Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning pollution, bogus spending commissions, and tax cuts for the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to repeal Biden Administration rules that benefit all of us, ignore the Musk/Ramaswamy cost-cutting commission, and let the bad parts of the 2017 tax "reform" expire. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Lever reminds us that the incoming Congress would just love to repeal as many Biden Administration rules as possible, so now would be a good time to call your Congressfolk and tell them to oppose any effort to repeal said rules. These include our EPA's lead pipe rule (which would result in cleaner water and less brain damage for our children) and methane emissions rule (methane, as you recall, packs a much bigger climate change punch than coal emissions). Republicans hope you don't remember that, you know, you hate pollution, and you like clean air and water and a non-burning planet. But will remind everyone if we have to.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to ignore the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency (or DOGE), particularly since such a Commission would have no Constitutional power to do a damn thing (since spending laws can only come from Congress). Even our President-elect says it will "provide advice and guidance from outside of government," which sure doesn't sound like big talk. And isn't it strange that our President-elect promised to put Elon Musk at the head of the DOGE – and then put Vivek Ramaswamy at the head of it, too? Putting two egomaniacs at the head of a commission sure sounds like a recipe for disaster! Still, we can't count on fantasies of realpolitik; we can only count on ourselves speaking out.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to let all the worst aspects of the 2017 tax "reform" bill expire. They weren't all bad – expanding the personal exemption was good, and we should expand it further – but even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and massive corporate tax cuts and tax cuts for the rich (all of which were bigger than any tax cut you or I got!) were terrible. These people don't need more tax cuts! They already have enough money! And cutting their taxes will mean one thing down the road: a manufactured "crisis" leading our government to try to take everything from us, like our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If we don't speak out, we can kiss all of that goodbye.

Action: concerning taxes, pollution, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end the Trump tax cuts and pass working family tax cuts, reject the so-called Energy Permitting Reform Act, and pass the Snowmobiles Aren't Weapons Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps youtell our House's Ways and Means Committee to let the Trump "tax cuts" expire and focus on delivering real tax relief for working families. Because the Trump "tax cuts" delivered massive tax cuts for the rich and tiny tax cuts for working families, whereas the Child Tax Credit expansion under President Biden delivered $250 and $300 checks per child per month to qualifying families in 2021. Will Republicans do any of that? Of course not! But will it cost them politically if they ignore us when we get in their grills? Yes, it will. After all, tax cuts for working families are popular, whereas tax cuts for the rich are, er, not.

The Native Organizers Alliance Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Energy Permitting Reform Act, which would fast-track approval of fossil fuel projects – whether they're actually safe or not, what's the difference? – and would also open up more public lands to mining and oil and gas drilling. "Fast-tracking approval," of course, also means taking away tools good Americans have to stop pollution in their backyards. Too many Americans think faster is better with every damn thing, but faster isn't better when you're trying to avoid spewing filth into our air and water. I'd say you should err on the side of taking your time and doing things right, but gosh, that would sound awfully conservative of me.

Finally, the Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Snowmobiles Aren't Weapons Act, which would, as its title implies, ban using snowmobiles to murder animals on public lands. Because who would do that? Some asshole in Wyoming, apparently, who ran over a female wolf with his snowmobile and then paraded her not-dead-yet body around a bar before finally shooting her. But this bill is so obviously a lay-up that it's nine House co-sponsors include four Republicans, including the bill's main sponsor, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, and the otherwise-notorious Matt Gaetz of Florida. But too often a no-brain Congress forgets to pass no-brainer bills, so we should still speak out.

Action: concerning striking workers and financial predators.

Long story short: tell port CEOs to accept striking portworkers' demands, and tell your government to protect us from financial predators in the green lending industry. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell port CEOs to accept portworkers' demands. 45,000 port workers went on strike this week to protest low pay (no, really, only $20/hour for that work?) and automation (ho hum, corporations making billions in profits want to give as many jobs as possible to robots). On occasion, legitimate, life-improving technological progress forces people out of work, but robots ain't that – robots will screw everything up while CEOs make even more money forcing the world to accept incompetence. These CEOs deserve to fail – but they won't, unless we pressure them to give in to their workers' demands.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell various federal agencies to protect good Americans from financial predators in the green lending industry. Lending programs that help folks deal with pollution and climate change are relatively new – which means they probably have a disproportionate number of scam artists, since new areas of our economy tend to get the necessary regulatory scrutiny much later than more established ones. And you know right-wingers stand ready to declare the green lending industry "unreliable." Their hell will be just as hot as ours, but why should any of us live in hell?

UPDATE. Port strikers have reached a tentative agreement with management, one that would raise pay 62% over the next five years but does not address automation. Go ahead and send your message anyway, amending it as you need to. Once you win, you need to keep fighting to keep your wins, and big bosses need to know we’ll do that.

Action: concerning labor, food safety, and pollution.

Long story short: tell Boeing to give its workers a fair contract, tell our FDA to keep lead out of cinnamon, and tell our EPA to keep nurdles out of our water. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Boeing that their striking machinists deserve a fair contract. Our "liberal" media have been telling you that Boeing workers went on strike after rejecting a proposed 25% pay hike. Surprise, surprise: that's not the whole story. Boeing workers are hunting far bigger game: they aim to challenge the entire corporate culture at Boeing, the culture that puts mammon above safety and quality, the culture that puts shareholder “value,” executive pay, and stock buybacks above planes being safe to fly. This could be a watershed moment in our history, like Reagan breaking the traffic controllers' union but in reverse, because if the Boeing workers win, they'll show the world that we can beat the culture of mammon, and workers all over America will suddenly find themselves more powerful than they've been in about half a century. So, yeah, we should help them do that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to limit lead found in cinnamon. This has been in the news lately, as all manner of food poisoning tends to be; one quarter-teaspoon of cinnamon contains more lead than anyone should ever have in a day, and lead leads directly to brain damage and maldevelopment in children, so our FDA should do at least as good a job as the state of New York, which limits lead to one part per million in spices. Oh, at the risk of piling on, the Project 2025 agenda would make sure our government could never keep our food safe again, so we must act now.

Finally, PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban corporations dumpling nurdles into our clean water. Nurdles! They sound so cute! Reader, they are not: used to make virtually any plastic product, they find their way into our oceans and not only kill animals who literally starve to death with bellies full of them and that is a cruel, cruel death, but they can find their way into our own bodies as well, and wreak havoc on our health. Again, not to pile on, but Project 2025 would prevent our EPA from keeping such things out of our water, so we must act now.

Action: concerning corruption, education, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fight corruption, fund education, and keep pollution off our public lands. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps youtell your Congressfolk to restore the anti-corruption protections our Supreme Court just struck down in Snyder v. United States. Our Court said, in Public Citizen’s words, that “federal law does not prohibit paying state and local officials for favors if the money isn’t promised in advance.” You remember former Rep. Vance McAllister (R-LA) telling us that other Congressfolk told him that if he voted a certain way on legislation, a group would give him money? So that’s why our Supreme Court is wrong this time! The fact that no formal offer gets made is irrelevant if you know what’s coming after you perform a favor! Hence we must fix a Supreme Court mess, again.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject education funding cuts. Some of our Congressfolk sure have crap-ass priorities – more spending on weapons that don’t work, less investing in our children – but if they want a fight over this, we’ll give ‘em one, and we’ll win it. Because the only reason they’ve got to cut education funding, itself an unpopular idea, is the racism of the book-banning crowd, also an unpopular idea. Republicans only won the 2021 gubernatorial election in Virginia because a) Terry McAuliffe is a horrible candidate and b) the “star” of that ad about books in school was a professional book-banner pretending to be a random “concerned mom.”

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, which would, as its title suggests, reverse a transfer of public (and, to the Apache, sacred) land to a big mining corporation and permanently protect that land from future development. So we have two reasons to act: one, we shouldn’t allow polluters to despoil our public lands, since they serve as a sort of repository for clean air and clean water, and two, the Apache find the land sacred and religious freedom still matters in America. At least, if it’s about people actually practicing their religion, and not forcing everyone else to practice their religion. The latter ain’t happening here, no matter what Rio Tinto says.

Action: concerning debt, drug prices, and clean water.

Long story short: tell our government to keep medical debt out of credit reports, tell a big pharma CEO to stop overcharging for diabetes drugs, and tell big chemical corporations you want all the PFAS out of our drinking water. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Both More Perfect Union and People Power United help you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to prevent big credit reporting corporations from using medical debt in their reports. Because people don’t accumulate medical debt because they’re “irresponsible”! People too often accumulate medical debt merely because some bankster manipulated a health insurance corporation into moving network boundaries around, so that what you thought your insurer covered, they now suddenly don’t cover! But banksters make bank getting health insurers to do that! I hope that helps them sleep every time a soldier’s prosthetic leg gets repossessed.

More Perfect Union also helps you tell Novo Nordisk director Lars Jørgensen to stop charging an arm and a leg for his diabetes drugs Ozempic and Wegovy. Because he charges a lower price for people in Europe than he does here! And that’s only because he can get away with it! But if we speak, in numbers they can’t deny, then they won’t be able to get away with it anymore! That’s the awesome power of the Big Stick of Bad PR, which has worked on other big pharma corporations that have unilaterally lowered drug prices in recent years. And $9 billion in profits after making a drug for $5/dose but selling it in America for $1,100/dose? We must shame whoever greenlit that! It’s the only civilized response!

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell big chemical corporations that you want all the PFAS out of our drinking water. They’re saying our EPA, in issuing rules making them get all the PFAS out of our drinking water, “abused” their power; imagine standing before St. Peter and having to confess that you put polluters above regular folks! Folks who are already ingesting about a credit card’s worth of plastic every week on average from all the plastic in our foods and containers! And I know, it’s hard to get all those PFAS chemicals out of our water, since you find PFAS in almost anything you can name, but these corporations have a lot of money, so they also have the ability to get it out. Hey, this is America! The can-do country!

Around the table: good news about bad news, and also bad news.

Our Supreme Court, which surely isn’t done doing us harm, temporarily blocks an EPA rule concerning interstate pollution, while plaintiffs (sigh Ohio sigh Indiana sigh West Virginia) can work their lawsuits through lower courts. Meaning it’s not a permanent defeat for the common-sense notion that air pollution doesn't just stop at the next state’s border, but a significant setback nonetheless. Anyway, dig Justice Barrett calling the majority opinion’s reasoning “an underdeveloped theory that is unlikely to succeed on the merits.” I’d say I’m starting to like her, but I know she’s going to disappoint me later like she’s disappointed me before. Right, Anthony Kennedy?

Benjamin Sandofsky tells us the story of the Lambda School, which was, spoiler alert, a school that raised a crap-ton of venture capital money promising a “better way” of teaching students to code (and then design websites, and then become nurses!) but pissed it all away through incompetence and hubris. The school never worked, it turns out, and telling everyone how well it was working when it wasn’t has, you know, consequences. Law and order consequences, you might say! Naturally, the anti-hero of this story, a Lambda co-founder I shall not name because his name and works deserve oblivion, whined about how “jealous” everyone must have been of his success to tear down his corporation. It’s like no one remembers Jesus turning over the moneylenders’ tables in His Father’s house.

At ProPublica we learn of the political non-profit that “Enriches Fundraisers While Spending Almost Nothing on Its Stated Causes.” Turns out the “political non-profit” is actually a thing some corrupt individuals create after their charitable empires collapse under FTC scrutiny (Trump Administration FTC scrutiny, no less!); they typically spend almost none of their donations on voter education and outreach, which you’d think a political non-profit would exist to do, and almost everything on fundraising and administrative costs, a lot of which goes to crony consultants and political non-profits. Yay, the rich have figured out yet another way to rob the poor! Now they’ll say we’re just “jealous” of them. Who’ll be the jealous one at the Pearly Gates?

Sen. Lindsey Graham (E-SC) says that the “lawless” President Biden should be put in jail – for forgiving student loans! Not even over whatever the hell that was that James Comer was ranting about in our House. How do you sound when you accuse a guy of “lawlessness” and say he should “be in jail” and your accusation’s all about forgiving student loan debt? You sound like a partisan whiner at best, and a crazy person at worst. Note well that his Personal Lord and Savior might get actual jail time in a few weeks for trying to cover up an affair with a Playboy bunny so people wouldn’t vote against him! I know which I think is worse.

Finally, a bit of advice about that debate performance: Walter Mondale crushed Ronald Reagan in the first 1984 debate and lost by 19 points; John Kerry smoked George W. Bush in the first 2004 debate (one exclusively about foreign policy, no less) and went home with the silver on Election day, and Mitt Romney’s unexpectedly good performance in the first 2012 debate, coupled with Barack Obama’s unexpectedly bad one, meant nothing for Mr. Romney’s electoral fortunes either. And the first 2024 debate happened three months before any of the others I mentioned, meaning most folks (I mean people, not pundits) will forget about it as quickly as they forgot about Mr. Biden’s sterling State of the Union address or his incongruously upbeat rally after the debate. Mr. Biden could very well be playing a game of rope-a-dope, and you know who the dope is.

Action: concerning worker safety, fairer trade, and free tax filing.

Long story short: tell our government to better protect workers from heatstroke and keep cheap imports out of America, and tell your Governor to opt your state into our IRS’s Direct File program. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor to issue the most vigorous possible rules protecting workers from extreme heat. We just endured a heat dome for most of the last week, and a lot of folks work outside all day, and their jobs (especially in Texas, amirite?) often don’t even have to give them water breaks. Yes, a lot of undocumented immigrants work outside, too! But if you’re the one who says well they should have known the dangers when they came here, then step away from this blog; it’s not for you. Cruelty is never the right answer, and nobody should have to suffer from extreme heat just because some boss says a minute spent drinking water is a minute spent “not working.”

Trade Justice helps you tell our Office of the Trade Representative to protect us from cheap foreign products made by workers paid too little. The Biden Administration has proposed imposing tariffs “strategically,” and I bet his plan could be better. Still, it would do a lot of good, and when the pundidiots on the TV wail about TEH ECONOMIEZ WILLZ BE TEH DESTROYEDZ!!!!!!, just remember that ending cheap imports empowers more local businesses and more local workers, and that it also means we’ll pollute less hauling it around. Also remember that Donald Trump had four years to do something like this, and (just like with infrastructure) he did nothing.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Governor to opt your state into our IRS’s Direct File program, so that you and yours can enjoy the benefits of filing your taxes for free with our government. While it is true that most Americans can in theory already file for free with the big tax prep corporations, most Americans don’t file for free because the big tax prep corporations go out of their way to make that process confusing! And you know what happens then – people give up and resign themselves to paying hundreds of dollars for something they should get for nothing. Why, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea! Here’s a better idea: let folks actually use a service they paid for with their taxes.

Action: concerning mass murders, judicial corruption, and anti-tax stupidity.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, pass the Supreme Court Ethics and Investigations Act, and make sure they fully fund our IRS. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a law that basically shields the entire gun industry from lawsuits, including those that might find gun-manufacturing corporations liable for enabling the daily mass murders we suffer as a nation. There are other reasons we suffer daily mass murders, of course – not least of them wall-to-wall sensationalist media coverage of banal mass murderers and their “motives” – but what other industry gets this kind of legal immunity? Imagine big polluters demanding, and getting, this kind of immunity. Why, we’d never drink clean water again! And given that guns tend to end lives, there’s even more at stake here.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Supreme Court and Ethics Investigations Act, which establish an Office of Investigative Counsel that would specifically look into ethics complaints against Supreme Court Justices. Maybe with this bunch that seems like a heavy lift! But Congressfolk face the threat of ethics investigations when they screw up, and Executive branch workers face the threat of Inspectors General when they screw up, so it’s a bit of a head-scratcher that we let Supreme Court Justices off so easy, especially with all the gifts Justice Thomas finally copped to receiving. So let’s make sure they don’t get off so easy.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires also helps you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our Internal Revenue Service (or IRS) so they can go after rich tax cheats. Republicans unsuccessfully tried to convince good Americans that giving our IRS more money would result in more working families getting investigated, but fact is our IRS was only investigating working families, because working families can’t hire big-money lawyers like rich folks can. It’s more than a little like saying what happened to Donald Trump can happen to you, when what happened to Donald Trump always happens to folks who can’t hire big-money lawyers. So let’s keep our IRS working for us.

Action: concerning domestic spending, polluter welfare, and Congressional stock trading.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject arbitrary spending caps on domestic spending, and pass the End Polluter Welfare Act and the ETHICS Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject arbitrary spending caps on domestic spending. Republicans made a deal with President Biden on domestic spending, but now they’re trying to go lower. They must think they’re Darth Vader! I am altering the deal; pray I do not alter it again. Republicans plan to cut Department of Transportation spending by 10% – just as Pete Buttigieg is starting to do his job! – and want to cut Labor, HHS, and Education by similar levels; these departments run programs that actually help good Americans, so let’s put a stop to these shenanigans.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act, which would (as its title suggests!) repeal all sorts of tax breaks that big oil and gas corporations get. Those tax breaks might have made sense once, while these industries were getting started, but they don’t make any sense now that they’re well-established, and they make a lot less sense when you consider that they’ve not only turbocharged climate change but they’ve also lied about it – about both doing it and knowing they were doing it. Have I mentioned I love the use of the world “welfare” in this bill’s title? Turn their words against them, that’s what I say.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the ETHICS Act, which would ban Congressfolk from trading in stocks. Now, to far too many folks addled by four decades of right-wing rule, that will seem laugh-worthy – who’s gonna pass a bill preventing themselves from investing in stocks ha ha ha snort look at me I’m so smart! These folks, despite my ministry and that of others, still do not get that Congressfolk exist to serve the American people, not enrich themselves, and we can’t trust that Congressfolk who legislate about corporate conduct but have investments in corporations would ever put their self-interest aside. We may be optimists, but we’re not fools.

Action: concerning endless war, air pollution, and Supreme Court corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to promote peace in the Israel/Palestine conflict, reject attempts to repeal soot standards, and pass the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a ceasefire in the Israel/Palestine conflict and hold President Biden to his word about withholding weapons as long as Israel commits human rights abuses there. President Biden’s declaration about that was, admittedly, astounding – few American politicians have been more pro-Israel than he – but our State Department’s recent finding that Israel hasn’t met the bar for human rights abuses is, sadly, less so. All that means is we need to keep holding our leaders’ feet to the fire. Because Israel’s government wants Hamas around and kills Palestinian civilians to keep them around.

Earthjustice helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject yet another “Resolution of Disapproval,” this one aiming at the Biden Administration’s new soot standard. We’ve all seen enough soot-in-face jokes on TV to know that soot ain’t something you necessarily want in your face, and we definitely don’t want it in our lungs – yet big polluting corporations and their lackeys in Congress stand ready to hunt down any standard that would protect us from soot in our air. Congress’s priorities sure are strange. You’d think protecting us from pollutants making us sick would be their job.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act. Not that we’ve never had corrupt Justices before, or that corruption is strictly speaking a partisan matter – you’ll recall that Justices Kagan and Sotomayor were landlords helping to decide the fate of COVID-era renter protections – but the various ethics imbroglios affecting Justices Thomas and Alito remind us that our laws don’t hold our Supreme Court to the same ethics standards as other federal judges. Surely we don’t think they’re too big to fail? In America, nobody should be too big to fail.

Action: concerning pollution and collusion.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Mining Regulatory Clarity Act and hold hearings about possible collusion between American oil corporations and OPEC. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, which would let our government hand out public lands to big mining corporations with inadquate consideration for mining corporations polluting our air and water or desecrating sacred Native lands. Such is the “clarity” of desolation, the “clarity” of mammon-worship, the “clarity” of doing injury without taking accountability. And ironically enough, this bill’s supporters have resorted to parliamentary arcanity to keep it moving. I guess only the clarity of the people’s will can stop them, so we should get to it.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to hold public hearings on alleged big oil corporate collusion with OPEC, a heavily-reported matter about which our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has already sued. No one should smile at American oil corporations colluding with a foreign oil consortium that produces a little under 40 percent of the world’s oil and may sit on 80% of the world’s oil reserves – especially with gas prices going up, for no other apparent reason. And again, remember that when right-wingers say our FTC is “out of control,” this is what they mean – that they’re actually working for us for once.

Action: concerning voting rights, actual frivolous lawsuits, and abortion rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inclusive Democracy Act, pass anti-SLAPP legislation, and repeal the Comstock Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Inclusive Democracy Act and thus end felony disenfranchisement in America. Some 4.6 million Americans can’t vote because of a felony conviction, and voting shouldn’t be conditional in America, because, you know, rights shouldn’t be conditional. And yes, that means even child molesters should have the right to vote! They just shouldn’t have the “right” to molest children. A certain “law-and-order” mindset says we should just heap punishments on people if we’re frustrated, but that’s not just uncivilized, it’s un-American.

Greenpeace helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass anti-SLAPP legislation. SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” a.k.a. when rich, thin-skinned pricks sue their critics just to shut them up. But why should good Americans get sued into poverty merely for criticizing some Donald Trump-wannabe? And why haven’t tort “reform” adherents embraced anti-SLAPP laws? Possibly because they think class action lawsuits against polluters are “frivolous” lawsuits, while the lawsuits rich folks file to silence their critics are good lawsuits. Or, maybe, they’re just evil. No matter: our duty is our duty.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, a 150-plus-year-old law that forbids our Postal Service from mailing anything abortion-related, a law right-wingers want to will back into enforcement so nobody can get mifepristone and misoprostol through the mail. Now, as you may remember, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held back in 1936 that the Comstock Act couldn’t prevent our Postal Service from shipping such medicines if a doctor ordered it. Our Supreme Court will almost certainly ignore that precedent, so we’ve got to speak out to our Congressfolk.

Action: concerning Israel, pollution, and price-gouging.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to restrain Israel’s behavior in its war on Palestine, reject the pro-polluter Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, and pass the Price-Gouging Prevention Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk that “U.S. support for Netanyahu’s war must have limits.” Civilized people set boundaries, right? Friends set boundaries, right? And “don’t use our money to kill Palestinian civilians” really ought to be a boundary we set; that’s what Kids Today are saying with their encampments, and a dirty little secret about America is that Kids Today Are Never Wrong. The bad news? Old men don’t listen to Kids Today very often. The good news? Old men are also tired of reflexively doing whatever Israel wants regardless of the consequences. So I see opportunity to do good works here.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, which would let our government give away public lands to big mining corporations in perpetuity and with no oversight. So I guess the “clarity” they’re looking for is all about government clearly doing nothing on behalf of its owners, the people! We don’t keep polluters off public lands to make ourselves feel good; we do it to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink and bathe with and the land we use for farming, recreation, and other forms of enjoyment. And letting bosses do whatever they like? That’s not America.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Price Gouging Prevention Act, which would empower our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to go after corporate price-gouging as an “unfair and deceptive” practice – saying something is worth more than it really is is a lie, after all, and corporations using their size to bludgeon people into spending more money is even worse than a lie. Good peoples, this is why we have government – to protect us from big corporate actors that would squeeze every dollar out of us if they could! The “free” market ain’t free unless we’re all free.

Action: concerning racism and pollution.

Long story short: tell big corporations to stop funding racists, and tell our Department of Transportation to reduce pipeline leaks. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Color of Change helps you tell big corporations to stop funding infamous racists like Christopher Rufo, Kris Kobach, and Stephen Miller. How do such emotionally-stunted men wind up getting so much attention – so much, in fact, that we can’t simply shame them into silence? We can put some of the blame on credulous “liberal” media coverage, but these dolts’ fake crusades to kill anti-discrimination laws and pro-civil rights laws would be nowhere without big corporate money. The good news? Big corporations hate the Big Stick of Bad PR. So it’s time for us to swing it!

Earth Justice helps you tell our Department of Transportation to finalize the most vigorous anti-pipeline leak rule possible. Even in this sick, immoral, and decadent time big pipeline leaks always make the news, but gas pipelines also leak almost three million tons of methane annually just sitting there, and that isn’t just a whole lot of climate change leaking out, but also a lot of usable energy leaking out. You can burn methane as fuel, after all! It’s OK to be against pollution and against wasting energy! The latter argument’s the only one that’ll sway some folks anyway.

Action: concerning election workers and Native American lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect election workers and sacred Native American lands. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Worker and Polling Place Protection Act, which would enact criminal penalties for folks who harass, intimidate, and threaten election workers when their guy loses. Let me be clear: the folks who went after workers like Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman (and all the good Americans who quit being election workers after the 2020 election) aren’t just assholes, they’re whiners, and frankly, being a whiner is worse, and I’m sick of folks getting their way by whining. And if we don’t put people in jail when they threaten election workers, then why do we even have laws?

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, which would once again protect the famous Oak Flat region in Arizona from being polluted by big copper mining corporations. Oak Flat already sits within federally-protected land, and that’s a phrase that should mean a lot more than it apparently does, otherwise we wouldn’t need this bill. You know another phrase that should mean more than it does? Religious freedom, not as in right-wingers’ “right” to tell you what to do and think, but as in protecting lands sacred to Native Americans.

Action: concerning monopolies and pollution.

Long story short: tell our government to stop the proposed Walmart/Vizio merger, and tell our EPA to enact the strongest carbon emissions restrictions possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) and our Justice Department Antitrust Division to stop the proposed Walmart/Vizio merger. But wait, the right-wing Glaucons are saying, it’s a department store buying a TV company, so what’s the big deal? Well, if you think, as I do, that no corporation should ever own another corporation, you already know the answer, but buying Vizio would not only enable Walmart to get a foothold in an area they can quickly monopolize given their size, but it’d give them access to crap-tons of user data. I don’t particularly want Walmart – or any corporation – to have any of that.

Daily Kos Green helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous carbon emissions restrictions possible. Remember when right-wingers called the Obama carbon emissions restrictions – which didn’t even address existing power plants, like this one does – a “war on coal”? Well, how about the war on air? Or the war on health care, since cleaner air results in reduced health care costs? Big corporations hate our EPA’s proposal, since it’ll hamper their executives’ ability to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. But such fools shouldn’t get all the say in America.

Action: concerning cruelty, corruption, and pollution.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate Nex Benedict’s death, tell our FERC to keep political spending out of our utility bills, and tell our EPA not to relax auto emissions standards. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first: MoveOn helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate the death of Nex Benedict, an Oklahoma non-binary teenager who strangely died just one day after being attacked by three girls in a school bathroom. By “strangely” I mean “almost certainly because of the beating,” regardless of what local police say. Also, the school suspended Nex Benedict in between beating and death, so they might have something to hide, too. Do non-binary people skeeve you out a bit? They really shouldn’t, but be honest! If the answer is “yes,” then ask yourself if they deserve to die for that. You’re welcome.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to bar utility corporations from jacking up your bills due to their own political spending. Hard to believe we actually have to do that, but we do. And don’t brook any silliness from right-wingers about how you can just switch to another utility, because usually you can’t – or you can switch to an even worse corporation. We ought to break up every last damn utility monopoly, and then we ought to make them public again, but in the meantime, people are dealing with enough high prices without their electric company passing the “cost” of their support for moronic politicians on to them.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) not to relax car emissions standards. Yes, they’re thinking of doing that, probably because they heard enough bellyaching from big auto-making corporations about how hard it is to make cars go further on a gallon of gas. You know what’s hard, though? Paying more for gas whenever big corporations want, that’s what! You know what else is hard? Trying to stay healthy with all the car-spewed pollution in our air and water! Big corporations with billions of dollars ain’t got it as hard as we do. But our EPA won’t hear us unless we speak out.

Action: concerning pollution and child labor.

Long story short: tell our EPA to ban chlorpyrifos again, tell big chocolate corporations to stop using child labor, and tell our government to stop buying single-use plastics. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

US PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban chlorpyrifos, again. The science remains clear on chlorpyrifos’s ill effects on childhood development, but late last year our 8th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down our EPA’s ban, ruling that they didn’t evaluate whether chlorpyrifos had “high-benefit uses” on certain crops – though another court had ordered them to either ban chlorpyrifos entirely or demonstrate those uses were safe! Sound like a setup? Doesn’t matter – not only must we fight to do the right thing, we also must fight to defend it.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell big chocolate corporations Hershey’s, Nestlé, and Mars to get the child labor out of their supply chains right now. They already promised to do it! 20 years ago! And they still haven’t done it! It’s like these corporate executives never had mamas to teach them to keep their promises. Seriously, though, does working two million African children to the bone justify cheap chocolate bars in America? I’m afraid of how some Americans would answer that question! But most of us know the right answer, and would do the right thing.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our federal government to stop using single-use-plastic. Maybe you and I can’t root all the plastic out of our lives because we don’t control all manufacturing or routinely invent better alternatives to contemporary poisons in our kitchen sinks, but our government, which is about the biggest buyer of anything as well as the biggest plastic polluter on Earth, had better be able to root out single-use plastic in their purchases. Hell, if you have that kind of power, why wouldn’t you use it for good? Because it’s hard? Anything worth doing is hard!

Action: concerning immigration, clean water, and social media.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to investigate Gov. Abbott’s anti-immigrant dramas, tell our EPA to get rid of all lead pipes in America, and tell social media corporations to better protect their users from political campaign lies. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for human rights abuses. Like what, you ask? Like busing asylum-seekers to liberal cities, which may be juicy drama to right-wingers but is cruel to folks fleeing oppression in other lands; why, he even bussed asylum-seekers to Los Angeles as a tropical storm approached. Oh, and he also put razor wire in the Rio Grande and then literally pushed asylum-seekers back into the river. Anyone who uses people as pawns to prove a “point” is evil, especially like this. So let’s do something about it.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to switch out all the lead pipes in America. Because lead pipes leach lead into our drinking water and cause brain damage in our children! Most reasonable people would agree with that; some less reasonable people would try to convince you that we should leave it to the “free” market, which ha ha ha what a crock. But after Donald Trump told Iowa ralliers that we have to “get over” school shootings, how long before some other prick says we have to “get over” pollution? Hey, if I thought of it, I know they have.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell big social media corporations to better protect their users from election lies, while Eko helps you helps you tell Meta, specifically, to stop allowing ads claiming that elections in the U.S., Brazil, and Italy were “stolen.” Literally none of this should be controversial! It’s only “controversial” to folks who want to lie to you because otherwise you won’t vote for knuckle-draggers! And for “stolen” election lies, I have literally zero patience. Some folks whine like diaper-loaded brats whenever they don’t get their way; right-wingers have had us convinced for years that we call those people “liberals.” But no: they’re right-wingers.

Around the table: and it's *bad* drama, part 989.

Biden Administration asserts that it does, in fact, have the lawful authority to seize patents for drugs developed at least partially with taxpayer money, if big pharma corporations are charging too much for said drugs. Of course asserting authority isn’t the same as using that authority, but this is a good first step. Now watch as the big pharma corporations threaten to sue the Biden Administration into oblivion, as if anyone’s rooting for them to keep demanding so much money for these drugs that folks can’t get healthy anymore. Watch, also, as right-wingers whine about how Mr. Biden is “abusing his power,” though they seem to prefer a President who’s already vowed to abuse his power if elected in 2024.

Surprise, surprise, CNN poll finds about half of Republican voters support Biden Administration policies aiming to halve carbon emissions by 2030, though given that pollution is actually quite unpopular, that number really ought to be much higher. Naturally, fewer than half of Americans approve of Mr. Biden’s handling of environmental issues, but even there you see good news – they may not approve because nearly three out of five Americans think the Administration isn’t doing enough, regardless of whether they approve of the things the Administration is doing. Also too, broad questions aren’t particularly useful. Remember when Mr. Obama’s approvals were low in 2012? How’d that work out for Mitt Romney?.

Texas Supreme Court blocks woman from getting an abortion at state Attorney General’s request, though her child would almost certainly be born dead and the birth would probably injure her badly enough that she wouldn’t be able to have children again. Next time someone tells you their health insurance shouldn’t have to pay for someone else’s abortion because of their “conscience,” ask them about this one, or about any ectopic pregnancies, or any other thing you can think of, and maybe also ask them if their conscience should get between an American and their doctor. Also too, Texas’s draconian anti-abortion law does allow women to get abortions if their lives are in danger or to “prevent substantial impairment of a major bodily function,” which begs the question: does Texas’s government really think childbirth isn’t a “major bodily function”?

Hoo boy Republicans think that pretending to be not such woman-haters about abortion will actually trick significant numbers of people into voting for them, but people won’t forget Republicans spending half a century making themselves into the woman-hating party just because individual Republicans claim “but I’m different.” And the masturbatory-rage crowd won’t be thrilled with their standard-bearers trying to nuance their positions, either. Republicans have to hope Democrats won’t hit them too hard on their “evolving” positions, and though they used to be able to count on Democrats to hit back soft or not at all, recent electoral returns suggest that day is done, particularly where abortion is concerned.

Finally, with Kevin McCarthy announcing his departure from our House of Representatives at the end of this year, Rachel Hadas at The Conversation looks over some classical dramas like Antigone, Ajax, and Julius Caesar and finds Mr. McCarthy a “slight unmeritable man” (in Mr. Shakespeare’s words) who was “not a hero.” “McCarthy does not qualify as a hero,” she writes. “To be humiliated, to fall, you have to have attained some height to begin with.” I keep saying that all Republicans do these days is drama and it’s never even good drama, and the “fall” of Kevin McCarthy seems to exemplify that trend.

Around the table: brought to you by the word "drama."

You’ve been hearing that Americans just don’t “get” how well our economy’s doing? And you’re not particularly inclined to blame them, even though wage growth is actually outpacing inflation for the first time in decades? Well, Paul Waldman reminds us that the vast majority of folks who tell pollsters that the economy’s doing badly are Republicans, which totally tracks! Particularly since Republican poll respondents seem to think our economy’s worse than it was in 2009 or 2010 – which, like, we’re not stupid, OK? – and also since Americans generally act like this is a good economy, i.e., by starting businesses or spending more money.

At least one California corporation thinks that electric car batteries can be used for solar power storage systems even if they’re so depleted that the cars can’t use them anymore, so I guess that’s for your right-wing friends who can’t stop whining BUT WHEREZ WILLZ WEZ PUTZ TEHZ EXPIRUDZ BATTERIEZ HA HA HA HA STUPIDZ LIBRULZ!!!!!! If you still have right-wing friends, of course. (Oh, and if they whine that TEH ELECTRICZ BATTUREEZ CAUSEZ MOREZ OFZ TEH FIURZ!!!!!, well, they’re full of soup about that, too.)

Good West Virginians could be paying more to clean up coal corporation pollution, and let us note that state legislators of both parties have failed to fund the state’s abandoned mine clean-up program (and way before coal corporations started going belly up), while West Virginia’s Republican Governor just fired a critical clean-up fund advisor, and President Biden has somehow failed to even nominate a new Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement administrator (who could force West Virginia’s government to act). The story even features the gnarled hand of Tha Bush Mobb promising to issue new, stronger regulations and then, stop me if you’ve heard this before, never getting around to it or explaining why. Of course Tha Bush Mobb was never the place to learn to clean up your mess.

In case you were wondering, yes our “liberal” media gave a lot more coverage to Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark than they’ve given to Donald Trump’s “vermin” remark, and it’s no use objecting that people are so numb to what Donald Trump says now that of course our media didn’t say much about it, or that maybe we shouldn’t respond to everything he says with more coverage, or, even, that Mr. Trump may not have meant you or I per se when he said “vermin.” Because guess what? No one murdered a “deplorable,” but someone will absolutely murder a “vermin.” (Of course, when he then tries to say it’s all Mr. Trump’s fault, I’ll remind everyone that murder is absolutely something for which one needs to take personal responsibility.)

When I hear that drama hound Jesse Watters at Fox News found a clip of President Biden drinking a milkshake through a straw and thought that was unmanly or something, all I can say is gosh, Mr. Watters, hate yourself much? And though we could tabulate all the layers of this hypocritical onion (Mr. Watters didn’t get upset that time His Personal Lord and Savior himself used a straw on a smoothie!), better to tell all your friends and neighbors to vote against drama in 2024, and fight drama every day until Election Day 2024.

David E. Clemenston at The Conversation reminds us that folks judge people like now-expelled Rep. George Santos (E-NY) as “trustworthy” “almost entirely from perceptions of their demeanor, not the words they utter,” and though he talks about Mr. Santos as someone who “speaks with certitude” and “has a charming, friendly, and interactive manner,” his point maps on to something I’ve been thinking for a long time. The advantage Republicans have today is tone, not better arguments – they sound like go-getters and problem-solvers, where too many Democrats sound like they’re just trying not to anger anyone (particularly their big donors!), and whether people articulate it or not, they hate politicians who sound like that.

Finally, staying with the George Santos Experience, Steve Bannon’s so full of rage about his expulsion – because rage is, apparently, all he can feel – that he says if “They want a civil war, they got one!” Seriously, a “civil war” over the expulsion of George Santos? Just as junkies only care about junk, dramatic people only care about drama, and if Donald Trump wins in 2024, dramatic people like Steve Bannon will be running this country into the ground again. So let’s do everything we can to prevent that from happening. Yes, even if it means re-electing a boring old Democratic President who’s actually doing a good job.

Action: concerning health care, Arctic drilling, and bad media.

Long story short: tell your state legislators to keep drug prices down, tell the Biden Administration to protect the Arctic from drilling, and tell big cable corporations to stop paying the “Fox fee.” Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your state legislators to create Prescription Drug Affordability Boards that can cap drug costs. In a nation where life-saving drugs costs more than they do anywhere else on Earth, where big pharma corporations jack up the price of life-saving drugs just because they can, where good Americans ration their insulin at the cost of losing their own lives, Prescription Drug Affordability Boards are the least our state legislators can do to protect us from predatory corporate drug pricing. Some states have health insurance commissioners who can cap insurance premiums, but we need that sort of thing for drug prices, too. When your right-wing pals call that “bureaucracy,” remind them how well the “free” market is keeping drug prices down! And stop inviting them to your cookouts.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to protect our Arctic public lands from fossil fuel drilling. If you hear folks say “there’s nothing up there anyway,” remind them that, at the very least, the salmon they get from the supermarket often comes from up there, and it won’t anymore if oil corporations pollute the water, as they all eventually do. Anyway, they’re wrong, and their ignorance of the area shouldn’t carry more weight than the views of folks who actually like clean water and wildlife diversity. But if we don’t leave public comments on the Biden Administration proposal – I hear it’s actually pretty good – then their ignorant views will carry more weight than ours. That would be a tragedy, and an avoidable one at that.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell big telecom corporations to stop paying high rates to the Fox News (sic) Channel. It’s bad enough that if you want to watch HGTV or the Cartoon Network you have to pay for a cable package that includes Fox News, but Fox News demands relatively usurious rates from cable corporations for the “privilege” of delivering rage and hate to Americans broken by a half-century of bad economic policy! And that means you pay more for cable, and Fox News makes money they don’t deserve to make! In a sane and decent world, on-air “personalities” like Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld would have to live on government cheese, because they wouldn’t be good at anything people need. In our sick, immoral, and decadent world, they make millions of dollars spewing filth every night, and we need to fight that.

Action: concerning the Dakota pipeline, corporate crime, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell our government to scuttle the Dakota Access Pipeline, start going after corporate criminals, and enact automatic voter registration. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Native Alliance Organizers Fund helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to scuttle the notorious Dakota Access Pipeline. Word on the street is that the Corps essentially farmed out their proposal to a big oil corporation to write! And of course our government has already rerouted the pipeline so it wouldn’t pollute water where more white folks live (both in South Dakota and in Iowa!), and then violated treaties made with Native American nations (as well as our laws!) during its construction. At least a judge ordered the Corps to do another environmental review, after doing a shoddy one in advance of the pipeline’s 2016 approval; now we’ve got a chance to tell them what we think of it, again.

Public Citizen helps you tell your government to start going after corporate criminals a lot more vigorously. Sam Bankman-Fried got convicted of fraud, but that’s unusual; it’s almost always the little guy paying for some little crime while the big guys get away with big crimes. That’s the “weaponization of law enforcement,” not right-wing whining over how Donald Trump is somehow the “victim” of his 91 felony charges. They want to talk about “government going after political opponents”? All of us little guys are potential political opponents of Our Glorious Elites, so they come after us and leave each other alone. We should at least tell them we’re on to them.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your state government to enact automatic voter registration already. Why would they not? Because they want as few people to vote as possible, that’s why, and sadly I’ve found that true of Democratic governments as well as Republican ones. Fewer votes means fewer people to control! Remember that when they tell you they oppose automatic voter registration because it’ll “enable voter fraud.” You mean the “voter fraud” they can never convict anyone of? And keep in mind we live in a time where so, so much paperwork documents our every move, so don’t believe the “voter fraud” hype.

Penny rants for October 25, 2023.

When I hear that a New Jersey state Senator, aptly named Ed Durr, said on Facebook a few years ago that “(a) woman does have a choice. Keep her legs closed!” and that state Democrats are using his words to tar other state Republicans, I am reminded that Mr. Durr spent around $300 to unseat a putative titan of the state Senate (Stephen Sweeney) in 2021 and that nobody covered all the stupid and obnoxious crap he said on social media before that until after the election. When I then hear that Republicans promise to “support women and teens facing unexpected or unwanted pregnancies” and “lift them up and help them and their families with access to adoption services, health care, financial and food assistance, counseling and treatment, and family planning” (as Idaho Gov. Brad Little has said in justifying his state’s abortion ban), I am not surprised to hear that Idaho Republicans cut funding for all that stuff almost on cue – and I’d prefer to see Democrat ads about that kind of hypocrisy, instead of the more sensational stuff that should have simply ended Mr. Durr’s campaign two years ago, but instead made him into the Democrats’ Useful Idiot almost like that was the whole idea.

When you hear that Texas Republicans are stalling gerrymandering-related lawsuits – and thus preserving their otherwise-unearned legislative majorities – by claiming all sorts of “privileges,” including lawyer-client privilege and “legislative privilege,” you may well wonder why privileges, even Constitutionally-established ones, always seem to outweigh rights in America. And when you hear that “legislative privilege” aims to protect the privacy of legislative debates, you may reasonably wonder why legislators’ “privacy” is more important than our right to know what legislators are doing, putatively on our behalf. Because they’ll be more honest with each other if we don’t know what they’re saying? Ah, they know how that sounds, right? And if someone defends Texas Republicans because “citizens won’t understand how private deliberations work and will overreact,” you only need ask why leaders don’t prevent such overreaction from happening before it starts. That’s what leaders do, after all, even in a world where our “liberal” media know nothing about anything and sensationalize everything. Sadly, today’s leaders work harder at excusing their failure to lead than at, you know, leading.

The good people at Popular Information offer another reminder that hysterical media reports about “crime waves” and “America in chaos” stand in conflict with the facts. Property crime may be up this year, but violent crime and murders are down, and both property crime and violent crime are half (or less!) of what they were in 1991, even though whining about it from our political class seems to have doubled over that time. Meanwhile, wage theft (which politicians never talk about for some reason!) outpaces property crime, and don’t even get me started on polluters and banksters. Seriously, I’m beyond fed up with tough-on-crime posturing. Politicians swing their balls about crime because they have literally nothing else to offer voters, and the only consolation is that it doesn’t work as well as it used to, or else Pennsylvania wouldn’t have been a wave year for Democrats in 2022. Hate to pile on, but when Vivek Ramaswamy says we need to institutionalize more people – which, I hate to say, we probably do – just remember that if he’s elected President, there’s no way in hell he’d ever actually do it, because how can you keep people in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage if you actually help make their lives better? Whenever you think of tough-on-crime politicians, think of the hate monster from “Day of the Dove.” Then they’ll make perfect sense.

Action: concerning internet freedom, health care, and pollution.

Long story short: tell our FCC to bring back net neutrality, tell the Biden Administration to make over-the-counter birth control pills free to all Americans, and tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous auto emissions standards possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate network neutrality protections post-haste. Net neutrality would ensure that your internet service-providing corporation won’t slow down or censor websites you want to see merely so they can push junk news in front of your face or favor websites they want you to see (likely because those websites paid your internet service-providing corporation). It’s one of the few political issues that unites liberal and conservative – which of course meant it was over a decade of pulling teeth to get our FCC to enact it, and then of course meant the Trump FCC repealed it, because people don't matter to Trump, only bosses do. So let’s bring back net neutrality, and make Americans matter again.

Daily Kos helps you tell the Biden Administration to compel health insurance corporations to cover over-the-counter birth control without cost to good Americans. Let right-wingers throw a tantrum over such an event if they like! They always throw tantrums whenever women get something good in their lives! And while having to get a prescription for birth control pills is obstacle enough, cost is also a pretty big hurdle, as you would know if you compared the cost of virtually any over-the-counter medicine with a prescription versus without. Women deserve control over their bodies, and they deserve to control their bodies without having to worry about whether they can afford it. If you have to pay more for it, after all, it’s not a right, is it?

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous auto emissions standards possible. Who wants to pay more for gas and have their cars belch more filth into our air and water? No one, not even the most right-leaning individual you know. But then the big oil corporations don’t want to do it, and then the most right-leaning individual you know – who really would like to pollute less and make cars run more efficiently – winds up squealing about TEH BIG GUMMINTZ REGULASHUNZ!!!!! and TEH FREE MARKETZ!!!!!! and this is why we can’t talk anymore even though we all want the same things. But talk past them, and to our EPA, and we might get some things done in America.

Action: concerning bankster pay, big ag, and food safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the RECOUP Act, reject the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act, and pass the Expanded Food Safety Investigation Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Recovering Executive Compensation Obtained from Unaccountable Practices (or RECOUP) Act. Remember how the Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, and Signature Bank (the last one had Barney Frank as a director, ha ha) all collapsed a little over six months ago? And did you know that Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO sold over $3 million in stock right before its collapse and a few First Republic executives sold about $12 million in stock in the months before its collapse? The RECOUP Act would, as its acronym implies, allow our government to recoup such executive compensation a full two years before a bank collapse. Maybe that’ll teach executives that they’re supposed to look out for their customers before they look out for themselves! OK, perhaps not. But if we don’t come out in force for this bill, it’ll be much harder to provide such teachable moments to executives in the future.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act. The bill sure sounds like it has a good name, but it’s an Orwellian title like so many others: it would nullify any state and local laws governing animal cruelty and food safety, which I have to say is real fucking “small government” of them! Right-wingers insist that the smallest communities know best how to govern themselves – until those communities stand up to right-wingers’ big ag paymasters and won’t allow them to put animals in cages in which they can barely stand or pollute their rivers with hog poop. I think the smallest community should get to set stricter standards without worrying about how billionaire corporations will cope – and if they want to set looser standards, we have to make damn sure they don't hurt anyone else. But you don’t get to have “states’ rights” just to oppress Black and Brown folks but not for anything else. End of.

Finally, in a related note, the Center for Science in the Public Interest helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Expanded Food Safety Investigation Act, which would allow Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) and Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) workers to go into factory farms and sample the kinds of diseases animals have that people could get. No use squealing BUTZ TEH ADMINISTRATIVZ STATEZ!!!!! about this, since a disease doesn’t respect state or local boundary lines any more than processed food does. How are we going to stop pandemics if we don’t deploy people to where they might be able to stop them? And why must corporate profits always be more important than our health, or our civilization? Folks who’d want to “debate” these matters should have no say about a damn thing in America.

Action: concerning financial regulation, tax policy, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep our CFPB as independent as possible, reject any extension of the Trump tax “cuts,” and pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would subject our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to the annual appropriations progress. Congress has long found this method of funding perfectly acceptable for other agencies, so why not now, with our CFPB? Probably because our CFPB has done a lot of good work for us. You’d think that’d mean something to our House Reps, given that they’re supposed to represent us (that’s why we call them “representatives”), but apparently the whining of big donors means more, hence why right-wingers want to defund our CFPB, which is an awful lot like defunding the police, since our CFPB catches financial predators. I’d hate for America to be a land where all you have to do to get what you want is have a lot of money and whine a lot.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to extend the notorious Trump tax “cuts.” I put “cuts” in quotation marks because most Americans didn’t get nearly as much benefit from them as the rich and corporations did. I’d happily make tax cuts for lower brackets permanent, but I would never be a hostage to letting rich folks pay hundreds of thousands of dollars less every year and corporations paying millions of dollars less every year. One percentage point is a lot more money at higher incomes, after all. Politicians pretend not to get that, but we do.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act. Big corporation (foreign or not, I really don’t care) wants to mine for copper on Native American sacred land that also happens to be public land? Why, no, thank you. And I’m not particularly anti-copper – the health care industry found out during the pandemic that getting rid of all those copper tables years ago was a big mistake – but I am anti-pollution and pro-clean water and pro-clean air and pro-respecting actual religious freedoms. I guess, for some people, religious freedom only counts if you’re white – or if you’re Black or Brown but also a Republican. That’s not the America we want to pass on to our children and our children’s children.

Action: concerning voting rights and government shutdowns.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and stop all the government shutdown drama. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would expand voting rights for all Americans, by restoring our government’s ability to stop vote suppression at the state or local level. Our Supreme Court ended that in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, by ruling that the Voting Rights Act (which gave our government the power to stop discriminatory voting rights laws) itself discriminated against Southern states – I know! – but the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would empower our government to stop vote suppression in any state or locality with a documented history of vote suppression. That sounds exactly the kind of thing Congress should be doing instead of indulging in shutdown drama.

Oh, yeah, speaking of that: both the National Women’s Law Center and the Coalition on Human Needs help you tell your Congressfolk to oppose brutal, hateful spending cuts and avert a government shutdown. I trust I don’t have to explain why, oh, but I will anyway: the folks who want to shut down government aren’t just evil, they’re also whiny diaper-loaded brats who act the way they do because they can’t win arguments on the merits. Government shutdowns mean no food inspections, no pollution inspections, no workplace safety inspections, and no soldiers’ pay. Anyone who wants any of that to happen just to prove a point about “spending” is an evil bastard whom we must oppose and defeat.

Action: concerning antibiotic abuse, printer ink, and climate change.

Long story short: tell WalMart to get antibiotic abuse out of its meats, tell our FTC to ensure we can get printer ink a lot more cheaply, and tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous carbon emissions rules possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

USPIRG helps you tell WalMart to get antibiotic abuse out of its meat supply chain. Why WalMart? Because it sells about half the groceries in America, that’s why! And getting it to root out the antibiotic abuse from the meat it sells would go a long way toward ending antibiotic abuse in America. Recall that seven out of every 10 antibiotics go, no, not to sick people or sick animals, but to nominally healthy feed animals, partly to fatten them up and partly to help them endure their squalid living conditions, and if we abuse antibiotics like that, we might as well put a welcome mat out for the next generation of superbugs. So how about we make antibiotics effective again?

PennPIRG helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break the big computer corporations’ iron grip on printer ink. You’d save big bucks using generic printer cartridges rather than the proprietary ones computer corporations bully you into buying, and while their scam certainly operates on a smaller scale than health insurance or cable TV, it’s the same awful principle. Our FTC has done good work, which is why Republicans call FTC Chair Lina Khan a “socialist,” but we should still treat all government agencies as though they’ll only act if we tell them to – because if they don’t, they’ll find (as they did during the Trump years) that it’s actually against the law to simply ignore public comments.

Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous carbon emissions rules possible. Our EPA has finally proposed limiting carbon emissions from existing plants as well as new ones, and that is, as a famous philosopher would say, a BFD. But of course the big fossil fuel corporations doing the polluting will get a lot of oxygen, so to speak, for their rubbish arguments. Waaaah it’ll kill jobs! Waaaah it’ll drive prices up! Actually these rules create jobs for folks who help implement them, and raising prices is to a large degree up to the corporation selling the service, but you know, when you can’t win arguments, just cry a river. Hey, right-wingers do it all the time.

Action: concerning striking workers, encryption, and free tax filing.

Long story short: tell Hollywood to meet actor/writer demands and end their strike, tell Meta to encrypt Messenger chats already, and tell our IRS to ensure that all good Americans can file their taxes directly for free. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell big Hollywood corporate executives to end the writers/actors strike by meeting their demands. Don’t let the occasional Seth MacFarlane or Adam McKay lead you to believe the life of a Hollywood writer is cush – the vast majority of Hollywood writers have just as much trouble making the bills as you or I, while the vast majority of Hollywood executives make millions of dollars, and want to replace all their writers and actors with AI as we speak. Of course, as Simon Pegg has pointed out, AI only imitates other folks’ work and has nothing of consequence to say on its own. Also too, all workers are important. So let’s get in these bosses’ grills.

UltraViolet helps you tell Meta to install end-to-end encryption for all Messenger chats like it said it would. While Meta fiddles, good Americans go to jail for having abortions or helping their family members get abortions – and Meta enables it all by turning over their data to law enforcement! If Meta had to turn over a bunch of data it couldn’t read and cops couldn’t read, that’d help good Americans struggling against our Supreme Court’s right-wing tyranny. You might say this isn’t particularly a law-and-order stance, but I reserve that phrase largely for banksters, polluters, and fascists, not for folks just trying to muddle through, and certainly not for folks offending right-wing wannabe tyrants. Shouldn’t we get more say than wannabe tyrants?

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our Internal Revenue Service (or IRS) to support direct, free tax filing for all Americans. Our IRS will start a pilot program for direct, free tax filing next year, but this ain’t rocket science, particularly since our IRS already has all the information it needs to do your taxes and we hardly need all the private, for-profit tax-filing corporations standing between us and our obligations to our civilization. I’m sure right-wingers will get around to saying that private tax-filing corporations are job creators, but I suspect most Americans will find that as unconvincing an attempt at hostage-taking as I do.

Action: concerning voting rights, tax collection, and public media.

Long story short: tell California to let prisoners vote when they get out of prison, and tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to defund our IRS or our public media. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Progress America helps you tell California state legislators to pass Assembly Constitutional Amendment 4, so that good Californians can vote on whether to restore voting rights to prisoners once they’ve completed their sentence. No one should ever lose their right to vote, but restoring prisoners’ voting rights once they’ve paid their debt to society would be a good start. And yes denying voting rights to felons after they get out is absolutely racist! Black folks make up one-eighth of the population but comprise almost one-third of folks in prison; why, I’d rather have polluters and financial predators comprise almost one-third of folks in prison! In the meantime, let’s be a lot less cruel.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your House Reps to reject any effort to repeal the IRS funding passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. Between this and their grandstanding about the FBI, Republicans are so hot to get rid of law enforcement funding these days! You might even call them the “defunding the police” party! But the added IRS funding has already started to catch some big-time tax cheats, and I know Republicans target our IRS because “no one likes paying taxes,” but people also don’t like schools and libraries closing or bottoming out over potholes or getting put on hold on 911, so maybe we should encourage Republicans to put their big-boy pants on.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to repeal or reduce public media funding. It seems like Republicans always threaten to cut public media funding and they never do, but that’s only because we speak out, so we need to keep speaking out. And, as with our Postmaster General’s zeal for getting rid of post offices in areas where no private mail-delivery corporation wants to go, a lot of public media work in areas where big private media corporations either don’t operate or put out a lot of cookie-cutter media “product” that doesn’t do a damn thing for the good Americans who live there. Sure I wish public media were less pro-establishment, but the folks who have nothing else likely don’t care.

Action: concerning pollution, apartheid, and cruelty to animals.

Long story short: tell our EPA to limit carbon dioxide pollution from existing power plants, tell President Biden to withhold military assistance from Israel until it stops oppressing Palestine, and tell our BLM to stop using cyanide bombs on animals. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous carbon dioxide pollution standards possible. Our EPA has proposed limiting CO2 pollution from existing plants for the first time – Obama-era limits only addressed new plants, you may recall – and that is, as a famous philosopher once said, a BFD. Of course the big polluting corporations will flood our EPA with comments about KILLINGZ TEH JOBZ and STRANGLINGZ TEH INNOVASHUNZ!!!!, so we’ve got to remind our EPA that fighting pollution reduces health care costs for everyone, creates jobs for folks who implement the new standards, and helps corporations innovate their processes. I think that does it.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to withhold military/security funding to Israel until it dismantles its apartheid system in Palestine. Hey, Jimmy Carter said it almost 20 years ago! And he actually brokered a peace deal between Israel and Egypt back in the day, so he might know what he’s talking about. You don’t have to believe Mr. Carter, of course – you need only note that Israeli forces are bombing a refugee camp in the West Bank as we speak. Who bombs a refugee camp? Two kinds of people: one, someone actually trying to create terrorists, and two, someone whose sense of self-preservation has gone so wrong they commit atrocities. If Israel is the latter, we can work with that.

Finally, the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to ban the use of cyanide bombs in animal control. Yes, we really do that, and it’s as awful as it sounds: the notorious M-44 cyanide bomb lures coyotes and foxes in with a sweet aroma and then shoots out a deadly poison leading to a long and painful death. And of course it’s not even as discriminating as all that, for it also lures in other animals and gives them that same painful death sentence. If a coyote attacked your dog or your child, you still wouldn’t be a civilized person if you wished for such an execution. Civilization demands more of us than that, even in our most inconsolable pain.

Action: concerning taxes, energy efficiency, and voting.

Long story short: tell our IRS to make tax filing a lot easier, tell the Biden Administration to strengthen federal building codes, and tell state legislators to abandon any proposed internet-voting scheme. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our Internal Revenue Service to offer free direct tax-filing software, no matter how much the big tax prep corporations whine about it. Most of us don’t have complex investments designed to evade legal scrutiny, so we ought to be able to just file our tax returns with our government and be done with it. And these corporations have been getting caught red-handed trying to divert people from free filing options even as they claim to promote free filing options, so Jesus Mary and Joseph why should they get all the say about everything? And we’re about the only rich country that makes people jump through these hoops about taxes, so let’s maybe be “number one” only at good stuff.

The Sierra Club helps you tell the Biden Administration to update energy efficiency standards for all federally-financed buildings. Even a conservative would agree that if we’re paying for it, we get to set standards, but today’s right-wingers would reflexively call any energy efficiency standards evil. But what’s wrong with living or working somewhere that doesn’t bleed heat, or gets electricity from the sun? What’s wrong with keeping pollutants out of federal buildings? Maybe all that doesn’t make some executive rich, but we’ve spent the last half-century letting these executives dictate to us how we live our lives, and that is not freedom. I mean, yeah, it’s freedom for them, but not for the rest of us. And that is why we fight.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell state legislators to abandon any thought of forcing internet-based voting on their constituents. Because it’s easier to steal an election conducted over computers than it is to steal an election with a paper trail, that’s why! Gosh, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea. Don’t get tempted to think that we’re the greatest nation on Earth so we should be able to do elections over the internet. A better thing to think is that we’re the greatest nation on Earth so we should be able to conduct free and fair elections! Which easily-hackable internet elections won’t be, no matter how many rich people get in the grills of state legislators. So we’ve got to get in their grills first.

Action: concerning child labor and pollution.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to enforce child labor laws, and tell our EPA to enact vigorous mercury and tailpipe emissions rules. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell the Biden Administration to enforce federal child labor laws against the states that would destroy them. Iowa’s new law is justly notorious, allowing younger kids to work more hours at more dangerous workplaces, but a lot of states want to do the same thing; I guess right-wingers “blame” higher wages for that, but those wages are the result of millions of Americans taking stock of their lives during the pandemic and deciding they wanted more from their jobs than the back of their bosses’ hands. So naturally they turn to child labor! Their efforts deserve humiliation then oblivion, so let’s get our government to deliver that.

Moms Clean Air Force helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous mercury emissions rules possible. As with lead, no amount of mercury is safe (just ask Zombie Isaac Newton!), but coal power plants still belch it out. No use going all TEH WAR ON COALZ!!!! whenever we contemplate limiting mercury emissions; one would think a coal corporation would constantly refine its processes to deliver energy more efficiently and pollutes less! But one would also realize that coal corporations, like all the others, mainly try to goose up stock prices at the expense of every other aim, and that’s why our government has to step in on our behalf and make them do the right thing.

Finally, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous passenger car and truck tailpipe emissions rules possible, so that we pollute the air less and save good American car-drivers money. Passenger cars and trucks account for well over half of all vehicle-caused climate emissions, and if you can go farther with less power, you’ll spend less money as well as pollute less. And why would anyone oppose these things? Are folks really objectively pro-pollution? Well, some are objectively pro-more money for rich folks, and that leads them to be objectively pro-pollution, whether they see that or not. Of course, they don’t get all the say about everything in America – if we speak out.

Thieves in the Temple will be off all next week, so everyone, enjoy your holiday!

Around the table: "law and order" my ass!

When I hear Ben Shapiro say, in re Donald Trump’s latest legal troubles, that “the only way that you actually restore the credibility of the justice system is to have Republicans prosecute Republicans and Democrats prosecute Democrats,” I note that folks who trap themselves in corners always make up new rules. Pledge allegiance to America, Mr. Shapiro, and not Donald Trump, and you won’t have to resort to such stratagems. Also too, Republicans have so thoroughly won the “law and order” propaganda war that even Democratic Presidents tend to appoint Republicans to law enforcement positions in their Administrations, so again we must ask: why does anyone listen to Ben Shapiro?

From Popular Information we learn that murder rates have dropped rather dramatically in at least 90 cities in 2023, and surprise, surprise! Our “liberal” media have basically ignored this development.” That’s partly because all they care about is sensationalism! But also, when they covered the 2020 spike in murder rates – when it was still much lower than in the relatively pandemic-free ‘80s and ‘90s – they argued that Donald Trump’s “law and order” approach was needed, even though the murder spike occurred on his watch. How else to blame liberals for everything? I did actually type the phrase “Donald Trump’s ‘law and order’ approach” without spritzing tea all over my keyboard. (Also too, think Larry Krasner will ever get any credit for Philadelphia’s 17% murder rate decline? I kid, of course.)

When I hear that a proposed constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights in Florida enjoys 70% support but “its passage is far from assured,” I’m reminded not only that Florida is a fascist state that deserves ejection from our Union, but that a lot of very, very popular ideas die once the big corporations, to quote a phrase, flood the zone with shit. And when I hear about the anticipated battle over whether the amendment should say “pregnant people” instead of “women,” I think we worry too much about offending other people – seriously, if you’re insistent enough on saying “women” that you’d rather see the amendment die, I don’t want you in my foxhole. Saying “patient” instead was a pretty good way to slice that knot, though. And rest assured that right-wing complaints about the amendment are far, far worse than any battle over diction.

Dahlia Lithwick at Salon argues that calling Justice Alito’s fishing trip imbroglio an “ethics” issue actually diminishes its evil, but since I don’t actually “tend to think of ‘ethics’ scandals in league with failures to use the correct shrimp fork,” I can’t say I agree. I do agree that “(i)t is a big-game safari for access to powerful people,” and that the Justices are actually “the hunted” in that safari. And I also say that we Americans like to flaunt our cynicism, particularly about ethics, because we have far less mastery over our lives than we did 50 years ago, and while we need to struggle to regain that mastery, we also need to shame cynics who strut around like peacocks. (Of course cynicism isn’t as great an evil as dishonesty or hypocrisy; it is a gateway drug to either or both, but maybe I hate it more than I should because I see so many good people become cynics.)

This 2019 article alleging that “Your Cotton Tote is Pretty Much the Worst Replacement for a Plastic Bag” seems like the sort of thing an editor demanded – while it’s true that manufacturing cotton actually uses up a lot more resources than manufacturing plastic does, you must also consider that plastic never breaks down and chokes our oceans and winds up in our bodies at alarming and unhealthy rates, which fact the article does disclose in paragraph 3, but almost dismissively. One might just as easily say that the Chicago Bears were a pretty good team last year except for all the losing, and you would not feel particularly informed by that statement. Also, what about hemp, which would be more durable and which uses up way less water and fertilizer than cotton does? If we ask our “liberal” media, we might never know!

Finally, the Georgia Elections Board has cleared pollworkers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss of all those ridiculous election fraud allegations, and in a sane and decent society, the knowledge that a Republican-dominated board cleared them would be enough to end all the stupid stories and death threats. Sadly, the only reason that’ll ever happen is that folks have moved on to some new outrage manufactured by their right-wing thought-leaders – dirty books, trans folk, it doesn’t matter. Have I mentioned that folks who make death threats are the weakest, most cowardly people on Earth? It is possible I have not mentioned that yet.

Action: concerning health care, education, and food stamps.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to keep no-cost preventive health care, tell Ohio state legislators to reject an anti-education bill, and tell your Congressfolk to stop with the cutting of food stamps already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Pennsylvania Health Access Network helps you tell your PA state House Rep to pass the Health Insurance Preventive Coverage Act, which would ensure that good Pennsylvanians continue to get no-cost preventive health care. But doesn’t the Affordable Care Act already require that of everyone in America? Well, it did, but then that Texas judge, the one who’s had it in for Obamacare since forever, struck it down, in a ruling so terrible our Supreme Court should have an easy time gutting it, although you know how they are. All that's to say we must protect what we’ve won at the state level. And preventive health care helps everyone and saves money, so let’s get to it.

Ohio residents, take note: Civic Shout helps you tell your Ohio state legislators to reject the so-called Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act, which would prevent colleges from teaching anything that might give right-wingers a sad – like climate change, which the bill somehow declares a “controversial” subject. It’s “controversial” only because corporate executives want to keep polluting rather than embrace new technologies! Oh, and also because of the politicians who suck up to them. Frankly, I don’t find racism “controversial,” either – like climate change, it’s real, it’s happening, and it’s wrong, and folks who can’t handle these truths should move to a police state. In the meantime, let’s not let stupid people win.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk not to cut food stamps. But wait, you may well ask, didn’t the debt limit “deal” take care of that? We sure thought so, didn’t we? But Republicans upset about the “deal” continue to throw tantrums, such that the House couldn’t pass any legislation last week, and Congress also has to pass actual appropriations bills in a few months, so they’ve seized on “more food stamp cuts” as the way to, I don’t know, feel better about themselves? Someone who’d cut food stamps to feel better about themselves will have a tough meeting with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. We could help them avoid that fate by communicating our will that they not cut food stamps.

Action: concerning child labor, corruption, and pollution.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to enforce federal child labor laws more vigorously, tell our government to remove Judge Aileen Cannon from the Trump indictment, and tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous mercury/air toxin regulations possible Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell the Biden Administration to enforce child labor laws more vigorously, especially now that states are starting to make child labor legal again! You know, because “no one wants to work” – which you may more reasonably read as “no one wants to work for dung pellets” -- except for young kids who’ve never had to make a budget and thus don’t know that $7.25/hour won’t help them get a one-bedroom apartment or pay their water, electricity, or internet bills. Children are either The Future or they’re just another labor pool to exploit; they can’t be both – but it’s moot if the Biden Administration doesn’t do their job.

Care2 helps you demand that U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon have the Trump indictment taken from her. Normally federal judges get cases at random – unless they were involved in some way with those cases before. But that shouldn’t be reason enough to give it to Judge Cannon, since her involvement consisted largely of hindering our Justice Department’s review of documents, her grasp of the law in her orders so tenuous that the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned them. Of course I don’t have to mention which diaper-loaded brat of a President appointed her. But Judge Cannon should not oversee the Trump indictment for the same reason you wouldn’t let someone rebuild your house just because they had experience burning it down.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect us from mercury and other airborne toxins as vigorously as possible. Don’t believe the hype that “the air is so much cleaner now, so now the EPA is just killing jobs.” We have to work to keep our air clean from the moment we become conscious of that need until the moment we pass from this Earth, and we don’t get to stick a “Mission Accomplished” banner on that effort merely because we want to, or because some big polluting corporation says so. The price of civilization is constant vigilance; I’d hate to be in a foxhole with anyone who thinks otherwise. But I’m happy to protect the air they breathe, too.

Action: concerning conservation, social media, and pollution.

Long story short: tell our government to protect old-growth forests, tell YouTube to stop putting up 2020 election denialist claims, and tell our EPA to regulate truck emissions as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Forest Service to protect old-growth forests from logging corporations as vigorously as possible. Once again, while it’s good our government would actually propose to protect old-growth forests – all the Trump Administration ever cared about was making money for bosses, you recall – our Forest Service would still allow far too much logging of these forests to take place. Thousand year-old trees trap carbon emissions like nobody’s business and help keep our air and water clean; in that context, cutting them down so you can make money you’re just going to spend anyway doesn’t seem very far-sighted. But that only means the most far-sighted among us must make ourselves heard.

Both Care2 and Common Cause help you tell YouTube to stop letting users post false claims about the 2020 election. Which Joe Biden won, which was not “stolen” from Donald Trump, which was not plagued by “voter fraud” – you get the picture. YouTube stopped posting such videos for a while, but lately they’ve reversed course; they must think we’re not looking anymore, or that 2020 election deniers have anything to offer YouTube users except masturbatory rage. But Fox News just had to fork over $787.5 million because they amplified this crap in their coverage; we can help YouTube avoid such a fate by reminding them that our First Amendment doesn’t permit or obligate them to publish just any old lie.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect us from truck pollution as vigorously as possible. This may be The Future, but we still ship most of our goods on our roads, and tailpipe pollution causes a lot of health problems (not to mention climate change!), so we ought to make that process as painless as possible. And not for nothing, but the ill health effects of tailpipe pollution do hit Black and Brown communities harder, no matter how many right-wingers say so the roads are racist ha ha snort? We built a disproportionate number of those roads through Black and Brown neighborhoods, so again, we should make that fact as painless as possible.

Action: concerning regulations, food stamps, and defense spending.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the REINS Act and pass the RESTORE Act and the People Over Pentagon Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the REINS Act. Is the REINS Act really back, yet again? Yes, it is – the return of the REINS Act when Republicans control at least one House of Congress is now as predictable as water being wet, bears pooping in the woods, or the Pope being Catholic. The REINS Act would give Congress the right to examine Executive branch regulations again, even though Congressional laws already authorize our Executive branch to issue regulations, meaning Republicans actually want more bureaucracy. And you know as well as I do that they mean to go after anti-pollution regulations and anti-financial predator regulations, so let’s not give them more tools to create drama and chaos.

The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RESTORE Act, which would stop the cruel practice of banning people with felony drug convictions from our food stamp program for life. Yes, for life – because, as we know, no one ever rehabilitates themselves, nor do we put too many people in jail for drugs! Seriously, politicians who want to prove they’re “tough on crime” and “tough on Those People who use food stamps” push bans like this, but that’s exactly the kind of “toughness” that poisons a civilization. If we let people who stoke rage run our civilization, it won’t be very long before we don’t have a civilization, and passing the RESTORE Act would help us avoid that tragedy.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the People Over Pentagon Act. No doubt someone will retort that what good is putting people first if we can’t protect them ha ha ha snort? Of course, that supposes that we can only protect Americans if we spend so much money on defense – and that all the money we spend on defense actually protects us! We pissed away trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the money we could spend teaching children to think or ensuring everyone has health care would protect our civilization a lot better than all the corporate welfare for defense contracting corporations ever could. And it’s well past time we got that right.

Action: concerning harassment of protestors, government spying, and petrochemical pollution.

Long story short: tell DeKalb County’s District Attorney to drop charges against the fund bailing out Cop City protestors, tell Thermo Fisher to stop helping China collect DNA on Tibetans, and tell our EPA to regulate petrochemical pollution as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Color of Change helps you tell DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston to drop “money laundering” and “charity fraud” charges against the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has been paying bail for Cop City protestors arrested on trumped-up “domestic terrorism” charges. Think of how a government might call any charitable donation you might make, to a cause you believe in, “domestic terrorism” and I think you see the problem here. Plus they’re protesting the construction of a police training center in an urban forest; do police really feel “terrorized” by protests? Do we? Let’s reserve words like “terror” for those who actually blow things up and mass-murder people.

Eko helps you tell Thermo Fisher Scientific to stop helping the Chinese government collect DNA samples from Tibetans. You don’t have to know that Tibet has been an “autonomous region” of China for over 70 years, or that China has met Tibetan protests with all the repressions a modern police state deploys, to see that Thermo Fisher has aided and abetted evil here, and we can help stop that by deploying, once again, the Big Stick of Bad PR. Unfortunately, by “once again” I also mean that Thermo Fisher also supplied DNA kits to China to be used in Uyghur labor camps. But while it may feel like our work as civilized people is never done, it’s still the best work in the world.

Finally, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to protect us from petrochemical pollution as vigorously as possible. You probably already know the story: our EPA has proposed pretty good regulations, but they could be better! They could, for example, strengthen leak-detection requirements and monitor more petrochemical plants at the fenceline, so we’ve got to communicate our will. You know the big petrochemical corporations will be communicating their will, which will be comprised of word salad about “stifling innovation” and “killing jobs” and “the burden of compliance,” so we’ve got to get ahead of that noise. And remember: “compliance” isn’t a “burden” when you’re not trying to cheat.

Action: concerning plastic pollution and clicking-to-cancel.

Long story short: tell our EPA to curtail single-use plastic production, and tell our FTC to enact a vigorous “click-to-cancel” rule. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous plastic-reduction regulations possible. So far our EPA plans to stamp out the idea that converting plastic to fuel is “recycling” – fuel only gets used once, too! – but our EPA could do a better job stamping out single-use plastics, which cause a lot of pollution and health problems these days. We’ve only ever recycled about 10% of all the plastics we’ve made, and folks now ingest the equivalent of a credit card a week on average, so we’ve got to stop making so much damn single-use plastic in the first place. Doesn’t matter if it’s convenient! In America, we shouldn’t settle for mere convenience.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact the most vigorous “click-to-cancel” rule possible, so good Americans can get out of subscription-based services a lot more easily. Who wants to be paying for gym memberships and streaming services they’re not using but aren’t canceling because of the hoops they have to jump through to do that? I wonder what sort of comments corporate hacks will write to our FTC! Actually, I don’t: it’ll stifle innovation the burden of compliance costs we’ll have to fire people we can’t compete with foreign corporations. That’s all rubbish – but it’ll win the day if we don’t speak out.

Action: concerning monopolies, pollution, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, tell our EPA to stop power plant pollution, and tell President Biden to get with the firing of Postmaster General DeJoy already. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, which would, and stop me if you’ve heard this before, put over two dozen supermarket brands under one owner, which would in turn close stores, kill jobs, and raise prices for good Americans. Raise prices, you say? Obviously! We’ve witnessed over two years of corporations raising prices because they could, and making corporations bigger, and therefore more powerful, only means we'll have a lot more inflation. Now, by all the evidence, our FTC finds all of these statements sympathetic, but we still have to speak out.

Both the League of Conservation Voters and Penn Environment help you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to limit power plant pollution as vigorously as possible. And you can sign both petitions if you like, since the first deals with power plant pollution generally and the second deals with coal wastewater pollution specifically. Don’t believe the hype that Joe Manchin will single-handedly repeal his own Inflation Reduction Act if we make power plants pollute less, because do Americans let themselves get taken hostage all the time? No, we do not – in fact, all this relentless hostage-taking is kinda un-American. ZOMG I said the “u” word! I try to avoid saying it, but when I say it, I don’t regret it.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to take the necessary steps to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already. One more time: his 10-year plan to “revitalize” our Postal Service involves service cuts, slashing jobs, and raising prices; what a visionary plan that is! Is this why fools say the private sector works so much better than the public sector? Because worse service, fewer jobs, and higher prices sure don’t sound better! Figure in also that service cuts translates directly to good Americans not getting life-saving medicines through the mail, and you’ll see that we still need to save our Postal Service.

Action: concerning bankster pay, fuel efficiency, and uranium pollution.

Long story short: tell our SEC to curb CEO pay at crashed banks, tell our EPA to enact the strongest possible fuel efficiency standards, and tell the Biden Administration to keep uranium mining corporations away from the Grand Canyon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to write the most vigorous clawback rule possible for bank executives. The Dodd-Frank law mandated that our SEC write a rule allowing our government to “claw back” CEO compensation after a bank fails, and sadly, our SEC is just now getting around to writing it, but we might as well take this opportunity to help give banksters a reason not to take massive risks with our money that crash banks. As it is now, banks crash and the CEOs get a golden parachute to go away – and that hardly ensures they’ll take care of our money, does it? A good clawback rule will do much better by us.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the strongest fuel efficiency standards possible. Because literally no one on Earth says I want my car to be less fuel-efficient so that I can pollute more and pay more for gas! Auto CEOs may make all kinds of excuses so they don’t have to make better cars, but we don’t have to listen to them. And certainly don’t let people tell you that stronger fuel efficiency standards mean nothing because we’re still driving and driving means polluting. We don’t let the perfect murder the good, and no law of physics says you can’t support stronger fuel efficiency standards and a more walkable world at the same time.

Demand Progress helps you tell the Biden Administration to keep uranium mining corporations away from the Grand Canyon. Allowing uranium mining to pollute the drinking water around the Grand Canyon area would come perilously close to is nothing sacred? territory. I mean, anyone who’s ever seen the Grand Canyon wouldn’t want any kind of pollution nearby, even before they realize that the Colorado River that runs through the Canyon provides clean drinking water to seven U.S. states. And those who insist you can have both the Grand Canyon and uranium mining are wrong – once uranium mining corporations come in, clean water goes, and once it’s gone, we ain’t getting it back.

Action: concerning "free" trade, housing policy, and fuel emissions.

Long story short: tell Indo-Pacific Trade Deal negotiators to put people and planet above profits, share your story about background checks and renting apartments with our CFPB, and tell our EPA and NHTSA to enact the most vigorous fuel emissions standards possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Trade Justice helps you tell Indo-Pacific Trade Deal negotiators to ensure that any trade deal prioritize people and our planet over profits. If you think of the notorious “Trans-Pacific Partnership” when you hear about a proposed Indo-Pacific Trade Deal, I wouldn’t blame you, and frankly, I’d prefer no “free” trade deal at all. But our leaders may finally be listening to us; after all, the USMCA trade deal is a dramatic improvement upon NAFTA – for which both former President Trump and House Democrats deserve credit – and I certainly don’t let the perfect murder the good. Still, we should remain on our guard, so that we don’t let the evil murder the good, either.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your story about background checks and renting apartments to our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB). Our CFPB wants comments about this matter, particularly because we all suspect that landlords use background checks to raise rents, and don’t let folks retort so what, landlords will use any excuse to raise your rent, because the whole point of this particular CFPB rulemaking process is to prevent landlords from using any excuse to raise your rent! And background checks tell us nothing about someone’s ability to pay rent.

Finally, Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (or NHTSA) to enact the strongest fuel-emission standards possible. Don’t listen to the folks who say all regulations hurt small businesses, because how many small businesses manufacture cars? Exactly. Also, regulations capping fuel emissions result in cars that get more miles to the gallon, pollute less, and cost less to fill up. Who could possibly be against these things? Oh, right, auto manufacturing corporate executives, who don’t want to spend money to make money. They shouldn’t get all the say about this matter – but they will, if we don’t speak up.

Action: concerning wildlife conservation, environmental racism, and corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act and the Environmental Justice for All Act, and tell your Senators to investigate alleged corruption on the part of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which would give our government more funding to enforce the Endangered Species Act. The bill would allot about $1 billion more annually to wildlife conservation; that’s $1 billion out of at least $5 trillion in expenditures, so don’t let right-wingers act like that’s some unconscionable amount of money. Don’t let them tell you wildlife conservation and protecting endangered species are some kind of luxury, either, because they’re not – not to a great civilization, anyway, and a civilization that pretends the “free” market must do everything most certainly is not great.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Environmental Justice for All Act, which would, at long last, attack the system that allows big corporations to situate their most noxious power plants in majority-Black or majority-Brown neighborhoods. The bill would (among other things) let good Americans sue for discrimination over the pollution and bad health they’ve suffered and would take past environmental racism into future permitting decisions. We also need to enforce the Fair Housing Act in a way that honors Dr. King and all those who fought for it, but in the meantime we need to pass this bill to help stop environmental racism.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for his acceptance of expensive gifts. Republicans will act like such an investigation is a partisan issue – I’m sure they’ll say “witch hunt,” too, which insults everyone who ever died in an actual witch hunt – but when they do, all you have to say is: if you’re a judge, is it OK to get large gifts from people who might have a case before you one day, let alone fail to follow the few disclosure laws we do have? Some folks will say “yes,” and you can dismiss them, shun them, and shame them. But the rest should have something to think about.

Action: concerning facial recognition, the care economy, and renewable energy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban facial recognition software at performance venues, invest more in our care economy, and ensure that any effort at permitting reform benefit renewable energy exclusively. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell Congress to prohibit performance venues from using facial recognition software on event-goers. You don’t even have to know that facial recognition can’t tell Black people apart any better than your January 6-addled uncle can to tell Congress to ban its use; you only need know that facial recognition enables law enforcement fishing expeditions, and opposing those, I would think, would be something conservatives could get behind as well as liberals. If your right-wing neighbor retorts BUTZ I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!, just remind him that could be him getting profiled and wrongly-arrested the next time Bruce Springsteen rolls into town.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell Congressfolk to invest in our care economy. Sound like a tall order for a Republican House that cares only about drama? Doesn’t matter! Right is right, and duty is duty, and Congress has a duty to help us make our lives better, not stand by while nursing home corporations and child care corporations continue to gouge good Americans who can’t do without them. They say inflation is bad, but inflation has, for a very long time, been really bad in areas of our economy that folks can’t simply refuse to participate in – if you have kids or elderly parents, they need care. So our Congressfolk have got to help, not hurt.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that any effort at permitting reform benefits renewable energy producers exclusively. Because there’s enough filth in our air and water already, and when politicians talk about the shift to clean energy “killing jobs,” they’re full of soup. Solar and wind and geothermal all create jobs; what they don’t do as well as coal and oil and gas corporations is redistribute more of your wealth upward to executives so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) are trying to take us toward more pollution and unearned income for bosses, so we’ve got to step up.

Action: concerning the debt limit, Oak Flat, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican debt-limit bills and pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act and the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

You want action alerts against the Republican debt-limit bill? I’ve got ‘em, from Coalition on Human Needs, Moms Rising, and Daily Kos. They’re trying to justify their whole debt-limit drama by cutting services good Americans actually need, which is evil. The Moms Rising alert deals mainly with work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid, and some folks think that’s common-sensical, but they’re wrong: work requirements aren’t a good idea for a program that’s supposed to help you when you don’t have work. And finding and punishing fraud is a separate issue. How about we cut the budget of fighter planes that don’t fight?

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, which would pretty much do what its title says – save the Oak Flat region of the Tonto National Forest from the Rio Tinto mining corporation. Numerous Native Americans consider Oak Flat sacred land – I guess religious conscience only matters when it’s right-wing corporatists not wanting to cover their employees’ birth control! – and the mining would also poison and deplete the water there. Despite Native Americans' heroic efforts in keeping Rio Tinto out, the project still isn’t dead; that’s why we step up, as we have before, and we keep stepping up until our Congressfolk act.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act. Banning anyone who might counsel abortion from providing health care overseas (as the Helms Amendment does) hurts our efforts to get birth control and other health care to other countries, so let’s not let philosophical purity murder what works – and, you know, let’s not let it murder people, too. I suppose right-wingers will try to hide their sexist objective by yelling AMURIKA FIRSTZ!!!!! But unsafe abortions and maternal deaths – which the Helms Amendment surely causes – are an atrocity anywhere.

Action: concerning bad media, the horrors of renting, and mercury pollution.

Long story short: tell big cable corporations to stiff Fox News in upcoming fee negotiations, tell our CFPB your horror story concerning background checks and renting (if you have one), and tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous anti-mercury rules possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

No Fox Fee helps you tell big cable corporations Charter, Cox, and Xfinity not to give in to Fox News’s insatiable desire for higher cable fees. As Angelo Carusone’s excellent analysis points out, our campaigns against Fox News advertisers largely haven’t worked, because Fox News extorts huge fees from cable corporations, fees second only to ESPN – and this also means that everybody pays a higher cable bill because of Fox News! However, Fox News has, ah, landed in trouble as of late, and so we have a golden opportunity to pressure these big cable corporations into standing their ground against Fox News’s bottomless hunger for higher cable fees. But only if we speak out.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you leave a comment with our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) telling your horror story with background checks in rental housing. They’re looking to crack down on abuse in this area – on folks who do a background check on you without telling you, making you pay for said background check, charging you a higher rent based on your background check, among other things. None of this is cool, especially considering your background check might have mistakes in it! And seriously, to keep making people pay for mistakes they've already paid for – is a little more money worth the lack of mercy? Money you can't take with you, but mercy you can take to the Pearly Gates with all your other good works.

Finally, the Natural Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to strengthen rules preventing various forms of air pollution, including mercury pollution. As often happens with the Biden EPA, the most recent proposed EPA standards for mercury do improve the standards we’ve got, but they could be better – and the result would not be a “war on coal” as right-wing drama hounds constantly say, but fewer heart attacks, less cancer, and less brain damage in our children. Another result might be less money for big polluting corporation CEOs to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, but hey, this is America, where we all sacrifice for the common good, right?

Action: concerning pollution, the minimum wage, abortion rights, and defense spending.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the TAP American Energy Act, raise the minimum wage to at least $15/hour, pass the EACH Act, and redirect more defense spending toward human needs. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Native Organizers Alliance Action Fund helps you tell your Senators to reject the so-called TAP American Energy Act, which our House passed late last week, and reject any efforts to fast-track dirty energy projects. This bill would defund renewable energy projects, weaken clean air and clean water regulations, and ramp up drilling on public lands; imagine being the politician who actually champions these things! But some Congressfolk have also proposed gutting the National Environmental Policy Act, which gives communities a way to protect themselves from pollution, so we must fight that, too.

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour – or more. An astounding 52 million workers make less than $15/hour presently, and they all deserve a raise. Don’t tolerate any foolishness from folks who claim that folks who make less “don’t work hard enough”; in my experience, the folks who claim that made a lot more money when they were working minimum wage jobs. No, really: $2/hour went a lot further in 1969 than $7.25/hour does now. Right-wingers love pretending inflation doesn’t exist – until they want to beat up on Joe Biden.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the EACH Act, which would overturn the notorious Hyde Amendment, which has kept taxpayer money from funding abortions for 40 years. Some folks no doubt think that’s a reasonable compromise, but it’s really not, and not just because Roe v. Wade isn’t there anymore (so there’s literally nothing to “compromise” with!). Folks who have money will always be able to get abortions regardless of whether or not they’re legal, but folks who depend on Medicaid won’t, and as taxpayers we should ensure that everyone can access the safe and effective health care they need. And remember: if you think abortion is immoral, don’t get one.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to spend less on weapons and more on human needs. No, you can’t justify spending literally any amount of money by saying “we have to defend ourselves.” We already spend more money on defense than the next nine nations on that list combined; we’re spending far too much money enriching defense corporation executives and not enough on the things that actually defend and strengthen a civilization – things like education, health care, and housing. If we can’t defend ourselves for less money, maybe we’re not the greatest nation on Earth. Maybe we’re just the most arrogant.