Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning labor, food safety, and pollution.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: in which Volkswagen workers have a much better week than Tesla owners.

Good news, everyone: Volkswagen workers at that corporation's Chattanooga, TN plant have voted to join the United Auto Workers union. Workers have lost two elections at this plant before (in 2014 and 2019), but won this one; perhaps that pandemic has reset good Americans’ minds in more ways than one. Of course Tennessee’s politicos opposed unionization; dig Gov. Lee’s blathering that “(w)e’ve seen plants close that made the decision to go union so I hope that’s not what happens here.” Nice job; be a shame if something happened to it! What’s going to happen to it now? Better pay, better benefits, and better working conditions, that’s what. I am pleased to see that right-wing hostage-taking doesn’t always work.

Bad news, everyone: some 30,000 good Americans died waiting for their Social Security disability status to be determined. Did they all die from bureaucratic negligence? Of course not. But one person dying from bureaucratic negligence is too many, and the solution isn’t what right-wingers say it is – LET TEH MARKETZ DO ITZ!!!!!, when ha ha, big corporations will screw you over far worse than your government ever will. No, the solution is to process these claims a lot more quickly, which means more staffing and therefore more funding. Which, no, does not mean more taxes for you. We’ve got millionaires and billionaires we could be taxing a lot harder.

Emergency rooms in deep-red states have been turning pregnant women away since the fall of Roe v. Wade – despite the Emergency Treatment and Medical Labor Act (or EMTALA) making such negligence illegal. Some mothers have lost their babies because of it, which nobody could have predicted! Of course our Supreme Court will strike down EMTALA when they get around to it, intoning, again, that “abortion should be left to the states.” And I’m sure they’ll also be very sorry for all the pain that causes, but everyone who prizes ideology above people says that, and I’m old enough to be very tired of it.

Starbucks fired baristas who were organizing a union, our National Labor Relations Board (or NLRB) ordered them to rehire them – and now Starbucks wants our Supreme Court to overturn that decision. Starbucks’s case is absolute horsedoodle – they actually claim they didn’t intimidate the workers because the store unionized anyway and that giving them their jobs back somehow constitutes an “extraordinary remedy.” Sadly, I can see this Court agreeing, and delivering a real pretzel-logic argument to do so. On the bright side, no matter what our Court does, all the money Starbucks lost won’t come back.

Our “liberal” media needs to be a lot less credulous when covering Donald Trump’s so-called “middle-class tax cut” proposals. Increasing the standard deduction and cutting marginal rates for “middle-class households” would be good policy, of course, but Jesus Mary and Joseph a payroll tax cut is not a “middle-class tax cut,” but a big corporate tax cut designed to hurt middle-class folks later in life, when Social Security and Medicare aren’t there for them because the payroll taxes that fund it never got collected. And you know any middle-class tax cuts will only come with another big tax-cut-for-the-rich.

Finally, buried in this account of the massive 4,000 Tesla cybertruck recall because of accelerator pedals that stick to the floor is the news that “Tesla has reportedly stopped development of a cheaper vehicle option so it can focus on self-driving robotaxis.” And this is why we don’t “leave it to the free market” – given the choice of serving the public with cheaper cars and indulging their vanity, the Boldest and Brightest Entrepreneurs who run the “free” market will choose vanity every time, particularly if they’re already so rich that they’ll escape accountability for every evil they do.

Action: concerning drug prices, affordable internet, and gun lawsuits.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to oppose anti-Medicare drug price negotiation bills, extend the Affordable Connectivity Program, and repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms 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.

First things first. Courtesy Helen Santoro at The Lever, we learn that several big pharma-aligned House Democrats have proposed limiting Medicare drug price negotiation. It’s like they’re saying if 90% of us support something, then we should all just go fuck ourselves! So let’s call our Congressfolk and tell them to oppose the ORPHAN Cures Act, the MINI Act, and the EPIC Act, and let’s also tell them to stop pretending we must either have price-gouging or no cures at all! That is, of course, a rhetorical hostage situation. And any politician who believes we should pay more for life-saving drugs deserves defeat. That certainly includes Donald Trump!

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Connectivity Program Extension Act, which would extend the Affordable Connectivity Program Congress created during the pandemic, so that more working families can afford internet. You remember how all our kids had to go to school online for a year or so? Well, we would be cruel to make it harder for some people to afford the internet connectivity they might one day need just to go to school again. I mean, we’ve already got cable corporations to be cruel to working families by charging whatever they like! Certainly our government doesn’t need to heap more cruelty on top of cruelty.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prevents gun corporations from being sued not just for their role in enabling daily mass murders, but also for the gun safety issues they cause. Why do big gun corporations need this kind of protection from the marketplace? If we extended that to, say, cars or cribs, people would recognize that as an offense to civilization right away. But guns? Too many people want to hold guns more sacred than people, and that’s also an offense to civilization. And, look, truly frivolous lawsuits lose, but gun corporations don’t deserve the privilege of not having to deal with lawsuits.

Around the table: of planes, rageheads, bad cops, and trillionaires.

Hard to believe, Harry, but Boeing airplane operators filed about one service difficulty report per day between 2020 and 2023, with Alaska Airlines filing the vast majority of them. Problems include not just windows blowing out in mid-air and denuding children but also fuel leaks and debris in fuel tanks and “malfunctioning stabilizing motors.” And while you may recall the Trump Administration shoving as much taxpayer money as it could Boeing’s way in 2020, the vast majority of these reports have come during Pete Buttigieg’s tenure as Transportation Secretary, and the FAA’s official response to The Lever’s report sure ain’t promising. “(S)ome airlines may file more reports than what is required”? Whoever wrote that needs to lose their job.

Oxfam International tells us that the world may have its first trillionaire within the next decade, and about the only consolation I can take from that is that, if history is any guide, that trillionaire will almost certainly not be Elon Musk, regardless of how good things look for him now. Of far less consolation: the person who does achieve trillionaire-hood will almost certainly be an even worse human being. In the meantime, more than half the world’s population has become poorer over the last three years, while the five richest men on Earth have more than doubled their worth over that same period, but please, right-wingers, keep whining about immigration and crime.

Pro-Palestinian protestors at Columbia University get hit with an Israeli chemical weapon – and college administrators chide them for holding an “unsanctioned” protest! After all, getting hit with skunk is something you ought to expect, since pretty much everyone can buy it at their local supermarket! Seriously, if only you had protested the way we wanted you to you’d have been OK goes well beyond scolding and into hostage-taking. Ask Rosa Parks how well the civil rights movement would’ve done if she’d just protested the way the state wanted her to. (And hey, wanna put some pressure on Columbia over this matter? Jewish Voice for Peace helps you do that.)

Families suing Koch Industries-owned Georgia-Pacific over the havoc asbestos has wrought in their lives condemn Koch for using a bankruptcy work-around called the “Texas two-step” to avoid paying out. Texas law allows corporations to divide into two corporations and then dump all their legal liabilities onto the second corporation – which then declares bankruptcy! I would never expect our Supreme Court to do its duty and assert that such bankruptcy arrangements hurt the rights of others to redress grievances, but that’s what they ought to do. In the meantime, boycott Dixie cups and Brawny paper towels. “Tear-a-square” paper towels are stupid anyway; I’ll always be a size-a-sheet man.

”21 Bodycam Videos Caught the NYPD Wrongly Arresting Black Kids on Halloween,” announces ProPublica, so “Why Can’t the Public See the Footage?” I’m going to go out on a limb and say the answer is “because it would embarrass the NYPD.” Look, if you do bad things, you should expect to be embarrassed, and you should expect your friends and neighbors and family to shame you; all that’s called civilization , and too many powerful people think they’re above it. And if the NYPD remains in control over who can see body cam footage, that doesn’t mean “body cameras don’t work” – it means we should have more control, and the police should have less control, over who gets to see body camera footage.

Finally, a Christofascist who shall remain nameless because history will forget him assures us that folks “involved in election fraud” will be “struck dead by God.” Well, I guess so, eventually, though it seems He’s working awfully slowly, particularly in that Georgia case where everyone heard Donald Trump say he just wanted to find 11,780 – oh, wait, he means us! Everyone thinks God’s on their side, long after it’s obvious He’s not. But then, rage is a hell of a drug.

Around the table: our sick, immoral, and decadent culture, part 876.

Back in late December Reuters published an excellent investigation of all the problems Tesla cars have been having – which the corporation has known about, and has been blaming on drivers. Ha ha ha it’s your fault your front right suspension has completely collapsed while you were driving! But we make the best cars! And come on, give us some room to grow, we haven’t been around for 400 years like Ford! This could only happen in an America where shareholder wealth is more important than customers’ lives.

French researchers find that hydroxychloroquine may have killed almost 17,000 folks, in six countries (Italy, Belgium, France, Turkey, Spain, and the United States) over a period of four months (March to July 2020) at pandemic’s beginning. One is tempted to say that must be a very small percentage of folks who died from COVID (the U.S. reached 2,000 deaths almost every day in April of 2020, for example), but you won’t find that reassuring if it happened to someone you love. What a hoot it was to have our President tell people to take it, saying “what do you have to lose?”

Americans for Tax Fairness study finds that Americans worth $100 million and up are holding an astounding $8.5 trillion in untaxed wealth. How is this possible? Because most ultra-rich wealth isn’t exactly liquid – it consists of unsold (or “unrealized”) real estate and hifalutin investments, which rich folks then use as collateral to take out low-interest loans to subsidize their lives (apparently adding five points to the prime interest rate didn’t stamp out these low-interest loans as I’d hoped). Thrilling that efforts to tap into this untaxed wealth “have virtually no support among Republicans.” Remember that if Donald Trump tries to run to Joe Biden’s left, because he’s shameless enough to do that.

When I hear that ISIS has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack on an Iranian ceremony (commemorating the Revolutionary Guard commander assassinated by President Trump in 2019), I am reminded that every fundamentalist thinks his fundamentalist forebears are sellouts. Remember when young right-wingers took shots at William F. Buckley, Jr., after he came out against the Iraq War? Like any of those little snot-noses would have been anything without him! Anyway, think the Tha Bush Mobb gamed out a member of the “Axis of Evil” finding itself in the crosshairs of a terrorist threat midwifed by the Iraq war? Of course they did! The “war on terror” is just the gift that keeps on giving! And it’s well past time we broke this wheel.

With the completely shocking news that FAA officials have ordered the grounding of over 170 Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliners after a window blew out on one of its planes while it was in the air, let’s take the wayback machine to 2019, when two Boeing 737 Max planed crashed in five months. You may not be surprised by the story’s critical elements: shareholder wealth being more important than customers’ lives, banksters running out engineers and making absurd demands of them because love of money. Yes, engineers should run more of America than they do. Certainly banksters shouldn’t! Banksters ruin everything!

You already know that Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley has lately omitted slavery while listing Civil War causes – but you may not know that she managed to deploy the phrase “I had Black friends growing up” in explaining that omission. Her larger point, apparently, was that slavery was so obvious it didn’t need to be mentioned. Of course describing slavery in the passive voice, i.e., “(i)t is a very talked about thing,” reveals that Nikki Haley fears offending assholes. Never fear offending assholes! Assholes live to be offended, and if you don’t offend them, they’ll just pretend you did!

Finally, Donald Trump actually claims that we could have “negotiated” the Civil War rather than fight it. Of course we should not “negotiate” enslaving Black men, women, and children – and that was why we fought the Civil War; just read President Lincoln’s private letters, in which he won’t STFU about how much he hates slavery and how happy he’ll be when it’s gone – but we should also remember that The Dealmaker only makes deals that benefit him, and he’d prefer making deals that benefit only him. Sadly, he’ll probably have the sense to skip over the next rhetorical step – World War II is something that could have been negotiated! You’d never have heard of Franklin Delano Roosevelt! – and just blame Teh Libruls for the Holocaust.

Around the table: of price-fixing, product safety, and American "hearts."

Lee Hepner writes about fighting price-fixing when it’s algorithm-driven. Turns out the problem’s even worse than simply arguing that even if everyone’s using the same algorithm, is that really a monopoly? – it’s also judges who, in Mr. Hepner’s words, “create() a Catch-22: plaintiffs need to have more specific evidence of an unlawful conspiracy before they can begin the litigation discovery process to get that same evidence.” And folks who would characterize strong enforcement of the Sherman Act as “judicial activism” might want to consider that judges currently “re-writ(e) the law to provide immunity to price fixing.”

Factcheck.org evaluates “evidence” of corruption in re that payment from Jim Biden to his brother Joe Biden, finds it wanting. Trouble is that Rep. Comer (E-KY), when confronted with the notion that “Joe Biden provided a short-term, no interest loan to his brother, and that six weeks later James Biden paid that money back with money obtained in a business deal that did not involve Joe Biden,” has nothing to say in response but well, I don’t believe it, and if you’re going to prove wrongdoing, you’ve got to have more than that. It must be mere coincidence that their Presidential nominee for 2024 might well be in jail for actual corruption in not too long.

Uh oh: big corporation finds its breathing machines are defective – that, for example, they could “spew dangerous particles and fumes into the lungs of patients,” no lie – but tells its distributors to keep selling machines they have in stock. And these machines were defective to the tune of over 3,500 complaints over more than a decade! Is this what people mean by “CEOs take a lot of big risks you could never understand, so they deserve all that money”? It’s more likely evidence that corporations with subsidiaries in more than half the countries on Earth are too big to safely exist.

We’d best respond to a few Republican House Reps’ efforts to expel fellow Rep. George Santos – facing 23 federal charges as we speak – as drama. Two-thirds of our House Reps, not half-plus-one, would need to vote to expel Mr. Santos, meaning it almost certainly won’t happen, but the endangered House Reps in New York state calling for the expulsion vote will get to shield themselves from claims that they didn’t do enough about their colleague. And in the unlikely event it does happen, the Democrat who runs to replace him won’t have George Santos to kick around as a campaign issue. So, yeah, that’s all very clever, unless you insist, as I do, that cleverness benefit more than a handful of people.

New House Speaker Mike Johnson (E-LA) responds to Maine mass shooting by telling Sean Hannity that “the problem is the human heart, it’s not guns,” but note well the Biden Administration’s response: “We absolutely reject the offensive accusation that gun crime is uniquely high in the United States because of Americans’ ‘hearts.’” I mean, yeah, Mike Johnson, you did kinda say Americans’ “hearts” are worse than the hearts everywhere else on Earth, since "the human heart" doesn't cause nearly as many mass murders anywhere else on Earth. Golly, maybe Joe Biden isn’t as dumb as people think.

Finally, speaking of our new House Speaker, you may not know that Mike Johnson is an acolyte of David Freaking Barton, having said that Mr. Barton’s “work” “has had such a profound influence on me and my work and my life.” Of all the terrible things we’ve heard about Mike Johnson in the last week, this may be my least favorite – he’s an “acolyte” of the man who says the Founders said all kinds of right-wing crap but can’t document any of it? If you’re an acolyte of a snake-oil salesman, you’re either evil or a fool, neither of which recommends you for a leadership position, certainly.

Action: concerning child labor, health care, immigration, and product safety.

Long story short: tell Iowa state legislators to reject a bill that would loosen child labor laws, and tell your Congressfolk to defend Medicaid and CHIP and pass the DREAM Act and the Sunshine in Product 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.

Care2 helps you tell Iowa state legislators to reject Senate File 167, which would loosen child labor laws so that corporations could put 14-17-year-olds to work in such carefree childhood vocations as demolition, mining, and meatpacking. Perhaps even worse, the bill would let corporations off the hook in civil suits for any kids they neglected, sickened, injured, or killed at the workplace! Because trial lawyers bad! No: putting kids to work in dangerous occupations is bad, though maybe it’s not as snappy a bumper sticker slogan. Look, either children are the future, or they’re just another workforce for fat-cat bosses to use and discard. They ain’t both. And if we have any say about it, they ain’t the latter.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to defend both Medicaid and the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (or CHIP) from Congressional debt-limit hostage-takers. Maybe they won’t get Social Security and Medicare cuts and then again maybe they will, but we need to put them on notice about Medicaid and CHIP as well. Medicaid is less popular than Social Security and Medicare, because of the absurd perception that it only helps lazy people, but it’s no less important than any of the other programs they’ve taken so much flak about cutting. And Republicans already let CHIP expire once, so they don’t care about kids, and why should they keep getting away with that?

The Progressive Reform Network helps you tell your Congressfolk pass the DREAM Act, which, as you no doubt remember, would help immigrant children whose legal standing in America has lapsed, but who’ve met certain standards of service and education, to remain in America (and keep contributing to American culture) rather than get deported back to the countries they’ve never known. Because that’s cruel! And to those who reflexively respond AMURKIA FIRSTZ!!!! to everything because they can’t argue their way out of a paper bag: the DREAM Act would help, at most, some 1.9 million folks out of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in America, so this is not so damn much to ask.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Sunshine in Product Safety Act, which would let our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) warn the American public about dangerous products without having to get permission from the corporation that manufactured the dangerous product first. Yes, you read that right! Currently we can’t spread the word about dangerous products lest we hurt some corporation’s fee-fees! That’s because Congress amended the Consumer Product Safety Act to give corporations an effective veto over product safety announcements in 1981. Still we deal with the bitter fruits of the Reagan Revolution. This is why we fight.

Action: concerning product safety, Afghan refugees, and the debt ceiling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Hide No Harm Act and the Afghan Adjustment Act and abolish the debt ceiling. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 9361/S. 5139, the Hide No Harm Act, which would hold corporate executives accountable for knowingly hiding their products’ dangers from good Americans. Some “law and order” types would call it “nanny state” legislation, but folks who’d injure or kill people to make money need a nanny! Others might throw up their hands at the prospect of ever getting a CEO to go to jail, and while I understand their pain, we should pass laws like this – even if they don’t put every law-breaker in prison, a lot of executives will think twice before knowingly putting out unsafe products, if only because fighting criminal charges is expensive.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4787/S. 8685, the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would help the thousands of Afghan refugees achieve permanent status a lot more quickly. There’s a lot of we-broke-it-we-bought-it here – we helped break Afghanistan, which sent a lot of refugees here, so we ought to take care of them. Folks who profess to be “worried” about having “potential terrorists” in America ought to consider that refugees run from oppression, and they should also consider that most terrorists in America are natural-born white supremacist killers. Maybe it diddles one’s rage gland to worry about foreigners rather than the real threat.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to just abolish the damn debt ceiling already. Because it never reduced public spending the way its adherents claimed, and because now Republicans just use it to manufacture a hostage drama. It doesn’t matter that Joe Biden and Senate Democrats will stand in the way of their using it to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, because I’m still scared of what Republicans might get with their little hostage drama – like defunding the police at our FTC, SEC, CFPB, and DOJ Antitrust Division, so their corporate cronies can merge into evil monopolies at will. Get rid of the debt ceiling, and we’ll never have to know.

Action: concerning car safety, labor, and methane emissions.

Long story short: tell big corporations to fix big truck and SUV blind spots, tell UPS to hire more unionized workers, and tell our EPA to protect us from methane emissions. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Consumer Reports helps you tell big car manufacturing corporations to fix the front-end blind zones on all their cars. Yes, if you’ve ever driven a pickup truck or an SUV, you may have wondered how you’ll see all those pedestrians who may well be shorter than the front end of your truck. Surely that’s an unintended consequence of big automakers’ efforts to sell big cars to insecure people! But these same big automakers could make a few changes to their trucks and SUVs, like lowering their hoods and pedestrian-detection devices, and they could do this now with the technology we already have, but alas, they don’t. Not until we brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR against them, that is!

More Perfect Union helps you tell UPS to hire more unionized workers so it doesn’t have to hand out so much overtime now. To your right-wing uncle who tells isolated anecdotes about bus drivers doubling their salary with overtime ANDZ THAT’Z NOTZ TEH FAIRZ!!!!, just remind them that the whole reason we insist on people making time-and-a-half for overtime is to force their bosses to hire the right amount of people to do the job. That’s job creation! And it’s not something bosses do – they’d replaces us with mounds of dung if they could! – but something we do, through communicating our will to our elected leaders.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous methane emissions rule possible. You know the story here, too – fossil fuel drilling tends to belch out methane into our air, and methane not only packs a much bigger climate change punch than coal emissions, it represents usable energy that sure ain’t doing anyone any good up in the air. Plus, when corporations drill on public lands, methane leaks also represent royalties the public can’t collect. A whole industry already exists to reduce methane emissions, so it’s not like we’re asking that much of big drilling corporations. No, less money for CEOs ain’t that much to ask.

Action: concerning our Postal Service, net neutrality, fair regulation, protecting our democracy, and marijuana legalization.

Long story short: tell your Senators to confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees who will save our Postal Service from Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and confirm President Biden's FCC Commissioner nominees, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Corporate Capture Act, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, and the MORE 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.

Progress America helps you tell your Senators to confirm USPS Board of Governors nominees who will protect our Post Office from its Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Who tried to sabotage the 2020 election, as you recall, and who has lately increased prices while cutting service as his "bold" plan to "save" our Post Office, and that sure ain't helping out anyone who gets their life-saving medications through the mail. President Biden hasn't nominated new USPS Governors, but we may as well put our Senators on notice that they work for us -- a fact we need to remind them of fairly frequently! -- and they're supposed to do our will. They're not supposed to put our Postal Service on a path to privatization, because only a few crony corporations want that, and they're not supposed to get all the say about everything in America.

Battle for the Net helps you tell your Senators to confirm both of President Biden's FCC Commissioner nominees. Our Senate Commerce Committee has moved Jessica Rosenworcel's nomination out of committee, but stalled on Gigi Sohn, as at least two Republican Senators, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, have put holds on her nomination because she's "too pro-net neutrality." If Messrs. Tillis and Sullivan actually listened to their constituents, they would confirm Ms. Sohn precisely because she's pro-net neutrality, net neutrality being one of the few issues that actually unites conservatives and liberals. As long as they're only going to listen to big corporations -- literally the only possible "constituents" they might have that oppose net neutrality -- then we're just going to have to be louder.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6107, the Stop Corporate Capture Act. What would the Stop Corporate Capture Act do? It would streamline our regulatory processes by a) keeping out corporate-financed "scientific" studies that aim to undermine clean air, clean water, and product safety regulations, and b) require our government to consider societal benefits a bit more broadly when crafting regulations. Too often Congress gives corporations too much of a say over regulations that are supposed to benefit all of us, not just them, hence the madness over "cost-benefit analyses" that tabulate how much money a regulation will cost a corporation, rather than how much a regulation will help all of us. The Stop Corporate Capture Act will strike a blow against all that, so we should demand it.

Public Citizen also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. You remember Donald Trump, right? Pretty much a walking advertisement for How to Abuse Presidential Power, amirite? Well, the Protecting Our Democracy Act would right a lot of his wrongs by strengthening Congressional subpoena power, giving whistleblowers more protection against retaliation, and restraining Presidents from abusing their pardon power. The bill would also restrict Presidential emergency declaration power, require Presidential candidates to release a decade's worth of tax returns, and prevent Presidents from profiting from being in office. Certainly the Protecting Our Democracy Act represents an effort to learn from our recent mistakes, and we should encourage that.

Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act. The bill would not only remove marijuana from our federal Schedule I, which would essentially make pot legal across the land, and it would expunge previous pot convictions and reinvest in communities harmed by the notorious "war on drugs," which has largely become a war on Black and Brown folks. Hey, the Man's gotta keep them down somehow -- the Man can't always stop them from voting no matter how hard he tries! Pot legalization is yet another issue that, these days, actually unites conservatives and liberals -- the only folks who really want to keep pot illegal are the folks who are already in a state of rage about everything, and they already get too much say in how we run America.

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, tell our government to regulate Facebook more vigorously, tell your Congressfolk to void President Biden's proposed $500 million deal with Saudi Arabia, pass the Preventing Harmful Exposure to Phthalates Act, and ban cyanide bombs from the wild, and tell our Department of Energy to reject uranium mining. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise all Build Back Better Act funding by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. If you're an Arizona resident, you'll definitely want to call Sen. Sinema, since she seems to be the one Senate Democrat who opposes raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. Stop me if you've heard this before, but over two-thirds of Arizonans support raising taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the Build Back Better Act. As usual, the "inscrutable" "iconoclastic" "maverick" "earns" her reputation by simply defying the will of her own constituents, in favor of the big corporate donors she seems to hobnob with every weekend. That's not very mavericky, frankly! And we shouldn't let her get away with it.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Medicare drug negotiation, good and bad Presidential nominations, product safety, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to include the Lower Drug Costs Now Act in the American Jobs Plan, tell your Senators to confirm Rohit Chopra as CFPB Director, tell your Senators to reject Neil MacBride as Treasury Department General Counsel, tell your Congressfolk to pass the STURDY Act, and tell big corporations to abandon ALEC. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to contact your Congressfolk where appropriate, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to include H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act, in the American Jobs Plan. They can do that, because H.R. 3 would give Medicare the power to negotiate the prices of many drugs, and that power would result in savings for whom? For the taxpayer, of course! You fund Medicare, after all! And then the American Jobs Plan could apply those savings to needed projects. You've been telling them to help fund the American Jobs Plan with corporate taxes, and so far they haven't listened. They may not listen when we tell them to help fund it with savings from Medicare drug negotiation. But let's put it more toward the front of the public mind that Medicare drug negotiation is fiscally responsible.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's nominee for Director of our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra. Mr. Chopra has been a warrior for consumer rights for decades, and would represent a huge improvement over Donald Trump's CFPB heads, Mick Mulvaney and Kathy Kraninger, who seemed to think their job was to help the banksters rather than the American people. Some of Joe Biden's Executive branch picks, like Lina Khan as SEC Chair, have been pretty inspired; maybe that's why our Senators haven't confirmed Mr. Chopra yet. Still, duty is duty -- and duty ain't just for us, obviously.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to reject President Biden's nominee to be Department of Treasury General Counsel, Neil MacBride. Did we just say some of President Biden's Executive branch picks have been pretty inspired? Mr. MacBride's nomination isn't one of them! Mr. MacBride has been a long-time corporate lawyer, and regardless of how one may feel about his corporate defendants, I would not say that experience is an asset when working for our government -- in fact, I'd say it's more an asset for him and his once and future employers. Seriously, they always try to say we need more people in government who understand the economy, but what they mean is "more people in government who'll compromise government in favor of corporate power." And if I may borrow a metaphor, you can be an expert on the swamp without being a swamp creature.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1314/S. 441, the STURDY Act. "STURDY" here stands for "Stop Tip-overs of Unstable, Risky Dressers on Youth," and William Carlos Williams it ain't, but the title does accurately describe what the bill would do, and that's a good thing for a bill to do. The bill would mandate that our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) issue vigorous safety standards for these dressers and test them for tip-overs. What would an opponent of this bill say? I find it hard to imagine, but I guess it'd be something like GUMMINT BAD REGULASHUNZ BAD. They're happy to repeat that mantra when one of these dressers fall over on one of their children or grandchildren.

Common Cause helps you tell big corporations to stop funding the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which has gone back into the vote suppression racket after famously bowing out of it after their work on Voter ID laws became well-known. I guess they didn't learn much from that, did they? Spreading Donald Trump's lies and funding "fraudits" of election results sure ain't the actions of someone who's learned their lesson -- unless they thought the "lesson" was "stay out of sight until the time is right." Big corporations need to learn a lesson, too -- that it doesn't matter how many nice things they say about helping Black folks vote if they're going to fund ALEC's vote suppression efforts. And the Big Stick of Bad PR still seems like the ideal weapon to teach this lesson.

Around the table: the harder they come.

Good news, everyone! our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) has enacted a rule outlawing the inclined baby sleepers that have killed at least 50 babies. That we know of, that is! These sleepers defy American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations for baby sleepers (i.e., that babies should sleep on a firm, flat, stable surface without restraints or soft bedding), though I suppose if Donald Trump had gotten wind of it, and saw an advantage, he'd be doing to the AAP what he's trying to do to Dr. Fauci. Anyway, if you agitated against the proliferation of inclined sleepers, you deserve a big fat Buffalo chicken cheese steak, or whatever it is you give yourself after a job well done.

What's "The Secret Behind Amazon's Domination in Cloud Computing" per Politico? Amazon hires former government officials to show them the ropes, that's how, which (as we remember from healthcare.gov's bumpy rollout) has more to do with how you fill out forms than how good your product is. So, for one thing, that's not very bootstrappy of Amazon, is it? And, for another, maybe we could imagine a much better world of cloud computing except that monopolists like Amazon game the system and impose their will on the rest of us. Anyway, add this to the reasons we try to stop the revolving door between government and industry.

Ho hum, NYC police seemed far more eager to crack down on protestors than to crack down on looters, and if you stand ready to say well, that makes sense, looters are dangerous, try and remember that being a police officer is supposed to be dangerous -- if you're working for the police and expect every day to be donuts and coffee, you're more than a bit deluded -- and think a bit more carefully about the politics of letting looters run relatively rampant. I mean, if they put down looting, where would Fox News get all its footage? Certainly you'll want to fully confront the notion that protestors are actually more dangerous -- to powerful people -- than actual criminals.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the man who gives the Citizen Legislator a bad name, says he's still undecided on whether he'll run for a third term in 2022 -- but also says he's "more panicked today" about the state of the nation than he was when he first ran in 2010. Uh, that means he's running, folks. He has until June 1 to file -- and what a shame we couldn't get that info from the Journal Sentinel! It does seem newsworthy! Instead, we got another list of things Ron Johnson is wrong about; I guess I shouldn't be too mad about that, since it's a pretty long list, and thus a decent reference.

Our FBI is investigating Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for campaign finance associations. If Donald Trump were still blogging, I guess he'd squeal TEH WITCH HUNTZ!!!!!, but setting the aside the profound insult to those who died at Salem, one must ask oneself whether maybe our government is investigating Mr. DeJoy because his actions merit it. In other words, maybe our government's working for us, for once! And if this is the thing that finally gets that one fellow on our USPS Board of Governors to cut bait on Mr. DeJoy, well, who am I to complain?

Upon hearing that Israeli finally-soon-to-be-ex-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fears that his "overthrow()" "will cause a collapse of the global right-wing," all I can say is we can only hope! But, in my experience, right-wingers always find someone worse -- plenty of sympathetic folks think that, in soon-to-be-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, they already have. And really, right-wingers will be strong everywhere for as long as we liberals let them walk all over us. I think there's a solution in there, somewhere.

Around the table: from Joe Biden's recent success to Ted Cruz's fake populism.

Here's another deleterious side effect of moving quickly during a pandemic: new brands of hand sanitizers with high levels of carcinogens. The online pharmacy Valisure filed a petition with our FDA last week finding that at least 15 brands of hand sanitizer contained the carcinogen benzene at levels above 2 ppm -- a level our FDA set a year ago, probably to encourage production. Benzene is one of the worst carcinogens, per our Department of Health and Human Services and the World Health Organization. The link above provides a list of the brands Valisure identified; I haven't heard of any of them, suggesting that brand name recognition has some utility.

You've heard of Joe Biden's American Families Plan? Well, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy finds that the plan's tax hikes would fall almost entirely on the top 1 percent of taxpayers. Specifically, it'd bring back the 39.6% tax bracket on income over $400,000 (but why not go higher?), while also subjecting capital gains and dividend income over $1 million to the same tax rate (it's currently 20%). It'd do other things, too, like finally end the "carried interest" loophole that lets hedge fund managers pay less on their unearned millions than you do on your hard-earned thousands.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon writes that President Biden has "turned the tables" on Republicans, partly by speaking plainly (which I wasn't sure would be a strength with him!), partly by embracing actually-popular ideas (though not enough of them, not yet!), and partly because Republicans don't even talk policy anymore, but just talk about whatever diddles the Batshit Insane 25%'s rage glands. I just hope her assessment isn't premature, even though he's done a good bit better than I thought he would. And I'm ashamed to say I didn't realize that the Republicans' Kamala's-in-charge trope is all about stoking racist and sexist rage. I mean, I can't explain it any other way!

In a peripherally-related note, Chris Walker at TruthOut reminds us that Republicans demand "unity" but that most voters like President Biden's policy prescriptions thus far. Far from being "catnip for their liberal base," as Mob Boss Mitch put it, the American Rescue Plan enjoyed 63% support in polling, while the For the People Act, putatively a "Democrat power grab," also in Mob Boss Mitch's words, garners 68%, which is actually a bit lower than the 70% of Americans who think Republicans should find common ground with President Biden, a cunning reversal of the usual "liberal" media formulation. Thus we are reminded that, just as "healing" meant "forget the hurt we caused you," "unity" means "submit to our will."

Sen. Scott's Republican response to the Biden address got all the ink, but Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) also delivered a response to the Biden address -- for the Working Families Party, and from the left. The WFP has been a fixture of New York state politics for over 20 years, though it has run or endorsed candidates in other states. I sure hope nobody from the right whines about "the liberals" getting two responses to the Biden address, lest I remind them that it wasn't that long ago that both the Republican party and the Tea Party -- the latter of which existed more in fever dreams and fundraising drives than in reality -- gave responses to numerous Obama State of the Union addresses.

Finally, Sen. Ted Cruz (E-TX) declares he won't be taking any more corporate PAC money. Not because corporations redistribute worker income upward to executives or pollute the planet or make unsafe products, but because they "run away" when the "left's digital pitchforks come out." In other words, Ted Cruz is as much a friend to the American worker as Marco Rubio, who infamously supported the Amazon union drive only because Amazon no longer sells some of his favorite right-wing screeds. Well, Ted Cruz is nothing if not cunning, so he might get a few new votes by pretending to hate corporate power without actually hating corporate power. And rageheads won't notice the difference.

Action: concerning the minimum wage, car safety, and corporate donations.

Fight for $15 helps you demand that Congress enact a $15/hour minimum wage in the first 100 days of the Biden Administration. When they tell you that a $15/hour minimum wage causes unemployment or destroys the economy, demand proof. Demand the scientific studies that "prove" that higher minimum wages kill jobs or jack up prices (they almost all say the opposite!). No, it's not "common sense" that higher wages "kill jobs" or "jack up prices"; it's actually more common-sensical to say that higher incomes for lower-wage earners actually stimulate economies (low-wage earners pretty much have to spend their money, after all) or that higher minimum wages actually create jobs in local economies (since that money's more likely to be spent locally). If you do describe studies that refute their fears, don't be surprised if they talk over you like they're Sean Hannity or if they go on about $40/hour minimum wages no one has proposed or how they're not actually conservative like anyone gives a damn. Just declare the argument won and walk away. Right-wingers don't learn until we set boundaries.

Meanwhile, Consumer Reports helps you tell your Senators to pass good auto safety legislation. A number of good bills in our Senate would do that, and the House-passed H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act, includes automatic braking and blind-spot warning devices on automobiles among its multitudinous reforms, and, you know, it's not like safer cars is unpopular or something. You may be old enough to remember how much like pulling teeth it was to make cars put seat belts in! As a youth, I was in the front seat, unbelted, of a car that got into a fender-bender going no more than 10 MPH, and my head hit the windshield; that was all the instruction I needed to belt up every time I got in a car afterward, but a lot of folks have died before learning such a lesson, and why should we allow that? If we can cut car crashes in half now, then why wouldn't we do it? Because it'd "kill jobs"? People will be working jobs redesigning and rebuilding the safer cars, right? Too often right-wingers say it'll "kill jobs" when they actually mean "it'll cost executives money." Put that in the front of your mind, and you'll see things a lot more clearly.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President-elect Biden to reject big corporate contributions toward his inauguration, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. This shouldn't be that tough a lift, given how thoroughly corporate inaugural contributions appear to have compromised our current President, and also given how scaled-down the Biden inauguration would have to be, given the pandemic, but if we say nothing and "trust" them to do the right thing, they'll take that as approval of doing the wrong thing. I'll admit it is a bit unnerving, I'll admit, to be reminded that Barack Obama rejected big corporate contributions to his 2009 inaugural, given how corporatist his Administration proved to be, but that only means we must apply pressure at all points in time. I know people are tired of fighting, more so now than in 2008, even, but I think we have to consider a bit more carefully whether our politicians are so terrible to us precisely because it leaves us too tired to fight them. I've thought about that a lot, and I'm pretty sure it's the truth. And I don't know about you, but contemplating that truth only makes me fight harder.

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

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Remember: don't get discouraged, because that's how they want you to feel. Indeed, the only reason they have the power they do is because so many Americans are discouraged. But when we fight through our discouragement, and we act, we make good things happen.

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

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

Action: concerning good House bills, consumer protection, and product safety.

Happy Tuesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Don't believe the hype that our Senators have a lot on their plates right now! If they'd have passed these bills earlier, they'd have less to do now. Besides, you don't get to make excuses when you don't do your job, so why should they?

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

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

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

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Our House has passed a lot of good bills that fight discrimination, vote suppression, and corporate greed; our Senate has responded by ignoring them. Our duty is clear: we either guide them out of their ignorance, or hold them accountable for it at the polls. We'd prefer the former, but we're ready to do the latter.

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

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

Action: concerning product safety and various law and order matters.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent police from using "less lethal" weaponry on protestors. "Less lethal" means, I suppose, that we have no right to get upset unless police use "lethal" weapons? So if you've ever lost an eye to a rubber bullet, or lost your hearing to a stun grenade, or gotten burnt by tear gas, you should be sitting at home saying "at least it wasn't a lethal weapon"? And those who get skull fractures and die from tear gas cartridges can't testify to the "lack of lethality" of these weapons. Cold would be the heart that would say that protestors deserve such treatment! Of course, that heart could mask its own coldness by simply equating protestors with looters, even though now -- in an era where everyone carries around an HD camera in their pocket! -- we know a lot of looters are agents provocateurs, and we know the violence at protests flows mainly in one direction. Spoiler alert: in the protestors' direction, not the police's.

Meanwhile, another day, another Presidential nominee who'll favor big corporations over her true bosses, the American people: one Nancy Beck, former chemical industry lobbyist, now EPA toxicologist ensuring that chemical safety regulations favor her former employers, and now, perhaps, chair of our Consumer Product Safety Commission. She's figured prominently in our EPA's efforts to do as little as humanly possible about PFAS chemicals, which you may better know as "forever chemicals" because virtually everyone has them in their bloodstream, and scientists have linked them to cancer and birth defects, so of course she should head up the CPSC, whose name, after all, doesn't have the words "product" or "safety" in it, right? Oh, wait. So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Nancy Beck to our CPSC, lest we one day realize that our President has spent years not complaining about her, which is (as with Messrs. Mnuchin, Ross, and DeVos) is the surest sign that someone does not have a soul.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop corporations from abusing COVID-19 relief, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Remember when our President and our Treasury Secretary promised there'd be "oversight" into how $500 billion of taxpayer money was disbursed as "paycheck protection"? And then remember when our President replaced one of the Inspectors General who would have actually overseen the program (and likely done a good job at it)? And then remember when big, big corporations like Perkins and Ruth's Chris Steak House got caught taking money always intended for small businesses and the resulting PR storms forced them to give the money back? And then remember when Mr. Mnuchin, who wears glasses so people don't punch him in the face, said the information about which corporations got COVID-19 relief was too "proprietary" and "confidential" to be released? All sounds like a corporate welfare scam, doesn't it? And it's a scam we must stop.

Action: concerning coronavirus policy, solar power, and product safety.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to impose a national moratorium on evictions and foreclosures. You know how this is going to go: too many Americans are going to lose their jobs, either because the economy's about to go in the toilet or because they're sick and can't come to work and have neither paid sick days nor a union to fight for their jobs, and when they lose their jobs, they're not going to be able to make their monthly bills, and rent and mortgage are two of the biggest monthly bills you can pay. Even Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin says we might have to prepare for a 20% unemployment rate! Of course, Steve Mnuchin is also the Foreclosure King, the man who kicked an elderly woman out of her house because she owed 27 cents on her mortgage, and I expect a lot of right-wingers will be like him: all those people thrown out of work will just get lazy if we let them stay in their homes! Yeah, all these "lazy" people needing respirators to help them breathe -- they should just get a job!

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: solar power is a lot less expensive than it used to be -- for many folks it's within the reach of a home equity loan now -- but why not help everyone enjoy the benefits of solar power? HB 531/SB 705 would set guidelines for the creation and operation of community solar organizations, which would enable a group of people to pool their resources together to get solar power if they can't afford it on their own, or if they rent rather than own a home, or if their house gets too much shade to have a proper solar set-up. Some right-wingers would call that "socialism," but not all right-wingers would! Some right-wingers would also say it's more self-reliant to use your own source of power, rather than relying on some distant utility. Too many folks don't understand that our government doesn't automatically cripple freedoms through laws and regulations, but can actually create and secure freedoms this way. If you're as subtle a thinker as that, then let the Sierra Club help you tell your PA state legislator to help spread solar power by passing HB 531/SB 705.

Finally, with a ProPublica investigation finding at least corporation designed its testing so that it's "side-impact-tested" car seat almost couldn't possibly fail it -- which sure doesn't tell you very much about whether your kids would die in a car crash if they were in that seat! -- US PIRG helps you tell our National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (or NHTSA) to enact the most vigorous car seat safety standards possible. Congress only told the NHTSA to accomplish this task 20 years ago, so maybe they should get cracking! And no, this isn't "socialism," either -- our government must step in where private corporations fail to protect us from their own greed and laziness; otherwise, why do we have one? To more effectively deliver corporate welfare to some politician's crony or other? Because that seems to be what today's politicians what our government to be. Luckily, we live in America, and they don't get all the say about everything: we do. But not if we don't use the power that belongs to us. Not if we don't speak out.

Action: concerning paid sick leave, Social Security benefits, and unsafe baby products.

It's a bit rich hearing big corporations like Amazon and Uber telling their workers to stay home if they feel sick, since most of these big corporations don't offer paid sick leave to their employees. So if they don't come to work because they're sick, they don't get paid, and they might get fired! If you still think you shouldn't get paid when you're sick, ask yourself how many of the illnesses you've had were 100% your fault. I swear, some people act like no one else has ever deserved a break. And if you still think getting fired for being sick is "just the free market at work," I would feel compelled to ask if you have ever been in danger of losing your job for being sick. In a world where we now bow out of social gatherings because we fear the coronavirus, we should make sure folks who interact with a lot of customers can take some time off to get well so they don't make those customers sick. And these workers shouldn't face joblessness or destitution because of it! Hence Sum of Us helps you tell big corporations to start granting paid sick leave to their workers.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 860, the Social Security 2100 Act, so that we can increase benefits and ensure Social Security remains on a secure fiscal footing, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would calculate cost-of-living increases in a realistic manner, rather than used the "Chained CPI" that doesn't take into account all the fixed costs seniors have. I mean, if the price of a drug goes up, seniors aren't just going to switch to a cheaper drug, are they? But Chained CPI would assume they would! The Social Security 2100 Act would also tax income over $400,000 into the system -- feel free to tell your Congressfolk that income between $132,700 and $400,000 should also be taxed into the system! -- and would raise the threshold at which Social Security benefits can be taxed. So the Social Security 2100 Act would pay out more money, and would also let you keep more of your hard-earned money. And make no mistake, you earned Social Security.

Finally, with our government a little slow (who'da thunk it?) in getting dangerous and potentially lethal inclined baby sleepers off the market, Consumer Reports helps you tell Facebook and Craigslist to ban the sale of these items on their platforms. Facebook's marketplace is booming, and Craigslist is still a big player in online classifieds no matter how 2000s they seem. And they really have no excuse, since Walmart, Amazon, and eBay have already committed to ridding inclined baby sleepers from their platforms. Please don't be the fool who says but don't folks who have inclined baby sleepers have a right to recoup some of their costs? After all, they didn't know they were buying a product that would be banned! I would answer that question with another question: does any baby deserve to die by accident in a product we all know isn't safe just so someone can get a few bucks back? You could only answer "yes" to the first question if you could also answer "yes" to the second; I suspect more folks would answer "yes" to both than they would have years ago, simply because being uncivilized doesn't seem to be the stigma it used to be. But they're still wrong.

Action: concerning our nation's budget, law and order, and dangerous baby products.

You've no doubt heard by now that our President has put out a budget that would, guess what, cut Medicaid, cut Medicare, cut Social Security, cut food stamps, cut housing assistance, cut job training funding -- but jack up funding for defense, since spending more than the next eight highest-spending countries in the world combined somehow just isn't enough. Even Republicans in Congress act like the President's budget is a dead letter -- retiring Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, announced last week he won't even hold a hearing on the budget, but that doesn't mean we can't weigh in anyway! And we must weigh in -- our President has decided to weigh in, after all, on "his priorities," so the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject our President's budget and fight for our priorities. Mr. Enzi is correct to note that "Congress holds the purse strings, according to the Constitution," but our laws require that our President submit an annual budget proposal; it's a real, legal thing that happens, so we, the American people, must attend to it.

Meanwhile, you've also no doubt heard by now the tantrum our Administration threw over its Justice Department prosecutors recommending seven to nine years in prison for Administration crony Roger Stone, the subsequent hullabaloo resulting in the resignation of four prosecutors in the Stone case (I feel their pain, but I wish they hadn't quit, since now our President will replace them with four new cronies) and over 2,000 former Justice Department officials demanding the resignation of Attorney General Barr for his interference in the matter. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell our House Judiciary Committee and the Department of Justice Inspector General to investigate our Justice Department for possible wrongdoing. Yeah, I know, look how well the impeachment investigation worked out. But this won't go before a Senate full of Administration lapdogs: this will go before a hostile House committee and an Inspector General mandated by law to be independent. Maybe our President will fire all the Inspectors General -- he's already tried! -- but let's at least make him humiliate himself before the people.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to ban inclined baby sleepers, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. Do it quickly, though, since our CPSC's comment period ends in eight days. Researchers have linked, at this time, the inclined sleepers to 73 baby deaths and over a thousand baby accidents and injuries to the inclined sleepers, and remember, 73 is the number of babies we know about. Manufacturers touted the sleepers as a way to rock babies to sleep faster and keep them asleep longer, but the sleepers allow babies to roll onto their stomachs while rocking, and then they suffocate because they can't get back on their back. Babies also suffocate when their heads fall forward (their heads tend to be disproportionately heavy) in the sleeper, or when their faces roll into the product's sides and they rebreathe carbon dioxide-filled air. We all know parents are exhausted (indeed, it's almost like our economy wants it that way) but we also need to get rid of products that kill their babies.

Action: concerning government spying, financial predators, and unsafe baby products.

H.R. 5675/S. 3242, the Safeguarding Americans’ Private Records Act (or SAPRA), would roll back many of the worst offenses of the notorious USA PATRIOT Act. It would, for example, end NSA hoovering of your private data, prohibit warrantless collection of your browsing and search histories and your geo-location data, and would sunset the National Security Letters program which the FBI has used to get information without a court order. Note very well words like "warrantless" and "court order" in the previous sentence; passing SAPRA would not "hamstring our ability to fight terror," but would merely make law enforcement follow our laws and our Constitution in fighting terror. Hate to pile on, but if we stopped treating people entirely like commodities, we'd have a lot less terrorism. Sure, we'll always have some nutjobs, but let's not create more of them with tax cuts for the rich and corporate tax cuts and mass incarceration, shall we? The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our privacy rights by passing SAPRA.

Meanwhile, H.R. 5050/S. 2833, the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act (or VFCA), would extend the protections our soldiers and veterans enjoy from predatory lenders to all Americans. The bill would cap annual interest rates at 36%, so payday lenders couldn't trap good Americans in a death spiral of debt with loans that wind up having 400% interest rates. Banksters will no doubt complain that we just won't allow them to make money anymore, but nobody puts a gun to your head and makes you become a payday lender! I suspect folks become payday lenders because they see it's easy money. Besides which, lenders can still make money if the don't gouge their customers; we know this because veterans already enjoy the protections of the bill, and some states have passed similar protections, and is our economy in the toilet? No, it is not -- in fact, banksters continue to do quite well a dozen years after crashing our economy. Hence US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect all Americans from predatory lenders by passing the VFCA.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to ban the inclined baby sleepers that have led to over six dozen baby deaths, then Consumer Reports still helps you do that. The CPSC will take public comments on the matter until the end of February, though I have some difficulty imagining what pro-inclined sleeper comments you could write. I guess it would be priceless to learn that some stooge of the inclined baby sleeper lobby commented that banning inclined baby sleepers would be "the nanny state at work"! I suppose they'll say a ban is too extreme, that our CPSC should give them time to work out the kinks, as it were, but I would have a couple of things to say about that. One, the corporations making the sleepers knew for years that their sleepers were killers but did nothing about it. Two, if it were your baby, you wouldn't want it to happen to anyone else's baby. Three, there are other ways to put a baby to sleep -- ways that will not result in the baby's death, no less!

Action: concerning war with Iran, peaceful protest, product safety, and shareholder power.

We've heard rather little about war with Iran this week -- but that doesn't mean we won't! Particularly since our President killed Gen. Soleimani in the middle of an impeachment, and that impeachment ain't going away just yet. Hence Win Without War helps you call your Senators and tell them to reject war with Iran. To think, if Jimmy Carter had simply bombed the crap out of Iran in 1980 he might have won a second term! But if our President is thinking the same thing, he's forgetting that 40 years have passed, and several wars-fought-under-false-pretenses have passed, and thus we're all a little skittish about fighting another one of those. And if you're thinking that maybe killing Gen. Soleimani really did prevent a war, note well that the whole "he was going to hit four U.S. embassies" rationale is, well, based on fairly flimsy evidence-if-we-can-call-it-that, with at least one Administration official saying people were wondering if our President had made it all up. And that's why we restrain Presidential power, as our Constitution commands us to do.

Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee (or IOC) has lately banned political protests during the Games; protest might include kneeling, raising of fists, or wearing of armbands or signs. You may recall that track stars John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists in support of the civil rights movement while getting medals in 1968; yes, "The Star-Spangled Banner" was playing, and if you think Messrs. Carlos and Smith "disrespected our country" in doing so, I'd say you were a bit sensitive. Surely your love of country can survive your being told you're not doing quite enough to fight racism, can't it? Hence Color of Change helps you tell the IOC to rescind its ban on political protest during the Olympics. Would I thus allow a white athlete to make one of those obnoxious white-power symbols during our national anthem? Of course I would! And let's see how many pals he'd have afterward, both among his fellow athletes and his corporate sponsors! Probably less of both than Colin Kaepernick, whose True to 7 shoe is doing quite well as we speak even though NFL teams with far worse quarterbacks won't sign him.

In other news, H.R. 5565, the Safety Hazard Recall Efficiency Information Act, or SHARE Information Act, would amend the Consumer Product Safety Act so that corporations couldn't mark information about their product defects "confidential"; yes, our laws actually allow them to do that, even though a lot of good Americans might benefit from information about, oh, just to pick an example out of thin air, the dangers presented by inclined baby sleepers linked to at least three dozen infant deaths over the last decade. The bill would also stiffen penalties for violating the Consumer Product Safety Act; what a shame that right-wingers never call that "law and order," though it's a perfectly valid application of the phrase. You can meet those right-wingers who complain that the SHARE Information Act would impose "more bureaucracy" on poor beleaguered corporations with the words "law and order" -- or the words "dead babies," if you like. But first, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote product safety by passing the SHARE Information Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to reject its own rule that would curtail shareholder power at big corporations, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. The SEC would require shareholders to own ten times more stock before you could even introduce a shareholder resolution; as usual, one must ask what is the SEC afraid of? They must be afraid of Boeing not being able to build unsafe airplanes like the 737 MAX -- because shareholder resolutions did try to call attention to Boeing executive coziness with federal regulators, and under the new rules, you sure would see a lot fewer of those. Boeing has taken a lot of PR hits, and deservedly so, over its problems with the 737 MAX, but making it harder for shareholders to prevent their corporations from making grave errors like the 737 MAX sure seems like the wrong lesson to learn. Of course our President seems to live for learning the wrong lessons. That doesn't mean we can't teach him the right ones.

Action: concerning a financial transaction tax, unsafe baby sleepers, and campaign finance disclosure.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a financial transaction tax, also known as a Robin Hood tax or a Wall Street sales tax. We used to have a financial transaction tax in America, but that was 50 years ago; now banksters use the internet to trade like they're all on speed, but don't pay a tax per trade that might actually fund some good things for good Americans. H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, would impose at most a $5 tax on every $1,000 in trades, while H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, would tax $1 every $1,000 in trades; I'd go higher and do a full one percent tax, but at the lowest tax rate in the Wall Street Tax Act, we could raise over $70 billion annually. How do right-wingers respond? By taking your pension hostage, of course! As if your pension relies exclusively on the lightning-fast trades speculators conduct -- or as if a less-than-one-percent tax is somehow onerous! But most sane people support a financial transaction tax, and it's well past time most sane people got to make most of the decisions.

Meanwhile, infant inclined sleepers have now killed 73 infants, but you can still buy them! That's right, no manufacture has recalled these sleepers, nor has our government forced them to do so even after our own Consumer Product Safety Commission declared them unsafe. This sorry state of affairs goes on even though every pediatrician worth the title will tell you babies should sleep on their backs on flat and firm surfaces, and even though infant deaths do tend to be all over the news for good reason. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell the nine corporations that manufacture infant inclined sleepers to recall them immediately. Our current Administration hates telling other bosses what to do, but if we want to remain a civilized society, we have to tell them what to do, and there's a good chance they'll do our will, if for no other reason than that they want the bad publicity to stop. Of course, anyone who builds a device that suffocates helpless infants deserves all that bad publicity. But if they do the right thing, they can make it stop.

Finally, H.R. 2592/S. 1356, the Honest Ads Act, would amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 -- our seminal campaign finance law -- so that it would be able to require disclosure for online political ads as well as TV, radio, and newspaper ads, and the bill would also extend that law's prohibition on foreign nationals buying campaign ads to internet ads. I remain one of those folks who think we wouldn't even be talking about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign if Democrats had nominated a better candidate, but it's fairly obvious that more and more Americans (ahem!) look to the internet for their news, and thus deserve the same protections from noxious campaign ads that other folks get. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand campaign finance disclosure to internet ads by passing the Honest Ads Act. I'm sure the right has its lies about preachers being silenced and politicians being able to silence opponents all lined up, but this bill is about disclosure; what do they have to be afraid of?

Action: concerning airplane safety and pollution.

In the wake of the news that our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) never actually independently looked at the cause of two deadly Boeing crashes, but rather let Boeing tell them what they found out on their own, Penn PIRG helps you tell our FAA to stop outsourcing its regulatory duties to the private corporations it nominally oversees. It's a simple principle, really -- make corporations follow the law and do the right thing, rather than ask them if they're following the law and doing the right thing and just take their word for it -- but it has too often seemed a difficult task for the last six Presidential Administrations. Of course too many Americans (though not a majority) still regard regulations as a "burden" upon corporations. They don't regard laws against burglary as a "burden" on burglars, and they tend to change their tune when regulatory failure directly affects them, but we can't wait for their wisdom to catch up with ours.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our legislature is trying, yet again, to pass bills that would hamstring our state's ability to keep big oil and gas drilling corporations from polluting. HB 1106 would give our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) a mere 30 days to review gas and oil drilling permits, which wouldn't allow time for legally-mandated public comments, while HB 1107 would terminate all DEP employees currently involved in permit evaluations and would replace them with a five-member Commission appointed, of course, by the legislature. Again, it sure seems like politicians' anti-regulatory fervor only seems to affect good regulations. Might we call HB 1106/HB 1107 supporters objectively pro-pollution? Hey, civility is their shield and sword, not mine; mine is truth. The Center for Coalfield Justice helps you tell your PA state legislator to protect us from pollution by rejecting HB 1106 and HB 1107.

Action: concerning arbitration fairness, pollution, and high drug prices.

H.R. 1423/S. 610, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal (or FAIR) Act, would (as its title suggests) invalidate any arbitration agreement a corporation forces upon an employee or customer if the dispute concerns employment, product safety, antitrust law, or discrimination. These little "agreements," as you know, force you into an arbitration proceeding generally of your opponent's choosing, which denies you your rightful day in court and also very likely denies you a positive outcome. If this bill passes, we'll never have to hear, again, of folks who get raped in nursing homes but whose families can't sue, or folks whose lenders illegally renew thousand-percent loans but can't sue, or folks whose banks use their names to open fake accounts but can't sue. Really, these are not "frivolous" lawsuits. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our right to a day in court by passing the FAIR Act.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to reject the Pebble Mine project in Alaska's Bristol Bay. You probably know the drill by now: mining for copper in Bristol Bay will not only pollute good Alaskans' water and disrupt the unique and fragile ecosystem, but it'll also be the death knell for the Bristol Bay's sockeye salmon industry, one of the world's most famous salmon fisheries and one that supports 14,000 jobs. You probably also know that not even that most inveterate corporate defender, former EPA head Scott Pruitt, could see his way clear to approving the Pebble Mine project, and you probably also know that a lot of Pebble Mine's potential investors have gotten cold feet. But none of that is any reason to be complacent, since we are currently ruled by a President who thinks it's honest work to buy low, suck the wealth out of the resulting failure, and foist the burdens of that failure on the taxpayer. So let's make sure we do our duty.

Finally, a Change.org petition helps you tell Pennsylvania state legislators to cap insulin prices in that state. In days of old (and, who knows, maybe tomorrow, too), right-wingers would have decried such things as TEH PRICE CONTROLZ!!!!! But arguing against "price controls," here, would be the same as arguing in favor of big pharma corporations setting insulin prices so high that diabetics start rationing their insulin and then die. Is it naive to suggest that right-wingers will perhaps exercise some shame at the prospect of being called objectively pro-diabetic death? I kid, of course -- right-wingers tend to recast any shame they deserve as liberal oppression, at which point I say: c'mon, we're either the people who want to give everyone participation trophies or we're the people who are waiting for you in the parking lot with baseball bats, but we can't be both.

Action: concerning Medicare drug prices, abortion, product safety, and defense spending.

We've spent a lot of time trying to get Mob Boss Mitch to hold Senate votes on good bills passed by the House, but sadly, it's also like pulling teeth to get Democratic House leadership to consider some good bills. Case in point: H.R. 1046, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act of 2019, which would, as its title suggests, finally let Medicare negotiate its drug prices on behalf of our seniors -- and would empower our government to manufacture its own generics if big pharma corporations refuse to negotiate in good faith. Why would Democratic leadership not want a vote on that? Could it be because Democratic leadership is far better at raising money from big corporations -- including big pharma corporations -- than they are at legislating? It's a question worth asking! Or, more precisely, it's a question worth making moot by demanding that Democratic House leaders allow a vote on the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, which Social Security Works helps you do.

CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 29975, the Women's Health Protection Act. The Women's Health Protection Act would prevent states from passing legislation outlawing (or putting onerous restrictions upon) abortion; you may have noticed that states have been doing a lot of these things lately. Would you respond that we should let the smallest government make the most decisions about the most people's health and welfare? I am, after all, neither immune to nor automatically disdainful of such arguments! But you're better off taking that argument up with our Constitution, because our Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision specifically says we cannot leave the legality of abortion up to the states. Given the current composition of our Court, that argument may not hold much longer. But I'll still oppose outlawing a procedure when only half of Americans (i.e., women) could ever serve time for it -- I mean, the only fair thing to do would be imprison men for the ill-considered sex that also contributed to the abortion, and I know no man in America would support that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would ban unsafe baby sleepers, like the Fisher-Price Rock 'n Play, and other unsafe baby products. An April Consumer Reports investigation revealed that sleepers like these have helped kill over three dozen babies, and you can't just pretend you're Brit Hume and say that's not so big a number, because every baby is the apple of someone's eye. And our Consumer Product Safety Commission knew, for several years, that the Rock 'n Play had helped kill babies, but took no action until the aforementioned investigation revealed more deaths than our CPSC had said. Consumer Reports will also help you call for a ban on crib bumper pads that help cause suffocation and strangulation, and tougher safety standards for dressers so they don't tip over on babies, since that also leads to over two dozen deaths annually. Again, if these numbers don't seem so impressive, just imagine it's your baby. That should do it.

In the wake of the news that our government is actually making a defense contractor pay for overcharging our government -- not a big-name defense contractor, nor a huge amount of money ($16 million) in the context of a $700 million-plus annual defense budget, but it's still a good work -- a consortium of good government groups (including Public Citizen, Roots Action, and Win Without War) helps you demand a $200 billion annual cut in defense spending. I often hesitate to put a number out there that looks arbitrary, but you don't even have to know that we already spend more on defense than the next seven countries combined to know that we can afford it -- you only need know that we routinely throw billions of dollars at weapons that clearly don't work. Which is to say they don't actually help defend us -- at "enriching corporate CEOs" and "funneling corporate welfare to big corporations," I guess these weapons do work. Call me old-fashioned, but I think defense spending ought to defend.

Action: concerning discrimination, aircraft safety, and internet freedom.

Last week the House passed H.R. 5, the Equality Act -- with eight Republican votes! Eight! It's a firestorm of moderation! I kid, of course -- I'm old enough to remember when the Republican Moderate Caucus in the Senate had two dozen members; now it doesn't even meet for lunch! Still, that might bode well for passage of the Equality Act in the Senate, since all 47 Democrats will vote for it and a handful of Republicans still style themselves as moderates. Perhaps a handful more will style themselves as independents who worry about more important things than continuing to discriminate against gays and transgender folk -- but only if we get in their grills! Hence you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a smartphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers so you can call them and tell them to pass the Equality Act. Maybe our President will veto it (at Vice President Pence's urging, no doubt!), but let's at least make him do it.

In the wake of numerous news reports about safety failings of the Boeing 737 Max plane, which caused two of them to crash in six months, Penn PIRG helps you tell our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) to mandate the "optional" safety features that could have prevented those crashes, and Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase FAA funding and take decision-making power about safety standards away from airplane manufacturing corporations. When folks started telling us that "the private sector does everything better," and started privatizing government functions, they assured us that government would still hold corporations accountable when they failed -- and then they started privatizing the accountability itself! It's like telling burglars to decide the length of their own jail sentences because, hey, they know best! Truth be known, airline deregulation has been a problem as long as I've been alive; maybe now's the time to stop all that?

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to vote for H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, then Free Press still helps you do that. Americans across the ideological spectrum -- yes, actual conservatives and actual liberals -- support the Save Internet Act, because it would restore net neutrality, the principle that big telecom corporations should treat all network traffic the same, and thus you, and not some corporation, should get to decide where you want to go on the internet. But politicians don't support it, because politicians care more about big telecom money than about people. Harsh? Nah, just truth. How do we know? They can't concoct a good argument against net neutrality -- take their complaining that internet regulation needs a "light touch," when net neutrality is obviously "light touch"! When an internet regulation doesn't mandate content or price, that's light touch.

Action: concerning Muslim bans, birth control, product safety, and taxes.

H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, would reverse our President's various Muslim bans and prevent future Presidents from issuing similar travel bans, mainly by amending the Immigration and Nationality Act so that it explicitly prevents discrimination against foreigners based solely on religion. What's that, you say? Our Supreme Court said the Muslim ban wasn't an attack on religious freedom because it also happened to include a few nations our Administration obviously put there to provoke such a ruling? Well, our Supreme Court was wrong, and not just because they simply refused to consider our President's stated intent (to enact a "Muslim ban, but legally") when they've bent over backwards to amplify supposed "intent" in other rulings. They're wrong because a billion Muslims live on Earth and if Islam was really so "violent," ISIS would be as big as pre-World War II Germany. Hence People for the American Way helps you tell our Congressfolk to truly honor our actual religious beliefs by passing the NO BAN Act.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a pair of bills that would increase our lawful access to birth control. H.R. 2182/S. 1086, the Access to Birth Control Act, would require pharmacies to supply birth control medication to anyone who can lawfully get it, regardless of any pharmacist's "religious" "beliefs," since "conscience" doesn't give you the right to discriminate against others. Folks who profess worry that the bill will force pharmacies to dispense birth control medication to folks who can't pay for it or who don't have a prescription in states where the law requires they get one, etc., can go ahead and read previous versions of the bill at Congress.gov to find out they're wrong. Or they can just admit they're trolls. H.R. 2091/S. 1049, the Access to Contraception for Servicemembers and Dependents Act, would expand access to birth control for our soldiers and their dependents, without the cost-sharing schemes that can limit that access.

Did you know our FDA can't get cosmetics off the shelves that have asbestos in them? Even makeup marketed to children? I wouldn't market makeup to children, personally, but if I were so inclined I certainly wouldn't market makeup to children with a chemical scientists have strongly linked to lethal lung diseases. If your Tea Party uncle tells you that of course the FDA can't get cosmetics off our shelves because it's called the Food and Drug Administration, remind him that the law that expanded the FDA's power in 1938 is called the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and it came about because of (among other things) the mascara "Lash Lure" that purported to give women a permanent eyeliner look but instead blinded them. I'd hate to one day find folks dying of mesothelioma because they used makeup as kids. Anyway, PennPIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to give our FDA the power to remove cosmetics from our store shelves.

S. 1138, the Working Families Tax Relief Act, would expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (or CTC), by expanding the size of the benefit taxpayers who qualify for the credit would receive. You should distinguish that from right-wing efforts to "expand" the EITC and the CTC so that higher-income folks can get the credit; the effort described in S. 1138 actually helps working families, while the right-wing "expansions" only pretend to. You should also distinguish the Working Families Tax Relief Act from the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the law that promised tax cuts to the middle class but instead delivered massive tax cuts to rich folks and corporations -- and slammed a lot of middle-class taxpayers with a tax bill this year instead of the tax refund they'd come to expect. The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the struggle of working families by passing the Working Families Tax Relief Act, because it's a bill that actually lives up to its name.

Around the table: the worst word in the English language, and other revelations.

John Mauldin at Forbes announces that "The Average American Can't Save Enough to Retire" -- and that's mainly because the average American doesn't make enough money. Take that, rich boss who looks down on everyone who's not like him! I can't really fault Mr. Mauldin for talking about retirement in terms of "cruises and golf tournaments," or bills only in terms of paying off your house or car, since I imagine that's how his intended audience at Forbes thinks about these things. And perhaps some of them will get the message, however muted, that they're not paying their employees enough to have a decent-sized IRA.

Fran Quigley at TruthOut warns us that big pharma corporations are trying to deflect from their role in pricing life-saving drugs too high by nattering on about middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers." Because what else can they do when you have them dead to rights on jacking up the price of insulin so much that some diabetics skip doses which diabetics cannot ever do? Just remember that big pharma corporations pay their executives tens of millions of dollars and report profits as high as 40%, and that the price of insulin has increased tenfold over the last 20 years, which is, to say the least, a lot faster than inflation. (Also, note that pharmacy benefit managers don't set a drug's list price.)

Buried in this account of how our President hates the idea of self-driving cars, not that he's doing anything about it, is the statement that Administration Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao faces a "challenge" to "manage safety concerns while promoting U.S. innovation." If a car isn't safe, how is it "innovative"? Are we "innovating" on the definition of safety now? To include, you know, stuff that's not safe? "Innovation" is really the worst word in the English language. You can safely decide that anyone who deploys it as an unambiguous positive is a fool.

Janine Jackson at FAIR reminds us, in the wake of the news that the Venezuelan government didn't blow up those aid convoys at all, that "Exposure of Another Pro-War Lie Doesn’t Make Media More Skeptical of Pro-War Claims." You have to wonder why our "liberal" media keep going to the same people who are always wrong about everything -- a phenomenon we've observed repeatedly, such as when folks who swore up and down that the Iraq war would be easy-peasy kept getting cited as "experts" in news reports -- but of course we already know why: because war makes big corporations money, and media outlets don't challenge money.

If you're wondering why this session's Medicare-for-All bill has fewer House Democratic supporters than last session's Medicare-for-All bill did, despite there being, you know, more Democrats in the House this session, you can take comfort in the fact that quite a few of last session's Democrats supported it because it had no chance of passing, and its chances of passing grow with the passage of time. You can take less comfort in recalling that Democrats sure do have a habit of sabotaging good ideas when they have the power to do so -- but you can take more comfort in knowing that our job isn't to elect more Democrats, but to make the politicians in power do our will.

Finally, in a related note, David Dayen reminds us that California Senator/Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris loves to celebrate her role in getting that $25 billion settlement from banksters over foreclosures, but that the settlement itself is nothing to celebrate. That goes beyond the fact that banksters were able to write that $25 billion off their taxes, and none of them went to jail, even though they obviously broke the law -- a lot of that settlement money didn't actually help anyone keep their home, though that was, ostensibly, its whole purpose. Think of that the next time someone tells you that you have to support Kamala Harris because she's "electable" or "sensible" or whatever -- in these times, these words mean "part of the problem."

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

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

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

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

Around the table: more lessons about drama and duty.

Surprise, surprise, while the Senate Judiciary Committee created all that drama on Friday, the House passed yet more tax-cuts-for-the-rich. Not that they planned it precisely that way, of course -- but creating drama all the time does give folks cover to do nefarious evil, and I'm sure the folks who create the drama are quite aware of that. (The House did not pass the bill in question, H.R. 6760, as part of a budget reconciliation process, meaning our Senators can filibuster it, and of course we'll get on our Senators to do that presently.)

Natalie Shure at In These Times instructs us, in examining the collapse of alleged innovative corporation Theranos, that we're not going to "innovate" our way out of our health care problems. "Ingenuity isn’t what our healthcare sector needs," she writes. "We have plenty of it already, and it hasn’t managed to stop poor people from dying over 10 years earlier, on average, than their wealthy peers." I was going to add that "looking to private corporations to fix health care is more than a little like looking to banksters to fix the foreclosure crisis," but then I realized it wasn't much of a joke, because the Obama Administration did all of that. Didn't we used to think scientists, not entrepreneurs, were the big innovators?

Rebecca Solnit at The New Republic does a public service by reviewing three books about female anger. Male anger -- the kind that ends up in school shootings, wife beatings, and whole movements of men who never stop whining about woman constantly rejecting them I wonder why -- gets most of the ink in America, but it's well past time we acknowledged that women have a right to be angry, and that we need to stop telling them they don't. (I mean, I don't put up with oooooh why are you so angry? from the haters, and it never occurs to me that I should -- but we make women feel like they should.)

Jake Laperruque and David Janovsky at the Project on Government Oversight inform us that aerial drones may have reached a point where they're good enough and cheap enough to tempt local police departments to radically increase spying on the citizenry. And the more automated they become, the fewer people will be involved in their use and maintenance -- which means, yes, that aerial drones kill jobs. How many times must I tell these pimps! Ensuring that government spying doesn't violate our rights is the work of a democracy, and only people can do the work of a democracy -- and if that last part puts the fear in you, then your task as a citizen is to help create people worthy of that work, not throw up your hands and let machines do it.

You can get too hypnotized by the inside politics in this excerpt from Michael Lewis's upcoming book (The Fifth Risk) about how our Administration is destroying our government from within, but you'll probably agree that, regardless of the specific context in which he said it, "fuck the law...I want my fucking money" is pretty much the motto of our President and of the corporate executives he regards as his real constituency. Remember that motto every time our Administration tries to slash clean air, clean water, and product safety regulations.

Finally, we learn the amazing story of how Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) went from declaring his support for the Kavanaugh nomination to demanding an FBI investigation into the allegations against Mr. Kavanaugh after activists confronted him in a Senate elevator with their stories of sexual assault. That video is hard to watch, but "(l)ook at me when I'm talking to you!" is exactly how we must confront the powerful in America, and when we do, we have the opportunity to learn a simple lesson: that shame works. Never let the cynics and the haters tell you any differently.

Action: concerning Puerto Rico, self-driving cars, and endangered species.

Given the fact that Puerto Rico -- which ought to be a state, so Americans are less likely to think it's full of brown-skinned foreigners -- is still suffering from the ravages of Hurricane Maria over a year later, Amnesty International helps you tell local and federal authorities to investigate our government's response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The immediate news hook: a CBS News report (based on photos taken by a Puerto Rico police officer) that millions of bottles of water sat on a runway in Puerto Rico for more than a year. I guess our Administration will blame REGULASHUNZ!!!!! for that, though is that sort of excuse really worthy of a can-do country? Also, both the Union of Concerned Scientists and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to enact some real relief for the good citizens of Puerto Rico. And if that means building out a renewable power grid and/or ending the forced austerity policies so beloved by the banksters who hold Puerto Rican debt, well, those are sacrifices we should be willing to make.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to oppose S. 1885, the AV START Act, which would let corporations put self-driving cars on the road without ensuring their safety, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. You heard about the two people self-driving cars have killed this year, but you may not have heard that road tests commonly find self-driving cars absolutely flummoxed by a little snow or a solitary seagull. One corporation wants to put sensors under cars so they'll "see" the road better. I have a few better ideas: properly fund public transportation, mandate that corporations with known safety problems start disclosing them, and shame people who only buy cars because they're flashy. We'll start getting safer driving after that! Why do we assume machines will do things better than people when machines can't check out my groceries better than a 16-year-old? Because bosses don't want to have to pay workers, that's why. Let's not enable that behavior.

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Administration not to pursue a bunch of regulatory changes that would seriously injure our ability to protect endangered species. Get to stepping, though, because the deadline for your comments is Monday. What does our Administration plan to do? Among other things, they plan to allow agencies to tabulate "economic costs" when deciding how to protect endangered and threatened species and also to ignore scientific data before giving out oil and gas drilling leases. They'd further mandate that every single threatened species in America get its own rule, even though one rule currently covers all of them; is that what right-wingers mean when they say REGULASHUNZ IZ TEH BURDENZ!!!!!? Apparently the right finds cumbersome regulations just fine when it makes the real work of civilization much harder. They'll answer to God for their nefarious works -- but let's maybe help them walk a more rewarding path by speaking out now.

Action: concerning banksters, free speech, and product safety.

With the 10-year anniversary of the 2008 financial services armageddon having lately passed, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to break up the big banks via a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, which would make banks smaller by preventing them from indulging in the hifalutin investments that crashed our economy and will crash it again. As the first sentence suggests, we've already seen what happens when we don't break up the big banks -- and we're continuing to see what happens when we let banksters determine what our economy is going to look like, and it includes a lot of income redistribution upward from people who work to people who don't. But limiting the size of any institution that threatens to run roughshod over our freedoms is not some "radical" proposal, but one with a long history and precedent in America. You might even say a fundamental opposition to concentrated power created America.

Meanwhile, our Education Department would like to adopt a definition of "anti-Semitism" that would equate criticism of Israel or support of Palestine with anti-Semitism! All so folks can win civil rights cases against folks who do either one in an academic setting! Hey, that could be any of us, if we work in a school! Of course, Israel is not Judaism even if their far-right-wing government acts like they are, and when even the progenitor of the legal theory equating anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel says it can't be used in academic settings due to free speech issues, you have to wonder what our Education Department is really afraid of. Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell our Education Department's Office of Civil Rights not to equate pro-Palestinian activism or criticism of Israel with "anti-Semitism." Yikes, this from the Administration whose President said some Nazi wannabes are "very fine people."

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to ban poisonous paint strippers. A lot of paint strippers contain N-Methylpyrrolidone (or NMP) and methylene chloride, which cause respiratory problems and could lead to death; our EPA did propose a rule banning these paint strippers during the second Obama term, but you know what happened after that: a President openly hostile to regulations that protect good Americans happened. Walmart, Lowe's, and Home Depot have all lately banned these toxic products, but that ain't the boon it seems to be, as our EPA might use that as an excuse to declare that "the market has taken care of the problem," even though these three big corporations could all reverse their decisions tomorrow. And, ah, don't be the fool who retorts WHAT YOU THINK PAINT STRIPPERS SHOULD ONLY HAVE NICE CHEMICALS HA HA HA SNORT. Nobody should worry about dying because they use a paint stripper.

Action: concerning taxes, unconstitutional war-making, and product safety.

As long expected, Congressional Republicans have introduced H.R. 6760, known as the "Protecting Family and Small Business Tax Cuts Act of 2018," but perhaps better known as "Tax Scam 2.0," the bill that would make permanent certain tax cuts Republicans passed late last year, and though Republicans spend a lot of time telling you these are really for, well, "families and small businesses," that's utter rubbish -- sure, the cut in the 25 percent bracket to 22 percent will stay, but that's not a whole lot of real money, whereas the 2.6 percentage point cut in the former 39.6 percent bracket is real money, and so is the Estate tax cut (which working folks like us never pay), and so is the pass-through business tax cut which mostly rich folks get. We might as well get the jump on this, so Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your House Rep to reject the work-hating, deficit-busting, working families-hurting "Tax Scam 2.0."

Meanwhile, several Congressfolk from both parties are still pushing for a War Powers Resolution vote on our participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and Just Foreign Policy joins with MoveOn to help you demand that your Congressfolk vote on the war on Yemen, as our Constitution and the War Powers Act mandate they do. Earlier this week, our Administration "certified," in testimony to Congress, that Saudi Arabia and the UAE "are undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure." Like bombing school buses? Like leaving Yemen teetering on the brink of famine? Defense Secretary Mattis has also said that American influence on Saudi Arabia and the UAE has saved civilian lives, which sure sounds like a rhetorical hostage crisis to me. You know what would save more civilian lives? If our government didn't feel like it had to go along with whatever Saudi Arabia wants, that's what. It's hard to say you have leverage over someone if you never actually use it.

Finally, hot on the heels of the news that some Playskool crayons you find in dollar stores or at online sellers like Amazon or eBay might have asbestos in them, Penn PIRG (which conducted the study) helps you tell our Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to recall these and other products that might injure our children off our shelves. (As an aside, I sure do find the misspelling of "playschool" less funny as I get older.) Penn PIRG's findings also included markers with benzene and three-ring binders with phthalates, and while a Johns Hopkins toxicologist said the amount of asbestos found in the Playskool crayons isn't dangerous to "most" people, you have to wonder if "most" people includes children, and one of the Penn PIRG study's authors points out that if you get trace amounts of asbestos from several products (and you might!), you're still at risk for getting sick. So, yes, it seems like recalling the crayons would help save lives.

Action: concerning conservation, marijuana, and self-driving cars.

Congress still hasn't reauthorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund, though it'll expire at the end of this month, and though it has worked to reclaim American lands for decades now. And why not? Because they abhor hard work? Because dedicating oil and gas drilling fees toward buying up and reclaiming lands like the Appalachian Trail is TEH EXTREMIZTZ ENVIRONMENTALISTZ!!!!!? Because it's about conserving the past so the future can enjoy it and today's politicians only care about the present? Because a program that doesn't actually cost taxpayers anything must be a program that runs well and therefore must be destroyed? Whatever the reason, the Wilderness Society helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund with a quickness. And if they start talking about the LWCF needing "reform," you can remind them that when they say "reform" they usually mean "deform." There's no reason they shouldn't know we're on to them.

Meanwhile, our Administration has convened a Marijuana Policy Coordination Committee, with the apparent purpose of bamboozling the public not to support better marijuana policy, as most of us do. You'd think they'd have better things to do with their time, but let's one-up this "policy coordination committee" and let Drug Policy Alliance help us tell our Congressfolk to pass pending legislation which would improve our federal policy toward marijuana. The bills you'd support are the Marijuana Justice Act (H.R.4815/S.1689), which would remove marijuana from Schedule I and help communities ravaged by the "war on drugs," and the STATES Act (H.R.6043/S.3032), which would let states that have legalized the drug operate without federal interference. Why, even our President endorsed the STATES Act earlier this year! Of course, that was then, and for our President, tomorrow is always another country.

Finally, Congress is still itching to pass legislation that would actually allow corporations to put self-driving cars on the road without first determining if they're safe. This is, as you know, a matter of some debate, since self-driving cars have killed people on two occasions this year, and you and I still can't get one! But S. 1885, the AV START Act, would not only let self-driving car-manufacturing corporations glide past federal safety standards, it would prevent states from banning self-driving cars. I remember asking why folks are so excited about self-driving cars, but of course I know the real reason: putting these monstrosities out on the road will make someone a lot of unearned money. Indeed, it often seems like that's the only reason corporations do anything in America. Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good Americans from unsafe products by rejecting S. 1885.

Action: government oppression, food safety, and marijuana prohibition.

Amnesty International helps you tell the government of Venezuela to release its political prisoners. Venezuela just had an election, as you know, and it wasn't quite the resounding victory for which incumbent President Nicolas Maduro might have hoped -- in fact, given the increased number of protestors out in the streets after the election, it may well have been a loss. Mr. Maduro has taken a page from Mr. Assad's playbook by shooting those protestors, a few short years after following in the footsteps of his predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez, by wresting rule-by-decree power, this time while the opposing party controlled the nation's assembly. But it doesn't matter whether I might agree with any part of Mr. Maduro's political philosophy, because governments are always wrong to fire on their protestors, and governments are always wrong to detain their political opponents. And if governments do either one, then they are failed governments, and deserve to be out of power.

Meanwhile, Food and Water Watch helps you tell the U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to keep unsafe Chinese chicken out of American stores. Specifically, you'll ask the USDA to deny "granting equivalency status for the poultry inspection system in the People's Republic of China," which the USDA would like to do though China's lackluster poultry inspection system is notorious the world over, allowing things you might expect (sick birds and antibiotic abuse) and things you might not (using recycled cooking oil from street gutters, yum!). This is the kind of thing we supposedly put Mr. Trump in office to stop, but the Trumpoids have an answer: it's a great deal, a YUGE deal, really, because we're opening up their markets to our beef! So we're selling safe, high-quality beef to China, and we're getting crappy, disease-ridden chicken in return. Yeah, that's a great deal like getting Jason Grimsley for Curt Schilling was a great deal for the Astros.

Finally, Sen. Booker (D-NJ) has introduced the Marijuana Justice Act, an ambitious bill worthy of the man Mr. Booker pushed out of the Senate, the late Frank Lautenberg. Among other things, the bill would end federal scheduling/prohibition of marijuana, withhold funding from states that continue to criminalize it (which they'd have the right to do) if they disproportionately arrest and convict non-whites on pot charges, and establish a Community Reinvestment Fund to help those communities most harmed by the "war on drugs" (which, as John Ehrlichmann himself said, was always about demonizing blacks and anti-war activists). Fact is, pot is no worse than alcohol or tobacco, and if it's a "gateway drug" to anything, it's most likely a gateway drug to "getting hemp grown the way we've historically grown cotton," which may explain Attorney General Sessions's opposition to it even more than any racist feelings he might have. Anyway, Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Marijuana Justice Act.

Action: "free" trade, free speech, and EPA funding.

CREDO helps you tell our U.S. Trade Representative to put people first, not corporations, when he renegotiates the North American Free Trade Agreement. CREDO presents an impressively detailed list of demands: an "open and transparent" negotiation, the elimination of the "investor-state tribunals" that allow corporations to nullify our laws and exact tribute from taxpayers, strong environmental and labor standards, strong product safety standards for imports, and strong protections for citizens against higher drug prices. Who could possibly oppose these things? Why, no one, of course -- which is why "free" trade votaries try to distract you with irrelevancies like "booga booga China" and "polls say everyone likes trade" and "OK, we hear your complaints, just let us have this trade deal and we'll listen next time." That's mostly stuff corporate Democrats say, but don't be lulled into complacency by the presence of President Trump, because he appointed a lot of "free" traders to his cabinet, and because, you know, duty is duty.

Meanwhile, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject H.R. 1697/S. 620, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act. I've held that past attempts at the state level to zero out government funding for groups associated with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (or BDS) movement are odious, but not unconstitutional -- you have a right to free speech, but you don't have a "right" to collect money from your fellow taxpayers. The Israel Anti-Boycott Act goes further than that, though -- it prohibits any American citizen "engaged in interstate or foreign commerce" from "requesting the imposition of any boycott by a foreign country against a country which is friendly to the United States" or "supporting any boycott fostered or imposed by an international organization, or requesting imposition of any such boycott, against Israel." That sounds an awful lot like our government telling us what to do and what to think, so let's not put up with that.

Finally, the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose proposed Trump budget cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, and also to expand EPA funding so it can do the job the people have commanded it to do. Our government's failure to properly fund the EPA's mandate to keep our air, water, and land clean has been a problem almost since its inception under President Nixon, and you may be surprised to learn that even a few far-right Republicans aren't necessarily that anxious to cut EPA funding further: "There's not that much in the EPA, for crying out loud," says Rep. Simpson of Idaho. Now, if we get EPA funding up to the point where it actually can inspect fracking wells, for example, I bet Rep. Simpson reverts right back to complaining about how the EPA "oppresses small businesses" and "kills jobs," though nobody wants the EPA to be 20 percent of our federal budget. More than 0.22% (that's 22 one-hundredths of one percent, not "22 percent," "liberal" media) of our federal budget would be nice, though.

Action: "free" trade, and endangered species.

President Trump may have withdrawn the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" and notified Congress of his intention to renegotiate NAFTA, but don't congratulate him too much for these things -- Mr. Trump, after all, decided not to try to get rid of the most odious part of NAFTA and other "free" trade deals, the "investor-state tribunal" that allows corporations to nullify our laws and extract tribute from the taxpayer. Also, Mr. Trump's own Commerce Secretary told a corporatist crowd that he'd start renegotiating NAFTA by adding in some of the only-slightly-less-odious parts of the TPP, like its extension of drug monopolies. You'd think any renegotiation of NAFTA would begin by putting workers' interests at its center, since that's pretty much what Mr. Trump said he'd do, so Sign for Good helps you tell the U.S. Trade Rep to make sure any NAFTA renegotiation puts workers in all three countries first. These interests include getting rid of "investor-state tribunals," requiring imports to meet strong American safety standards, protecting Buy American and Buy Local rules, and restricting monopolies on drug patents. Think they want to do any of that? Of course not. But let's make them known as opponents of the popular will, if it comes to that.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the Department of the Interior to reverse its planned delisting of the Yellowstone grizzly bear as an endangered species. Interior plans to protect grizzlies inside the Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and near Glacier National Park, but would rescind protections for hundreds of grizzlies in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. Some of these will now fall prey to trophy hunters, whom I'm pretty sure wouldn't face a grizzly bear without a big gun. Didn't know trophy hunters got so much say about everything, did you? Particularly after more than 600,000 public comments to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service prevented delisting last year? We do have many more grizzlies than we did 40-plus years ago, but not nearly as many as we used to, and grizzlies have lost nearly 10% of their numbers since 2014, so they still face challenges. And folks who complain about having to work to protect the grizzly for yet more years are clearly out of touch with the whole idea that anything worth doing is hard, takes time, and should be done right. You might think these are conservative values. And then you might wonder why so few of today's "conservatives" seem to hold them.

Action: product safety, and campaign finance disclosure.

Lithium button batteries have come a long way over the last few years -- but not necessarily at Duracell, which still makes lithium button batteries for toys, remotes, and the like that can burn through a child's throat in a mere fifteen minutes, if a child happens to swallow one. But they just tell parents to watch their kids and make sure they don't swallow them. Even though toddlers can get into a whole lot of things with a quickness, most folks (even most parents!) want to tell parents that at some time or other -- after all, it's been pretty obvious for a while that no one watched Donald Trump enough when he was a kid. But what we need to train ourselves to do more, frankly, is tell corporations: if you can make something so that it's safe, why not just do it already? Maybe Duracell will tell you making their button batteries safer would drive up the price, but so what? No one who loses their child to a swallowed battery will console themselves with the notion that at least they didn't pay as much for it. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Duracell to help keep children safer by making their batteries safer.

Meanwhile, H.R. 430/S. 229, the DISCLOSE Act, would require corporations, unions, and other entities to disclose any campaign spending of more than $10,000 they undertake -- and would also require those entities to disclose the names of any donors who contributed more than $1,000 to that effort. Why? Because money is not speech, and disclosing the names of the big donors who seem to get whatever they like after they donate their money is not "bullying," as Super Great and Awesome Real American President Mitch McConnell has called it. The DISCLOSE Act would also expand the definition of "independent expenditure" so that corporations et al can't hide their donors as easily behind an "issue ad," which may slam a particular candidate while avoiding literally expressing a preference for one. I disagree with the part that would let folks 17 and under donate money to campaigns, not just because children aren't supposed to have all the same rights as adults, but also because "contributions from children" sure looks like a way to launder money. Still, Sign for Good helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the DISCLOSE Act.

Action: "free" trade, corporate welfare, and cosmetic safety.

As you know, the text of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" is finally out, and early analyses suggest the deal is even worse than we knew it was going to be from leaks. So both the People's Email Network and Roots Action help you tell your Congressfolk to reject this noxious "free" trade deal. The TPP would, as you know, would ship our jobs overseas and bring more unsafe products here, would make it harder to get the drugs you need to get better, would make it harder to speak freely on the internet, and (perhaps most noxious of all) would allow "investor-state tribunals" to nullify our laws if they cost some investor some money somewhere -- even if those laws protect the people against pollution, workplace injuries, or bankster schemes. The deal is so bad that its supporters (including President Obama and his former economic BFF, Lawrence Summers) can't defend it coherently -- Mr. Summers's last defense relied on booga-booga about China and a vague promise to stop passing bad "free" trade deals and get future "free" trade deals right if we'll only give up and let this one pass. He must think the American people are profoundly stupid. We're not.

Meanwhile, some four dozen big corporate tax breaks have expired, as they do every year, and Congress is anxious to renew them, as they do every year. Have any of them considered that the difficulty they have renewing such corporate welfare handouts as the "bonus depreciation" handout might well be due to the American people's hatred of corporate welfare handouts? I kid, of course: Congressfolk know full well what they do, and care more about their big donors than their real bosses, i.e., the American people. Naturally, at the same time our glorious representatives are figuring out how they're going to extend these handouts, they're waffling on extending expansions of actual tax relief for actual working families, namely the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (or CTC). Congress may well play the we're-broke game they never play with corporate welfare handouts -- unless we tell them not to. Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell Congress to prioritize tax relief for working families over corporate welfare handouts.

Finally, this week the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (or HELP) Committee will mull S. 1014, the Personal Care Products Safety Act, and Breast Cancer Action helps you demand more vigorous action against carcinogens in personal care products than the current bill would take. More and more scientists are linking cosmetics to cancer, but S. 1014 doesn't go far enough in protecting good Americans from carcinogens: it would make the FDA evaluate a mere five chemicals annually, and though cosmetic manufacturing corporations would have to provide a list of chemicals they use to the FDA, they wouldn't have to put those ingredients on their product labels -- you know, where good Americans might actually get to read them. Perhaps most importantly, the FDA would, under S. 1014, assume all chemicals are safe until they're discovered to be harmful, rather than force corporations to prove their chemicals are safe to begin with. There is, also, the matter of funding the FDA's new mandates, which S. 1014 doesn't address. You're supposed to spend money to prevent wrongdoing, after all.

Around the table: of constructive economic policy and disruptive technology.

Boo hoo, the super-rich need therapy, too, because of the unique problems of having wealth. As if the rich aren't "isolated" because building a society that worships wealth above all isolates all of us, or this isolation isn't so often a conscious aim of the super-rich. If the "liberal" media were actually making the people who crapped all over our economy feel "ashamed," my response would be bravo! But when one "wealth psychologist" says "I am not necessarily comparing it to what people of color have to go through" before going ahead and comparing it to what people of color have to go through, I'm reminded that there are still far too many "liberal" media folks who'd tell a struggling black man to "start with the man in the mirror" but would never say that to John Paulson.

The New York Times runs a story claiming that increasing taxes on the rich would actually do quite a lot, but it doesn't go all the way. The return of the 91% tax bracket still apparently has the name of Voldemort to the "liberal" media, and no it is not true that we should not bring back the 91% tax bracket because "at some point, higher tax rates would discourage extra investment and work" -- it would make CEOs pay themselves less with corporate revenues, and then shield those revenues from taxation by hiring people to make stuff, which would go a long way toward bringing back a thriving middle class.

Robert Reich argues that Hillary Clinton's Wall Street policy prescriptions won't be enough. Mr. Reich approves of the thrust of her plan, which would impose fees on banks that depend less on deposits and more on short-term funding, and would regulate mutual funds and hedge funds more stringently, but Mr. Reich argues it won't be enough, simply because the banksters are too politically powerful now, so we ought to break them up. I concur -- not just because I've long said the biggest enemy of the small bank is the big bank, but because banksters resist any change, this after they took a massive crap all over the economy. You'd think they'd feel shame or something.

Cade Metz at Wired tells us why the internet porn business isn't as "ridiculously lucrative" as it was, say, 10 years ago. Long story perhaps a bit too short: it's now ridiculously easy to see porn for free on your home computer -- to the point where it's become a "low-margin" business, in the testimony of one porn app entrepreneur -- while at the same time it's actually quite difficult to get porn on the smartphones most folks use to surf the internet these days. There's a bit more to the story than that, but that's the jist of it.

Finally, Ana Swanson at the Washington Post covers actual disruptive technologies, and concludes that the most disruptive technology of the last 100 years is the refrigerator. And, if you think about it, it's true: as another writer says, "(a) whole arsenal of home preservation techniques, from cheese-making to meat-smoking to egg-pickling to ketchup-making, receded from daily use within a single generation." This and other technologies (including the dishwasher, the clothes-washer, and the vacuum cleaner) resulted in a big drop in the time working families spent on meal-prep, laundry, and house-cleaning: from 58 hours weekly in 1900 to just 18 in 1970. (Remind your libertarian friends, though, that without clean water regulations and product safety laws, there'd be much fewer of us around to celebrate these labor-saving devices.)

Around the table: from the non-ISIS ISIS plot to the worker-owned co-op rising from the ashes of a failed corporation.

FAIR catches the "liberal" media howling about an ISIS nuke plot that doesn't demonstrate ISIS involvement in said plot. Details! They're so hard! But this is how they'll create another generation of rage-filled citizens the next Republican President will harvest. And like the last generation, they'll forget all about terrorism the moment their Personal Lord and Savior takes a giant dump all over the economy, and then rebrand themselves as teabaggers for the next center-right Democratic President.

California enacts the strongest digital privacy law in America -- by virtue of requiring that law enforcement get a warrant before compelling any business to turn over any electronic data. Alberto Gonzales would find that concept "quaint," and Barack Obama would oppose it because of "the grave threats we face," but this is America, so their kind don't get all the say around here.

Ho hum, North Carolina's reactionary state legislature imposes auto and appliance repair taxes in order to pay for another round of tax cuts for the rich. How hard would it be for Democrats to run TV ads showing some state legislator helping some guy in a monocle literally take money out of working people's pockets? I mean, that took me ten seconds to work out. But Democrats are either too "polite" to do it or too "smart" to think of it. Please understand that by "polite" and "smart," I mean weak.

Double ho hum, Notre Dame study finds a strong correlation between corporations that pay their executives in stock options and corporations with a lot of product safety issues. But don't they say stock options make an executive more invested in his corporation's success? Not when "success" no longer includes making good products -- or safe ones. Naturally, CEOs who've run their corporation for a while have fewer product safety issues. Why, it's almost like sticking around and building something lasting is, like, good for the world or something.

Right Wing Watch catches Mike Huckabee endorsing a boycott of Frito Lay over its gay-friendliness -- and remembers that Mr. Huckabee called a similar boycott of Chick-Fil-A over its gay-unfriendliness "economic terrorism." Don't people know they're not talking into the void? But even worse is the guy who suggested the boycott, who thinks we're now all supposed to "participate" in gay weddings (I bet Mr. Lane doesn't even get invited to them!) and also says that in the year 2000 we'll all be put in jail if we don't "cheer" gay weddings. Evidence of these assertions? I kid, of course. Let's never speak of this David Lane dodo again.

Finally, we check in with worker-owned co-op New Era Windows, and find them doing quite well. You remember when Republic Windows and Doors closed down in 2008 and the workers occupied the factory to keep it open and keep their jobs? (Even some Libertarians approved!) Well, Republic sold the factory to a California corporation Serious Materials, which then tried to shut the factory down again -- so the workers occupied it, again. And then Serious Materials buckled under popular pressure (which you may have helped apply, if you were reading this blog in 2011) and sold the factory to the workers, and now they're back on their feet and thinking they might be a model for other corporations. Times could get tough, and greed could see an opening to creep back in, but they're showing it can be done, so good for them.

Action: government spying in France, forced labor in Uzbekistan, and chemical safety in the U.S.

France is considering a bill that would give its secret service (the DGSE) the same sort of government spying capabilities our NSA has -- spying on phone calls and vacuuming up data without warrants, with very limited independent oversight on how it's using its powers. Because all that's worked out so well, and has been popular with so many people! Keep in mind, when considering the madness the French Parliament contemplates here, that we're still the only nation with a First Amendment guarantee that the government can't put you in jail merely because you spoke out against it. As a result, citizens of other nations are more likely than we are to consider free speech as something that ought to have "sensible" limits (besides the obvious limits on libel, slander, and terroristic threats), and that opens the door a bit wider for government spying initiatives like this one. But if our great gift to the world is our democracy, then we have a duty to weigh in on what the French government plans to do. Hence Access Now helps you tell the French Senate to reject the surveillance bill passed by the French National Assembly.

Meanwhile, Uzbekistan continues to force many of its citizens into labor every October in that nation's cotton fields, for little or not pay and for the monetary reward of that government's corporate cronies. (Personal to right-wingers constantly squealing about our "socialist" President: this is what a state-run economy looks like.) Worse, the World Bank invests hundreds of millions of dollars into agricultural projects in Uzbekistan, which helps prop up the slave labor regime. And Uzbekistan is the world's fifth-leading cotton exporter, so Uzbek cotton could wind up in your clothes. The World Bank has said it'll withdraw from Uzbekistan if it discovers evidence of slave labor there, but it might not be all that motivated to look hard for it. Hence the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell the World Bank to investigate the matter vigorously. Let's at least put them in the position of falling back on the old but if we leave, we won't be able to effect change there argument -- which you no doubt recognize by now is a hostage situation.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Consumer Product Safety Commission (or CPSC) to ban flame-retardants in household furniture, then Friends of the Earth still helps you do that. I expect you know the long-story-short by now -- flame retardants don't particularly retard fires even as well as their name would suggest, and they typically contain toxic chemicals scientists have found cause brain-development issues in children, as well as cancer and reproductive issues in everyone. And when furniture with flame retardants does catch fire, it releases toxic fumes and smoke, which makes them harder to contain and thus puts firefighters at more risk. (Yes, firefighting is not a risk-free job, but there's no point in making it riskier if we can avoid doing so.) Deadline for comments to the CPSC is October 19, and we shouldn't expect positive action from Congress (which is still poised to pass a bad chemical safety "reform" bill they had the cojones to name after Frank Lautenberg), so now is the time to get cracking.

Action: net neutrality, voting rights, and chemical safety.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell Congress to stop its cowardly backdoor attacks on the FCC's net neutrality rules, then CREDO still helps you do that. You may recall the story: a financial services/general government spending bill contained a section effectively preventing the FCC from enforcing net neutrality regulations until three lawsuits against net neutrality had been settled -- a process that, with appeals and all, could take years. We called over a dozen House Reps on the Appropriations Committee to see if we could get that section struck, but the Committee passed the bill with the offending provision; now it gets a full House vote (probably this week), and then a full Senate vote, and then it goes to the President, whom we may have to convince that net neutrality is a legacy-calibre issue. By then, of course, the appropriations process may be so gummed up that he'll give it up in order to get something done. Though I'd let the government shut down over that odious net neutrality provision, I'd prefer that we communicated our will to our Reps in force, so that doesn't become necessary.

Meanwhile, CREDO also helps you tell your Reps and Senators to pass H.R. 2867/S. 1659, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, so we can fix the hole in the Voting Rights Act the Supreme Court blew wide open in Shelby County v. Holder, if you haven't done that already. Or if you have -- sometimes you gotta tell someone until they're sick of hearing about it, especially if that "someone" is a Senator who'd prefer to listen to his or her big donors over martinis rather than listen to their actual bosses, their constituents, over the phone or at their offices. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would require states or municipalities to pre-clear any changes in their voting rights laws for 10 years if 15 or more voting rights violations occurred there over the past 25 years -- and that number would go from 15 to 10 if the state itself committed the violation. That pre-clearance formula would presumably satisfy the Supreme Court's objection to the Voting Rights Act's original formula, even if a fairly-applied VRAA just so happened to list the same states for pre-clearance.

Finally, Jennifer Beals has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell four prominent dollar stores to stop stocking items containing toxic chemicals. With Congress about to pass a crappy chemical regulation reform bill, we're stuck, for the moment, with telling the corporations to get the toxic chemicals off our shelves, but they're all susceptible to the Big Stick of Bad PR. And dollar stores often wind up being a frequent stop for folks in impoverished communities, even more so than WalMart -- I know plenty of folks who buy groceries at dollar stores. But the Campaign for Healthier Solutions has found that four out of every five items in dollar stores contained toxic chemicals, the kind scientists have linked to learning disabilities and cancer, among other things. So let's help them do the right thing, and don't be swayed by folks saying making dollar stores sell safer stuff will hurt impoverished communities that depend on them, when making folks sicker hurts them more.

Around the table: from a dumb "anti-terrorist" questionnaire to a deceptively smart-sounding potential Clinton campaign slogan.

National Counterterrorism Center develops smartypants questionnaire, to be used by law enforcement and community and religious leaders, to rate someone's ability to succumb to violent extremism and become a terrorist. Well, there's no way unscrupulous government officials could abuse that! Note to NCC: people who "talk of harming self or others" might be in severe pain or have legitimate mental health issues. Know what a better plan would be? Let's stop treating the world's citizens like they're mere obstacles to infinite wealth. We'll enable the creation of fewer terrorists as a result.

The Center for Effective Government highlights the presence of toxic chemicals in dollar stores. Why does this matter? Because big-box retailers have pledged to phase toxins like formaldehyde, phthalates, and heavy metals out of their products, but a lot of working families use dollar stores, and one study found over 80% of tested dollar store products violating either mandatory or voluntary health standards. Sadly, our forty-years-outdated chemical safety system is also to blame -- and you know Republicans aren't going to fix that, right?

Robert Creamer at the Huffington Post says new Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner is an awful hybrid of Mitt Romney and Scott Walker. I guess the Scott Walker in him is his drive to get rid of Illinois's public unions, which I expect he'll have a tougher time with than Mr. Walker did, but Mr. Creamer does a good job illuminating his Inner Romney, nowhere better than in this paragraph: "Rauner brazenly claims that state employees' average wage of $64,000 per year is simply too high. This from a man who makes $64,000 in two and a half hours."

On Wednesday, cell phone service provider corporations began allowing their customers to unlock their phones so they can use those phones with another provider, and the Consumerist describes some of the ins and outs of that process. Generally you need to be all paid up on your phone to move it (which, hopefully, you'd expect); T-Mobile adds some small requirements and AT&T adds a few more. Sprint customers, however, are pretty much trapped unless they've just bought their phone, and by "just bought" I mean today, yesterday or the day before. (Verizon 4G customers all have unlocked phones to begin with, and only a few 3G customers will need customer-service intervention to switch providers.)

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback reverses the executive order issued by his predecessor that extended anti-discrimination protections for state workers to gays. Mr. Brownback then said approximately the stupidest thing I've heard all week, that "(a)ny such expansion of 'protected classes' should be done by the legislature and not through unilateral action," as if the legislature never granted the Executive branch the authority to do just that in hiring and maintaining Executive branch workers. He only wants you to think he's dumb, though.

Conservative economist provides potential Hillary Clinton campaign slogan: "The Republicans gave us a crappy economy twice, and we fixed it twice. Why would you ever trust them again?" While folks probably don't remember the Reagan revolution as well as they did 20 years ago, they probably do remember, quite vividly I think, that this particular "recovery" hasn't done very much for them. Hell, we shouldn't even credit the Clinton miracle to the Clintonoids -- the internet bubble had more to do with that than anything, and no similar bubble has emerged during the Obama years.

Around the table: renewable energy, ebola, "liberal" media folly, celebrity endorsements, and net neutrality.

Remember Solyndra, which went belly-up after taking a loan of over half a billion dollars? Well, the federal loan program that gave that loan is now turning a profit -- as in, the interest payments on these loans now exceed defaults. But don't worry, Scott Walker will get rid of this program as soon as he's President, and inhabitants of distant planets will hear SOLYNDRA!!!!! echoing on their media devices hundreds of years from now.

The World Health Organization reports that ebola has killed 5,000 folks, almost entirely in Western Africa nations like Liberia and Sierra Leone. Kudos to the AP not just for actually staying on top of this story, but for resisting the temptation to report it as if Americans (total deaths from ebola in America: one) matter more than anyone else in the world. (Don't read the comments, though; too many of them are depressingly moronic.)

Surprise, surprise, the "liberal" media can hardly find anyone who opposes President Obama's new war in Syria and Iraq, as a mere three percent of its guests on roundtable/interview TV programs during the middle of September opposed the war. Reminds me of that time Tim Russert told Bill Moyers that he wished he "had access" to sources who might have been more skeptical of Tha Bush Mobb's rush to war in Iraq! After all, it wasn't like Tim Russert was a journalist or anything.

Ashlee Kieler at The Consumerist tells you why celebrity endorsements of products shouldn't matter that much to you. Really, we should be able to separate the Fonz from Henry Winkler when seeing reverse-mortgage ads, but Ms. Kieler also wonders why celebrities don't take more trouble to learn about their products -- witness Larry King's utterly moronic suggestion that "When you’re a spokesman, you have to have some faith." Don't you have to have some brains?

Finally, numerous actual conservatives take to Sen. Ted Cruz's facebook page after Mr. Cruz's brain-dead comments about network neutrality. Cynics will no doubt claim that all the variations of the phrase "bought and paid for by the big telecom corporations" signal a fake grassroots campaign, but what of the possibility that conservatives like net neutrality, too? They make a pretty good case for it, after all -- mainly, that net neutrality doesn't "stifle" competition but promotes competition.

Action: getting carcinogens out of products, and keeping our air clean.

CREDO helps you tell Procter & Gamble to remove carcinogens from all of its products. Why Procter & Gamble? Partly because you have to start somewhere, and partly because P&G have been promoting breast cancer awareness all month without labeling any P&G product ingredients that might be helping to cause that cancer, like ingredients that release formaldehyde in many of their hair and makeup products. But mainly we ask Procter & Gamble because Procter & Gamble, a name I've heard since I've been watching TV, has such an outsized share of the market -- Tide, CoverGirl, and Pantene are just three of their brands. Of course we also ask because our government has done very little about the matter -- getting chemical safety legislation has proven to be a Herculean task, and though Rep. Schakowsky (D-IL) has thrice introduced legislation allowing the FDA to regulate cosmetic products, Congress hasn't moved on it. (No, not even when Democrats controlled both houses.) We'll have to demand action from Congress in time -- but no power can stop us from demanding action from corporations until then.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to tighten the rules that cover air pollution when energy plants start up, shut down, or experience a malfunction. Essentially, the EPA wants to stop giving plants a free pass when their startups and shutdowns (but not malfunctions, though surely energy corporations can find people who can design plants that malfunction less) put them over emissions limits. Let me guess: big energy corporations claim their plants won't be able to start if the EPA gets its way. Well, that's not very big-boy of them, is it? Surely, as the best and brightest people in America, they can figure out how to start up and shut down plants so that the good folks downwind don't get asthma and cancer as much? Or are they only good at stealing money from people who work? What about the folks who have to breathe that air, anyway? Are their needs worth nothing? Because big energy corporations, whenever they dismiss regulations that clean our air, sure do act like other folks' needs are worth nothing. If they wonder why we get that impression, they may need to look in the mirror more often.

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

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

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

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