Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning voting rights, pregnant workers, and credit reporting.

Long story short: tell your state legislators to create ranked-choice voting in your state, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and reform our credit reporting system. 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.

Roots Action helps you tell your state legislators to create a ranked choice voting system in your state. Maine and Alaska use it, so now third-party candidates no longer create openings for right-wing ogres (cough Paul LePage cough) to win elections. Right-wingers no doubt cite that as a reason not to use this system, and indeed, I haven’t heard a single coherent argument against it. Ranked-choice voting – in which you have to essentially seed candidates in order of preference – not only ensures that independent candidates can run and win, but also ensures that the two major parties can’t use independents to defeat the other guy. I think that’s something we can all get behind.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1085/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. We’ve gone over how the PWFA doesn’t “make it impossible for bosses to manage their workers,” but I have neglected to mention that the bill would protect all female workers who could get pregnant, by preventing bosses from making workers miserable if they get pregnant after being hired. A woman of child-bearing age could get pregnant at any time, but that doesn’t mean they suddenly lose all the skills and qualifications that got them hired in the first place! Sadly, too many bosses act like it does, because they’re not up to dealing with challenges. But they shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to overhaul our credit reporting system. Why? So that it doesn’t make so many mistakes, so credit agencies can’t let identity thieves steal your personal data, and so credit reporting doesn’t allow historical racism to keep crushing Black and Brown folks! Our private credit reporting corporations do all of that, and we just put up with it, thinking there’s no other way. Of course, there is another way: a public credit reporting agency, accountable to the American people, competing with the private ones! Now let’s watch the big credit reporting corporations soil their shorts.

Action: concerning voting rights, pollution, and pregnant workers.

Long story short: tell state and local legislators to secure voting rights, and tell your Congressfolk to protect us from pollution and make the workplace fairer to pregnant workers. 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 federal and state legislators to stop jailing people for unintentional voting errors. More precisely, the state should not affirm your right to vote and then jail you for exercising that right! Right, Ron DeSantis? His government just arrested 18 folks for “voter fraud,” and then the world learned that Florida county governments had told all of them they were eligible to vote! That’s some drama they got going over there. And frankly, the state shouldn’t take away your right to vote for any reason! But let’s at least protect those who vote in good faith because the state told them they could vote. This just ain’t that damn deep.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to abandon efforts to weaken enforcement of the National Environmental Policy Act. This could be the Manchin “side deal” he demanded so we could pass the Inflation Reduction Act, but he should have put it in the bill if he wanted it so badly! I mean, having demanded that President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda be split up into parts that could be “bipartisan” and parts that couldn’t – and having prevented most of the latter from passing at all! – he should know when he’s getting his own medicine. But seriously, we can’t rubber-stamp fossil fuel projects without ensuring they don’t spew filth all over the place, lest we hurt our children, and our children’s children.

Finally, the National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1085/S. 1486, the Pregnant Worker’s Fairness Act. Perhaps I haven’t been explicit enough: folks who would tell you that the Pregnant Worker’s Fairness Act would “prevent managers from doing their jobs” are lying. (Does it do any good to assume folks just don’t know what they’re talking about anymore? Nah.) And you don’t need to take my word for it – just read the bill and note that it requires that bosses make “reasonable accommodations” for their pregnant workers. And folks who think it isn’t “reasonable” for bosses to give extra bathroom breaks and not refuse to hire pregnant workers merely because they’re pregnant shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning marriage, pregnant workers, and baby food safety.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the Respect for Marriage Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, and tell all your Congressfolk to pass the Baby Food Safety 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.

Amnesty International helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which would protect gay marriage and interracial marriage from future Supreme Court decisions declaring them unconstitutional. Recall that Justice Thomas has told the Supreme Court to do just this, using the logic, such as it is, of the Dobbs ruling. And still Republicans pretend the Respect for Marriage Act is a “stupid waste of time,” in Marco Rubio’s words. You know what’s a stupid waste of time? Marco Rubio. And if we all call our Senators and demand they pass the Respect for Marriage Act, we’ll have to waste much less time on him.

The ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1085/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would make it harder for bosses to fire or harass workers for the cardinal sin of getting pregnant. Specifically, the bill would force bosses to make “reasonable accommodations” for pregnant workers – including less strenuous assignments and more bathroom breaks – and would prevent bosses from refusing to hire someone instead of making those accommodations. Let me guess the Republican argument against it: lazy sluts trial lawyers nanny state right to work fuck your feelings. I don’t think a pregnant woman going to the can for the 12th time would find any of that persuasive.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2229/S. 1019, the Baby Food Safety Act, which would limit the amount of certain heavy metals (like mercury, lead, and inorganic arsenic) that could be present in baby food. Since they damage babies’ brains! I guess the Republican argument against this one might be a bit more cogent: more regulations means more baby food shortages and you remember baby food shortages? But n.b. I said “a bit” – a great nation can insure its baby food is safe and plentiful at the same time, and demanding that we sacrifice safety for plenty is the mark of someone who doesn’t believe America is a great nation anymore.

Action: concerning taxes, health care, pollution, and pregnant workers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich, help more Americans get health insurance, fund conservation and energy efficiency efforts, and pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness 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 you tell your Senators to strengthen and pass the Millionaire’s Surtax from last year’s Build Back Better Act. The Millionaire’s Surtax would tax income above $10 million at an additional 5% (making an effective tax rate of 42% on that income) and tax income above $25 million at an additional 8% (making an effective tax rate of 45%). But some of our Senators want to lower those rates, when they should be levying such surtaxes on income above $1 million. It is a "Millionaire’s Surtax," after all! Most Americans want higher taxes on the rich, so our Senators should do our will, not the will of their biggest donors, who do not outnumber us.

Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Senators to keep expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies so that three million more Americans can continue to have health insurance. Our House already passed legislation to keep these subsidies going, so all our Senate has to do is pass that very same bill, easy-peasy. They need not attach poison-pill amendments or complain about the cost or say "just get a job" or say "I just can’t get there"; they need only pass the bill. It’s not like constituents who need the subsidies are "lazy." It’s more like the health insurers charging whatever they like just because they can are lazy! There. I said it, and I'm glad.

NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to close the Medicaid coverage gap, where two million Americans make too much to get Medicaid but not enough to get Affordable Care Act subsidies, and so don’t have health insurance. Sounds pretty absurd, right? Like the Medicare "donut hole" and the Social Security payroll tax ceiling, the gap exists because Congressfolk negotiated to win votes on the bills that created these programs, and given that exactly zero Republicans voted for the Affordable Care Act, this gap should seem even more absurd. Close the gap, and two million more Americans don’t have to lie awake at night wondering if they can make ends meet.

Stand.Earth helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 425/S. 1639, which would help fund conservation and energy efficiency programs. President Biden has lately invoked the Defense Production Act not just for baby formula but also for renewable energy products like tariff-addled solar panels; right-wingers will squeal TEH BLACK HELICOPTURZ!!!!!, but President Biden has done the right thing with lawful authority already granted to him by our Congressfolk. Now they just have to reauthorize a program that (among other things) helps buildings get more renewable-friendly, which also makes them less pollution-friendly and saves money. Who could be against all of that? Besides a hysterical right-winger, I mean.

Finally, the National Women’s Law Center helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would force workplace bosses to make reasonable accommodations for pregnant workers, like more sit-down work and more bathroom breaks. Anyone who’s ever had an enlarged prostate should be able to understand how a woman carrying something considerably larger in her abdomen needs to pee more, and a boss who "just can’t find" sit-down work for a pregnant employee probably isn't trying hard enough. With great power comes great responsibility, right? And to right-wingers telling hysterical stories about what pregnant workers will be able to "get away with," you need only say this: read the bill.

Action: concerning tax evasion, pollution, rent control, pregnant workers, and forced arbitration.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to give our IRS the resources it needs to catch rich tax cheats, permanently protect the Boundary Waters from pollution, and pass national rent control legislation, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment 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 you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund our Internal Revenue Service (or IRS) so it can catch wealthy tax cheats. You've heard that we lose $1 trillion every year in unpaid taxes, and you've also heard that our IRS goes after low-level tax cheats simply because they don't have the money to fight rich tax cheats and their well-paid lawyers. And that's why we should fund our IRS properly! It won't break the bank and it'll bring back far more money than it'd cost. If certain people would stop with the BS about how they'll come for the little guy if they come for the big guy, that'd be nice, too. I mean, again, our IRS can't afford to do anything but go after the little guy. So less drama, more reality, as usual.

President Biden cancelled two mining leases that would have polluted the famous Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, which is terrific, but it doesn't offer any guarantees about the future, so now the Wilderness Society helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Boundary Waters from mining for good. Among the many other reasons to protect the Boundary Waters -- like, that lots of wildlife lives there, and that it's a big, big tourist draw, which also means it supports lots of jobs and brings in lots of money -- the Boundary Waters is also sacred to several Native American nations. We still care about religious freedom, right? Or do we only care about religious freedom for bigots? You could forgive me for thinking that's all we care about. But I'd prefer to live in a better America than that.

Hot on the heels of a Senate banking committee hearing about the matter, the Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell your Senators to support various reforms that would curb corporate control of housing. These would include more investment in public housing and one of my personal favorites, national rent control. Only a few states and municipalities cap the rents landlords can charge, and most states actually prevent any of their municipalities from instituting any kind of rent control, but as recent events have shown us, we can't count on "market forces" to ensure everyone has a place to live any more than we can count on "market forces" to keep us healthy and well-educated. To those who would assert that "all price controls are bad," you need only retort "so paying less money is bad?" I think everyone can get behind that argument!

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would require employers to make reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers at the workplace, including giving them less strenuous work and more bathroom breaks while they're pregnant, and I said the word "reasonable" with the italics hammer in a perhaps-vain attempt to forestall right-wing arguments like "they'll let pregnant workers run the place!" The bill would also prevent employers from firing workers just for being pregnant, and would also prevent them from refusing to consider a pregnant job applicant just because she's pregnant. It feels like we've been fighting for this bill forever; sometimes it takes this long, and we have to just keep fighting. I'd prefer not to wait until men can get pregnant before it passes, though.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4445, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. So many employment contracts mandate forced arbitration for all employee grievances, but forced arbitration more often than not results in your boss winning, and you losing -- and in some cases, you paying for the forced arbitration! You'd have a better chance of winning in a court of law, and H.R. 4445 would at least prevent corporations from forcing you into arbitration over sexual abuse or harassment charges. Yes, I'd prefer to end forced arbitration for all disputes, but bosses seem to go even further out of their way to ignore sexual assault/harassment charges, and passing H.R. 4445 would get our foot in the door toward that end. And that's worth doing.

Action: concerning press freedom, voting rights, weapons sales, "Grinch bots," and pregnant workers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act so our Executive branch can't keep abusing it, tell your Senators to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act, the Stopping Grinch Bots Act, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness 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 Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act, so that our government can't use it to put journalists in jail. Yes, that's what Julian Assange is, regardless of whether or not you agree with him! And that's what releasing the Wikileaks papers was, too, and if we're going to put him in jail for that, then we should have put Daniel Ellsberg in jail for releasing the Pentagon Papers, and nobody's in favor of that, are they? I must say I find it disheartening to find President Biden continuing the unfortunate trend under President Obama of using the Espionage Act to punish truth-tellers, be they journalists or whistleblowers from within the Executive branch. American democracy demands more of President Biden, just as it demands more of us.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to vote on S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act, this month. Especially now that Democrats have actually snuffed out the shutdown and debt limit dramas! And easy as it is to make fun of Joe Manchin's objections to the For the People Act, his Freedom to Vote Act is about as good -- it gets rid of ethics provisions I wonder why! but it adds provisions that would keep states from hijacking the people's will during elections, as many states have moved to do this year. And early voting for 15 days in all states, same-day voter registration, making Election Day a national holiday, clamping down on partisan gerrymandering, restoring ex-felons' voting rights, and restricting dark money campaign contributions are all good works. So let's make our Senators do them.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4718, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act. In the wake of our government selling over $100 billion in weapons to nations we know abuse the rights of their citizens, like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Philippines, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act would allow our President to impose sanctions against any nation that breaks international human rights law, and that sure seems prudent -- I mean, you wouldn't want to be an accessory to someone else's genocide, would you? The bill would also establish a Commission on Atrocity Accountability and Human Rights, which would be able to supply Presidents with the information they'd need to determine human rights violations and impose sanctions. How would this bill's opponents object? Probably by yammering on about "socialism."

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5263/S. 3276, the Stopping Grinch Bots Act. What are "Grinch bots"? They're pieces of software that roam the internet and buy up all the most popular items, so they can resell them at a high markup. Nice work if you can get it! Actually, since you're not a Grinch-bot -- and, very likely, you're not someone who writes Grinch-bots -- you can't get it, and more to the point, you can't get something nice for your nephew for Christmas this year because some bot has already bought it up and now wants twice as much as it paid for it. In a time of supply-chain bottlenecks caused by COVID, this ain't exactly what you need this holiday season. But Congress has done this kind of thing before, with 2016's Better Online Ticket Sales Act, so they can do it again.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. We've been trying to get this passed for years, since too many bosses fire pregnant workers, won't hire pregnant workers, or make their pregnant workers' lives miserable; the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would prevent bosses from doing any of these things, by forcing them to make, and I quote, "reasonable accommodations" to their pregnant workers. Note well the word "reasonable," for when some right-wing prick rants about Big Gummint letting workers spend their entire shift in the bathroom, which the bill does not allow, because it is not a "reasonable" accommodation. Our House passed this bill in May by a wide margin, but the bill still needs a vote before the whole Senate, so let's prompt them to do that.

Action: concerning war, privacy, women's health, whistleblowers, and corporate spying.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the National Security Powers Act, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act, the Whistleblower Protection Improvements Act, and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale 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, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2391, the National Security Powers Act. S. 2391 would repeal all the authorizations to use military force (or AUMFs) relating to war in the Middle East, give Congress more authority over arms sales to other countries, and reform the National Emergencies Act, presumably so the next dunderhead who wants to build a border wall can't abuse it like the last one did. And if anyone tells you this would hamstring the President's ability to act, tell them that's a feature, not a bug. The President is only supposed to lead armies into battle after Congress declares war, not whenever the President feels like it.

Restore the Fourth helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1628, the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act. S. 1628 would ban targeted advertising to children, require that internet corporations get consent before collecting data from children, allow parents and children to more easily delete personal data from private data brokers, and mandate a whole lot more transparency about this issue than we have now. We have the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, but that became law over 20 years ago, and a lot's happened since then -- it's a lot easier to get targeted ads now, for example. S. 1628 would help update COPPA for modern times. Our kids deserve that, after all.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. The bill would essentially legalize abortion all across the land, in anticipation of our Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, which action would allow the states to regulate abortion again, and would make it illegal for states to restrict access to abortion in the ways they've done it over the last decade. The most recent egregious example? The Texas law that lets literally anyone sue an abortion provider for performing an abortion! Never mind proving standing to sue, or even that harm was done to you! A court will strike that part of the Texas law down for those reasons fairly soon, but why make good Americans wait?

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would require bosses to make reasonable accommodations for workers who get pregnant -- that means more sit-down assignments wherever possible, more bathroom breaks, no firing of workers just for getting pregnant or refusing to hire workers who are just because they're pregnant. I shudder to think of the "objections" Republicans will throw up against this bill. I suspect they'll mostly be TEH TRIAL LAWYERZ!!!!! and TEH BOSSEZ CAN'TZ DOEZ TEH BOSSINGZ ANYMOREZ!!!!!, both of which will be revealed to be utter horsedoodle to anyone who reads the bill, or to anyone who's ever been fired because their boss wouldn't get them a chair.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2988, the Whistleblower Protection Improvement Act. Folks who blow the whistle on our government's corruption deserve our admiration, because they risk their careers and their personal lives when they do so; people who think they just live off the fat of a huge reward have obviously never blown the whistle on a damn thing in their lives. H.R. 2988 would better protect whistleblowers from retaliation at their jobs -- even if their boss is our President! -- and would give them more access to jury trials and speed up the process of rewarding them (if their whistleblowing merits it), so they can get on with their lives with minimal placing of sharp objects to their wrists after three years of being completely unable to work, just as a for-example. We need their good works, so we need to protect them.

Finally, the Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. H.R. 2378/S. 1265 would prevent third-party data broker corporations from selling your personal information to law enforcement personnel, because selling that personal data willy-nilly like that may be lucrative for people who really should go get a real job, but it contravenes our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. If law enforcement wants to get you, they should get a warrant first, but buying up big chunks of data from brokers lets police work around that. And they shouldn't get to work around it! If you're tempted to get all thin-blue-line about this, just imagine police harassing you because some web search you did in 2009 raised their antennae.

Action: concerning corporate taxes, our Post Office, nursing home neglect, paid family leave, oil drilling in the Everglades, and fairness for pregnant workers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise corporate taxes to pay for the American Jobs Plan, tell our Post Office to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's plan to cut services and raise prices, tell President Biden to help hold nursing homes accountable for neglect, tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family and medical leave, tell our Interior Department to reject oil drilling in the Everglades, and tell your Senators to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness 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. Good hunting, and have a happy and safe Memorial Day weekend!

Another day, another Republican "counter-offer" on the American Jobs Plan that ain't as large as it looks, plus they want to fund it with unspent American Rescue Plan money! So the Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund the American Jobs Plan with corporate tax hikes, not stupid tricks. "User fees" count as a stupid trick; like sales taxes, these always hit lower-income working families the hardest, and we can't just blame Republicans for it, either -- some of our Democratic Senators (cough Mark Warner cough) favor "user fees," too. So we need to disabuse them of that thinking. If you can fund good works by raising taxes on the corporations that constantly use their power against us, you do it. This shouldn't be hard to understand.

Our Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, is as we speak finalizing his plan to gut Post Office services and charge you more for whatever he's generous enough to keep doing, so Progress America helps you leave a public comment smacking it down. If right-wingers get in your grills demanding that you come up with a better solution, well, you can always say "repeal the mandate that our Postal Service pre-fund employee benefits for an absurd length of time," since Congress designed that mandate specifically to cause our Postal Service problems later on (even Mr. DeJoy wants to end this mandate, because stopped clock rule, I guess), or "allow our Postal Service to offer basic banking services to folks in rural and urban areas banks won't touch," which our Postal Service could do until the late 1960s. Right-wingers won't be listening, but it won't matter, because our government has to listen to our public comments. Seriously, there could be legal ramifications if they don't.

Public Citizen helps you tell our President to reject the Trump Administration "advisory opinion" that nursing homes should be immune from COVID-related lawsuits alleging neglect. Let them fight it out in court, obviously! Too many corporations think they have a "right" not to have to go through the trouble of defending themselves, but if they've done good Americans wrong, then good Americans have an actual right to force them to make it right. Again, I shake my head at the fact that I still have to explain things like this. I know most people get it, but the people who don't -- or, more likely, pretend not to -- seem to have too much say about everything. That only means we need to be louder.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass paid family and medical leave. That supposedly will be the one of the main aims of the American Families Plan when President Biden puts it out later on this year, but best to tell your Congressfolk now that we want paid family and medical leave. Seriously, they need to know right now that this is a priority with us. We're basically the only wealthy nation on the planet that doesn't have it, and only a Scrooge McSmallgovernment says look how well we're doing without it! Because we'd do a whole lot better with it if we didn't have to worry about getting time off whenever the baby gets a 104-degree fever or grandmom falls in her bathtub.

Sum of Us helps you tell our Interior Department to reject Burnett Oil's application to drill in the Everglades. Not just because it'll pollute our air and water and disturb unique ecosystems -- and these are both good reasons not to drill there, and maybe do some solar and wind infrastructure elsewhere! -- but because Burnett already has two drilling sites in the Everglades and hasn't cleaned up their messes there, though they've committed to doing so. When someone doesn't do what they say they're going to do, they murder a part of the world. Oh, and the area they want to drill this time? Just so happens to be Seminole holy land, which suggests, again, that politicians only care about the religions of white people.

Finally, the National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1065, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The bill would force corporations to make "reasonable accommodations" to pregnant workers, and would prevent corporations from refusing to hire someone just because they're pregnant. You'll notice that each of those phrases preemptively refutes right-wing whining -- no, pregnant workers wouldn't be able to force their bosses to set up workstations in the bathroom, and no, corporations wouldn't be forced to hire pregnant workers just because they're pregnant. Right-wingers are formulating these "objections" as we speak, not to spark debate but to destroy it. Let's not have any of that.

Action: concerning jobs, law and order, pregnant workers, privacy, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk about your "red line" for the American Jobs Plan, tell your Congressfolk to oppose military weapons and "qualified immunity" for police officers, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. You can 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 Congressfolks' phone numbers, or use the links in the following paragraphs.

Tired of hearing how "bleak" the prospects are for a "bipartisan" American Jobs Plan? It's bleak enough that we're even negotiating with the supporters of the January 6 insurrection! The Republicans' "red line" is, of course, NO NEW TAXUZ!!!! -- although "use fees" somehow don't count as taxes to them, at least at this moment -- and President Biden's "red line," unfortunately, does not appear to include "the bill must raise taxes on corporations." Want a better red line? The American Jobs Plan must include a 55% tax rate for corporate profits over $1 million, must invest substantially in clean water, renewable energy, and the care economy, and must not include "use fees," which always hit working people harder than they hit rich people. Our red line matter more than their red lines -- if we speak out. (Daily Kos helps you communicate your will in re corporate taxes and renewable energy and the care economy.)

Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3227, the Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement Act, which would end the notorious 1033 program which funnels surplus military weapons to local police departments. Seriously, if you heard "police get military weapons" in nations like Iran or Russia, you'd find that alarming, wouldn't you? Don't let "but police have it hard" get in the way of you finding that alarming here in America, too, because these weapons don't help police deal with criminals -- they help police put down peaceful protests against their brutality! And don't put the phrase "defund the police" in your counterarguments, either. This is literally not "defunding the police," and attaching any concept that makes you mad to any other concept that makes you mad is not argument worthy of civilized people.

Further along these lines, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers in America. "Qualified immunity" is the legal doctrine, promulgated by our Supreme Court in Pierson v. Ray, that protects government officials (including police officers) from civil suits over their discretionary actions (i.e., actions not mandated by law), unless the plaintiff can prove those actions violated "clearly-established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." But in practice, folks trying to get relief from police brutality have to prove something almost exactly the same happened to someone else, and that they got relief, in order to get relief themselves. And judges have used the narrowest excuses to throw cases out -- "your example was about police siccing a dog on a suspect lying down with their hands to the side, but you were sitting down with your hands up, so it's not the same! Too bad!" No, I didn't make that up. We should make it hard to convict people of crimes in America, but we shouldn't make it damn near impossible. "Qualified immunity" does that, and Congress should end it.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1065, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Too many women in America have to choose between having a baby and having a job, and why should it be like that? If men could get pregnant, you'd best believe bosses would make every conceivable accommodation at the workplace, like assignments with less lifting and more tolerance of bathroom breaks. But too often we assume women have "ulterior motives" for getting pregnant, when, hey, who would get pregnant just to get light duty? Don't believe the hype that the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would "make it impossible for bosses to do their jobs." The bill pointedly does not force bosses to make unreasonable accommodations. When you read bills, you learn things.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Our laws already prevent most corporations (including the big telecoms and social media corporations) from selling your information to law enforcement -- but our laws don't prevent the third-party data collecting corporations that buy that data from selling it to law enforcement! Which they do, so if you're a Muslim looking up which direction Mecca's in on your phone, now our government can find out about it, and harass you if they want. There's a reason we demand that law enforcement get warrants to investigate you -- it's for your protection! And we deserve that protection even when big corporations figure out how to work around it. And that's why we have lawmakers.

Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. The Medicare for All Act would ensure that all Americans have health insurance, including the 30 million or so who can't get health insurance now, and we could deliver better care more cheaply. How? Well, for one thing, Medicare-for-All won't have a slew of million-dollar executives who need to be paid first. Also, Medicare-for-All will bargain with doctors and hospitals and big pharma corporations with the strength of a 330-million-person-plus pool, and in insurance bargaining, there's always strength in numbers. Don't worry that doctors won't be able to "make money"; doctors still make plenty of money everywhere that governments guarantee that everyone gets health care. So, really, there are no counter-arguments. (Cost isn't one, either; I've shot that zombie in the head many times, most recently last week.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning paycheck fairness and the right to repair.

H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, may get a full House vote this week, and it would, at long last, force employers to make the same accommodations for their pregnant workers that they already make for their disabled ones. And if you're quick to yell THE PREGNANCIEZ IZ NOT TEH DISABILITIEZ!!!!!, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) imagine yourself walking around with 30 extra pounds and a constant urge to pee, and 3) consider that employers wouldn't have to make these accommodations forever because the pregnancy will end. The bill would also prevent employers from retaliating against workers for requesting reasonable accommodations, denying employment to pregnant workers merely because they know they'll have to make those accommodations, or force employees to accept unnecessary accommodations when they can make reasonable ones. The key word, as you may have noticed, is "reasonable," so keep that in mind when right-wingers start with their imaginary horror stories about what'll happen if we treat pregnant workers with fairness and dignity. Moms Rising helps you tell your House Reps to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn PIRG helps you tell your state legislators to pass "right-to repair" legislation. Why? Because we generated nearly 60 million tons of e-waste (or waste from computers and computerized gadgets) just last year, which would represent the weight of over 160 Empire State Buildings. And why do we generate so much waste? Because we're drawn to the new and the now, sure, but also because big corporations like Apple and Microsoft make it prohibitively difficult for you to repair your own products, and not just by refusing to give third-party repair shops access to parts and manuals -- I'm old enough to remember installing a faster processor and more RAM in my Apple laptop from the '90s; just a few years later I didn't even find screws on the outside of my iBook. And if we could do that easily again, we could make our computers and phones last longer! Not to pile on, but all this e-waste also means we have a crap-ton more toxic chemicals like mercury polluting our air, land, and water, and it seems to me we shouldn't tolerate that, either.

Action: concerning health care, pregnant workers, and discrimination.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support Medicare-for-All health insurance. The news hook, of course, is the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, and you may have heard about the fellow in Miami who got slammed with a surprise $3,000-plus medical bill after getting tested to ensure he didn't have it. Since Medicare-for-All would cover everyone, and since even right-wing think tanks say it'll cost substantially less than our current health insurance system, I feel pretty confident in saying that surprise medical bills would be a thing of the past under Medicare-for-All. We live in a nation where we can watch pretty much any TV show we like pretty much any time we like but almost half of us still can't afford even a $400 emergency; I put that first part in there to give today's more libertarian-minded observers some pause. I'm sure in the '40s they were arguing that no social justice movements were necessary because every house has a refrigerator now! But that doesn't help folks who are six feet under because they couldn't pay for health care.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. Some folks no doubt wonder why discriminating against pregnant workers isn't already illegal, but actually, it is already illegal -- and when you make something illegal, you then have to deal with all the ways big corporations try to get around the law in order to punish workers for getting pregnant. It's sad, but it's true -- as Noam Chomsky said long ago, the corporation is fundamentally anti-family, because caring for families not only doesn't help a corporation make money, it makes the worker "less reliable" as a cog in the corporate machine, since, you know, family members get sick and need to be cared for. So when you're up against corporations, you don't just need laws telling them they can't discriminate; you need laws telling them they can't discriminate in all the ways they've gotten away with since they were told they can't discriminate. But this is our duty.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Our President issued his Muslim travel ban over three years ago, has lately added six more countries to his ban, and has even mooted using the coronavirus to extend that ban to even more countries -- though even our Supreme Court, which blessed his Muslim ban without evaluating his own statements that he aimed to discriminate against Muslims, might not bless that last extension. See? Give an Executive an inch and he takes a mile! I guess his votaries would squeal NO TERRURIZTZ ATTACKZ SINCEZ TEH GREATESTZ PRESNITZ EVAHZ TOOKZ OFFICEZ!!!!!, but then these are the same folks who blindly supported the Republican President who did allow a major terrorist attack on American soil. And anyway, denying people entry into this country because they're Muslims is profoundly un-American. I try not to use that word "un-American," but some folks leave me no choice.

Action: concerning disaster aid, pregnant workers, and "religious" "conscience."

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Housing and Urban Development (or HUD) to disburse Congressionally-appropriated hurricane funds to Puerto Rico. Yes, once again, we have to tell our President to obey the law -- if Congress says spend money on X, the President has to do it, no matter how thin-skinned he is when Puerto Rican government officials criticize him. Seriously, must drama guide every decision a President makes? And I know, he's gotten away with his refusal to disburse money to the Ukraine until it investigated one of his political opponents, but right is right and duty is duty. And you can't discount the possibility that our President wants Puerto Rico to continue to suffer so that banksters can come in and steal all of the island's money, again. In fact, we really should assume that's the endgame! But that doesn't mean we put up with it -- after all, it could happen to any of us, particularly if we don't deliver our electoral votes to this President in 2020.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. No this bill will not be a "boon to trial lawyers" or "impose undue burdens on small businesses" -- and anyway, right-wingers who would complain that way love trial lawyers when they're working for them, and love using small businesses as a human shield against any effort to make big corporations do the right thing. And, seriously, forcing big corporations to make reasonable accommodations to their pregnant workers isn't a "burden." Forcing big corporations not to discount a pregnant worker's job application merely because they're pregnant isn't a "burden." And forcing big corporations not to retaliate against workers for getting pregnant isn't a "burden." For right-wingers, burdens only ever seem to exist on big corporations that already pay a lower rate in taxes than people do and already get more welfare handouts than we'll ever see. But they don't get all the say around here.

Finally, if you're sick and tired of our Administration going out of their way to allow big corporations to discriminate against gay and transgender folks out of "religious" "conscience," then Daily Kos helps you tell Congress to pass legislation that would nullify all of this Administration's human rights rollbacks. Our Administration may think our Supreme Court now allows anyone who claims to have a "religious" "conscience" to discriminate against anyone they want, but, actually, it doesn't -- the notorious Hobby Lobby ruling actually only allows closely-held corporations (i.e., corporations with only a few shareholders, who might be family members) to exercise such "conscience." Granted, our Court may just be waiting for the case that would allow them to expand that exemption so that everyone gets to pretend they're discriminating because Supply Side Jesus said to. Still, let's not let our Administration pretend it's open season on everyone's rights.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning war in Syria, pregnant workers, and fossil fuel advertising.

Rep. Gabbard (D-HI) has introduced H.Con.Res. 70, which invokes the War Powers Act and Article I, Section 8 of our Constitution to force our Administration to remove our soldiers from Syria unless and until Congress passes a resolution authorizing war there, so Just Foreign Policy joins with Change.org to help you tell House Speaker Pelosi to give H.Con.Res. 70, a.k.a. the "Syrian War Powers Resolution," a clean floor vote. You'll recall that the last House Speaker, Paul Ryan, prevented the Yemen War Powers Resolution from coming to a vote by attaching an amendment to the freaking Farm Bill that prevented a vote on it! I'd call that clever, if I didn't insist on cleverness being, you know, not evil. But if enough of us speak out, we can overcome the noise of defense contractors and lobbyists and haters. And by the way, passing H.Con.Res. 70 wouldn't "let the Kurds die" per se -- rather, it would force Congress to authorize military action that would help the Kurds, which is how our Constitution and the War Powers Act want us to do it.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, is back, and though it is actually already illegal for bosses to discriminate against their pregnant workers, the law also doesn't punish these bosses enough. But this bill would force bosses to make "reasonable accommodations" to their pregnant employees -- recall that word "reasonable," so that you're ready when right-wingers start making up shit about what this bill would allow -- and would also prevent bosses from forcing pregnant workers to accept unnecessary workplace accommodations. The bill would also prevent bosses from simply refusing to hire pregnant workers merely because they don't want to make these accommodations -- I mention that, of course, to forestall right-wing whining that ZOMG WE WILLZ BE FORCEDZ ONLY TO HIREZ TEH PREGGURZ!!!!! Ah, but I kid -- I know just as well as you do that literally nothing forestalls right-wing whining anymore, certainly not shame. In any case, CREDO helps you tell your House Rep to fight discrimination by passing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell big media outlets not to take any more fossil fuel corporation advertising. No, this is not a "free speech" issue -- partly because free speech is for real people, not corporate "people," and partly because buying ads is more a money issue. But it's not a "free speech" issue mainly because our First Amendment does not guarantee you the right to advertise on big media outlets, and certainly "free speech" isn't an issue of who can pay for more of it -- once a right can be bought, it ain't a right anymore, is it? It's a privilege. And gosh, you don't need TV ads to tell you where to buy gas or how to power your house, so the point of fossil fuel advertising must be something else -- like advertising how "green" they are, when they're really not. Generally, as civilized people, we should be reducing the amount of useless information broadcast on media outlets. I know how square that sounds, but nobody said the work of civilization is sexy -- only that it is necessary.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, methane pollution, and discrimination.

Both Houses of Congress have passed defense spending bills that include amendments that would get our soldiers out of the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen and stop our government from selling weapons that kill good Yemenis -- but, of course, now both Houses have to go to Congress, and some folks who should know better (Sen. Reed of Rhode Island, for one) are making noises about ensuring they pass a bill that our President will actually sign. How many times must I tell these pimps! You do the people's will, and you let the President take the heat for ignoring it! I tell you, they've got some serious Stockholm Syndrome sufferers in our Congress. Hence Avaaz provides some phone numbers: you can call Sen. Reed at 202.224.4642, Speaker Pelosi at 202.225.4965, and House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith at 202.225.8901, and tell them to keep anti-war amendments in the defense spending bill. It has to pass, after all, so our Congress holds all the cards here. They ought to start acting like it.

Meanwhile, our Administration has announced its final proposal for methane pollution limits -- and of course they're gutting them, because if a regulation actually protects good Americans from corporate pollution, it cannot stand! (Alternately, if President Obama issued a regulation, it cannot stand!) Allowing gas and oil drilling corporations to leak methane from their wells and pipelines willy-nilly not only packs a bigger climate-change punch than coal emissions do, they also deprive good Americans of royalties if the drilling operations are on public lands -- methane is, after all, a usable energy source. Hence Penn Environment, Environmental Action, and the Environmental Defense Fund all help you tell our EPA to reject its own proposal to increase methane pollution. Why bother telling our Administration to do things they don't want to do? Because they're taking public comments on it, meaning they have to come up with a very, very good reason to ignore the public will, or else the courts will smack them down -- as they've done to a great many of our Administration's regulatory "efforts" so far.

Finally, our Administration is also trying to let corporations get federal contracts and discriminate against people on the basis of their "religious" "conscience." Using religion as an excuse to discriminate is an old scam -- folks used the Bible to justify slavery, after all -- and using "religious" "conscience" to (for example) fire pregnant workers, avoid hiring gays, and force transgender employees into the wrong bathrooms isn't significantly different. Chances are it ultimately won't pass Supreme Court muster, since our Supreme Court ruled in the Hobby Lobby case that closely-held corporations (i.e., ones with a handful of owners), and not just any old corporation with a knuckle-dragging CEO, can exercise "religious" "conscience." But this Administration doesn't care about law and order; they only care about stoking rage in their votaries. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your Department of Labor to reject its own proposal to allow federal contractors to discriminate on the basis of "religious" "conscience."

Action: concerning unconstitutional war-making, discrimination, and working families.

After last week's alleged attack on oil tankers in the Middle East -- a drama where all the actors involved can't even agree upon what really happened -- our Administration is even hotter for war with Iran. Fortunately, it's not their call to make -- it's our call to make, through our representatives in Congress. Hence both CREDO and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your Congressfolk to stop the march to war with Iran. Do not believe the hype from your elected officials about "tying the President's hands." How many times must I tell these pimps! Our Constitution demands that we "tie the President's hands" in war-making! It's a feature, not a bug! Our Constitution reserves war-declaration power for Congress, and reserves war-conducting power for our President, but having the power to conduct a war is not the same as having the power to start a war. That's the way our Founders wanted it, and that's the way it should be.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee Holler has reported that Coffee County (TN) District Attorney Craig Northcott has declared that he doesn't prosecute gay or transgender domestic violence cases. His his reasoning? "The reason there’s extra punishment on domestic assaults is to recognize and protect the sanctity of marriage," he says (so I guess he doesn't prosecute domestic violence in unmarried hetero couples either!), and since "there’s no marriage to protect," (because of course he doesn't "recognize" our Supreme Court's ruling legalizing gay marriage) "I don’t prosecute them as domestics." He can believe whatever he likes -- I, too, often think our Supreme Court is wrong! -- but his job is to enforce the law, which says gay marriages are marriages. And no, "religious" "conscience" plus "prosecutorial discretion" does not equal "I can do whatever I want." Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Mr. Northcott to resign, now that he has professed his lack of devotion to law and order.

In a directly-related note, 18 Million Rising helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The Equality Act would ensure that federal law grants the same protections under the Civil Rights Act to gay and transgender folk that other long-oppressed minorities (like women and folks of color) can get. If it bothers you that women and folks of color would no longer get more protections than gay and transgender folk, you really need to reacquaint yourself with the whole concept of fighting the real enemy. And if you subscribe to the notion that, say, the Equality Act will enable men to join the WNBA -- I wish I were kidding about this! -- then contemplate more closely how well someone who tried that would be received in any of his social circles. You might also want to contemplate more closely whether the slight possibility of such an occurrence is really worth continuing to let landlords refuse to rent to gay folks or employers refuse to hire gay folks or knuckle-dragging state legislators continuing to torment transgender folks.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2694, the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act would ensure that employers make "reasonable accommodations" for workers who become pregnant -- which would include giving them sit-down work wherever possible and being lenient on bathroom breaks since anyone who's ever been pregnant would tell you they always have to go to the bathroom. It would not, of course, include letting them spend their entire shift in the bathroom, since that would be an unreasonable accommodation; I put that there for those who have so little faith in our justice system that they fear "small businesses" getting swamped with "frivolous lawsuits." And the bill would also prevent employers from firing workers (or otherwise retaliating against them) just because they get pregnant. I mean, all that would be quite anti-family, don't you think?

UPDATE. One Taylor Swift, of Nashville, TN -- perhaps you've heard of her! -- also has a petition (on Change.org) which helps you voice your support for H.R. 5, the Equality Act. It has close to 300,000 signers as of Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at noon EST, so leveraging some star power to help this thing get passed would be worth your effort even if you've already called and written your Senators. Taylor Swift's a good egg.

Action: net neutrality, and pregnant workers.

The FCC, as you know, voted late last week to begin the process of dismantling that agency's 2015 Open Internet Order, despite receiving almost six in 10 pro-Internet Order comments -- a number that jumps to 96 out of 100 when you discard, as you should, the "spam" comments signed by folks who had their private information stolen in a data breach. The FCC's vote begins a new public comment period, so The Consumerist helps you leave your public comment with the FCC about the 2015 Open Internet Order, which enthroned net neutrality as a legal principle. You know what the FCC did in its 2015 Open Internet Order: it used authority granted to it by Congress in law to reclassify broadband internet as a "common carrier," thus giving it the legal authority to regulate traffic over the internet. And the Open Internet Order does not, for example, make ISPs prioritize pro-government internet content over any other kind -- all it does is prevent internet service corporations from giving special treatment to some kinds of internet traffic. But if the new FCC Chair's plans gets his way, your ISP will be able to control where you can go and what you can see on the internet. Imagine having to watch some cable news jerkwads yell at each other before visiting your favorite political blog! It offends the civilized mind.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2417/S. 1101, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act -- which we've seen before in previous Congresses, shame Republicans acted like this guy and wouldn't let it come to a vote -- would, among other things, ensure that employers make "reasonable accommodations" to pregnant workers, and would prevent employers from denying jobs to pregnant folks just because they're pregnant. That latter item is especially important, for when do you need a job, money, and health insurance (since you usually get that through your job in America) more than when you're with child? What did Republicans have against this bill? You know, the usual: BIG GUMMINT HANDOUT OBAMA SOCIALISM COMMUNISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!! Today they might drop the "NAZISM" from their lazy Susan of complaints, but still, they've got nothing that would constitute a cogent argument. Not ZOMG WHAT IF WE HAVE TO HIRE ONLY TEH PREGGERS!!!!! The bill doesn't say that. And certainly not ZOMG TEH PREGGERZ WILL BE IN TEH BATHROOMZ ALL TEH DAYZ!!!! The bill doesn't say that, either -- recall the phrase "reasonable accommodations"; pregnant women use the bathroom more than you or I do, for reasons you might easily imagine, but they don't need the toilet moved from the bathroom to their desk. So both Moms Rising and the National Women's Law Center help you tell your Congressfolk to support the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Action: the People's Budget, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

As an alternative to incremental Obama budget proposals and reactionary Republican budget proposals, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has introduced the People's Budget. Long story short, the People's Budget would tax millionaire income harder than our government does now (though having five separate tax brackets separated by one percentage point each is a head-scratcher, at least to me) and would spend more on maintaining our nation's infrastructure than our government does now. It would do a crapload of other good stuff, too, like institute a financial transaction (or "Robin Hood") tax, permit Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices, tax investment income at the same rate as income derived from work, fund public campaign financing, replace the Affordable Care Act's "Cadillac" tax with a public option, and crack down on corporate tax avoidance -- all things we fight for every day. The Economic Policy Institute joins with Sign Here Now to help you tell your Congressfolk to support the People's Budget.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2654/S. 1512, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would prevent employers from failing to accommodate their pregnant workers (except where such accommodations would impose undue hardships upon the employer, which I mention because right-wingers will pretend that part doesn't exist in the bill), and it would prevent employers from refusing to hire, or retaliate against, their pregnant workers. The bill would also keep employers from forcing unnecessary accommodations upon their workers. And no, John Kasich, pregnant workers can't "just work from home" -- not if they're cashiers, not if they're waitresses, not if they're health care workers, not if they're warehouse workers. And when even the Supreme Court recognizes the need for pregnant folks to have reasonable accommodations at work, Congress has no business holding their fingers in their ears.

Action: climate change, country-of-origin labeling, and fairness for pregnant workers.

Some 49 Senators (including two coal-state Democrats who are probably toast in 2018 no matter what) have co-sponsored S.J.Res. 24, a "resolution of disapproval" aiming to gut the EPA's carbon emissions plan. Why? Because they're doing what their big donors tell them to do. No, really, that is the reason. They'll say it's other things, like "states' rights," even though the EPA's Clean Power Plan already empowers states to come up with their own plans for meeting the EPA's goals. And they'll use "small businesses" as a human shield, like always, citing the higher utility prices small businesses will have to pay if we have to produce more of our power from solar and wind and suchlike, never mind the higher prices we're all going to pay for everything if we don't, or that big utilities use any excuse to jack prices up anyway. No, they're protecting their big donors' ability to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. But they don't get all the say around here! The Sierra Club helps you tell your Senators to support the Clean Power Plan and reject legislation that would weaken or destroy it.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2393 is called the Country of Origin Labeling Amendments Act, but it doesn't "amend" country-of-origin labeling laws for meat so much as it repeals them. The House passed H.R. 2393 in June, but the Senate hasn't taken it up yet. Perhaps they know how unpopular repealing country-of-origin labeling laws are! They'll say their hands are tied, of course, since the World Trade Organization ruled that our country-of-origin labeling laws violated at least two "free" trade agreements and put other nations at an "unfair" competitive disadvantage. If it's not entirely clear to you how merely mentioning where meat comes from constitutes a "disadvantage," you're not alone. And of course, this is the same Congress that wants to ram another "free" trade deal, the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," down the throats of the people. I know it ain't just me who sees the essential relationship between two of the most unpopular legislatives in America. CREDO helps you tell your Senator to reject H.R. 2393 and save our country-of-origin meat labeling laws from the nullifying force of trade agreements.

Finally, H.R. 2654/S. 1512, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, may have a shot at getting passed, since the Senate version, at least, demonstrates some collaboration between Democrat Bob Casey, Jr., of Pennsylvania and Republicans Dean Heller of Nevada and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would mandate that employers make reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers on the job -- which may mean something as small as letting an employee sit down to do her job or carry around a water bottle or have more access to the rest room -- and would forbid rejecting a job applicant just because she's pregnant, or requiring pregnant employees to take unpaid leave if reasonable accommodations can be made, or otherwise retaliating against an employee for getting pregnant. That anyone would do that may seem incomprehensible -- until you remember that corporations are actually quite anti-family, since families distract workers from the important business of making the CEO as much money as possible. But Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Action: keeping water public, keeping pregnancy private, and keeping families healthy with the FAMILY Act.

Missoula, Montana residents may have reclaimed their water from private corporations, but the city of Cascade Locks, Oregon still plans to let Nestlé haul away water for about one cent for every 40 gallons of water, and then sell that water for more than 100 times that amount. Nice work if you can get it! The Cascade Locks City Council would give up its rights to Oxbow Springs water for the promise of 50 created jobs and the promise that Nestlé will double the city's property tax revenue. I'd say it's nice that Nestlé will pay property taxes, if I thought fulfilling your obligation as a corporate citizen was all that impressive, or didn't know that the public will have to pay for all the infrastructure needed to move water in and out of town. Nestlé plays dumb, saying it needs the water merely to "respond() to consumer demand." Respond to consumer demand? What was the consumer demand for bottled water, exactly, before corporations started bottling it? More likely Nestlé means "our CEO's bank account's demand." Sum of Us helps you tell the Governor of Oregon to block Nestlé's plans and protect public water.

Meanwhile, corporations promote wellness among their employees, and sometimes give financial incentives to get their workers healthy. Toward that end they'll ask questions about their lifestyle and medical history -- but some bosses try to find out if their workers are pregnant before they're ready to announce it, and thus get an opportunity to discriminate against those pregnant employees. So the National Women's Law Center helps you tell the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (or EEOC) to clarify that a boss can't force women to share the news of their pregnancies before they're ready to do so. The EEOC is apparently proposing to regulate corporate wellness programs, but their proposals don't actually address pregnancy in this manner, and they should. For as Noam Chomsky instructed us all those years ago, corporations are fundamentally anti-family, because some family matters (like pregnancies, illnesses and accidents) aren't as predictable as corporate bottom-liners would like. CEO attitudes toward things like paid sick leave are changing, but pregnant workers still need protection.

And speaking of paid sick leave, Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to co-sponsor H.R. 1489/S. 736, the FAMILY Act. The FAMILY Act would, as you may know, provide working families paid family medical leave for up to 12 weeks, at an amount not exceeding two-thirds of whatever they're making when they're working. And imagine that, in countries that provide fathers with paternity leave, women face less wage discrimination. It's not that big a surprise if you think about it, I suppose. Remember, also, that a 0.2% payroll tax (that's two-tenths of one percent, not "2 percent," "liberal" media) would fund the FAMILY Act, and the only people who could oppose that are the NO NEW TAXEZ EVAH!!!!!! crowd. Who don't get all the say about everything, at least not in my America. And for the fool who reflexively complains "they'll just pass the cost onto their customers": if they did that (which they won't, for the simple reason that the 0.2% tax would be split among employee and employer), that would raise the cost of a $10 dinner at Wendy's to $10.02. Complaining about that would just about qualify you as a whiner.

Action: "free" trade, the Endangered Species Act, and fairness for pregnant workers.

Word on the street is that the pro-"free" trade caucus in Congress is getting closer to getting the votes it needs to pass the "fast-track" bill the Senate passed a few weeks ago. See? Congress can-so get things done, if those things are horrible things. Just so happens that Tom Tomorrow, who writes the marvelous This Modern World cartoon, has (as is his wondrous habit) summarized everything wrong with TPP fast-tracking in a mere six panels. "They don't have specific objections to the trade agreement they're forbidden by law from discussing specifically" would be hilarious, if I were less spiritually-advanced (or maybe more spiritually-advanced, I can't decide). Of course, Our Glorious Elites attack us without disclosing the rules they've written, like making it illegal to keep the TPP a secret (which sure has deterred Wikileaks, I notice!) or preventing our members of Congress from taking any notes about the TPP when they go in to read it. What do they have to hide, you wonder? Public Citizen, Food and Water Watch, Sum of Us, CREDO, and the Union of Concerned Scientists all help you tell your House Rep to oppose "free" trade "fast-tracking," while CREDO helps you call House Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and tell her to declare her opposition to "fast-track," if indeed she does oppose it. She voted against it back in 1998, and doesn't seem to be whipping votes for it this time, but we should pressure her to do more.

Meanwhile, Congress also seeks to lay waste to the Endangered Species Act -- but should it be a cautionary tale that Rep. Richard Pombo tried that in 2005, only to lose re-election in his heavily Republican district in 2006? The only caution we should take is this: politicians who want to get rid of the Endangered Species Act won't come out and say so; they'll say they want to "reform" it, mainly by making the regulatory process more convoluted and giving politicians the option of just ignoring scientists whenever they want to let their cronies seize a plot of land so they can turn it into a money-making graveyard. Politicians love to add more hurdles to a regulatory process and then turn to you and say "see? The regulatory process doesn't work!" It's a little like an arsonist demonstrating that housing just doesn't work by setting your house on fire. At least half a dozen bills that would in some way cripple the Endangered Species Act have already been introduced in this Congress, so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop screwing around with the Endangered Species Act.

Finally, H.R. 2654, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, has been reintroduced in the House, and both the National Women's Law Center and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to support it. H.R. 2654 would prevent employers from refusing to make reasonable workplace accommodations for pregnant employees unless the employer can prove it would significantly impact the business's operation; the bill would also prevent employers from denying employment strictly on the basis of pregnancy, retaliating against employees who become pregnant, requiring pregnant employees to take unnecessary leaves, or shunting pregnant workers off to other functions as a punishment for getting pregnant. I mean, we know corporations are basically anti-family -- since having a family interferes with the corporation's bottomless hunger for money -- but as civilized people we know we should not be making it harder for people to get pregnant, and we shouldn't be making it harder for them to keep their jobs, either. So let's be civilized, and too bad if being "civilized" is the opposite of being corporate.

Around the table: this used to be the future.

A 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court decision strikes down a federal appeals court ruling saying that UPS didn't discriminate against a pregnant woman by failing to give her light duty work. Ever lift packages for UPS? Then you know a pregnant woman is really putting herself in danger by doing it. Naturally, the Court's decision is fairly narrow and technical, merely ruling that the federal appeals court didn't let the plaintiff make her case. But UPS has already changed its rule on this matter, so I'll call that victory.

Gov. Mike Pence signs "religious freedom" bill allowing businesses in Indiana to discriminate against gays and anyone else they don't like as long as they can use their "religious beliefs" as an excuse. That came not long after the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) declared (as GenCon did) that it would strongly consider pulling its annual meeting out of Indiana if the governor had signed the bill -- and not long before billion-dollar cloud computing corporation Salesforce declared it would "cancel() all programs that require our customers/employees to travel to Indiana to face discrimination." Maybe what the business community wants won't register with the nominally-Republican Mr. Pence after all.

Ho hum, three "progressive" Democrats join together to sell the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" "free" trade deal to Teh Librulz. And they're peddling the same swill -- we better take this agreement or we'll have no say over trade, as if rejecting this agreement somehow isn't a way of having a "say" over trade. And fast-tracking these bills defeats the purpose of "having a say" in trade matters, since you have less of a say when you don't amend a bill or limit debate on it. On the plus side, I suppose: former Gov. Gregoire sounds like she's totally phoning in her fast-track support.

I guess it's mildly noteworthy that Sen. Ted Cruz has slammed the "special favors" in the form of "subsidies and special benefits" that big Wall Street corporations "seek out and get" from our federal government, and not because his wife worked at Goldman-Sachs until a few days ago. Pretty much anyone could have predicted that Republicans could put on the robes of populism as easily as Democrats could, but as always, I don't see very much action from Ted Cruz on matters such as these. Did he shut down the government over untrammeled Wall Street power? No, he shut it down over Obamacare, which he just signed up for, by the way.

Finally, the Consumerist plays "Where Are They Now?" with your favorite 1990s websites, like AOL, Geocities, anad AltaVista. Out of all the big '90s players, only Yahoo! (still a good news aggregator) still stands in anything like its original form, though AOL's sheer persistence is to be admired, I suppose -- though AltaVista (my search engine of choice until Google outdid it) or Netscape (which I used all the way into the middle of 2001, and whose soul exists in Firefox, my web brower of choice today) deserve more admiration, certainly. Maybe Geocities, too, which I always found hard to load in the '90s and I'm pretty sure that was my loss.

Action: war, climate change, and pregnancy discrimination.

Just Foreign Policy and MoveOn still help you tell President Obama and Congress to work through the U.S. Constitution when contemplating war -- meaning that the President must come to Congress for approval, not the other way around. Absolutely Executive branch diplomacy should insure that regional powers get a say in the result (I do wish the petition were more explicit about that), and absolutely Congress should be putting a time limit on war-making and setting geographic limits so that this President (or the next one!) doesn't interpret it as a mandate to make war wherever he or she likes. No, setting time limits doesn't encourage terrorists to hide out until the time limit's up. We're the most heavily-armed nation on the planet; if we can't achieve relatively simple military objectives within a short time frame, then we're a bunch of idiots. And let's not also have the argument that if we don't dictate terms to the Middle East diplomatically, we're just setting ourselves up for more terrorist attacks. News flash: we've been dictating terms to the Middle East for decades now. How's that working out?

Meanwhile, Friends of the Earth helps you tell the EPA to mandate reduced hydrofluorocarbons (or HFCs) from common household appliances. A lot of appliances, like refrigerators and air conditioners, replaced chlorofluorocarbons (or CFCs) with HFCs back in the day because CFCs depleted the ozone layer, but now we know that HFCs cause about a thousand times more climate warming than carbon dioxide does, and maybe that is David Koch's real objection to having his coal plants regulated -- that HFCs are so much worse! I kid, of course. But we might have three times as many HFCs in our atmosphere in 2030 as we have now, and we can replace HFCs with better technologies that don't contribute nearly as much to climate change or ozone depletion -- like propane and isobutane, which do contribute more to climate change than carbon dioxide, but substantially less than HFCs. Guess who doesn't like proposed EPA rules limiting HFCs? The chemical corporations that make HFCs, of course. But they don't get all the say about everything that happens in America any more than David Koch does.

Meanwhile, Florence, KY police officer Lyndi Trischler has become pregnant, which isn't ordinarily news, particularly since Ms. Trischler herself has been pregnant before. So why is it news now? Because unlike her last pregnancy, Ms. Trischler's bosses won't give her light-duty work this time, citing new city policy that doesn't allow such work for any city employees unless a work injury created the need for it. It's safe to say that her pregnancy isn't a "work injury," though it now makes her unable to wear the body armor her patrol work requires. I've seen workers manipulate the system enough to understand where the city's coming from, but pregnancy is a pretty hard thing to fake, and you really don't want to discourage your officers from having families. Besides which, their policy just so happens to violate the law -- not only the Pregnancy Discrimination Act but the Americans with Disabilities Act, which doesn't cover pregnancy, but does cover health conditions caused by pregnancy. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell the city of Florence to make their policy less hostile to pregnant mothers.

Action: mass executions in Egypt, fairness for pregnant workers, and fracking in Pennsylvania.

Egypt not only plans to execute the 528 folks it sentenced to death back in March for their alleged role in a protest-turned-riot last July (including more than 400 in absentia), but has lately sentenced almost 200 more folks to death since then on similar charges. I'll say it again: if a country has to kill over 700 people at once, then something's horribly wrong. You don't even have to know that the court convicting and sentencing these folks barred defense lawyers from the trial on its second day to know that. And can you say killing all your political opponents at once, kids? Seriously, if Russia or China pulled this crap, we'd see through it right away. Still, there is-so such a thing as bad PR, especially since the world is not only watching Egypt, but I dare say pulling for Egypt to do the right thing, given the optimism we had when the good people of Egypt threw Mr. Mubarak out of office. Hence Amnesty International helps you tell the Egyptian authorities to overturn the death sentences.

Meanwhile, the National Women's Law Center has a novel idea to promote S. 942, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act: they're planning to deliver "the largest Mother's Day card ever" to Congress on Mother's Day with signatures supporting the bill. (At approximately eight feet tall, it's certainly much larger than what any company would be willing to manufacture in any volume.) The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would force corporations to make reasonable accommodations to their pregnant workers, which may include more frequent bathroom breaks and less lifting and sitting for long periods. Woe unto the corporations who say they simply cannot let their cashiers go to the bathroom more frequently when they're pregnant, for these managers will mark themselves as extremely incapable people, who could not be counted on in a real crisis! S. 942 would, not incidentally, also prevent corporations from discriminating against job applicants just because they're pregnant. So the National Women's Law Center helps you tell Congress to support the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Pennsylvania Gov. Corbett not to overturn a moratorium on gas drilling in state parks, as he obviously has a jones to do, the Sierra Club still helps you do that. We know he has a serious jones for gas drilling on public lands because he's tolerated the nearly 600 wells that are already on or right up next to public lands and because he seems sanguine toward gas drilling corporations' plans to add 3,000 more, but, as a famous philosopher once said, this livin' with the joneses just ain't where it's at. Here's where it's at: these lands belong to us, the citizens of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania; they're the lands where we hike and camp and hunt and fish, the lands that wildlife and the scientists who study them call home, the lands that hold the air we breathe and the water we drink, and all the Governor's talk about "non-surface disturbance" drilling which makes him sound so smart! doesn't change the fact that gas drilling, as currently practiced, puts all of the common wealth at risk. So don't put up with it; fight it instead.

Action: unemployment benefits, and fairness for pregnant workers.

Thought I forgot about long-term unemployment insurance, did you? Not when America still has close to three unemployed workers for every job opening, and our corporate titans still think labor is a bigger drag on their profits than their own lack of imagination and initiative. But the Senate (which is, as you recall, just one house of Congress) couldn't pass either of two proposed unemployment extension bills a little over a week ago, supposedly because Republicans couldn't offer any amendments. No, Republicans are saying that -- apparently they don't even know when they sound like whiners anymore. NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell Congress to extend long-term unemployment insurance already; NETWORK also helps you find a town hall your Rep might be hosting this week, since they're out of session. (Spoiler alert: apparently, only 19 House Reps, out of a possible 435, will hold town halls this week. I guess the rest are busy doing something.)

Meanwhile, while we live in a wonderful land, too often we find women put on unpaid leave or fired simply because carrying an extra few dozen pounds around for nine months makes you more tired and more prone to injury. But H.R. 1945/S. 972, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, would fix that, by forcing employers to accommodate their pregnant workers the way they accommodate their disabled workers. Not by doing anything outlandish, either -- by being flexible with scheduling, or letting them sit on a stool at a cash register, or letting them carry a water bottle. Yet I can hear the don't-tread-on-me crowd yelling: well, if you didn't want to get fired, you shouldn't have been born with a uterus! The day men can get pregnant, morons such as these will get on board with the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. But the National Women's Law Center helps you, sentient life form, get on board with it now by telling your Senators to support the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Action: featuring, for once, three bills we can support.

Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Sen. Leahy (D-VT) have introduced the USA FREEDOM Act (no bill numbers or entries on thomas.loc.gov as of yet), and yes it features an unwieldy title shoehorned into an unlikely acronym, but it shares little else with the USA PATRIOT Act. The bill would not only curb our government's (claimed) powers to vaccum up all the phone records it can, but would also amend the nefarious FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to prevent our government from searching through all that data whenever it likes. And the USA FREEDOM Act would create a privacy advocate within the FISA Court, who would have standing to argue privacy concerns on the public's behalf before the court. Yes, we'd like the bill to do more, but this is a good start. Both Free Press and the ACLU help you support the USA FREEDOM Act. I'm interested to see what all the ZOMG TERRORISM!!!! types have to say about it. Wait, no, I'm not.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1975/S. 942, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, would keep employers from discriminating against their pregnant workers. Specifically, the bill would force employers to make "reasonable accommodations" for their pregnant workers on the job, prevent employers from denying jobs to pregnant women out of a desire not to make such accommodations, ensure that employers don't force workers to accept unreasonable workplace accommodations, and keep employers from forcing pregnant workers to go out on leave in a misguided quest to avoid making reasonable accommodations. And by "reasonable accommodations" I'm talking letting pregnant women lift less or sit down while cashiering. Do these take food out of anyone's damn mouth? Of course not. Both the ACLU and the National Women's Law Center help you support the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Finally, Senate Majority Leader Reid plans to bring up ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, this fall. He made that promise in 2010, too, so I'm a little wary of hearing it, but lo and behold thomas.loc.gov informs us that ENDA (H.R. 1755/S. 815) has made it to the Senate legislative calendar. ENDA even has 55 co-sponsors at the moment, including two Republicans. The bill still prohibits employers from discriminating against gays just because they're gay -- which protections we need at the federal level because employers can still fire someone just for being gay in 29 states -- and the bill still specifically addresses pretty much all of the histrionic objections a right-winger could invent, because it still includes appropriate exemptions for religious organization, still won't prevent employers from enforcing dress codes, and still doesn't create affirmative action programs for gays. Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to support ENDA.