everything else they do! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to block this Administration's new methane emissions rule. Congress would have to accomplish this by passing a "resolution of disapproval," and you may be tempted to wait until a new President and a new Senate come into office, but I wouldn't count on that, and anyway, our duty is always to do the right thing right now.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to block the proposed sale of DNA-collecting corporation Ancestry to big private equity corporation Blackstone, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Hopefully I've identified the problem with the proposed sale by identifying what each of these corporations does -- it's bad enough that big corporations get their grubby hands so deep in your investments, so you certainly would not want their grubby hands in your private information, and your DNA is as private as it gets. And I do not accept the notion that "you give your DNA to someone to help figure out where you came from and you take your chances." Why must it be like that? Because the internet's a big place? Because the "free" market is sacred? I'm so old-fashioned I only think doing what's right is sacred, and letting big corporations buy your DNA info is wrong. And I've never believed the internet is "too big to civilize," no matter how much Our Glorious Elites want you to believe it. And I always choose civilization over chaos.

Action: concerning good House bills, big telecom shenanigans, and water conservation.

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! 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. These bills would make America a more perfect union -- by raising working family wages, protecting voting rights, and restoring internet freedom, among other good works -- which must be why Sen. McConnell (E-KY) refuses to allow a vote on any of them! But he ain't the boss of us! And our Senators need to know that -- but they'll only know it if we speak out.

Meanwhile, Charter Communications, the second-largest cable corporation in America, has lately petitioned our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) for permission to institute data caps! In the middle of a pandemic, while millions of kids are learning from home, no less! And Charter pledged not to institute data caps if our FCC green-lit its merger with Time Warner Cable, which should remind us how much a corporation's "word" is worth. In a typically whiny retort, Charter spokeshacks say that since other corporations get to do it, they should get to do it, too, but nobody should get to do it, because it doesn't serve any real purpose except to make money. I'm old enough to remember when our government forced corporations to serve customers, but now our government pretends that's never an option, as they let big telecom corporations jack up prices for ever-worsening service. But we don't have to take that! Free Press helps you tell our FCC to reject Charter's request to institute data caps. After all, this is the year it could cost your kids at school -- and it may not be the last year that happens, either.

In other news, our Administration has proposed loosening showerhead water efficiency standards, by redefining "showerhead" so that individual parts of the showerhead can count as a complete showerhead! And thus the entire showerhead can waste more water while still nominally complying with the standards! Our President complained a little over a month ago that showerheads don't put out enough water to help him make his hair "perfect," and while we shouldn't give one rat's hind-quarter about whatever our President's hair issues are, we should also note that we're staring at a future with a lot more drought in it, and appliances which actually help us conserve water will also help us deal with that drought. There's that word "conserve" again, the root word of that other word, "conservative," which a lot of reactionary rageheads pretend to be these days without understanding that it's really not all about yelling and screaming and getting attention and pissing off liberals. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of Energy to reject its proposed plan to loosen showerhead regulations.

Action: concerning good House bills, public land stewardship, and making billionaires pay.

Happy Tuesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yeah, give them the whole list! Senatorial staffers take down your will and communicate it to their bosses -- and then their bosses do the will of their bosses, i.e., us. At least, that's how it'd work in a sane and moral society. Until then, we must insist on sanity and morality -- again and again and again.

Meanwhile, Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell Interior Secretary Bernhardt to remove William Perry Pendley from his job as Acting Director of our Bureau of Land Management. That's right, another of our President's infamous "acting" officers, so installed as to bypass the Senatorial confirmation process -- a process our President is so confident will go his way that he is withdrawing Mr. Pendley's nomination to be the real Director. So he "bows" to our Senators' will, but flouts it by keeping him there in an "acting" capacity! Putting Mr. Pendley in charge of the Bureau of Land Management is fox-henhouse territory to begin with -- Mr. Pendley is yet another Administration leader who believes his own department shouldn't exist, plus he professes to be an adherent of the "shoot, shovel, and shut up" way of dealing with having endangered species on your land. But his numerous denigrations of non-whites and immigrants? Well, that's just special sauce for this Administration. Maybe we can make it a PR nightmare for Mr. Bernhardt, who's Mr. Pendley's boss. Particularly since we're really the boss of both of them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8020/S. 4490, the Make Billionaires Pay Act, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. As the pandemic rages and our economy craters, billionaires make out like bandits, so to speak, their wealth increasing by over $5 billion every day, and if that fact doesn't testify to how little billionaires have to work to make their money, nothing does. We'd all like to make money more efficiently, but this state of affairs isn't efficient if it's not doing our civilization any good. Can you even imagine what could you do with $5 billion? $5 billion wouldn't just pay off your mortgage, it'd pay off 10,000 mortgages -- if those mortgages averaged half a million dollars! You don't even know 10,000 people! No, not even on Facebook! So putting $5 billion in the hands of our richest Americans every day surely doesn't benefit the masses of Americans struggling with, say, health care debt. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Make Billionaires Pay Act would actually remedy that to some degree.

Action: concerning good House bills, taxing the rich, pollution, and health care data.

Happy Wednesday, good people! 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. These bills promote voting rights, internet freedom, public lands, and consumer safety, among so many other good things, so our Senators have no excuse to ignore them. And ignore them they will, unless we make that impossible.

Meanwhile, you've heard about how well Jeff Bezos, Marc Zuckerberg, et al have been doing during this pandemic, even though you and I struggle to make ends meet? Well, S. 4490, the Make Billionaires Pay Act, would impose a one-time 60% tax on skyrocketing billionaire wealth, and would direct the proceeds toward Medicare so it can cover the out-of-pocket health care costs of all Americans for the next calendar year. The total take from this tax -- according to the bill's original sponsor, Sen. Sanders (I-VT) -- would be close to $422 billion, and would still leave said billionaires a little over $310 billion of their windfall during the pandemic, so brook no silliness from right-wingers about how extortionate this bill would supposedly be. Frankly, leaving them over $300 billion is extraordinarily generous -- I'd want to tax them until they stop acting like they're the only people who ever mattered. The 91% tax bracket sure did curb a lot of insanity in the old days, and we need only look to our whiny baby of a President to understand the damage the absence of the 91% tax bracket has done. Anyway, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to strike a blow for fair taxation by passing the Make Billionaires Pay Act.

In other news, our EPA has proposed new smog regulations that -- wait for it -- make literally zero improvements on the smog standard we already have, even though said smog standard is now inadequate to the amount of air pollution (and the resulting health care costs) we now face, and (this part is really important!) even though the law mandates that our EPA revise our smog standards every few years to adapt to changes in our atmosphere and in our scientific knowledge! It's beyond asking "how likely is it that our smog problem is exactly the same as it was five years ago?" and on toward asking "how likely is it that we now think smog is exactly as harmful as it was five years ago?" So, yeah, this is another pro-pollution "environmental" "regulatory" effort that will likely die a cold death in court -- but not if we don't weigh in with public comments! Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our EPA to do its damn job and enact more vigorous smog standards. In 2015, our EPA lowered the standard from 75 ppm to 70 ppm; now we want them to lower it to 60 ppm, and if big polluting corporations whine about it, we can just remind them that they're bold and can rise to new challenges. You know, the way Americans do.

Finally, if your head is still spinning from all the which-data-is-the-right-data drama that our President and his votaries like to foist upon us, then you'll be interested to know that H.R. 6585/S. 3850, the Equitable Data Collection and Disclosure on COVID-19 Act, would not only mandate that our CDC and our Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services publish daily updates on COVID-19 cases, testing, and treatment, but would also force these agencies to publish that data by race and ethnicity, among other categories (and would require our Indian Health Service to collect COVID-19 data for the populations it serves). We all know -- well, those of us who've thought about it for a minute and who aren't addled by devotion to this particular President -- that COVID-19 disproportionately hunts down poor folks and folks of color, and that's a damn shame. We also know that this President questions the data like he has a vested interest in the data being wrong or something, and his votaries like to muddle the waters with abject falsehoods. So the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to support accurate medical reporting by passing the Equitable Data Collection and Disclosure on COVID-19 Act.

Action: concerning voting rights, phony recycling, and Social Security.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Has our House passed all these good bills because they know our Senate won't pass them and our President won't sign them? It's quite possible! Would such cowardice matter if our Senate and our President bow to our will? Of course not! But if we don't communicate that will, it'll be a moot point.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: some state legislators want to, ah, innovate on the definition of "recycling" so that it includes things that are patently not recycling -- like converting single-use plastics into oil or fuel -- and this would mean big corporations could claim that facilities dedicated to that purpose are "recycling" facilities. Recycling ain't just about decreasing pollution (which converting single-use plastics into fuel decidedly does not do) or reducing trash (ditto, since pollution is trash), it's also about getting utility out of trash, and if fuel burns once and is gone, well, that's about as "single-use" as you can get. Even if we could agree that corporations should do it -- as opposed to, say, solar or wind, which won't increase demand for single-use plastics! -- they shouldn't get goodies from our government for doing it, and we certainly shouldn't murder the definition of "recycling" just so they can get those goodies. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislators to protect our air and water by rejecting HB 1808.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our President's raid on Social Security funding which he calls a "tax cut," then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. We shouldn't regard his obsession with cutting payroll taxes as something unique to him; rather, we should regard it as part of the right's obsession with destroying Social Security by hook or by crook. The fact that he's taken it up only demonstrates that he's one of Our Glorious Elites -- not their enemy, as a lot of his votaries fantasize. Now, I think folks generally understand that taxes pay for services we may all use -- and all of us want to live long enough to collect Social Security. Unfortunately, too many of our media "personalities" act like they don't understand it, and you can catch people off-guard if you repeat lies with conviction, and if no other media personalities call them on their lies right there and then. This is how lies get spread in America -- not just because of malicious people, but because of the cowards who don't stand up to them. But we are neither of these, and we will keep fighting.

Action: concerning good House bills, law and order, and birth control.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 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. Our House has passed a lot of good bills that fight discrimination, vote suppression, and corporate greed; our Senate has responded by ignoring them. Our duty is clear: we either guide them out of their ignorance, or hold them accountable for it at the polls. We'd prefer the former, but we're ready to do the latter.

Meanwhile, Moms Rising helps you tell the Pittsburgh (PA) public school system to get police out of their schools. I've been saying for a while now that we use police like they're the Swiss Army knives of our civilization, and though some folks have been calling for expanding their training so they can handle all their multitudinous tasks better, I would prefer that we just use police officers for very specific purposes -- serving warrants, making arrests, and investigating crimes. We should not be sending them out to solve domestic disputes, talk folks off ledges, or "scare kids straight." Seriously, any school district that needs police officers to control kids' bad behavior needs a new spine. And the best part? Having police officers in schools doesn't do schools (or our children) any good, since a police officer's training (and therefore intuition) is to respond to situations with violence; having the right number of counselors, nurses, and psychologists does do schools (and our children) a lot of good. They said the future would be all about relatable skills, and they were right! It's the mark of a civilization that grows and makes progress. We ought to make this that civilization, wherever we can.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7861, which would repeal the Helms Amendment and make it legal for foreign aid to be used for abortion care. No one in the world wants more abortions, but making abortions illegal (or impossible to get, which making them illegal doesn't necessarily do) would let civilizations force women into breeder roles, and the right to abortion is the best tool we have to avoid that sorry state of affairs. The Helms Amendment has, since 1973, prohibited any foreign aid from going to abortions, and I shudder to think at all the women all over the world who haven't been able to make a better life for themselves because of it. And by "a better life" I don't merely mean a life where women can make a decision that's best for their family -- I mean a life where women don't get routinely raped, often as children, and whose resulting pregnancies become merely another way for men to control them, because that's the reality in a lot of the world today, and the Helms Amendment pretends that reality doesn't exist. Want to make abortions disappear from our planet? Support birth control, at no cost, for anyone who needs it. Right-wing swordfighters can't even do that anymore.

Action: concerning good House bills, plastic pollution, and healthy food.

Happy Wednesday, good folks! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 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. 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. This week we add H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act, which finally passed the House last week. Our Senate has no business sitting on bills that fight discrimination and promote voting rights, internet freedom, and working families. And if we tell them enough, they'll learn it one day.

Meanwhile, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (or TCEQ) has proposed rules on regulating plastics so they don't wind up in our water, and surprise, surprise! They're not good enough -- everyone wants to keep Coke bottles out of rivers, but the TCEQ would do nothing about microplastics, which also wind up in our water and too often also wind up in our bloodstream, causing or exacerbating all manner of health problems. The TCEQ apparently did not take health care problems into account; only "environmental" problems, as if environmental problems somehow don't cause health care problems. The TCEQ, like any agency wishing a "smooth" relationship with the corporations it supposedly regulates, would give plastic manufacturing corporations another year to comply with the rules. And if people suffer for it, too bad! They must be sacrificed so that regulators and corporations can get along better! Seriously, government agencies should cultivate an adversarial relationship with the corporations they regulate; maybe then they'll do their job. So Public Citizen helps you tell the TCEQ to regulate plastics in water much more vigorously than they've thus far proposed.

Finally, our Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee -- which helps our Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services put together the Dietary Guidelines for Americans every five years -- has recommended that the Guidelines for 2020-25 advise that we limit added sugars and address how we grow food so we can actually have an agricultural sector in the coming decades. These are absolutely necessary recommendations! And of course there's no guarantee that this Administration will follow them. Word on the street, of course, is that our President -- with advice from former Bush Mobber John "The Crusher" Yoo -- has read our Supreme Court's DACA ruling (which went against him, you recall) as permission to do whatever he wants until someone sues him under the Administrative Procedure Act. And if you responded by saying I thought he was doing that already!, you win a prize, but consider that he now may feel even less constrained by the rules and norms of civilization than he did before, and consider, also, that he loves junk food and he thinks planning for the future (which "not eating sugar today" most certainly is) is for "losers." Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our government to adhere to the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee's recommendations.

Action: concerning good House bills, future COVID vaccines, and bear baiting.

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 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. 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. It's July already, I know, and the best time for the Senate to pass these bills was last year. But the second-best time for them to pass these bills is now.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to mandate that any and all publicly-funded COVID-19 vaccines be available to everyone, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. Because if your taxpayer money funded the vaccine, you should benefit from it -- and, by the way, that's most drugs, not just a future COVID-19 vaccine Congress has allocated $10 billion on just this year. That's $10 billion of our money, folks! You don't think Congress just gets lucky at the casino, do you? And yet our Great and Glorious True American Administration says they can't guarantee we'll all be able to get it, because we need private corporations to do the work and they "deserve" to make whatever profit they see fit. They have the relationship exactly wrong: we don't need them to do the work; they need us to give them the work. And frankly, if we did the work ourselves -- that is, if our government hired the scientists and paid them to do the research -- we'd have a cheaper vaccine more quickly.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to reject bear-baiting in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Imagine people actually thinking they're TEH GREATEZTZ HUNTURZ EVAHZ!!!!! if they can lure a bear out of its den with jelly cream donuts and then shoot them dead! How sporting is that? And why should civilized people allow it? There lies the rub, of course: this Administration loathes civilization, because civilization prevents us from giving in to every conceivable impulse -- and impulse control sure is a problem with this President! And civilization also reminds us that there is not only a past but also a future; but for this Administration, the past only exists to put women and folks of color in their "place," and the future only impedes the mad drive to make money today. But those of us who value civilization will work for it, even if our politicians don't.

Action: concerning good House bills, renewable energy, methane regulation, and "conversion" "therapy."

Happy Thursday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 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. 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. Don't be swayed by the hype that "Mitch McConnell will never pass these bills." He ain't in charge; we are, and the more we assert that, the better off we'll all be.

Meanwhile, our Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (or BOEM) is now taking public comments on a "supplemental environmental impact statement" on Vineyard Wind, a proposed 800 megawatt offshore wind power project. But our BOEM has already done an environmental impact statement on Vineyard Wind, and given our President's vocal and loud opposition to any form of renewable energy, you might well decide this Administration is merely stalling until they can reject the project without criticism. Well, too bad! The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our BOEM to get on with issuing permits for Vineyard Wind already. Aside from the normal ridiculous arguments about noise and ugliness and avicide, you'll hear about "the need for wider transit spaces between wind turbines" -- but Vineyard Wind has already compromised on that, and asking them to do so again would all but announce that our Administration wants to kill the project while making Vineyard Wind look like the bad guys. So let's not get rolled here.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: our state's Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) has proposed methane regulations that fall short of what's necessary, so the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our DEP to strengthen methane regulations for good Pennsylvanians, so we can breathe cleaner air. Clean air is a big deal in Pennsylvania, since we're third in America in greenhouse gases and second in natural gas production, and these are not necessarily things you want to say WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. (I'd prefer to be number one in renewable energy production. Pennsylvania ranks 42nd in that.) The DEP proposal would exempt "low-producing" wells, though their definition of "low-producing" happens to include most wells, and it would also reduce inspections on wells that had previously passed inspections, as if leaks can't happen at any time. That latter one sticks in my craw a bit -- the people who want to flood liberal cities with jackboots also want to go easy on corporations when they pollute our air and water. Some "law and order."

Finally, Change.org helps you tell North Dakota state legislators to ban "conversion therapy," the "therapy" by which "doctors" try to convert gay people into straight ones. You might as well try to convert a bulldog into an ocelot! And "conversion therapy" ain't "tough love," as some folks say -- it's abuse to make gay folks "relive" molestation and do naked touching and promise them they'll be cured when they'll more likely want to kill themselves. Republicans dominate North Dakota's state legislature, but that doesn't mean they're all a bunch of bigots. But some of them will pretend their "religious" "beliefs" mean more than the fact that no reputable medical or psychological professional association thinks "conversion therapy" is actually a thing with either scientific basis or good results. Those folks need to be exposed, whenever they stand in the way of real compassion and love, and demanding that they outlaw "conversion therapy" may well be a good way of outing them. So to speak.

Action: concerning good House bills, corporate welfare, and police brutality.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 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. 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. They're good bills that would reduce poverty, discrimination, and vote suppression, among other evils, and your Senators have no excuse for sitting on them. They'll keep sitting, though, if we stay silent.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our state legislators failed to pass an elephantine $670 million tax break for fracking corporations earlier this year, so now they aim to attach it to an unrelated, non-controversial bill and hope no one notices. Too late! Penn Environment helps you tell your legislators to reject any bill that would hand out corporate welfare in the dead of night. This latest would-be abomination comes not even a week after our Attorney General's office issued a grand jury report detailing the pollution fracking causes and our state's poor record in controlling that pollution. And, of course, it also comes in the middle of a pandemic, when our leaders really should be thinking of other things than how much of our taxpayer money they can funnel down some fracking executive's gullet. That's what it's really all about, after all -- it's not about "jobs," it's about executives being able to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Maybe politics should be about us?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end the 1033 program that supplies police officers with war weapons, then Fight for the Future still helps you do that. Don't get caught up in the hype that police officers' lives are so dangerous that they need bazookas to deal with it! Police officers' lives can be dangerous at times, obviously, but they won't bring down drug kingpins with bazookas -- they bring them down with superior detective work. The real reason they need bazookas, by the evidence, is to attack protestors who protest police brutality! And, yeah, that's a problem that creates itself. If you're still thinking they need bazookas to bring suspects in, ask yourself why officers so often shoot black folks dead without provocation but were able to take Dylann Roof to freaking McDonald's on the way to the station. Don't be tempted to respond with "because Dylann Roof came peacefully" -- to the degree white people "come peacefully," it's because police don't go at them with guns blazing.

Action: concerning good House bills, health care for Native Americans, and abortion.

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 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. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. And now we add H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, passed by our House. These bills would deliver (among other things) better health care, better voting rights protections, better internet protections, and better wages for working families -- if our Senators would do their jobs. We just have to get in their grills until they do.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund the Indian Health Service. Unsurprisingly, Native Americans have also suffered disproportionately from the COVID-19 pandemic, just like other folks of color and senior citizens. And yet our government spends less than a dollar on the IHS for every $10 it spends on health care generally. Why Native Americans should suffer even more by our hand after all we've done to them over the centuries is beyond me. Worse, some state and federal officials won't let tribal epidemiologists see the COVID-19 data they've amassed over the months, and other states won't help them with contract tracing so they can keep infections down. Everyone knows data sharing and contact tracing work -- well, everyone who's not so emotionally-invested in defending their Personal Lord and Savior Our President at all costs. So we should ensure that our Native American population gets the same access to health care that the rest of us do. (And, yeah, we should all have more access to health care.)

Finally, our Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that would have shut down all of that state's abortion clinics, but only because Chief Justice Roberts recognized that the Louisiana law was virtually identical to a Texas law our Court had already struck down. But we don't need to hold to that slim reed in order to protect abortion rights in America, because H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women’s Health Protection Act, would sweep away the limits states have placed on women over the last decade, including the absurdly high standards placed on providers and facilities that absolutely intend to keep women from getting abortions. I have no animus toward those who abhor abortion, but I do have a very particular animus toward those who simply don't want women to control their bodies. There is actually a difference between the two, and it's why I come down on the side of abortion rights. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect women's rights by passing the Women's Health Protection Act. (And, sorry, they are women's rights -- until men can give birth, at least.)

Action: concerning good House bills, racism on social media, and ancient forests.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! It's time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. This week we add H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, which would make Washington, D.C. our 51st state; the House passed this bill late last week. Our Senators really have no excuses opposing any of these bills, so get in their grills and tell them to pass them now.

Meanwhile, over 180 corporations have stopped advertising on Facebook because of their years-long enabling of Nazi wannabes; Mr. Zuckerberg has explained away all this enabling, however obliquely, by talking about his unwillingness to restrict "free speech." Of course, our First Amendment protects us from our government, not from publishing houses, which Facebook most assuredly is, even if communications law doesn't currently define them as such. Saying "I have to publish every dung nugget from obviously bad human beings because I'm Facebook" is a little like saying "I have to accept every single manuscript that comes across my desk because I'm a publishing house." And, like, that's not how that works! Hence Color of Change helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Facebook during the month of July. And Sum of Us helps you tell Reddit to ban racist hate speech on its platform. Reddit bills itself, not without justification, as "the front page of the internet," but the Southern Poverty Law Center found it also to be the home of "violently racist" content as far back as 2015, so why should they be exempt from our fury?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 2491, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. The Roadless Area Conservation Act would prevent our Department of Agriculture from permitting road construction in areas where Roadless Rule regulations already prohibit them; yes, we actually have to tell our Administration to do this, because they're trying to work around the Executive branch's own regulations. Why not just rewrite them? Possibly because their efforts will ultimately fail in court, like most of them do! Our Administration ultimately aims to let loggers into the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which is a rain forest, yo, with, like, thousand-year-old trees in it. But I guess making desks and toilet paper from thousand-year-old trees is better than keeping thousand-year-old trees around and being able to study them and learn from them. Put six beers into our President and I bet he puts it pretty much like that. He'd probably also call you a LOOOZER!!!! for disagreeing with him. But he'd just be projecting, as usual.

Action: from good House bills to bad hunting regulations.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. These are all good bills: the Voting Rights Advancement Act, for example, would put the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act that our Supreme Court knocked out, while the Save the Internet Act would reinstate the FCC's pro-internet freedom net neutrality rules as the law of the land again. So tell your Senators to pass these bills, with no excuses.

Meanwhile, H.R. 7221, the Prohibiting Law Enforcement Use of Chemical Weapons Act, would (as its title suggests!) prevent police from using tear gas as a weapon. If you're of the mind that reforms such as these would "keep cops from doing their jobs," please think about it: how many crooks do police apprehend with tear gas? It is an enormously cumbersome and imprecise weapon, much more so than a handgun or a taser. Of course, crooks don't get apprehended with tear gas -- but peaceful protestors sure do! And that's who the tear gas is really for. You would also want to consider why police would need a weapon soldiers haven't been able to use since 1997; I would discard answers that include the phrase "because the streets are so much more dangerous now," because a) that's not true and b) I just said that tear gas is a bad weapon to fight crime with. No, really, people do pretend to be that stupid. Anyway, the Other 98 helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect peaceful protestors from police violence by passing the Prohibiting Law Enforcement Use of Chemical Weapons Act.

In other news, Amazon has stepped up its feel-good PR campaign -- you saw the ad with the deaf single dad? Yeah, they'll fire his ass, too, if he walks too slowly in the warehouse -- almost like they know they achieved their position as the world's number one online retailer mainly by doing evil! Amazon has also lately imposed a one-year moratorium on police use of its infamous (and pretentiously-titled, don't think any of that Kraftwerk coolness rubs off on you!) Rekognition software. You remember Rekognition, right? The facial recognition software that's almost as bad at telling black folks apart as your right-wing uncle is? A one-year moratorium is exactly the kind of thing that's designed to make people feel good about using Amazon again -- and then quickly forgotten once the PR storm passes over, as it will for a lot of Americans, though not for a lot of black Americans who still have to face random police brutality. Anyway, MPower Change helps you tell Amazon to cut all of its ties with law enforcement. They're still providing cloud computing services to ICE, after all; think that helps out anyone but Amazon?

Finally, our National Park Service finalized rules in several Alaska national parks allowing hunters to kill bears and cubs while they hibernate and shoot wolves and coyotes while they're with their pups; the rules also allow hunters to shoot coyotes from motorboats and lure bears out of their dens with donuts so they can shoot them. Well, that all sounds very sporting, doesn't it? It doesn't sound like "good Americans ritualizing how their forebears used to survive"! It doesn't even sound like "an excuse for a bunch of guys to hang out and get drunk," as one hunter described hunting's purpose to me years ago. No, the word we're looking for here is cruel, though Alaska's Congressional delegation supports the change, claiming that it -- hey, not my words, but Sen. Murkowski's! -- is a "matter of states' rights"! Who knew the "right" to own slaves was at play here? And on federal land, no less! So, in short: it's not just cruel, it's also bad law-making. And since our Administration wants to do this to other Alaska national parks, the Alaska Wilderness League helps you oppose similar cruelty in other federal parks in Alaska.

Action: concerning all those good House bills, anti-renewable energy desperation, and statehood for D.C.

Happy Wednesday, good folks! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. No we must not give up on all of these good works, which would protect voting rights, fight discrimination, make our internet free again, ensure minimum wage workers can better make ends meet, and help protect protections for pre-existing conditions -- among many other things! So don't let them tell you only one thing at a time matters! That's what they want you to think so you forget to fight for all the things that matter!

Meanwhile, an alleged nonprofit called the New England Ratepayers Association (or NERA) has filed a petition with our Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (or FERC) that could destroy the practice of "net metering," by which home solar users sell their unused power back to their local utility. Specifically, NERA claims that our federal government, not the states, should regulate net metering, because net metering is somehow by definition a "wholesale sale" (even if users get retail prices for their unused power, apparently) and only our federal government gets to regulate wholesale sales. That will baffle anyone acquainted with the defintion of the word "wholesale," to wit: "being sold in large quantities to be retailed by others." Solar users do sell their unused power literally "to be retailed by others" (since the power goes to the utility corporation), but the idea that solar users sell "in large quantities" is laughably absurd. Clearly NERA is counting on this Administration, which hates renewable energy with a passion bordering on the murderous, to destroy solar power for them. So Penn Environment helps you tell our FERC to reject NERA's desperate petition asserting that net metering is a "wholesale sale."

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunties to tell your Congressfolk to make Washington, D.C. our 51st state, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. I didn't think of this, but the Daily Kos Liberation League points out that our President deployed federal soldiers in D.C. neighborhoods to round up a few hundred peaceful protestors; when you consider, also, that our President displayed disgusting indifference in teargassing protestors out of his way so he could do a photo op at a church, you, too, might consider that making D.C. a state, which would have a Governor, might provide a useful check against future Presidential obnoxiousness. All the other arguments against D.C. statehood, in a word, suck -- D.C. can't be "too small" if it has more people than three actual American states, and if you're worried that they'll just elect two more Democrats to the Senate, then be a Republican who earns their vote. Sheesh, it's not that damn hard, and Republicans don't need any more welfare from our laws than they already get.

Action: concerning good House bills, genocide in Burma, and carbon regulation in Pennsylvania.

Happy Thursday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. They've been avoiding passing these bills because they would actually do good things for Americans -- like protect voting rights, health care, and internet freedom -- instead of redistribute good Americans' wealth upward to corporate cronies, which is what politicians tend to prefer to do. You know what we prefer to do? Communicate our will until they can't ignore it.

Meanwhile, you may recall that the Burmese army has done its damnedest over the last few years to exterminate the Muslim Rohingya population, resulting in nearly a million Rohingya (i.e., almost all of them) fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh. But S. 1186, the Burma Human Rights and Freedom Act, would do a few things that would improve this situation. The bill would aid humanitarian efforts and reinstate certain trade restrictions, for one, but it would also prevent any taxpayer money from flowing to Burmese security forces until our State Department can certify that the Burmese military are behaving in a more civilized behavior -- admittedly a statement this State Department would rush to certify without evidence if our President decided it might make him look good, but maybe not the next one. The bill would also prevent our government from handing out visas to folks who've committed human rights violations in Burma and sanction any corporations controlled by such folks -- even if our President calls them "very fine people"! Hence the International Campaign for the Rohingya helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight genocide by passing the Burma Human Rights and Freedom Act.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our state legislature is chomping at the bit to prevent our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) from issuing any climate change-related regulations whatsoever! Oh, HB 2025's executive summary says it aims at carbon emissions regulations that impose a carbon tax, a matter about which reasonable people may be ambivalent, but Section 4(a) of the bill clearly prohibits Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection from enacting any climate change-related regulations, whether they come with a carbon tax or not! That is what we call a bait and switch, folks, and you have to wonder why our state legislators felt the need to lie to us. And by "you have to wonder," I mean "because lying is all you got left when you can't win the argument on the merits." There's really no excuse for opposing climate change action now -- no reasonable human being believes it's a hoax, and the only people saying it's a hoax are people who make money saying it's a hoax. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state legislators to protect our planet by rejecting HB 2025.

Action: concerning good House bills, corruption, and worker safety.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to protect voting rights, health care, public lands, higher wages, and many other good things by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. And remember: every call you make moves the needle in our direction, and every call you make exposes our so-called "leaders" for the spineless and/or malicious tools they are, and even when it doesn't look like it's doing any good, all your good works do add up.

Meanwhile, with all the corporate welfare our government's been handing out in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we've seen far too many attacks on the federal Inspectors General who would be overseeing these handouts and making sure they don't abuse the taxpayer. Seriously, when you put it like that, how can anyone reasonably support our President's efforts to get rid of Inspectors General? He removes the Inspector General who handled the whistleblower complaint that led to his impeachment; he removes Glenn Fine from his position overseeing the "Paycheck Protection Plan" after Mr. Fine forges a career exposing actual corruption in our government; he removes the Department of State IG after he starts looking into whether that $8 billion-plus Saudi arms deal was really legal. Recall that our President wanted to fire all the Inspectors General upon taking office (because getting 46% of the popular vote is surely a mandate for that!); cooler heads talked him out of it then, but clearly he's had them in his sights all along, and why? Because he knows they can get him. Hence the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to better protect our Inspectors General from removal by obviously corrupt Presidents.

Finally, Walmart workers have been doing their job throughout this pandemic, but getting their management (which is making record profits, of course!) to ensure worker safety and offer paid sick leave has been like pulling teeth! Hopefully not too many Americans are still saying things like "how hard can it be to be a Walmart worker? How much skill can it take?" Remember that we said similar things about manufacturing workers fifty years ago -- we said they were mere machine jockeys, not "real workers" like the folks who built furniture with their bare hands -- and now that they're almost all gone, and we're a lot more used to the idea of machines making things than we were back then, we lionize them. Now we have so many more service workers than we used to have, and I hope we won't wait until we struggle with inattentive and unsubtle automated "workers" to appreciate them! Hence United for Respect helps you tell Walmart to give its workers a seat on its corporate board, so workers can communicate their needs more effectively to their bosses. What on Earth could be the harm in that? That executives make a little less money and have to do better by their workers? Oh, the horror!

Action: concerning good House bills and good farm policy.

Happy Thursday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to protect voting rights, internet freedom, secure pensions, higher wages, and many other good things by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. I wouldn't blame you for thinking we're doing no good, since it's been almost a year and a half for some of these bills. But these bills are good works on issues from voting rights to internet freedom to the minimum wage, and we can't stop fighting for them until we win.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6718/S. 3221, the Farm System Reform Act, would achieve its stated aim by banning new factory farm construction and the expansion of existing factory farms, plus it would phase out current factory farms over the next 20 years. Factory farms have created many evils -- we've gone into two of them, pollution and antibiotic abuse, at some length over the years. But you know what else factory farms have done? They've helped make the small family farmer almost nonexistent in America! Factory farms can scale down expenses and scale up profits better than any small farmer can, but to what end? So that America becomes dependent on miserable animals, dung-filled waterways, and rampant antibiotic-resistant superbugs just to have relatively inexpensive chicken parm? So that a few big ag executives can dictate policy to the American people, policy that'll benefit them a lot more than it benefits us? Big factory farms aren't just bad for our health, our air and water, and our small farmers: they're bad for democracy. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner agricultural policy in America by passing the Farm System Reform Act.

Action: concerning voting rights, corruption, toxic waste, and paid sick leave.

Happy Tuesday! Now call your Senators and tell them to protect voting rights, internet freedom, secure pensions, higher wages, and many other good things by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. And if folks say don't you know there's a pandemic going on, remind them that leaders (which our Senators are, sadly) don't get to take tine off from doing the right thing.

Meanwhile, our Justice Department so-called continues its quest to gut the False Claims Act, our most powerful weapon against governmental fraud, waste, and abuse, because DRAIN TEH SWAMPZ!!!!! Seriously, how does someone "serious" about corruption conclude that the False Claims Act is the problem? Probably the same way someone concludes that Medicare is the "real price-fixer" even though it has literally no authority to negotiate the price of drugs. Anyway, our Justice Department wants the power to dismiss whistleblower claims without said whistleblowers ever getting hearings. And what if whistleblowers aim to expose wrongdoing by our Justice Department itself? Aw, come on, you can trust our Justice Department! But we didn't earn a thriving democracy by trusting our leaders, we got it by checking them. And not for nothing, but with more than $3 trillion in new deficit spending these past two months, there's going to be a lot of corruption to find. Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our Justice Department to end its quest to gut the False Claims Act.

In other news, our Environmental Protection Agency, ever looking for important work to avoid doing, has allowed the number of unfunded Superfund sites in need of serious toxic waste cleanup to triple just since Andrew Wheeler became EPA Administrator. Maybe you'll say well, it tripled to only 34, but that's the most in 15 years, and you won't be impressed very much with the math if you live near one and thus face the prospect of lead, mercury, arsenic, and other toxins in your air and water, and all the health care issues that go with it. How many times must I tell these pimps! Spending money now to clean up the Love Canals of this nation saves us all money later in health care costs -- but it doesn't save some polluter corporation CEO enough money to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, I suppose. Seriously, this Administration does not care about you, unless you're a boss, too. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to do its damn job and clean up Superfund sites already. I know, we're always telling this government to do its damn job, but that's our duty as Americans, and we'll keep doing it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell McDonald's to provide paid sick and family leave to all of its employees, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Hey, I'm not going to argue with all of the harried parents who just want to get something in their kids' stomachs, but if McDonald's is going to be an "essential" business, then its workers are essential, too, and McDonald's should treat them as such. And you know, I barely touched on this last time, but I should say more about it: fast-food workers are-so skilled. It isn't just that people who call them "unskilled" would melt down before the pressure of drive-through; it's that, basically, Our Glorious Elites have always spent all their time cutting down working people, in every era. You know how we hold manufacturing workers in such high esteem today? We didn't when they were the backbone of our economy -- we said they were mere machine jockeys with jobs monkeys could do. Let's try to remember that next time we're tempted to give a cashier the side-eye.

Action: concerning good House bills, defense spending corruption, conservation funding, and tax-cuts-for-the-rich.

Happy Tuesday! Now call your Senators and tell them to protect voting rights, internet freedom, secure pensions, higher wages, and many other good things by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yes, it's a pandemic, but the Senate is meeting, right now, to confirm some more right-wing anti-law-and-order federal judges, so certainly they can consider some good legislation while they're in town.

Meanwhile, our Defense Department has proposed rolling back the few protections we have against the "revolving" door between defense contracting corporations and our Defense Department, which is (at least nominally) supposed to consist of public servants. And I bet our right-wingers defend this action, claiming that "our President's getting rid of burdensome regulations" (as if laws against burglary "burden" thieves) or "the only people who understand defense spending are the ones who spend the money" (as if only thieves truly understand how you should dispose of your property!) or, perhaps, that you can trust this Administration to do the right thing, because our President is a "disruptor"! And there you have the real reason right-wingers might support such corruption -- because Their Man is doing it. Loyalty to people is always dicey, to say the least, but loyalty to our shared heritage as Americans (which includes our efforts to make America a more perfect union) will never let us down. So the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our Defense Department to scuttle its own efforts to increase defense spending corruption.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to reject the current version of HB 1822, which aims to cut funding for 16 worthwhile conservation funds, then the Sierra Club helps you do that. One thing the latest Sierra Club missive mentions that I didn't last time: a lot more good Pennsylvanians are visiting our public parks these days, because with all the shops and restaurants closed, our public parks are about the only place you can go outside, enjoy yourself, and practice physical distancing, so cutting funding for them is a profoundly stupid thing to do during a pandemic. Of course the pandemic is their excuse in the first place -- let's stop spending money on these things, because we don't have as much of it. If only our politicians had that eye toward corporate welfare in state budgets! But they don't: they'd cut what actually keeps good Pennsylvanians' air and water clean long before they'd cut some unearned tax break for some corporate crony who didn't even use it to create jobs! Unless we remind them that we are their bosses, of course.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to repeal tax-cuts-for-the-rich passed in the CARES Act, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. That would be the $130-billion-plus tax break that only 43,000 rich Americans get! At a time when over 30 million Americans have lost their jobs and likely their health insurance as well, meaning they face crunching household debts at a time when they have no income! But all that's what you get when you put a "businessman" in charge of our government -- particularly a "businessman" who only cares about other bosses, not regular folk like us. And our Administration continues to swing how utterly out of touch they are in our faces, by sending out Larry Kudlow-who's-wrong-about-everything to propose more tax breaks for tourism and sporting events and more business expensing tax breaks as a way to solve this ongoing economic Armageddon. I don't imagine good Americans standing in line just to get in the supermarket finding any of that persuasive. Unless Democrats don't offer superior reasoning, that is.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, pollution, and paid sick leave.

Happy Tuesday, good folks! Now call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. I know a lot of folks don't want to hear about voting rights, paycheck fairness, and the minimum wage right now because they want to get back to normal. But if we pass these bills, we can get a much better normal than the one we used to have. That normal wasn't good enough for a lot of Americans anyway.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: our reactionary state legislature advanced a pair of pro-pollution bills, HB 2146 and SB 327, on Earth Day, because HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW SNORT. Seriously, those of us who try to do better by our planet every day hardly have time for the sophomoric behavior of certain politicians. But HB 2146 and SB 327 would block state executive branch agencies from implementing any new clean air or clean water regulations until 90 days after our Governor's emergency declaration ends, because what says GAAAAH TEH EMERGENCIEZ!!!!! like "make sure big corporations can pollute more"? Seriously, it's like our politicians don't understand regular people like us -- as we look at this pandemic and say how do we pay the water bill this month?, they look at this pandemic and say "how do we let polluters pollute more?" The one way to get our legislators' attention, of course, is to communicate our will to them; the more they ignore our will, the bigger the chance they'll be looking for work come Election Day. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislator to protect us from polluters by rejecting HB 2146 and SB 327.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Governor that we can't "reopen the economy" until we all have paid sick leave. I know, we all have a temptation to write sentences that go "we can't reopen the economy until (we do this thing that I always say we should do anyway)," but it's actually true with paid sick leave, because when workers don't have paid sick leave, they go to work sick, and they get their co-workers sick, and they get their customers sick, and if they get everyone sick with COVID-19 because Governors and Presidents tell everyone to get back to work already, then all the work we did trying to keep ourselves safe goes for nothing. And then we get to fight another round of trillion-dollar corporate welfare handouts! You have to wonder if that's our President's goal: to stoke the crisis wheel, and put us in the deepest possible fiscal hole, until we have no choice but to cleave to him. If that's his game, of course, I intend that he lose it, because I don't cleave to politicians, and I bet you don't, either. We cleave to the truth, and we tell the truth, and if the politicians don't get it, we tell it until they do.

Action: concerning good works, bad tax policy, and good farm worker policy.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. At least one observer has said that our House passed all these bills so they could give the impression they "did something," without having actually done anything. But if we pressure our Senators to pass these bills, and then pressure our President to sign them, then we've done something, which is the whole point of a democracy.

Meanwhile, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Reps and Senators and demand that they repeal the millionaire tax break Congress slipped into the CARES Act. How does this tax-cut-for-the-rich work? It allows hedge fund managers and real estate speculators -- and why not just describe both occupations as "speculators? -- to avoid taxation by shifting their present-day losses to prior years, which would enable them to refile those years' tax returns and get a big refund check -- and by big, I mean an average of $1.6 million. So how does that $1200 stimulus check look to you now? Repealing the tax break would save at least $170 billion annually, and, perhaps more importantly, would send the message that speculators are not the most important people in America. Maybe people who, you know, actually make good products and provide good services are more important than the folks who make our economy into their version of Draft Kings. They've been saying for years that speculators do really important work, but if you've attended bankster behavior over the years, you know the most important thing they do is teach us how not to be.

Finally, the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell our Congressfolk to protect our farm workers during this pandemic. That means fair wages, paid sick leave, paid family leave, and better worker safety protections, among other things, and don't be the one who says they're just a bunch of illegals anyway, so who cares? People are people regardless of the status of their green card, particularly during a pandemic, which is the moment a great nation rises up and proves its greatness, amirite? And you don't prove your greatness by hair-splitting over whom you help. Besides which, as I keep saying, letting farm workers unionize under the National Labor Relations Act would solve all of these problems -- they could better get the wage and safety protections they deserve, and big corporations couldn't drive wages down by bringing foreign workers in. A lot of our problems have very easy solutions -- if our politicians would but solve them! Of course they don't solve them because their big donors have told them not to. That's why we have to make them solve them.

Action: concerning good House bills, the right to repair, Congressional corruption, and food safety.

It's Wednesday morning, so call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Our Senate will claim it has more important things to do than protect voting rights, equal rights, worker wages, internet freedom, and public lands, but it's bollocksed up that one more important thing (i.e., pandemic policy) it has to do, plus they actually do have time to pass good House bills. We'll need to communicate our will en masse to convince them of that, though, so let's get to it.

Meanwhile, our President is doing his damnedest to keep ventilators from getting where they need to go (i.e., versus where he thinks he can get more votes), but he ain't the only one: ventilator manufacturing corporations act like everything's a big trade secret and so they make it almost prohibitively difficult for hospitals to fix broken ones. It ain't like hospitals don't have people on staff who spend all day fixing machines, either -- a lot of things in a hospital can break, and a lot of very handy people do the work of keeping them going. Hence Color of Change helps you tell ventilator manufacturing corporations to let hospitals fix the ventilators they have, by releasing manuals, schematics, software, and other repair aids. Color of Change reminds us that -- contra what some observers tell us, that our President's votaries are the ones who are really going to suffer from his managerial incompetence/malice -- that COVID-19 has hit communities of color the hardest, and those communities tend to vote against our President. Gosh, if I didn't know better, I'd say he planned it that way. But let's fight for better health care management -- on every front.

In other news, at least four Senators dumped stock they owned right after hearing how bad the coronavirus pandemic was going to get -- and a few of them went out of their way to reassure their constituents that it wasn't going to be so bad! -- but somehow these Senators (of whom Richard Burr of North Carolina is perhaps the most famous now) have not resigned their offices in shame and humiliation. I'm old enough to remember when the scent of corruption was enough to send a Senator to an early retirement! Since our Senators clearly can't be trusted anymore, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban Congressfolk from trading any individual stocks while they serve their constituents in office. Don't brook any silliness about how you can "trust" Congressfolk to know the difference between right and wrong. Obviously we can't! And it's not our job to "trust" our representatives so much as it's our job to ensure they serve us. I mean, you wouldn't want to think they just create crises all the time so they can benefit financially from them, would you?

Finally, our USDA has been granting way too many waivers to big chicken processing corporations so they can speed up their inspection lines even faster! You can imagine the problem: speeding up slaughter lines allows more pus, more blood, more bile, and more pathogens to get by inspectors and get into your chicken parm. When our government allows a corporation to have one federal inspector doing three chickens per second -- or, worse, when our government allows a corporation to self-regulate its own safety inspections! -- well, that's not "relieving corporations of unnecessary regulatory burdens," that's relieving consumers of the healthy meat they expect to buy at the supermarket! Food poisoning, as you know, still makes the news virtually every time it happens; I'm just spitballing here, but that might be because people don't want their food to kill them or their loved ones. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell our USDA to stop making it easier for food processing corporations to make us sick with their meat.

Action: concerning good House bills, good coronavirus policy, and bad media coverage.

Because we don't give up, it's time once again to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). When our Congressfolk have other priorities -- like giving away as much taxpayer money they haven't even collected yet amirite? to corporate cronies as possible -- it's time to get them focused on the important things, like voting rights, internet freedom, public lands, and health care. So let's get to it.

Speaking of the important things, the pandemic took the lives of at least seven folks in federal custody last week, and if you think that's no big loss, please do the following things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that five of them were there on drug charges, and we should be curing drug addicts, not putting them in jail, 3) consider that at least two of these had high-risk health conditions almost sure to kill them if they got the virus, and 4) prisoners can't freaking practice any form of physical distancing and once one prisoner gets infected, pretty much all of them are at risk -- and that would include all kinds of people the state is detaining without having convicted of a crime. But now H.R. 6400/S. 3579, the Emergency Community Supervision Act, would reduce the kind of overcrowding that leads to mass graves by releasing certain prisoners into community supervision -- not violent prisoners, since right-wingers are no doubt already claiming the bill would do that. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to practice both mercy and pragmatic public policy by passing the Emergency Community Supervision Act.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell the big news corporations to stop covering our President's live coronavirus updates. It's a shame it's come to that, but it has, and when they say but it's news whenever the President says something, they're helping to ensure we live in a society where we all think our President is more important than we are. Well, he's not -- especially this one, amirite? Our news organs will also tell us that we're supposed to treat daily updates from our government about a pandemic with some importance. To which I respond: I wish our President would treat those daily updates about this pandemic with some importance! To him, it's just another opportunity to take all the credit for the good, blame everyone else for the bad, and otherwise act like a damn drama king. And the news already gives us too damn much drama! Our "liberal" media would also do well to learn that their job isn't covering the news passively so much as it's telling us the truth. If covering our President's clown car act gets in the way of the truth, then they need to stop covering it.

Action: concerning good House bills, internet freedom, and voting rights.

It's once again time to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). Why do I keep harping about these things in the middle of a pandemic? Because protecting voting rights and health care and public lands and internet freedom actually sustain us in pandemics and help us avoid future pandemics! So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell big telecom corporations to provide cheap or free unlimited internet service during this pandemic. You've no doubt been inside a lot during this pandemic, so you've likely been, ah, availing yourself of the various entertainment our internet easily provides, but that's not the only reason to press for super-affordable internet during a pandemic -- you're likely to get most of your information about how to fight the pandemic via our internet, and why would we make such a thing too expensive for some people? Unless we're cruel and heartless, that is. If you've been attending this argument, you'll no doubt wonder why we don't regulate our internet like a public utility! The answer, of course, is that we did -- until this President got elected, and decided that anything the previous President did that actually helped people should be shat upon, and so he put his cronies in at the FCC and they stopped regulating the internet as a utility. In the absence of sound public policy, the people must resort to shame.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state elected officials to ensure we can all vote by mail during this election season, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. While it's true that voting by mail is a good response to folks' fears that they'll get coronavirus from the voting booth, it's also true that voting by mail solves a number of other vote suppression hurdles people face -- there ain't long lines when you vote by mail, and there ain't no voting machines to "lose" your vote (or switch your vote to some other candidate!) when you vote by mail. Voting by mail doesn't necessarily address gerrymandering or caging, but that's why we're also telling our Senators to pass H.R. 1 (the For the People Act) and H.R. 4 (the Voting Rights Advancement Act). It may be giving them too much credit to say so, but this Administration may have hit on the ultimate vote suppression scheme -- the pandemic that'll scare people into staying home even when it's over! But voting by mail can help defeat such a scheme.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning good House bills and good coronavirus policy.

It's, well, close enough to Monday that it's time to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). No, we do not excuse the Senate from doing the right thing because of the pandemic! They use anything as an excuse to ignore the people's will! And they'll continue to do so until we make it impossible for them to do so -- and that means a lot more phone calls.

Meanwhile, you know how they tell us we should wash our hands more frequently now to stop the spread of the coronavirus? It's good advice -- and it's advice people literally can't follow if their water's turned off. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to mandate that localities can't shut off folks' water service during the coronavirus pandemic. If you're tempted to think of this as a way of coddling people who should have paid their water bills, please do the following things: a) slap yourself; b) contemplate whether death is a suitable punishment for failure to pay your water bill; c) contemplate more fully the absurdity that some folks buy penthouse apartments just to leave them empty for tax purposes while most folks don't make enough money to pay all their bills all the time; and d) contemplate more fully that when some folks can't wash their hands, all of us still face the threat of getting the coronavirus. See? It's not about helping freeloaders; it's about helping all of us. If you still don't see that, repeat steps a) through d) until you do.

Finally, in the wake of the news that New York Governor Andrew "the Lesser" Cuomo (D) would pay prisoners less than a dollar a day to manufacture hand sanitizer, Color of Change helps you tell Gov. Cuomo to try more humane policies in dealing with prisoners at risk of coronavirus. It's not like they can even use hand sanitizer in prisons, since the state's own laws would regard it as "contraband"! (Hand sanitizers contain over 60% alcohol, as you may know.) Hence you would call for Gov. Cuomo to end forced labor in prisons and institute a living wage for prisoners, stop blocking cash bail reform and thus stop artificially boosting prison populations, and grant clemency to the most immunocompromised prisoners (who will not necessarily then come to your door and cough on you, if you're of the paranoid stripe). I know a lot of folks would oppose such moves because they're mean to criminals as a way of feeling less insecure about themselves, but if we can't be humane to those who have injured our civilization and thus been put in prison, then we can't be humane, period. And I would like to think better of us than that.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning good bills and bad leadership.

Happy Monday, good citizens! It's time to call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). These are excellent bills that would secure our voting rights, protect our public lands, protect us from predatory health insurance corporations, and restore real internet freedom -- among many other good works! But of course our Senate runs on Mitch McConnell time, which is "never." So tell them they need to run on Do the Right Thing time, which is now.

Meanwhile, the notorious Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act -- which authorizes various federal agencies to spy on citizens without offering us the due process of law our Constitution requires -- expires on March 15, and you know what your Congressfolk are like: they're scaredy-cats who would rather let good Americans lose our rights than take a stand that'd be unpopular with the bullies among Our Glorious Elites. This, even though our own NSA shut down its metadata surveillance program last year! And word on the street is that Congressional leaders might use a coronavirus spending bill as the vehicle to ram through an extension or reauthorization of Section 215, which would be an act of unconscionable cowardice. And rather than wait for Rand Paul to stand up for our freedoms -- although, to be fair, he's gotten some of our freedoms back with his machinations in the past -- we should stand up for them. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to reauthorize Section 215 without reforms that would protect our rights, especially if they try to use the coronavirus as cover. Seriously, no one who would do such a thing should ever be allowed near an elective office ever again. Both Democrats and Republicans should attend that statement.

Finally, The Other 98 helps you tell our Administration to remove Vice President Pence from his position overseeing the American response to the coronavirus. All ye need know about Mr. Pence's ability to manage a crisis is that while Governor of Indiana, he let an HIV mini-epidemic spread in rural Scott County rather than let that county run a needle exchange program, arguing for two years that needle exchange programs encourage drug addiction, which, like, no it does not. And now he goes on Pravda TV and tells everyone what a great job he did for Scott County, since he did ultimately relent and allow needle exchange programs in Scott county two years later, which sure will comfort the families of those who died in the meantime. So we have an executive who knows nothing, thinks he knows everything, and then lies about his record of knowing nothing and thinking he knows everything -- gosh, it's like we learned nothing from George W. Bush. And not for nothing, but maybe, just maybe, if our President really wants to get the coronavirus under control, he should stop whining about how everyone's out to get him. People hate leaders who whine about the jobs they signed up for. They also hate leaders who make everything about themselves all the time, like our lives are their big drama.

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

Happy Monday, good folks! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, and H.J.Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Don't worry about giving your Senators' staffers too much to write down, because if they truly aimed to do the people's will, they'd have debated and passed these bills already. After all, it's been over a year since all Senate clocks got set to "Mitch McConnell Time" -- i.e., "never" -- and we're on Do the Right Thing Time, which is now, and our Senators should set their clocks like we do.

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

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

Action: concerning good House bills, government spying, and conservation.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. This week we add H.R. 2474, the PRO Act, which would protect workers' right to organize and which the House passed late last week. Just because the Senate runs on Mitch McConnell time -- which we know from experience is never -- doesn't mean we can't demand (among other things!) better voting rights protections, better health care protections, higher wages for workers, and real internet freedom. So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban corporate welfare from localities for Amazon Ring. Law enforcement would like to link up all the Ring doorbells in your neighborhood to form their very own surveillance network; they say it'll just help them watch The Bad Guys, but you know it'll help them watch you, too, and Ring is also, guess what, fairly hackable technology! And if your neighborhood decides to buy up a bunch of Ring doorbells, who pays for that? That's right, you do, with your taxes. Like Amazon needs another damn handout from the taxpayer! They already pay virtually nothing in taxes on all their billions in profits, so funneling our taxpayer money to them so police can spy on us just adds insult to injury. Also, as I've said, the police won't be the only ones spying on you -- Amazon will be spying on you (just ask Alexa, amirite?), and anyone who can hack into a Ring doorbell will be spying on you, too. And again, you'll be paying for all of that! The "free market" my ass.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to protect roadless areas from the pro-pollution urges of this Administration, then the Alaska Wilderness League still helps you do that. Specifically, you'd ask your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2491/S. 1311, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, which would mandate that our government "shall not allow road construction, road reconstruction, or logging in an inventoried roadless area where those activities are prohibited by the Roadless Rule." That's right, we have to pass a law to tell this Administration to follow the law, a task that's going to be even harder now, amirite? Our Administration wants to open up the Tongass National Forest in Alaska to loggers, and they can only do that by weakening the Roadless Rule preventing development. Naturally, the Tongass is home to thousand-year-old trees, and cutting them down for logging corporation profits would, I hope, strike you as not terribly conservative. There's a reason "conservative" and "conservation" have the same root, after all.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, Social Security, government oppression, and pregnant workers.

Happy Tuesday! It's time to call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. This week we add H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act, which passed the House last week and would restrict the use of cancer-linked chemicals you can't get out of your drinking water. But the other bills are good, too -- they would (among other things!) protect voting rights, protect health care, give workers a raise, and make real internet freedom the law of the land again. So let's get cracking.

Meanwhile, our Administration has proposed rule changes that would strip Social Security benefits from hundreds of thousands of Americans with disabilities, but I should be fair and note that Republicans have been trying to destroy that part of Social Security dealing with disability and survivor benefits for years now, this even though our former Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, paid for his college education with Social Security survivor benefits. He must figure he's one of the deserving ones! But then that's how they do it -- they tell you that you of course deserve benefits, but those other people don't. And then they tell a few stories about people cheating to get benefits -- true stories or not, what's the difference? -- and count on you not to remember that millions of Americans get these benefits and if they were all cheating, surely we'd be hearing that, and not isolated anecdotes. Hence Social Security Works helps you tell our Administration to scuttle its cruel plan to deprive good Americans of the Social Security disability benefits they deserve.

In other news, Google gets a lot of flak, and deservedly so, for failing to stand up to the totalitarian tendencies of the Chinese government, but Apple also deserves a lot of flak for capitulating to Chinese government demands to remove hundreds of apps and block hundreds of virtual private networks (or VPNs), even though these apps and VPNs help good Chinese citizens avoid getting censored or detained for their human rights activities. Apple will tell us that they can't get business in China unless they follow the Chinese government's rules, but is the business worth getting if you have to sell your soul to do it? Apple will also tell us that shutting the Chinese out of products they want because of their evil government is cruel, but a) Chinese citizens can do, and are doing, something about that government and b) Apple isn't a hostage here! Apple made nearly $63 billion in profits in just one quarter last year, so they've got some weight to throw around. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Apple to stop coddling the Chinese government and stand up for human rights.

Finally, H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, got through the House Education and Labor Committee with no trouble and now faces a full vote in the House, so the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your House Reps to support pregnant women at the workplace by passing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would force employers to make reasonable accommodations for their pregnant workers and would prevent employers from punishing workers for getting pregnant, whether by refusing to hiring them, forcing them to go on leave, or impose unnecessary conditions on their employment. If your Tea Party uncle exclaims in response ZOMG HOW CANZ ANYONEZ RUNZ TEH BUSINESSEZ!!!!!!, just recite the previous sentence to them again, filled, as it is, with words like "reasonable" and "unnecessary" that pre-empt such complaints. Remind him, also, that bosses should already be doing the things the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would require them to do -- and that when bosses won't do the right thing, the law has to make them do it.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, Mississippi prisons, and impeachment.

Happy Monday! Today you can call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. These bills have all passed the House, and would (among other things!) protect voting rights, fight discrimination, raise the minimum wage, protect immigrants, protect our public lands, reinstate real internet freedom, and help good Americans get better health care -- but Mob Boss Mitch won't let any of them come to a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." He's wrong -- we tell our Senators what they want, and if we tell them enough times, they do it.

Meanwhile, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate prison conditions in Mississippi. It's so bad in Mississippi prisons that it's even made the news! Our "liberal" media, of course, would rather talk about celebrities than about brown drinking water and no air conditioning in prisons, but human beings are suffering and dying, and no it doesn't matter that they're criminals! Jesus Mary and Joseph rights are for all people, and mercy is for all people, and a civilization that treats its prisoners well is a strong one, and a civilization that treats them badly is a weak one. Yes, that is the opposite of what the "tough on crime" crowd has been telling you all these years, but they were always weaklings, preying on our various insecurities. Hate to pile on, but no "rehabilitation" will happen if you can't breathe or eat healthy food or drink clean water. And folks who would call that "prisoners living the high life" really need to start with the man in the mirror.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to conduct a fair impeachment trial. That would include documents and witnesses, of course, and you'll never guess what then-Rep./now-Sen. Lindsey Graham said back in 1999, when he was anxious to remove a Democratic President: "in every trial that there's ever been in the Senate, regarding impeachment, witnesses were called," and not calling them against President Clinton would have "basically chang(ed) impeachment." But wait, there's more! "You can have three days of lawyers talking to each other on both sides...but when you have a witness who was there, who was engaged in it, who was in the middle of it telling you about what they were doing and why, that's a totally different case, and it's the difference between getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Maybe he'll explain this flip-flop -- or, after the manner of his new Personal Lord and Savior, he'll say you're an idiot for noticing it.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, discrimination, internet freedom, and a host of other issues.

Happy New Year, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. All you need do in your phone call is tell your Senators to pass these bills -- you need not explain your will, you only need deliver it, and in my experience Congressional staffers don't make a habit of challenging your will; it's their job to pass your will to your Senators. Nonetheless, I'll explain in some detail why we should pass these bills, since (also in my experience) we feel better when we call if we have more to say than we have to.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would allow national automatic voter registration, require disclosure of large campaign contributions, create a public campaign financing system, make Election Day a national holiday, and mandate that states use nonpartisan commissions to draw up districts -- all things we've been fighting for in other bills over the years. Automatic voter registration, in particular, would automatically register a lot of folks when they move, since they'll have to change their driver's license (if they have one) when they move, and that will help counter state efforts to de-register people they "suspect" have moved. Not too many Americans actually favor "more big money campaign ads" or "more secret corporate involvement in political campaigns" -- most Americans, in fact, will tell you these things are evil. It often seems like the only people who don't think they're evil, in fact, are the ones who rely on secret corporate campaign donations to survive at the polls. But why should they get all the say about everything? Is that the world we would have made?

H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Act, isn't perfect, but our agitation for a better bill prompted some members of Congress to demand (and get) improvements; H.R. 3, as passed by the House, would allow Medicare to negotiate prices and upwards of 25 brand-name drugs that don't have any competition from generic drugs. H.R. 3 would also cap such drug prices at either the average drug price of six other developed nations or (if that info isn't available, i.e., because a drug is only available in America) 85% of the current American drug prices. If the Senate wants to amend the bill so that it lets Medicare negotiate for all drugs on the market, well, I won't complain -- indeed, bills from Sens. Sanders (I-VT) and Warren (D-MA) would be considerably more comprehensive than H.R. 3. But I don't let the perfect murder the good, either, so H.R. 3 deserves your support. Remember that when Senators say the "free market" should be allowed to work its will, it's OK to remind them that the market's "will" is apparently for good Americans to die because they can't afford insulin for their diabetes or an EpiPen for anaphylactic shock.

H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act in its Shelby County v. Holder ruling. Our Court said that singling out Southern states for pre-clearance of state-level voting law changes was unfair to them, but our Court also said that a different pre-clearance formula that didn't single out Southern states would likely pass their muster. Hence H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a demonstrated history of voting rights violations to federal pre-clearance, which would only "single out" Southern states if they're the ones doing the most vote suppression! Sadly, vote suppression is a national sport now, reaching as far north as Wisconsin (where folks of color somehow get targeted by de-registration efforts far more than white folks) and Michigan (where Interstate Crosscheck may have delivered that state's electoral votes to our President in 2016). Luckily, the Voting Rights Advancement Act would give us the tools to stop it.

H.R. 5, the Equality Act, would amend the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act (among other laws) to extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folk -- who can still get fired, denied housing, and denied credit just because of who they are and whom they love. You may be pleased to know that a lot of folks who don't like gays and don't have gay friends aren't necessarily in favor of firing them, denying them housing, and denying them credit just because they're gay or transgender! And that includes some of our President's most devoted supporters! Really, it's only the proverbial loudest wagons of our political discourse who insist that gay and transgender folk should remain second-class citizens forever; most Americans really are live-and-let-live types who don't want to get too involved with regulating other folks' genitals and what they do with them. Our laws should honor our best natures as Americans, and the Equality Act would do that, by giving gay and transgender folks the same tools to redress grievances that other historically-aggrieved classes have.

H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act, would reverse our President's executive order revoking the DACA (or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program which allows immigrants brought here as children (and therefore against their will) can continue to stay here if they contribute to American society. Seems like a fairly uncontroversial idea, right? Not for our President or his most nativist votaries, who would happily send immigrants back to countries they don't recognize, as long as it gives them an opportunity to stay enraged at something. Rage is a hell of a drug, as I'm sure you've figured out by now -- you can never get enough of it, and thus the worst of Our Glorious Elites move the rage-addled around from one manufactured outrage to another. Raging against childhood arrivals by saying THEY'RE TEH ILLEGULZ AND TEH ILLEGULZ MUST TEH GOEZ!!!! is not actually very "law and order" of them -- childhood arrivals, as I've said, had literally no choice in coming to America, and removing them just so you can indulge in rage is cruel. It'll bite you in the ass, too, but that won't help any of these immigrants in the meantime.

H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act would give women more tools to fight pay discrimination. H.R. 7 would outlaw clauses in employment contracts that prevent workers from talking about their pay, and would prevent retaliation against employees who do talk about their pay -- and these are important, since talking about your pay is usually how you find out you're being shafted. The bill would still allow employers to pay men and women differently based on bona fide factors like, you know, skill levels and qualifications, but would restrict employers' ability to manufacture a "bona fide factor" after the fact. And the bill would also stiffen penalties for discriminating against women workers. It's hard to actually argue against these things, since no one wants to be called "objectively pro-paycheck discrimination," so its opponents yell about "trial lawyers" -- how hysterically lazy! -- and "what about when men are more qualified than women?", which, hey, re-read the third sentence of this paragraph if that's you or someone you know. When someone yells something like that about a bill, you're right to question whether they've read it or understood it.

H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, would raise our minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour gradually over the next six years -- yeah, I made sure to put those last six words there, for all the haters who say IT'S TOO TEH FASTZ!!!!! -- and would increase that minimum wage every year thereafter in accordance with the rise in the median hourly wage. The bill would also hike the minimum wages for tipped workers and disabled workers gradually and close the gap between these and the regular minimum wage. The arguments against this bill might give a lot of people pause, but they fall apart upon closer (or, indeed, any) analysis. Fast food workers make $20/hour in Denmark, but that hasn't resulted in $20 Big Macs there -- Big Macs cost around $5.50 there, which ain't that much more than they cost here. And that CBO study that said a higher minimum wage would kill half a million jobs? Actually, that study said job losses could range from zero to a million jobs lost, that range represents jobs lost over 10 years, and the economy already needs to make a million jobs roughly every seven months just to keep up with population growth, so let's not go in for hysteria.

H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act, would roll back an Administration guidance issued in October of 2018 which actually weakened the Affordable Care Act's guarantee that health insurance corporations couldn't deny you health insurance (and therefore health care) because of your pre-existing health conditions. The Administration's guidance allows sub-standard health insurance programs to operate legally in the United States, even if they discriminate against folks with pre-existing conditions, a nefarious practice the Affordable Care Act would have ended (even if the ACA has dozens of other flaws which we have already discussed at length). The Administration's guidance was never about delivering "really great health care" to Americans; it's about letting health insurance corporations flout the law, and of course it's also about taking a crap over a Barack Obama legislative achievement because Mr. Obama made fun of the President that one time. Really, I'm pretty sure that's what it was -- and if it's not, it's likely something about as petty, and Americans deserve better than to be held hostage to a President's pettiness.

H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would keep oil and gas drilling corporations out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) by repealing that part of the 2017 tax "reform" that authorized oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. H.R. 1146 would also impose inspection fees on corporations that drill offshore so that our government can actually fund these inspections. You know all the good reasons we shouldn't drill in the Arctic: because there's not that much oil to be drilled there, because it would threaten Alaska's salmon industry, because it would threaten local indigenous populations and wildlife, and because cleaning up a spill in the frigid Arctic is many times harder than cleaning up one in a more temperate region. What's the reason we would drill up there (aside from getting Sen. Murkowski of Alaska to vote on a tax "reform" bill she might have voted against)? Oh, you know, to make some crony oil or gas CEO rich. That's really all of it -- they'll say it's "jobs," but what of the actual jobs in the salmon industry that'll go away after the next oil spill?

H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act, would permanently withdraw over a million acres of Grand Canyon-area land from any drilling or mining considerations. It's a bit stunning that we would even consider drilling around the Grand Canyon -- I mean, you've been to the Grand Canyon, right? -- but uranium mining corporations have had a jones to do that for decades, and our President of course has a jones to give them whatever they want, since public lands exist merely for exploitation in his mind. This, even though uranium mining would inevitably pollute the Colorado River upon which citizens of five American states depend for clean water! The bill would also protect any additional land in the Grand Canyon area that our government acquires after the bill becomes law. So, to sum: we could preserve a national treasure and protect the drinking water used by tens of millions of Americans -- orwe could make a few corporate CEOs even richer. It's not much of a choice, really, though Our Glorious Elites do keep choosing wrong.

H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, would reverse the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstate the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order, which originally encoded the principle of net neutrality in law. All the bills I've listed have earned a lot of popular support, but none more so than the Save the Internet Act -- which makes this Administration's (and Mr. McConnell's) flouting of the popular will all the more offensive. Net neutrality guarantees that internet service-providing corporations deliver all files to your computer at the same speed and with the same priority, which does not amount to TEH BIG GUMMINT CONTROLZ TEH INTERNETZ!!!!, but our government preventing big corporations from controlling the internet, so that you can determine where you want to go and what you want to see on the internet, rather than having big corporations force you to watch Miley Cyrus twerking videos before visiting your favorite weblogs (ahem!). Yeah, they haven't tried that yet, but they will; they're not stupid enough to make your freedoms disappear all at once. And this is about your freedom, which will always be more important than some corporation's "freedom" to make more money doing less work.

H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, would force corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners" -- that is, the folks who create the corporations and, presumably, benefit financially from their existence -- and that would force banksters, terrorists, tax-evaders, sex traffickers, drug money launderers, and big campaign donors (who all use shell corporations to hide their wrongdoing) out into the light, and if they can't stand the light, well, that's the price of operating too long in the dark. According to a Global Financial Integrity study from 2014, America is the second-easiest nation on Earth to start an anonymous corporation -- behind only Kenya, where there just ain't as much money. Right-wingers will tell you that forcing such transparency would be Big Gummint spying on people -- and where are they when our government actually spies on us? Being outraged at football players kneeling, probably! -- but they would have to explain why revealing the beneficiaries of corporate crime should be guarded by the law.

H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, would mandate voter-verified paper ballots for federal elections, which is a big deal, since (as we saw in Mississippi earlier this year) a lot of electronic voting machines don't let you vote for the candidate for whom you want to vote! H.R. 2722 would also fund state efforts to update their voting systems, which you know some states "forget" to do in their black and brown neighborhoods. And H.R. 2722 would prohibit states and localities from connecting their voting machines to our internet, and that's also a big deal! After all, any fool can see that connecting voting machines to the internet is a profoundly stupid idea. I would say connecting your thermostat or your house lights to the internet is also a profoundly stupid idea, but as bad having your house hacked would be, having our democracy hacked would be even worse. Hacking our democracy has been in the news a lot the past few years, after all -- and not as much as it should have been in the years before that! A lot of times the most advanced technology is not at all the best technology.

Finally (cue cheers from convention crowd!), H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, incorporates most of the TRUE Fees Act, which would not only force big telecom corporations to reveal all the fees they like to hide in your cable or cellphone bill, but would force them to give you formal notice of these fees and would give you the right to cancel your contract with these big telecoms if you don't like the fees they give you. H.R. 5035 would not outlaw forced arbitration agreements in big telecom contracts, as the actual TRUE Fees Act would have done, and that's a backward step, but, as I've said, I don't let the perfect murder the good, and H.R. 5035 is good, because it will keep big telecom corporations from giving you surprises in your cable and cellphone bills. And we will one day bring about comprehensive arbitration reform, because just as the only people standing in the way of fee transparency are the big telecoms that no one likes, the only people standing in our way or arbitration reform are the corporate flunkies whom no one likes. Yeah, weakling politicians "like" them, I suppose, but all I want is a fighting chance.

If you've been reading with an open mind, you probably see that all of these bills would do good things that would improve our laws and our civilization -- and if you attend the ludicrous arguments opposing them, some of which I've touched on above, you'll likely be more convinced of that, not less. Most ludicrous, perhaps, is the reflexive smearing of many or all of these bills as "socialism." You know that words mean things, and you may also suspect that a lot of folks throw the word "socialism" at anything they don't like and hope it sticks because they can't win the argument on the merits. Nonetheless, ask yourself: is securing the vote, and protecting the vote, "socialism" -- or is it merely common sense? Is preventing cruelty to gay, transgender, and immigrant folk "socialism," or is it common sense? Are protecting internet freedom, lowering drug prices, and protecting good Americans with pre-existing health conditions "socialism," or are they merely common sense? I think all of these things are common sense, and I hope that knowledge will steel your spine as you talk to your Senators today.

Good luck, and God bless.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and pollution (among other issues).

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People 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. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And this week we add H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act -- a better bill now, thanks in large part to your pressure -- and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, which would shine a light on those big telecom fees and taxes you find in your cable and cellphone bills. These are all good bills, advancing (among other causes) voting rights, consumer protections, and better health care policy, and your Senators have no excuse for rejecting them. No, TEH CREEPINGZ SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! is not an excuse.

Color of Change helps you tell Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) to reject attempts by Formosa Plastics to build a giant petrochemical plant in an almost-50% black community. Why? Because Formosa's plants tend to pollute more than virtually every other plant in America. Because this particular Formosa plant would emit ethylene oxide, which a 2016 EPA study found causes cancer even with "limited" exposure. Because big corporations have this nasty habit of plopping down their dirtiest plants in neighborhoods of color. Because the area where they'd build is already well-known as "Cancer Alley." Because Formosa has already paid Texas residents $50 million for illegally dumping pollutants in their communities. And because Gov. Bel Edwards -- fresh off a re-election more improbable than his first election in 2015 -- has demonstrated a willingness in the past to reward big polluting corporations even whey they don't follow the law. Hey, he doesn't have to run again, so maybe he should try not enabling big polluting corporations, particularly when they practice environmental racism.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject its own proposal to weaken coal ash storage regulations, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Our President's votaries like to think he's "gotten rid of burdensome regulations," though we know he really hasn't -- courts keep striking his regulatory changes down, because you can't just do whatever you feel like doing when you run a government! But the next time your War on Terror/Tea Party deficit hawk/Regulation Nation/Blue Lives Matter/anti-immigration-but-not-a-white-supremacist-I-swear uncle says our President has "gotten rid of burdensome regulations," feel free to ask if allowing big coal corporations to avoid closing their unlined coal-ash ponds that leak into our water tables is more "burdensome" to big coal corporations than water pollution is to, you know, the rest of us. I know the good citizens of Roane County, TN and Eden, NC -- to name the scenes of two infamous coal ash pond spills -- would tell you which is more of a burden.