Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning sentencing, working families, and methane emissions.

Jacqueline Cooney has started a petition on Change.org with which you may tell our President to pardon her mother, Patricia Cooney, sentenced to 100 years in prison for a first-time drug offense almost 20 years ago. She's served 18 of those years and (thanks to sentence reductions, which, at least, testify to her status as a model prisoner) has 14 more years to go, but she's also 65 and very ill now, and might actually have a shot at getting her various illnesses (including lupus, hypertension, and hyperthyroidism) under control if she can get out of prison and actually get some good medical care. She sure seems to deserve mercy -- and though our President isn't exactly known for his mercy, he has been known to let people talk him into being merciful to folks caught up in long prison sentences now and then. OK, so we're not Kim Kardishian. But this is America, so why should that matter?

Meanwhile, Color of Change helps you tell NBA teams to stop booking Marriott hotels while Marriott workers strike. About 7,000 Marriott workers have been on strike since late last month, after their contracts expired over the summer, demanding such things as enough pay so they don't need a second job to make ends meet and enough say over Marriott's automation plans that they could at least blunt its impact. These are not unreasonable demands -- particularly the second one, where you would expect a corporation to automate its functions long before the technology actually supports that. But NBA players have been staying at Marriott hotels, though NBA players are, as you know, some of the most successful labor union members in the country. But the Big Stick of Bad PR can find everyone eventually, and my guess is that the NBA can find other hotels for their players to stay in, so that they can at least claim some solidarity with workers trying to make a better life.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its proposed plan to scuttle methane emissions rules, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. What argument will penetrate this thick-headed Administration? We've told them, many times, that methane packs a climate change punch far more potent than even coal emissions do. We've told them, many times, that letting oil and gas drilling corporations leak more methane into the air not only lets them waste usable energy but also lets them waste taxpayer money if they're drilling on public lands. I mean, our government should be about saving the taxpayers' money and saving energy, right? OK, I'll admit this is rather like banging your head against a wall. But don't bang your head against a wall -- just do your duty and communicate your will to your government. If they keep ignoring us, they won't be our government that much longer.

Action: concerning the right to protest, copyright law, and food safety.

So liberals get out in the streets to protest our government, and now our National Park Service wants to make it harder for good Americans to protest on public lands. Like our heritage as a people isn't based on protest! Like public lands don't, you know, belong to the public! The NPS would make protestors pay for the cost of barricades and "monitoring," would close off large areas around our White House to protests, and would give our government the right to shut down a protest for most piddling of reasons (rather than using the current "clear and present danger" standard). You know that famous photo of '60 civil rights protestors on the National Mall? Yeah, that won't happen under the new rules, and it's almost like that's the idea. You can pimp-slap the NPS by leaving a public comment opposing their new anti-free speech regulations, which Defending Rights and Dissent helps you do. But get to stepping, because deadline for comments is Monday.

Meanwhile, they call H.R. 1695 the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act; if you note the incongruous presence of the word "accountability" in the title, you already know something's up, and if you note the massive support this bill has from big entertainment corporations and big entertainment trade associations, you know something else is up, too. Currently our Library of Congress appoints a Register of Copyrights, but H.R. 1695 would make that position a Presidential appointee to be confirmed by the Senate. Meaning what? The position would become a political position, and, at present, would be filled by a President who thinks getting all kinds of unearned tax breaks for yourself is just "smart," but who also thinks that whatever big corporations think should be copyright infringement should maybe get your hands cut off. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Senators to reject H.R. 1695.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big corporations to get the glyphosate out of our food, then Just Label It still helps you do that. As you may recall, an Environmental Working Group study found glyphosate in oat-based foods at considerably higher levels than what most scientists would call safe, and scientists have long linked glyphosate to cancer, childbirth issues, and cell function. It's bad enough that four European nations have suspended Monsanto's license to use the most popularly-known glyphosate, Roundup, on their farms -- but here in America, we douse our crops with glyphosate in the hope it'll kill all the nearby weeds, though those weeds have long been developing a resistance to glyphosate, which means we'll heap more of it on, which means they'll get more resistant and we'll get sicker, ad nauseam. This could be yet another one of those disasters "no one sees coming." So, as usual, it's up to those of us who do see it coming.

Action: concerning taxes and conservation.

As you likely know, House Republicans are trying to ram through yet another tax-cut-for-the-rich; the bill number is H.R. 6760, and the title is the innocuous-sounding "Protecting Family and Small Business Tax Cuts Act of 2018." The cojones on these clowns, pretending that families and small businesses have anything to do with it! The idea that "pass-through businesses" are "small businesses" -- and not, you know, the kind of corporations rich people set up to avoid taxation -- is a laugh. The idea that making the 2.6% drop in the top income tax rate permanent is a way of "protecting families" is also a laugh. But when Republican Congresses come after our Social Security and our Medicare and our Medicaid because TEH DEFICITZ!!!!! -- when their own tax plan blew open a trillion-dollar-plus hole in the deficit! -- ain't none of us going to be laughing. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called "Tax Scam 2.0."

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund before it expires on September 30, then the Wilderness Society still helps you do that. The Wilderness Society's email action tool also allows you to tell your Congressfolk to permanently reauthorize the LWCF, which sure would be better than leaving it vulnerable to the hostage crises our legislators like to create -- I mean, if Congress really desperately wants to repeal it (or improve it!), it could simply pass a bill to do that later. Ha ha, I said "simply" like it would be easy for them to do! The LWCF is actually pretty popular, after all -- most of us have visited one of the 40,000-plus scenic places it's created at no cost to the taxpayer. Yes, it's much "easier" for Congress simply to sit on its hands and let popular programs expire, which is a damn good reason to make them reauthorize such programs forever.

Action: concerning ALEC, media consolidation, and public lands.

You may have heard that Verizon has lately left the American Legislative Exchange Council because of ALEC's newfound BBF, David Horowitz, a notorious right-wing Muslim-basher. Yeah, I wish more corporations had dumped ALEC over their support for Voter ID and opposition to municipal broadband, too, but I take an opening where I get it, so People for the American Way helps you tell other big corporations, like AT&T, Comcast, and UPS, to leave ALEC. I admit I was a bit surprised to learn that corporations were leaving ALEC over climate change, but I'd be a lot less surprised to find corporations leaving ALEC over David Horowitz. America's big corporations do seem to have wholeheartedly embraced liberal positions on social issues -- mainly, I suspect, to divert your attention from their reactionary positions on economic issues. But, like I said, I take an opening where I get it, and it's ALEC's economic work I hate the most.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger, then Free Press still helps you do that. Sprint and T-Mobile keep telling us this merger will be good for them, like we're supposed to be emotionally invested in that -- I'm such a churl I want only the things that are good for all of us, and having three big phone corporations instead of four ain't good for us. If four turns to three, then three can more easily turn to two, and two to one, and one was the number of political parties in the Soviet Union, and you know how that turned out. I don't make this analogy lightly -- one corporation monopolizing all of America's phone services would mean (especially in this post-neutrality age) one corporation deciding what you can see and hear. What do conservatives teach us? That concentrated power anywhere is evil. It's why we passed the Sherman Antitrust Act almost 150 years ago.

Finally, our Bureau of Land Management has proposed opening up almost all of New Mexico's Greater Carlsbad Cavern area to oil and gas drilling, and would even sell off some 50,000 acres for that purpose. Meaning it's no longer public land! Which you can only sell one time, I feel compelled to repeat with the italics hammer. Hence Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell our BLM to reject its plan to open up this area to oil and gas drilling. Read through Wild Earth Guardians's seven-point plan in the email you'd send and you'll be impressed with the breadth of its reasoning -- you would argue for prioritizing "securing public access to currently inaccessible lands" over corporate access and for strong safeguards against emissions and oil and gas leaks, among other things. So let's work on getting our policymakers to make some actual good policy, versus policy that enriches some crony or other.

Action: concerning methane emissions, drones, and endangered species.

Another day, another EPA regulatory proposal that would allow big gas drilling corporations to pollute more, specifically more methane. Our Administration has had an absolute hard-on for dumping methane emissions restrictions since the get-go, and Republicans surprisingly failed to pass a resolution of disapproval that would have nullified the EPA's methane emissions rules last year, so they're trying to undo them from inside the EPA now. But methane packs an even bigger climate change punch than coal emissions do, and letting gas drillers vent methane without making them clean it up also deprives America of a) usable fuel and b) royalties if gas drillers are drilling on public lands. Yes, whenever methane floats away on public lands, money that belongs to the American people floats away with it. So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell the EPA to keep methane restrictions strong.

Meanwhile, our Congress is working on a Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) authorization bill, and aims to use that bill to give our government the ability to shoot down drones it considers a "threat." And they don't mean the drones that we use in our unconstitutional war-making activities, but the drones journalists use to get documentation of detention center abuses. One might reasonably respond that if our government didn't do bad things to immigrants and refugees in the first place, they wouldn't need to shoot down any drones recording those things! But that'll fall on deaf ears with this Administration, which is, like Tha Bush Mobb, ignorant and arrogant about it. And while a quarter of the electorate worships them for that, the rest of us can let the Electronic Frontier Foundation help us tell our Congressfolk to reject any FAA authorization bill that allows our government to shoot down drones whenever it pleases.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Fish and Wildlife Service (or FWS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (or NMFS) to reject their proposals to base endangered species decisions more on economics and less on science and common sense, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. Don't be one of those folks who constantly says how's anyone supposed to make money? every time we try to protect endangered species, because that's actually evidence of weakness -- weakness of mind, in the inability to conceive of how business and nature could coexist, and weakness of spirit, in the unwillingness to make things work for anyone other than bosses. I mean, this is America, dammit, the can-do country of world history, and if we elevate mammon to primacy in all our decisions, we will destroy that can-do spirit, and we will deserve oblivion. But those of us with that can-do spirit will continue to fight.

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: concerning monopolies and conservation.

Freedom from Big Tech helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission to start breaking up big tech monopolies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Why? Because they have too much power! You remember Orkut, Tribe, MySpace, and Friendster? Now they're either gone or mere husks of their former selves, because Facebook dominates all. You remember search engines like Momma and Ask Jeeves? Well, Google stomps all over them, too. And Amazon didn't just muscle B. Dalton, Encore, and Waldenbooks out of strip malls all over America, they sentenced uncountable small businesses to oblivion. How many times must I tell these pimps! Small businesses are more accountable to the communities they serve than any big corporation, and they innovate more, too -- which is why big corporations constantly buy small businesses out. But the bigger they get, the more they impose their will upon us, and we have every right to demand that our government -- which works on our behalf, ideally! -- put a stop to that.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission to reject the proposed Sprint/T-Mobile merger. You know the reasons to reject it: mergers kill jobs, raise prices, give consumers fewer choices, and concentrate power in fewer hands; the fact that neither one of these corporations planning to merge is AT&T or Verizon doesn't change any of that. We have, incidentally, another reason to reject the merger: that it might cut off access to smaller carriers that use the bigger carriers' lines, since the resulting bigger corporation can more easily push around smaller carriers. For example, Consumer Cellular -- you've seen their ads; they give inexpensive phone plans to folks over 50, and they even offer flip phones! -- uses T-Mobile's lines; you think the behemoth resulting from a Sprint/T-Mobile merger will give Consumer a better deal? Maybe that sounds like a first-world problem -- until you can't afford phone service.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which has given us such historic outdoors landmarks as the Delaware Water Gap and the Appalachian Trail. LWCF funding expires in just a few weeks, and Congress probably hopes you don't realize the LWCF is there -- and certainly we can't count on our President suddenly reminding us it's there, since the LWCF is about preserving the past for future generations and I just named two things our President doesn't give one rat's hind quarter about. But the LWCF dedicates certain offshore gas and drilling fees toward the task of buying up and preserving historic lands, and when it last expired in 2015, Congress only extended it for three years, despite initially authorizing it for 25 and then renewing it for another 25. Yes, that's another data point suggesting Congress really has gotten a lot worse over time. But we made them reauthorize it before, and we can do it again -- if we act.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering why posting has been relatively light lately, I'm working on the second Penny Rants volume, which will cover the years 2013-2016. I'll put that out in mid-October, and then I'll get to work on the third Penny Rants volume, which will cover 2017 and 2018; that'll be out in mid-January. I'll do some live shows to celebrate those two releases; I'll share more details about those as I get them. But, you know, save the dates, such as they are -- and thank you for reading, and for being good citizens.)

Action: concerning Social Security, taxes, and drilling on public lands.

You've heard of the Republican plan to fund a paid family leave plan with Social Security benefits, resulting in you getting less money when you retire if you've ever used paid family leave? Now it's a real bill! It's S. 3345, with no text or summary presently available at Congress.gov, which could be because, hey, this is a bill that robs your future Social Security benefits if you want paid family leave now. After all, where on Earth else could we possibly get the money to do that? From that $1.7 trillion tax "cut" giveaway to the rich Republicans enacted in December, maybe? Or even from the infinitesimally small payroll tax that would fund an actual paid family leave bill, S. 337, where folks making $50,000 annually would pay $8.50 a month. $8.50 a month! I've seen single servings of coffee that cost more than that! So Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the Rubio rob-the-future-to-pay-now plan -- doesn't sound very conservative when put like that, does it? -- and Moms Rising still helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 337, the FAMILY Act, since that's a real paid family leave bill.

Meanwhile, speaking of that Republican tax scam, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and reject any further tax-cuts-for-the-rich Republicans (or our President) might contemplate. The Senate's talking about more tax cuts like there's no time for that, but don't you believe it -- if the House puts together a bill quickly enough, they'll move heaven and Earth to give more welfare handouts to their cronies. The massive corporate tax cut did not, as our President suggested, put $4,000 in every family's paycheck -- but it did result in a lot of massive stock buybacks, which concentrates power in corporate executive hands, because, yeah, they just don't have enough power already. And that 4% GDP growth from last quarter? You're not seeing any of that in your paycheck, either. You see, this is why America can't have nice things like paid family leave -- because our government cares more about its cronies than its owners, i.e., the American people. We'll just have to learn 'em.

Finally, our Administration plans to auction off two million acres of public land in six Western states so that gas and oil drillers can pollute it create jobs wean America off foreign oil redistribute yet more of our wealth as Americans upward, to themselves. Hence WildEarth Guardians helps you tell our Administration to scuttle these plans. We could go on (and we have!) about how gas and oil drilling spoil clean air and clean water, etc., and spoil wildlife habitat, etc., and these are very important things, but gas and oil drilling also put public lands off-limits to those members of the public who love the great outdoors. Surely it was love of the great outdoors (I doubt he conceived of pollution the way we do now) that moved the first President Roosevelt to start establishing national parks and monuments in the first place. How far we've fallen from him to our current President, the Whiner-in-Chief, for whom now is all and the future is for losers.

Action: concerning endangered species, national parks, and fairer sentencing.

Everyone likes the Endangered Species Act, right? As evidenced by the fact that Congress has been trying to destroy it for years and have failed? Well, now Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke apparently aims to succeed at gutting the ESA, in proposing several rule changes that would force the agency to take "economic impacts" into account during rulemaking, weaken protections for threatened species, solicit less public input, and insulate wildlife agencies from the consequences of their actions. But it gets better! Apparently one of Interior's proposals would have them write species-specific regulations for every "threatened" species, even though one rule currently covers all of them. And here you thought conservatives were all about "streamlining regulations," not making them so cumbersome they can't be enforced! So the Sierra Club helps you tell our Interior Department to scrap its plans to "overhaul" enforcement of the Endangered Species Act.

Meanwhile, the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado draws 300,000 visitors annually and features dunes as high as 700 feet -- but of course our Administration is suddenly anxious to let fossil fuel corporations drill for oil and gas as close to the Dunes as they can get! And thus our President would give massive corporate welfare handouts to the very same fossil fuel corporations that are rapidly losing ground to renewable energy, and take a dump all over our national parks. It's like killing two birds with one stone! One more time: the oil and gas you pull out of the ground doesn't last forever, and the money CEOs make from pulling oil and gas out of the ground doesn't last forever -- but national parks can be part of our heritage forever. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Administration to scuttle its plan to open up some 18,000 acres near the Great Sand Dunes to fossil fuel drilling.

Finally, the U.S. Sentencing Commission has proposed new sentencing guidelines for 2019, and they're taking comments thereon until August 10, so Families Against Mandatory Minimums helps you tell our Sentencing Commission what you think of their proposal. As you might expect, it's got good and bad bits in it. The Commission has proposed studying the effects of incarcerating parents on minor children, as well as whether the Bureau of Prisons is actually motioning for compassionate release as often as they should; neither of these is a policy change per se, but both could lead to policy changes in the future. But the Commission has also ruled out reduced sentencing for first offenders; those of us not completely ruled by our hormones would find treating first offenders exactly the same as folks who've committed many crimes not precisely civilized. So make sure the Commission hears from you.

Around the table: chronicling an unusually high amount of low-level corruption.

Our President pardons the two Oregon ranchers, currently serving five years for arson on public lands, who "inspired" the Bundy brothers' 2016 seizure of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Public lands belong to whom, again? To the people. That's kinda why they call them "public." The Hammonds and Bundys of the world, of course, act like they're the "public" and no one else is, but ain't nothing they can do our President can't make worse. Law and order!

Actual rich liberal populist wins Mexico's Presidential election, and the "liberal" media here in America hope for "business-friendly" change. I guess that's an improvement from saying Mr. López Obrador is "just like" our President (just like him, except in, you know, nearly all of his policy proposals!), but "business-friendly" shouldn't be everyone's first concern, when corporations go around ruining everything in the world just so they can squeeze it for money. Remember, kids: money doesn't last, but civilization does.

Ryan Cooper at The Week asks an obvious question: "If democratic socialism is so bad, why is Norway so great?" Important lessons: don't confuse democratic socialism with things like Communism (particularly as practiced by the Soviets) and don't put yourself in the position of arguing that elite individuals should control the economy but the people shouldn't. And wasn't our President complaining about not getting enough immigrants from non-"shithole countries" like Norway? (As an aside, the relatively high U.S. per capita income is undoubtedly goosed up by our world-leading supply of super-rich, which, as I've often said, doesn't mean you see a bump in your bank account.)

Uh oh: Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY) has been putting GPS tracking devices in campaign signs so he can locate the people who steal them! Which has led him, no, not to an Antifa or Black Lives Matter protestor, but to a retired pastor. I wouldn't steal campaign signs myself, but maybe Mr. Reed should have considered that getting all Captain Queeq about a campaign sign makes him look like a small man. And really, if you were to serve the good people of New York's 23rd district, instead of serving mammon, you wouldn't have to worry about who's stealing your campaign signs.

Double uh oh: shortly after voting for that massive tax "reform" last fall, Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL), who personally stood to gain $2.1 million from that tax "reform," bought himself a million-dollar yacht. Naturally his spokeshack whines about negative campaigning and "partisan smears," and the fact that Mr. Buchanan disclosed the purchase is irrelevant, like following the law is some gift he gives to us or something. This little yacht purchase is exactly the stuff of classic (and relevant) campaign ads. I wouldn't lay money on his Democratic opponent having the guts to run it, though.

Finally, Democrats seem to be meeting the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination with "mixed messages," which is, admittedly, always a danger when a nominee is so completely awful on everything. But I can help with that problem! Here's the message: Judge Kavanaugh thinks Presidents should be even more powerful, which would make the American people less powerful. You're welcome, Democrats. (Full disclosure: Democrats never take my advice.)

Action: concerning disaster prevention, renewable energy, and Yellowstone Park.

The EPA has proposed getting rid of every disaster prevention measure in its Chemical Disaster Rule, because of course they are. The West Fertilizer Company chemical explosion that killed 15, injured over 160, and either damaged or destroyed over 150 buildings was not that long ago! And it was all over the news! And a chemical accident happens almost every other day in America, so why the hurry to get rid of what little our government has done to protect us since then? Because Scott Pruitt knows his days as EPA Administrator are numbered, just as surely as the right wing establishment in America knows its days are numbered, and they are grabbing everything that isn't nailed down. Actually taking steps to protect good citizens costs CEOs money, after all, and CEOs have yachts to gas up and vacation homes to buy! Public Citizen helps you tell the EPA to scuttle its plan to roll back protections against chemical disasters.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3671, the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act (or OFF Act), would get our electric grid entirely "off" fossil fuels and onto renewable energy by 2035, and if your first impulse is to say golly, that's only 17 years away, keep in mind that you could, in theory, power America's entire electric grid by covering a mere 100-square-mile area of Nevada with solar panels, so this isn't a very big ask. The OFF Act would also repeal fossil fuel subsidies, help out low-income homes trying to get more energy-efficient, and provide rebates for folks to buy clean energy cars. When some right-winger tells you this all sounds like welfare, go ahead and ask him where he was all those times our government gave corporate welfare handouts to fossil fuel corporations. In the meantime, Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support renewable energy by supporting the OFF Act.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell our Interior Department to ban mining in or near Yellowstone Park. Interior is mulling whether to open up some 30,000 acres of public lands in the northern part to gold and silver miners, among others. Hey, wasn't the California gold rush over 160 years ago? Yes, it was, but even in our post-gold standard era some folks never seem to get over the fever. We all know that mining in or near public lands tends to lead to pollution and wildlife habitat destruction, and word on the street is that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke might actually agree, having supported a mining ban at Yellowstone while he was in Congress, but you'd be quite justified to fear that our Administration would prefer only to listen to other bosses trying to extract the value from public lands for themselves. But that only means we need to speak out until they do our will. After all, you can only spend money once, but when public lands are gone, they're gone forever.

Around the table: with important reminders about "far-left" policies, privatizing prisons, and political bad actors.

And here's the best headline I read all week: "The Surprising Popularity of 'Far-Left' Policies." The only way it could have been better is if they'd put ironic quotation marks around "surprising," because only Our Glorious Elites and their "liberal" media enablers would consider "protecting more public lands," "limit(ing) corporate tax loopholes," and "raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy" to be "far-left" positions, when in fact these policy proposals generally get majority support (and therefore bipartisan support) from Americans! But, as I've been saying for a long time, they love calling popular, good proposals "extreme," when their own solutions to everything -- make war on other countries so you can swing your balls around, cut spending that actually helps people, cut benefits for programs you've paid into all your life! -- are actually quite extreme.

The city of Tucson, AZ adopts resolution banning the privatization of its prison system. The even better news? Tucson isn't even the first locality to outlaw private corporations running their detention centers and jails, and a lot of the other localities that have done so are, like Tucson, in very red areas of the country. Of course, if you thought about it for a minute, you'd see that private prisons have no "market" incentive to improve prisoners' lives, because the more miserable they are, the less they'll be able to make it on the outside, and thus the more likely they'll become "repeat customers."

"Nearly Half of You Reading This Have Bullshit Jobs," announces the headline of this Daily Beast interview with the author of (you guessed it) the book Bullshit Jobs. The term "bullshit jobs" describes jobs that are a) quite well-paid and b) quite useless, the kind of job that exists to make other people look good, or at least not incompetent. They can range from the receptionist who takes one phone call daily but has to exist to make the boss look important to the "people who provide unnecessary supervision" to corporate-lawyer "goons." And they don't exist in spite of our "free" market ideology, but because of it, and its mania for quantifying everything. (Read the whole article; it contains, among so many other things, the best argument for a universal basic income I've yet heard.)

California Republican U.S. House candidate actually films herself harassing a transgender woman trying to use the bathroom at a Denny's. I won't name name this U.S. House candidate, since we shouldn't give jerks too much sunlight. But I will highlight her stupid argument, that a transgender woman was "invading my privacy" (italics in original) merely by a) being born male and b) wanting to use the women's room. Setting aside that following someone into a bathroom and then harassing them is an actual invasion of privacy, I could more easily argue that this House candidate is invading my privacy merely by being such an asshole that I noticed it. The good news? She'll be lucky to lose by only 50 points in this district, and thus she's the proverbial walnut in the batter of eternity.

Finally, upon hearing the so-far-unsubstantiated rumor that the Administration might fire Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, my first thought was: who on Earth do they think they're going to find to do that job better than she does it? By "that job," of course, I don't mean "informing the American people about what the Administration's doing," but the job of putting entire cartons of lipstick on the pigs this Administration keeps trotting out. Seriously, even Tha Bush Mobb's notorious last Press Secretary, Dana Perino, couldn't match the sheer will-to-lie of Sarah Sanders. Then again, I'd hate to report, in a few months, that I'd spoken too soon.

Action: wind power, prisoner rights, and Arctic drilling.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission lets gas drilling corporations conduct hydrofracturing (a.k.a. "fracking") on public lands, but thinks wind power is too dangerous to wildlife to allow onto public lands! Because of all the wind turbines that go rampaging through the forest, no doubt! Seriously, the Game Commission should really have said all that out loud before doing it. Fracking involves, among other things, leaking methane into the air, poisoning our air and water with carcinogens, and building pipelines that carve up land and run the too-high risk of spilling more poisons; what about that isn't dangerous to wildlife? Wind turbines, on the other hand, carve up rather little of the ground if you do it right, and fossil fuel corporations kill far more birds than wind power does. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell the Pennsylvania Game Commission to end its double standard for wind power development on public lands.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 2520, the Inmate Calling Technical Corrections Act. What would S. 2520 do? It would stop phone service corporations from extorting absurdly-high phone rates from the families of prisoners. And why should we care? Because prisoners who can stay in contact with their families go back to jail less often, because judges don't sentence prisoners to absurdly-high phone call rates, because families shouldn't be punished with those high rates either, and also, you know, because we're not cruel bastards. Speaking of which, our current FCC Chair apparently thinks the problem can be solved by stuffing burner phones into dead cats and throwing them over prison walls -- even though the very same corporations that "provide" phone "service" in prisons also provide prisons with cell-phone jamming devices! So let's speak out, not merely to treat prisoners and their families more humanely, but to better ensure this Administration's just humiliation.

Finally, as you may know, the Republican tax "reform" bill opens up the Arctic Refuge to drilling, even though we've been saying for years that the small amount of oil we'd get out of the Arctic Refuge doesn't outweigh the damage we'd do to clean air and water. Luckily, the Interior Department has to go through many public comment periods before anyone can drill in the Arctic, and though this Administration will try to go through those public comment periods as quickly as they can, so that fewer good Americans comment on the matter, they still have to go adhere to the process, because law and order. Hence the Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell Interior Secretary Zinke to reject new drilling leases in the Arctic Refuge. He doesn't care what you think -- unless you've got some free trips or a $150,000 door you can give him, amirite? -- but, as always, it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want.

Action: defending science, public water, and health care.

EPA Administrator Scott "Their Fault!" Pruitt has advanced a proposal that would, he says, eliminate "secret" scientific data from the EPA's decision-making process. What he's not telling you, of course, is that a lot of this data is "secret" for good reason -- data containing personal or medical histories cannot be publicly released, because that would violate good folks' privacy, and plenty of scientific data upon which the EPA bases decisions contains the personal and medical histories of folks pollution made sick. See how this will work? If some carcinogen released as a by-product of some fossil fuel corporation's production process gives you cancer, the EPA would never be able to use the data from your experience to ban it! And if this ban had been in place in the past, we'd still have lead in our gasoline! I'd call it clever, if it weren't also evil. Hence CREDO helps you tell the EPA to reject this fake "secret" data proposal.

Meanwhile, Nestlé may have won its battle to steal even more public drinking water from the good citizens of Michigan, but we can still fight Nestlé's effort to continue taking Ontario's groundwater using expired permits, as Sum of Us helps you do. If your permit expires to do something, you'd think you'd stop doing it, wouldn't you? Not big, bold, and ball-swinging Nestlé! No one tells Nestlé what to do! Certainly not the state of California, which told them to stop sucking water out of the San Bernardino National Forest, and certainly not the state of Michigan, which ignored the (literally!) 99.9% of public comments opposing Nestlé's plans. Well, OK, Oregon told them to go scratch last year, but that's about it for state governments, even though people generally like to keep their clean water in their tap, and not in Nestlé bottles at an insane markup. Perhaps we can make Ontario more like Oregon in this regard.

Finally, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield (yes, the result of yet another mega-merger between two already too-big corporations) has decided to reduce reimbursement rates on certain breast pumps. Doesn't sound like a big deal yet? Well, the breast pumps in question are common, inexpensive electric breast pumps you can get without a prescription, and if mothers can only get a manual breast pump, a lot fewer of them will breastfeed, which means a lot fewer kids will get breast milk, which most doctors (and your own common sense) say is the best kind of milk for newborns. But surely conservatives are at this moment rising up to denounce some health care corporation getting between you and your doctor, right? I kid, of course -- to today's "conservatives," big corporations always know best. Hence Moms Rising helps you tell Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to reconsider its decision to help make it harder for mothers to breastfeed their children.

Action: corporate welfare, EPA research, and oil drilling on public lands.

H.R. 5108/S. 2459, the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, would roll back a lot of the corporate welfare that the Republicans' recent tax "reform" bill handed out, by treating "foreign" corporations more like domestic corporations if they do most of their work here in America, and thus collect more taxes from them. When you think about it, you'll see how unfair the "inverted corporation" concept is to small businesses -- no small business in America has the financial ability to buy, say, a Canadian corporation like Tim Hortons and then pretend it's a "foreign" corporation to avoid paying taxes in America. But that's what Burger King did in 2015, and they're getting away with it even though most Burger Kings -- and the good folks who work there, and the good folks who eat there -- are right here in America. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to crack down on corporate welfare by supporting the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act.

Meanwhile, EPA Administrator Scott "Cone of Silence" Pruitt is, as we speak, trying to close the National Center for Environmental Research (or NCER), which does scientific research on threats to children's health. Indeed, the NCER has done important work on childhood asthma, early births, immune system issues, neurodevelopmental problems; lately it's done work arsenic in baby food and pesticide levels in farmworkers' children, which I'm sure you heard about on the news. Do these sound like the things we should be doing less of? And n.b. I said "we" -- if our government does research, that means we pay for it, and we prod our Congressfolk to oversee it; if our government decided research is best left to the "free" market, then we will find ourselves learning mainly whatever big corporations want us to know. Indeed, it's almost like that's the whole idea! So Penn PIRG helps you tell the EPA not to close the NCER.

Finally, the Project on Government Oversight (or POGO) reported last month on how little money our government collects from oil drilling corporations on public lands, and now POGO (via Sign for Good) helps you tell the President to make these corporations pay their fair share for using the land that belongs to all of us. It ain't just that, you know, oil drillers tend to pollute stuff, it's also that our government had reduced the amount of money it's charged oil drillers by almost 96% over the last 35 years! No doubt the President stands ready to whine that if we charge oil drillers too much for using our land, they won't be able to make any money and create jobs, which is to laugh. Even if corporations ever created jobs when they weren't forced to, either by policy or circumstance, why would we believe that we can't have both jobs and royalties earned for the public? Isn't this America, the can-do country that always finds a way and that rejects artificial hostage situations?

Action: with three more ways to fight greedy corporations.

Consumer Reports helps you tell Consumer Financial Protection Bureau acting Director Mick Mulvaney to regulate financial corporations as vigorously as the American people have come to expect. He doesn't give one rat's hind-quarter what you and I think, but it's our duty to tell him anyway. Since taking over the CFPB, Mr. Mulvaney has declared that the agency should be less about regulation and more about advice to consumers, which is precisely not what the American people wanted after banksters nearly destroyed our economy in 2008. That wasn't even 10 years ago, and yet folks like Mr. Mulvaney still spew out their REGULASHUNZ BAD!!!! absurdities like no one can remember back that far. And without the CFPB, which has to date returned almost $12 billion to consumers harmed by financial predators, we would likely never have caught Wells Fargo opening accounts for customers who didn't want them. So let's protect the things that protect us.

Meanwhile, Nestlé still pumps a crapload of water annually (as much as 160 million gallons) out of the San Bernardino National Forest in California -- and their permit to do that expired three decades ago! And the California Water Board finally told Nestlé back in December to stop drawing that water, but of course they haven't, because law and order! That's water belonging to the good people of California, who did recently suffer through a five-year drought, as you may recall -- and Nestlé was drawing water from San Bernardino to sell as bottled water the whole time. Bottled water is a scam, not just because the water from your tap is clean enough, but also because Nestlé pays so little for the water it bottles and charges so much. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell the U.S. Forest Service to enforce the rule of law and prevent Nestlé from siphoning public water from the San Bernardino National Forest.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Monsanto sued the government of Arkansas for banning the use of its dicamba herbicide during the upcoming growing season -- and an Arkansas county circuit court judge threw the lawsuit out. This is good news for vegetable and peanut farmers, whose crops suffered immense damage from the dicamba herbicide drifting from soybean farms over to their farms. Of course, Monsanto thinks the judge's decision causes "irreparable harm" to the corporation that made nearly $8 billion in profit in fiscal 2017. All together now: waaaaaaah! Corporations do seem to love creating proprietary pesticides that only work with proprietary crops, and vice versa, but if you're as annoyed as I am that these efforts to "increase crop yields" seem to do little but increase corporate profits at great expense to small farmers, then Penn PIRG helps you tell Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf to ban dicamba here in the Keystone State.

Around the table: concerning working families, corporate taxes, health care, financial regulation, and public lands.

Thinking about picking up Uber or Lyft as a side job? Well, think again: an MIT study finds that Uber and Lyft drivers, once they're done paying all the costs like gas and insurance and repairs that Uber and Lyft don't pay, make a median income of $3.37 an hour. The paper's co-author says "(t)his business model is not currently sustainable," though perhaps he's too polite to say that this model doesn't actually aim to sustain itself per se, but rather aims to redistribute income upward from workers to executives and shareholders.

Ho hum, American corporations spend over $200 billion in stock buybacks over the last two months. But the President's votaries will go to the polls with BUT TEH THOUZANDZ DOLLARZ BONUZEZ!!!!! on their minds, even though some of them would react badly to the news that corporations mainly use their big tax cuts to consolidate their power so that they're less accountable to their shareholders, of whom there are generally many fewer after a stock buyback.

The incomparable Michael Hiltzik notes that the current Administration will spend $33 billion more next year to cover almost nine million fewer Americans, which might strike fiscal conservatives, if any remain, as unconscionably stupid. In a related note, the Genius-in-Chief told the CPAC crowd that his Administration is bringing out "tremendous plans" "at a fraction of the cost that are much better than Obamacare," though he's actually bringing out expanded short-term plans that are cheap because they cover almost nothing -- and siphon off younger, healthier folk from the bigger pools, which makes their health care more expensive. Why does our President tell us cheaper equals better? Because that's how he's made money his whole life.

The equally-incomparable David Dayen reminds us that Republicans and Democrats can't agree on gun control in the wake of the Parkland mass shooting, but can "come together" on gutting financial regulations. Well, that's what "bipartisanship" is all about, after all: Democrats and Republicans coming together to give Republicans whatever they want. Over two-thirds of the biggest banks in America will benefit from "loosened" regulations, with the help of at least three Democrat Senators up for re-election in 2018; why folks like Jon Tester don't figure that "bucking the party" and "bucking the banksters" could actually be the same thing I'll never understand.

Finally, a Project on Government Oversight report finds that our government has been routinely screwing Americans out of royalties when corporations drill for oil and gas on public lands. Our government used to charge about $40 in royalties for ever dollar they do now; how would you feel if that was your money? Oh, wait: it is your money. One of the tricks they use, apparently, is to declare a certain tract of land or oceanfloor "non-viable," and then act all surprised, I guess, when some low-bidding corporation drills the crap out of it and makes a killing. They say if we charge what it's worth we'll kill jobs, but it won't -- it'll only deprive a few corporate executives of some unearned money. Besides, we're the boss here.

Action: protecting free speech and public lands.

H.R. 1865, the so-called Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, would not only fail to help efforts to stop sex trafficking, but would actually chill online free speech. How? By holding internet service providing corporations liable for any sex trafficking arranged through their networks even without their knowledge. You think an ISP can monitor every piece of network traffic that flows through their servers? Of course not! That means ISPs will simply start censoring people left and right. Our laws already hold ISPs liable if they know about sex trafficking on their networks and do nothing about it, so H.R. 1865 is the epitome of law-and-order ball-swinging -- blaming the blameless, pretending you're tough when you're weak, and prosecuting so many people you can't effectively prosecute actual wrongdoers. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect free speech by rejecting H.R. 1865.

Meanwhile, our Bureau of Land Management, just 18 short months ago, enacted the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, which protects upwards of 22 million acres of California's Mojave and Sonoran Deserts from development, and also protects over three dozen unique species of animals. Guess what our Bureau of Land Management wants to do now that President Manchild runs things? Why, open up these areas to mining and gas and oil drilling, of course! That's offensive on the face of it, and when you realize that the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan also set aside land for renewable energy development, it's doubly offensive. But remember, kids: our President doesn't care about you unless you're someone's boss. Maybe if we were to remind him that solar and wind power corporations also have bosses, he'd change his tune a bit. In the meantime, CREDO helps you tell our BLM to reject efforts to open up protected federal lands to polluters.

UPDATE. The House has passed H.R. 1865, so redirect your efforts to calling your Senators to tell them to reject it. Tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers are, as always, in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a smartphone).

Action: poisonous pesticides, and national parks.

Knowing that Arkansas is dominated by Republicans only makes it more heartening that their state government has fought Monsanto's dicamba, a herbicide scientists link to shortness of breath, muscle weakness, and vomiting -- but it's only banned dicamba use during the warmest parts of the year, since dicamba aerosolizes (and makes people sick) far more efficiently in warmer air. Hence Penn PIRG helps you thank the government of Arkansas for its partial ban of dicamba and encourage them to make their ban year-round. Should I bother mentioning that Monsanto manufactured dicamba for use on its own genetically-engineered crops? Yes, I should bother mentioning it again -- especially since Monsanto will no doubt tell you they do what they do to increase yields or end hunger, two goals that seem much too big for them to comprehend. I mean, making money off crops, they get, but doing so in a way that doesn't hurt people they're not anywhere near as good with. It sure is a good thing we're here to help them with that.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration's drill-everywhere-fuck-the-consequences plan continues unabated, as they now plan to sell fossil fuel drilling leases near Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. You may remember stopping fracking in Chaco Canyon back at the end of the Obama years, but, as they say, that was then and this is now, and "now" means nothing so much as big fossil fuel executives making as much money as humanly possible right away. That's Donald Trump for you, though -- he doesn't care about anyone but big boss-men like himself. Naturally, the Chaco park holds thousand-year-old artifacts from the Ancient Pueblo civilization, and good folks belonging to today's Pueblo nation find the area sacred, but again, "religious freedom" only means something to Trumpholes when you're a boss trying to deny women birth control. So CREDO helps you tell the Bureau of Land Management to reject proposed fossil fuel leases near the Chaco park. After all, oil and gas are temporary, but history is forever.

Action: "free" trade, and infrastructure.

NAFTA negotiators are meeting in Montreal as we speak, and since our President has already faltered before the challenge of demanding an end to the hated "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanism in NAFTA, and our Commerce Secretary thinks the hated TPP would be a wonderful guide to renegotiating NAFTA, it's up to us to act. So Public Citizen helps you demand that any future NAFTA deal put people before corporations. Corporations have the decided advantage, of course, since they're able to take a peek at NAFTA negotiations and we're not, even though we're, you know, the owners of government. And "free" trade deals have not only subjugated workers to corporations, they've overthrown American law -- recall that the World Trade Organization recently struck down a law mandating country-of-origin labeling for chickens as a violation of two of the more obscure "free" trade deals! And a more corporate NAFTA would do more of that. So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that Axios published a leaked outline of President Trump's infrastructure plan, and it's as awful as we've feared. The plan, you recall, would use some $140 billion in corporate welfare handouts to lure $1 trillion in private investment, but already you see the problem: private investors won't invest in a project unless it makes money, which makes it more likely they'll skimp on vital services to the people who need them just so they can make more money. And where's the money coming from? From oil and gas drilling in public parks, naturally. Of course we'd be better off simply reversing the recently-passed corporate tax cut, which offers a boon to corporations much larger than the infrastructure plan's $140 billion price tag, every year. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell our President to abandon his privatization-centered infrastructure program. He won't care, but duty is duty.

Action: national monuments, methane emissions, and ALEC.

As you likely know, President Trump has announced his intention to reduce the boundaries of the Bears' Ears National Monument by 85% and reduce the boundaries of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by about half. And he even went to Utah to make these announcements, perhaps figuring that everyone in Utah believes exactly as big mining corporations executives do -- that public lands should be drilled and mined as much as humanly possible. And here, you might have been thinking, like me, that Utah's a damn gorgeous state and the people there probably want to keep it that way. There's some question as to whether the President actually has any authority in law to shrink the size of national monuments, but Mr. Trump loves doing crap first and trying to use the consequences of his actions against us later, so let's engage in a little pre-emption, as it were, by letting the Wilderness Society help us tell President Trump to abandon his plan to give up large swaths of these national monuments to mining and drilling corporations. Did I mention that five Native American tribes consider Bears Ears' land holy? Think maybe that's just another reason for President Trump to hate it?

Meanwhile, as you may recall, the Trump Administration wants to delay implementing the EPA's new methane emissions standards for two years, presumably so they can gut them after that (though saying so out loud, as they've done, won't help them win the inevitable lawsuits against them). Of course you already know why this is a crappy idea: not just because methane pollutes the air, not just because methane packs a much larger climate-change punch than coal, but because allowing gas drilling corporations to vent methane into the air wastes energy -- methane being, you know, an energy source -- and when gas drilling corporations vent methane on public lands, they're also cheating the American taxpayer out of well-deserved royalties. Of course, President Trump doesn't care about any of that, as long as some executive, somewhere, is raking in money he hasn't earned through hard work and good leadership. And "delaying" the rule for two years does what, exactly? Besides give more children asthma attacks and make more good Americans sick from carcinogens, I mean. So the Sierra Club helps you tell our government to put people ahead of polluters and stop trying to delay methane emissions regulations.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell the CEO of UPS to stop funding the radical right-wing legislative agenda of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. I've found that the corporations that still associate with ALEC think it's perfectly OK to say that they don't agree with ALEC on voting rights or climate change or gun rights, but they support ALEC because of their work on economic issues. If there was ever an argument tailor-made to repel me, that's the one. Of course, everyone doesn't think the same way I do (a matter about which many people are thankful, I'm sure), and plenty of corporations have abandoned ALEC for reasons that seem (to me, at least) to be of secondary importance to the fact that ALEC's main reason to exist is to keep corporations far more powerful than people. But if "ALEC is a bunch of climate change-deniers and I know you care about passing on an inhabitable planet to your posterity, don't you?" gets more corporations to abandon ALEC, I'm on board. I'm a demanding bastard, but I don't let the perfect murder the good. And depriving ALEC of the funding it uses to let corporations run roughshod over people? Doing that seems to me almost a textbook definition of "good."

Action: tax "reform," clean budgeting, and fracking.

Yeah, I know, the Senate passed their tax "reform" plan at about 2 am on Saturday morning, but we still don't have to take it -- House and Senate must still reconcile their almost equally noxious versions of tax "reform," while figuring out how to fund our government by the end of this week and extending the Children's Health Insurance Program they let lapse over two months ago. So you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page -- or the bottom of this page, if you're looking at it on a cellphone -- to find your Reps' and Senators' phone numbers to tell them we still do not want a tax "reform" plan that hikes taxes on working families and cuts taxes for corporations and rich folks. Hey, they're bald enough to keep repeating the lie that "the tax cuts help middle-class families," so we can keep repeating the simple truth that it raises taxes for working families and cuts taxes for corporations and rich folks. The same folks who nearly destroyed our economy in 2008! And now Congress wants to give them even more tax cuts! How disgusting. But not as disgusting as if we just sat back and took it.

Meanwhile, as we noted above, Congress also has to pass a continuing resolution by Friday, or risk a government shutdown, and since a government shutdown means, among other things, national parks closing and seniors not getting their Social Security checks, government shutdowns are, well, rather like playing with fire, politically. Of course, President Trump has mused out loud (again) that a government shutdown might help him politically, and the government shutdown of 2013, the one in which President Obama finally stopped letting Republicans kick sand in his face, did little (if anything) to stem the pro-Republican tide in the following year's midterms. Still, Republicans are doing a little cock-swinging, now that the Senate passed that awful tax "reform" plan, and they'd like to stock their next continuing resolution with all kinds of poison pills that would roll back clean air and clean water protections, help corporations hide all their campaign spending, and (of course!) defunding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a clean budget bill without any of the legislative riders that would otherwise wither in daylight .

Finally, the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) released a draft proposal in re fracking in the Delaware River Basin, and though this draft proposal goes further than previous proposals did, they don't go far enough. Certainly, they don't go as far as the fracking moratorium passed in the 2012 state budget, because the latest draft allows gas drilling corporations to withdraw nearly 10 million gallons of water per well drilled from the Delaware River, and it would also allow those corporations to store fracking wastewater near or dump wastewater into the Delaware, and that wastewater tends to have a lot of nasty carcinogens that drillers have gone some length to hide. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell the DRBC to enact a much stronger fracking ban, one that would prevent any fracking in or dumping near the Delaware River. Right-wingers -- you know, the folks who call themselves "conservative" without earning it -- love to say we don't have "conclusive evidence" of fracking's dangers, but we have more than enough evidence to oppose it. And anyway, wouldn't it be conservative to ensure something's safe before doing it?

Action: internet freedom, immigration, and public water.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to oppose FCC Chair Ajit Pai's plan to roll back net neutrality protections, then Save the Net from Trump still helps you do that. Word on the street is that a lot of our Congressfolk are on the fence about net neutrality -- the principle that says only you, not some corporation, should be able to determine where you want to go and what you want to do on the internet -- and supposedly they're waiting for their constituents to tell them what to do; considering how many of their constituents have written in to the FCC about keeping net neutrality protections, that all seems a little silly, but we can play their game, too. Big telecoms are falling all over themselves saying that of course they'd never block or slow down websites or force junk news in front of you if we just give them more power to block or slow down websites or force junk news in front of you, but you know Our Glorious Elites, right? The minute we turn our back on them, they'll do whatever they like, because fuck-you-we-won. So don't turn your back on them.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has cut off Temporary Protected Status (or TPS) for about 3,000 Nicaraguans, and plan to do so for 300,000 other TPS residents who hail from Haiti and Central America, so CREDO helps you tell the Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) to extend Temporary Protected Status for these areas. If you're wondering why we're still giving TPS to folks escaping Hurricane Mitch in Honduras when that was over 20 years ago or the earthquakes in El Salvador when that was almost 20 years ago, I have two answers for you: one, that these nations tend to rebuild from such disasters a lot more slowly than we do, and two, such objections are less important than the fact that once folks have TPS status for years on end, they've made a life here, and what do they have to go back to, exactly? Particularly the children, who may be American-born and have never seen their original homeland? So cutting off TPS is just another way for Mr. Trump to be cruel and stoke rage among his followers. The good news? Trump votaries don't get all the say around here.

Finally, Osceola Township, Michigan, has denied Nestlé a permit to extract more groundwater, and conservatives all over America applauded the small town's efforts to control its own destiny! I kid, of course -- right-wingers extoll Nestlé's "right," under Michigan's Reasonable Use doctrine, to extract resources from its property. Of course they forget the "reasonable" part of "reasonable use" -- generally, that you should take what you need without hurting others, and specifically (per the Michigan Department of Environmental Protection) that Nestlé's efforts shouldn't harm public streams, wetlands, and lakes, a matter about which Nestlé has been suspiciously mum. It really doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to think that "reasonable use" ought to apply to public groundwater, too, and Nestlé has some chutzpah to undertake this project in the era of the Flint water crisis. Why, they've even sued Osceola Township, so Sum of Us helps you tell Nestlé to respect Osceola's right to clean water and drop their bullying lawsuit.

Action: unconstitutional war-making, elephant poaching, and national monuments.

H.R. 4140/S. 2016, the No Unconstitutional Strike Against North Korea Act, would (as its title suggests) prohibit our government from launching a strike against North Korea without Congressional authorization per Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. Since the end of World War II, Congress has ceded far too much war-making power to the Executive branch, and now we have an Executive who frankly doesn't seem particularly sane most of the time getting into a war of words with a North Korean executive who doesn't seem particularly sane any of the time. Does that sound like a recipe for victory? The Founders wisely wanted Congress to have the power to declare war, rather than etting the President do as he likes, of which I think we've all had quite enough. Hence the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to support sane and Constitutional foreign policy by supporting the No Unconstitutional Strike Against North Korea Act.

Meanwhile, with China phasing out its participation in the illegal world ivory trade, Hong Kong is now the world's number one ivory trader, and given that you have to slaughter elephants to get ivory, number one is not be the number you want to be on that list. (Don't tell President Trump, though -- when he hears we're not number one in the illegal ivory trade, maybe he'll send all his children to Africa to fix that.) The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species banned the international ivory trade almost 30 years ago, and elephant numbers did recover for a while, only to drop again about a decade ago, as demand for ivory from Asia boomed, until last year poachers killed African elephants faster than new elephants were born. Hong Kong's government has proposed legislation shutting down the ivory trade, but of course ivory traders are fighting it, so Avaaz helps you tell Hong Kong's legislature to protect endangered elephants by shutting down their ivory trade.

Finally, the Trump Administration has apparently decided, on the "advice" of the Interior Department, to shrink the size of two Utah national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Don't believe they hype that it's because these monuments exemplify federal government overreach, not just because right-wingers tell you that anything government does that doesn't actually suck is "overreach," but because the real issue here is these monuments are now off-limits to mining corporations. Now, we have considerable doubt, if we know anything about the Antiquities Act, that the President can actually shrink the size of a national monument after its creation, but President Trump has never been much for law and order; he's more the kind of fellow who likes to do stuff and dare you to stop him. We accept his dare, as we have accepted his dare all year, and so The Wilderness Society helps you tell your Congressfolk to stand up to Mr. Trump and stand up for our national monuments.

Action: fighting methane emissions and bad pipelines.

Earlier this year we beat back Congress's attempt to repeal the Bureau of Land Management's limits on methane emissions on public lands, but that hasn't stopped the forces of evil from fighting back, as the Interior Department has lately proposed to delay those emissions rules from taking effect until January 2019. Why? Because they can't win the argument on the merits, that's why! They can talk all they want about onerous regulations holding us back (which, like, is so not a way for brave and bold can-do American entrepreneurs to talk!), but facts are facts: an entire industry already exists to mitigate methane emissions, these emissions pack a far bigger climate-change punch than coal emissions, and leaking methane willy-nilly not only wastes energy but deprives the American taxpayer of deserved drilling royalties. Oil and gas corporations don't own this land, after all -- we do. (That's kinda why they call it "public.") Thus the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell the Interior Department to stop trying to delay the methane emissions rules that protect us.

Meanwhile, the Canadian oil corporation Enbridge would like very much to build a tar sands pipeline straight through lands protected by treaties with Native Americans and the headwaters of the Mississippi River which provides clean drinking water to millions of Americans. So many things about that must sound familiar, not least of which is that Enbridge is the corporation responsible for spilling a million gallons of crude into the Kalamazoo River in 2010 -- in addition to at least 800 other spills and leaks over the previous dozen years. That doesn't exactly sound like a group of souls devoted to pipeline safety, does it? And naturally they are proposing abandoning (without removing, of course!) an existing pipeline and building a whole new one carrying over 700,000 gallons of crude per day. Still, Enbridge has to get permission from the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission before it can build, hence the Sierra Club helps you tell the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to reject Enbridge's proposed pipeline through the northern part of the state.

Action: Iran, mining law, and abortion.

As you've likely heard, President Trump plans to start withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, because, once again, if it has the name "Obama" on it, it must be destroyed. Mr. Trump has until Sunday to decertify Iran's compliance with the conditions of the deal; never mind that everyone on the planet who's in a position to know says that Iran has complied with those conditions, because President Bigballs knows everything better than anybody and does whatever the hell he likes, right and wrong be damned. So the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you write a letter-to-the-editor of your local paper expressing your view that Mr. Trump should stop trying to sabotage the deal, lest we get plunged into a war with Iran. And just at a time when all the swordfighting between our President and North Korea's President could plunge us into war there, too! Also, decertifying Iranian compliance would open the door to new sanctions on Iran, so MoveOn helps you call your Senators and tell them to oppose new sanctions on Iran.

Meanwhile, S. 1833, the Hardrock Mining Reform and Reclamation Act, would amend the General Mining Law of 1872 -- you read that right; it's been over 140 years since Congress has seriously addressed mining issues! -- and it would not only do more to protect our public lands from the deleterious effects of hardrock mining than before, it would (for the first time!) charge mining corporations a royalty for extracting minerals from public lands, and then use some of that money to fund the reclamation of the half million or so abandoned mines all across America. We hear a lot these days about how all the jobs for frustrated Trump voters are gone; well, S. 1833 would create jobs by funding what sounds like necessary work, fulfilling work, and, dare I say, patriotic work. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support mine reclamation and job creation by supporting S. 1833.

Finally, the House passed a 20-week abortion ban last week -- hey, who says they can't do something quickly if they just put their mind to it? -- and now the Senate will consider it, so People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to reject a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The House's ban (H.R. 36) contains exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother (which I suppose gives tireless rageheads an opportunity to demonstrate their "independence" by saying this bill isn't tough enough), but does not provide an exception for the health of the mother, and you probably already know that virtually zero abortions happen after the 20-week mark unless something is seriously wrong. So this bill won't save very many lives, but it probably will kill a few women. If we want to reduce the number of abortions in America, and we do, we need to support birth control. But that's one more thing right-wing swordfighters will never do.

Action: concerning monopolies, credit, clean water, and fair redistricting.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Justice to reject the proposed AT&T/Time Warner merger, then CREDO still helps you do that. AT&T wouldn't be buying Time Warner's cable TV apparatus -- Charter bought that last year, after Comcast bid for it and then withdrew their bid under massive popular pressure. AT&T would be buying Time Warner's entertainment and news holdings, including CNN, HBO, and Warner Brothers, and while a pedant would tell us that AT&T's business is in delivering content and Time Warner's business is in producing content and therefore there's no monopoly possible, we of course know better, particularly if we recall that blocking such mergers if their "effect...may be substantially to lessen competition" has legal precedent in American law. We also know better, I'd hope, to think that an AT&T/Time Warner merger would "create jobs." Our opponents rarely say it anymore, which is an indication that most Americans do know better.

Meanwhile, CREDO also helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 1816, the Freedom from Equifax Exploitation Act, which would give consumers more tools to fight data breaches. The FREE Act (hey, at least it's not a completely tortured acronym) would require credit reporting corporations to provide credit freezes for free, would block corporations from selling your personal information when you have a freeze on your account, and would mandate an additional free credit check for those folks who used their annual free credit check before the Equifax breach. The bill would also refund folks who wound up paying for a credit freeze after the Equifax breach became known; a lot of people, I suspect, panicked and paid for credit freezes, which smells of the kind of corporate exploitation that too many folks call "the free market in action." But conservatives who extolled the virtues of the "free market" in the Reagan years didn't approve of such exploitation, and neither should we.

In other news, the Bureau of Land Management, scarcely two years after enacting regulations that protect clean water from hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. "fracking") on public lands, now wants to repeal those rules, which, like, sigh. Fracking didn't suddenly become safe over the last two years; so what do you suppose happened? Oh, right -- we elected a President who literally doesn't care about anything but money. Oh, and we also elected a President who seeks to completely erase President Obama from American history by undoing all of his works, even those (like the BLM's fracking rules) that didn't go nearly as far as we wanted, but went further toward protecting us than before. But there's no reason for good Americans to be held hostage to President Trump's insatiable thirst for drama; hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to protect us from pollution by abandoning its effort to repeal the fracking regulations it passed in 2015.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislator to pass HB 722/SB 22, which would create an independent commission that would redraw legislative districts more fairly then self-interested legislators tend to do, then Fair Districts PA still helps you do that. HB 722/SB 22, as you recall, has actual bipartisan support in the state legislature, but the relevant committee heads are sitting on the bill and refusing to hold hearings on it, despite their popularity (and despite the feedback they're getting from their constituents). This is America, though, so they can be so ignorant of the popular will for only so long, and now wouldn't be a bad time to start pressuring our legislators again, if for no other reason than that the relevant committee heads can get pressured by their colleagues as well as their constituents. It's a shame it's come to that, but I'm not too proud to use the whatever levers of power are available to me as a citizen.

Action: health care, immigration, and public lands.

The so-called "moderate" health care "reform" bill -- a.k.a. the Graham-Cassidy bill -- still stumbles through the hallways of the Senate like a zombie, threatening to take down the Affordable Care Act's pre-existing conditions ban through yet another clever loophole, kill the medical device tax that only bothers medical device corporations, zero out all of the Affordable Care Act's subsidies, and end Medicaid funding within a decade. That they're even calling this monstrosity a "moderate" bill shows you how thoroughly right-wingers have destroyed the word. And if it passes, it could get worse -- what's to stop this reactionary Congress from "reconciling" it with the hated House bill so that nearly all of the House bill becomes law? Look, if I thought of that, then they thought of it months ago. So give this zombie health care bill the headshot it deserves, by using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a smartphone) to call your Senators and tell them to reject the Graham-Cassidy bill.

Meanwhile, President Trump has occasionally seemed to be of two minds about the DACA program that defers deportation for certain folks who were brought to America as children. Now, we don't need to pay too much attention to this apparent dichotomy -- oftentimes politicians seem to be "conflicted" about something about which they're not actually conflicted, and they do it to put people off their game -- but the problem of DACA's end in less than six months still remains, and helping these good folks out is our duty as Americans. I mean, seriously, we're going to blame them for something they literally had no say in doing? And send them back to countries they likely wouldn't even recognize? All so people can have swordfights over "who's more conservative"? So People for the American Way helps you tell your Reps and Senators to pass H.R. 3440/S. 1615, the DREAM Act, which would not only protect a lot of immigrants brought to America as children, but would actually help them contribute more to American society.

Finally, Brazil's government would like to sell off vast swaths of currently-protected Amazon rainforest for the benefit of, you guessed it, corrupt cronies, and Brazil's President plans to travel to the U.N. building in New York next week to drum up support (and possible buyers, I presume), so Avaaz helps you tell the government of Brazil to stop selling off Amazon rainforest. It's a pretty simple principle, really: hold on to public lands, use them for the public good, and care for them on the public's behalf, and they'll last forever, but you can only sell public lands off once, and the money you make from them won't last forever. Besides, governments typically sell off public lands for one of two reasons: to make up for budgetary shortfalls they could have avoided, or to funnel money to some crony or other. And contemplate a rainforest that's home to approximately one out of every ten species of animals on Earth and produces more than a fifth of the world's oxygen, and selling off chunks of it sure does seem small, doesn't it?

Action: forced labor, national monuments, and gerrymandering.

It's "harvest time" in Uzbekistan again -- which means the Uzbek government conscripts its good citizens to work the cotton fields, regardless of whether they're already nurses, business owners, teachers, or college students. And of course folks who monitor and document "harvest time" risk detainment, deportation, and assault, almost as if Uzbekistan has something to hide. Now, if Uzbekistan's cotton-harvesting scheme sounds remotely like "everyone coming together for the common good" to you, please remember that you can't force people to work for the common good (though you can restrain people who work against the common good), and remember, also, that when good Uzbeks toil in cotton fields, they don't really work for "the common good" so much as the good of the government's crony cotton industry CEOs. So, at the very least, it's well past time to shame actors who pump money into Uzbekistan's cotton trade, hence the Action Network helps you tell the World Bank to support freedom in Uzbekistan by withdrawing its funding from Uzbekistan's forced labor scheme.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration's Department of the Interior has finally let slip which of our national monuments it would like to "modify," either by shrinking their size or by opening them up to commercial mining, drilling, logging, and fishing. Naturally Bears Ears in Utah is at the top of the list -- Mr. Trump's obsession with undoing specific Obama works has become quite annoying -- but the Trump Administration would also allow commercial fishing in the Pacific Remote Islands, designated by George W. Bush in one of his last acts in office in 2009 and expanded by Mr. Obama in 2014, and in another Bush-designated monument, the Rose Atoll. But opening up national monuments to activities like drilling and mining is not exactly a way of protecting those monuments. Fortunately for us, President Trump doesn't actually have the authority to alter national monuments -- only Congress can do that. So both the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club help you tell your Reps and Senators to stand against the Trump Administration's plan to hand over some of our public lands to corporate cronies.

Finally, Pennsylvania state legislative leaders still haven't considered anti-gerrymandering bills HB 722 and SB 22 despite actual bipartisan support. If I were less (or more?) spiritually-advanced, I'd find that comic -- a leadership structure protecting its power by refusing to hear bills that would challenge that power! HB 722 and SB 22 would take the redistricting power out of the legislature and put it in the hands of an independent commission, comprised of the Majority and Minority leaders of both parties in both houses plus a chairman selected by the other four. And that's going to be a damn sight better than letting legislators draw their own districts to their own interest -- or, perhaps more precisely, to the interest of their biggest donors. Passing HB 722/SB 22 would give you a fighting chance of getting legislators who might actually respond to your will. And all I ask for is a fighting chance! PA Common Cause helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislative leader to give the anti-gerrymandering bills BH 722 and SB 22 a fair hearing.

Around the table: racism as a virus, cowardice as a Democrat virus, and other high concepts.

U.S. House passes an actually-bipartisan amendment that would essentially roll back the Department of Justice's efforts to expand asset forfeiture. Allowing police to seize property from the accused, not the convicted, is obviously unconstitutional -- except to the politicians who prefer posturing about being "tough on crime" to actually solving problems. The Senate could still shoot it down -- as they just shot down a Rand Paul amendment that would have repealed the 2001 AUMF that three Presidents have now abused -- but it's still a step forward.

The incomparable Heather Digby Parton writes a long and thoughtful article (including excellent analysis of recent polls) wondering whether making a deal with President Trump on the debt limit was a "trap." Call me old-fashioned, but I think you can walk through a lot of traps if you stop playing 13-dimensional chess and just work for your constituents, though that seems to be a lot to ask of contemporary Democrats. Certainly one should cast a wary eye at Democrat efforts to "win back" Trump voters, the vast majority of whom were Romney voters, McCain voters, Bush voters, et cetera. The worst thing about the debt limit deal, as I've said, was that it cleared the board for Republicans this month, so they can exert more effort on odious tax "reform" and health care "reform" efforts.

Credit reporting corporation Equifax removes forced arbitration clause from the free credit monitoring service it set up in the wake of its now-notorious data breach, but not from its general Terms of Service. That means that Equifax could try to force you into an arbitration court if you have a dispute with them over this whole imbroglio (which means that even if you threw their own statement saying they wouldn't force arbitration on you back at them, you might be doing so before an arbitrator). So I'd be conservative and monitor your credit using an actually-free credit report via annualcreditreport.com. (Yes, that is a totally valid way of using the word "conservative," though I guess I can't blame you for doing a double-take.)

Adam Johnson at FAIR informs us that the six top US newspapers actually spent a little more time condemning anti-fascists than they did condemning fascists after Charlottesville. Even if I were generous, and assumed that the "liberal" media condemn anti-fascists because it doesn't actually take a lot of moral courage to condemn fascists, I still don't think the isolated incidents of violence from folks resisting fascists is more than half of this story. I think Nazi wannabes committing considerably more acts of violence against people they think should be wiped from the Earth is more than half the story, actually.

Ho hum, Martha Pskowski at TruthOut describes how Coca-Cola has been sucking the water out of the ground in an area of rural Southern Mexico. Conservatves ought to find a lot of these themes familiar -- like the city overtaking the farm and the extermination of local traditions -- but too many of today's "conservatives" simply repeat the words free market over and over again, possibly in an effort to position themselves for their next job as a corporate PR hack. Trouble is, Coca-Cola's water-draining arrangement probably violates Mexico's Constitution, which literally guarantees clean water to its citizens.

Finally, we've been hearing a lot lately about the "intra-Democratic divide," which is a vast improvement from our "liberal" media treating Barack Obama like he was Thee Most Liberal Liberal Imaginable, but too many folks treat "reaching out to working-class whites" or "keeping black and Latino voters" is an either-or. Mr. Marshall is right to suggest that racism is a "virus" that lies "dormant" but can be "activated" by the right set of conditions, but one of the conditions that helps activate that racism is a corporatist Democratic candidate who has nothing to offer other than not being a Republican. Give people the economic populism they crave and deserve, and racism won't be anywhere near as important.

Action: big corporate mergers, conservation funding, and clean water.

Demand Progress helps you tell the Justice Department to block the proposed AT&T/Time-Warner merger. Our government hasn't really cared about curbing monopoly power in America for many decades now, but our duty remains our duty. And don't sit back and wait for President Trump to stop the merger, because he likely said he would just because it was what you wanted to hear. Certainly don't let right-wingers harangue you that AT&T is big in cellphones and Time-Warner is big in entertainment so this deal won't make them a monopoly in either one, because in a world where entertainment can be delivered easily over cellphones, that doesn't mean very much, and if AT&T can get you to watch Time-Warner content (which includes HBO and TBS) on their phones (a lot more likely in a post-net neutrality world), they'll get even more power. And, as with the proposed Amazon-Whole Foods merger, we should stop corporations from leveraging their monopoly power in one area to get a foothold in another.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the reactionary Pennsylvania state legislature not only aims to slash conservation funding, but hand over the resulting "savings" to big oil and gas drilling corporations! If that isn't government picking winners and losers, I don't know what is -- and, no, "government funding state parks and waterways" isn't "picking winners and losers," but is government doing the people's will, since people generally approve of state parks and clean water more than they approve of corporate welfare. Hence Penn Environment helps you remind your Pennsylvania state legislator that conservation funding is more important than another round of handouts for corporations. Among the very successful programs on the chopping block: the Farmland Preservation Fund, which keeps farmland from morphing into strip malls and parking lots. Strip malls and parking lots aren't inherently evil, of course, but fertile land is far more valuable and durable.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunties to tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to keep banning fracking locally, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. The DRBC imposed a fracking moratorium in the Delaware Valley some seven years ago, but now they're mulling the matter again; one wonders what changed in the meantime, since fracking hasn't become less toxic, nor have folks evolved beyond the need for clean water. Wait, now I remember: Donald Trump got elected President, and wants to drill for everything everywhere, and damn the cost to regular folks (even those who delivered Pennsylvania to a Republican for the first time since 1988!). You can't convince large numbers of people that allowing more gas drilling pollution in their drinking water helps them, but you still need either strong opposition from Democrat politicians or strong opposition from the people to defeat such evil. We're not getting the first item, so you know what to do.

Action: health care, the "war on terror," and the Grand Canyon.

Despite reports last week that Senate Republicans don't have the votes either for their planned repeal-and-replace-badly bill or their just-repeal-and-don't-bother-replacing bill, word on the street is that they're going to try and vote on one or the other of these monstrosities anyway. The Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) hasn't helped Republican efforts, of course, by calculating that the just-repeal bill will kick 32 million more Americans off their health insurance, with more than half of those losses (17 million) coming in just the first year. But of course, when some Republican Senators talked about both bills' inadequate funding of Medicaid and/or fighting opioid addiction, you should have known what would come next: an offer of tens of billions just for funding Medicaid and fighting opioid addiction in the states those Senators just so happen to represent, which is exactly the kind of naked who-cares-what-it-looks-like opportunism that has made Mitch McConnell so beloved the world over. Still, you can call your Senators and remind them that the whole point of being a Senator is not to strike deals with other Senators, but to represent their constituents. And you can ask them if handing out massive tax cuts to the wealthy while throwing tens of millions of people off their health insurance (which both bills will do) represents their constituents.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that has enabled so much unconstitutional war-making over the last 16 years. Yeah, we're coming up on some anniversaries -- not just the anniversary of 9.11, of course, but the anniversary of every bad idea Tha Bush Mobb forced down the throats of the American people afterward, including the USA PATRIOT Act and the AUMF, which latter item President Obama used to justify military operations (in Libya and Syria, to name two) he didn't get approval from Congress to undertake. But when the House Appropriations Committee approved an amendment from Rep. Lee (D-CA) that would repeal the AUMF, a spokeshack for House Speaker Ryan (E-WI) quickly declared that the amendment "endangers our national security," though of course Mr. Ryan supported the Iraq war, which we can pretty much say created ISIS, and thus "endangered our national security." And now the Lee amendment has somehow been quietly disappeared from the defense authorization bill; Ms. Lee blames Mr. Ryan, which, if true, gosh, whatever happened to not stepping on your Committee Chairs' toes? That has, after all, been Mr. Ryan's go-to excuse whenever someone actually calls upon him to, you know, lead. They have an excuse for every occasion, don't they? Would it be too much to ask for Mr. Ryan's not-that-red district to send him packing in 2018?

Finally, President Trump wants to drill everywhere, even (or maybe especially!) on public lands, and guess what that means for the Grand Canyon? It means that former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's one great achievement -- banning uranium mining in the area around the Grand Canyon for 20 years -- is in danger of going down. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell current Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to keep uranium mining corporations out of the Grand Canyon. He doesn't care what you think any more than his boss does, but let's tell him anyway, because it's our duty. The Colorado River, as you know, winds through the Grand Canyon, and it provides drinking water to over 40 million people in seven states plus the northwest region of Mexico -- and, well, it provides noticeably less drinking water to those good folks now, thanks to increased demand and climate change. Now imagine leeching uranium into that water. Does that sound like a good idea? Especially given that some uranium already leeches into the water naturally? Why, it's enough to make you think maybe tourism is the best economical use for the Grand Canyon, which is one of our national treasures, even if our government hasn't formally designated it as such. (Yes, Mr. Obama forgot to do that, too, during his last year in office.)

UPDATE. "Coming up on some anniversaries" is how that phrase in the second paragraph should have read! Error corrected.

Action: fair housing, and ANWR drilling.

CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1447, the Fair and Equal Housing Act. What would H.R. 1447 do? It would (per its summary at congress.gov) amend the Fair Housing Act of 1968 to add "sexual orientation and gender identity" to the list of classes the law protects against discrimination "in the sale, rental, or financing of housing." H.R. 1447 would also define "gender identity" "without regard to the individual's designated sex at birth," and would extend protections against discrimination to people who associate with gays or transgendered folk or folks merely perceived as belonging to these classes. And among this bill's 18 co-sponsors are seven Republicans, including original bill sponsor Scott Taylor of Virginia. I'll brook no caterwauling from the far-right about how this bill would violate the "right" of people to live only next to people who don't offend their "religious beliefs," because no religious belief grants you the right to discriminate. And I'll tolerate no silliness about how H.R. 1447 gives "special rights" to gays, either, because equal rights aren't "special rights for those other people."

Meanwhile, CREDO also helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Back in the day, we learned that the amount of oil we'd get out of ANWR wasn't going to be very much, so why do certain elements in our government insist on opening it up? Possibly out of an ideological hostility to protecting public lands, possibly out of an ideological hostility to protecting wildlife, and possibly out of a desire to enrich one's oil corporation cronies. If these all seem like the same thing to you, I wouldn't exactly blame you. But you can't just consider the harm that oil drilling will do to the rare species and Native Americans who live in and near ANWR -- you must also consider the harm that a massive oil spill would do, since our government doesn't make oil corporations take preventive measures against oil spills anymore, nor does our government properly punish the corporations who cause the spills. They say fossil fuels are dependable and reliable, though of course they're more dependable as sources of unearned income for their executives -- the damage they cause to our way of life, whether through pollution or accidents, will prove far more "dependable."

Action: pollution, tax "reform," and drug monopolies.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the state legislature has passed SB 624, which would allow longwall mining corporations to dump their waste in Pennsylvania's streams as long as they come up with a "plan" to clean it up later. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you told your kid to clean his room, would you let him dump his clothes all over the floor and just let him come up with a "plan" for cleaning his room later? No, you would not. And your kid isn't planning to poison the drinking water in public streams! It gets worse: SB 624 would also apply retroactively, meaning the Consol corporation would get off the hook for the pollution it's already caused, and if that isn't the very definition of corporate welfare, I don't know what is. But Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf still has to sign the bill in order for it to become law, so you can call him at 1.844.906.0777 and tell him to veto SB 624. He wouldn't just be protecting good Pennsylvanians' drinking water, he'd be protecting the rule of law. I mean, if corporations can just get crony legislators to get them off the hook for their wrongdoing, do we even have a rule of law?

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration now says it wants to lay out a tax "reform" plan in September and get it passed by year's end -- and Treasury Secretary Steve "the Foreclosure King" Mnuchin said it absolutely won't raise taxes on the rich, despite reports that Steve Bannon wanted to see a "4" in front of the top tax rate (though I guess we can't discount the possibility that he really meant he wanted the top tax rate to be 4 percent!). But we know this drill: Republicans would merely give massive handouts to the rich and to corporations, and while we've done good work with our resistance to the health care "reform" bill, we're going to have to do a lot more heavy lifting to stop Republican attempts at tax "reform," in part because, well, a lot of folks don't remember that taxes pay for things. So go ahead and call your Reps and Senators, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and tell them real tax reform would bring back the 91% tax rate on millionaire income, raise the Estate Tax rate, close corporate tax loopholes, and favor lower-income families more than the wealthy.

Finally, H.R. 1223, the Orphan Products Extension Now Accelerating Cures and Treatments Act, is known as the OPEN Act, though its title actually produces the acronym OPEN ACT Act. Which is awkward! And as with so many bills with allegedly clever titles, this bill will do us harm by giving big pharmaceutical corporations an additional six months of exclusive rights to a drug the FDA approves for an additional, rare health condition. How does that help folks who have such conditions? Why, by forcing them to pay through the nose for the use of that drug for six months, that's how! In other words, H.R. 1223 is nothing more than a corporate welfare handout disguised as a way of "encouraging" big pharma corporations to treat rare conditions. If you're about to argue that their rarity precludes a big pharma corporation seeing it as a money-making opportunity, then slap yourself! Seriously! Stop accepting the lie that helping people must make someone rich -- because that's a good way of ensuring that people keep getting rich without actually helping anyone. Social Security Works helps you tell your Reps and Senators to oppose corporate welfare and drug monopolies by opposing the OPEN Act.

Action: health care, Amtrak funding, and anti-pollution funding.

As you know, Senate Republicans have postponed voting on their even-worse-than-the-House-bill health care "reform" bill, and maybe it looks bad for a bill that typically gets around a 17% approval rating (higher than Congress's approvals generally, but rather lower than Obamacare's approvals at similar points in 2009 and 2010). Still, let's not get complacent; the Senate plans to be done with revisions on the bill today, which means it would go to the CBO next week and get a vote in mid-July, and these Republicans are evil. They don't care that you rely on the Obamacare Medicaid expansion right now or might one day, they don't care that the ban against pre-existing conditions protects you from getting screwed by your insurer, and they certainly don't care that you already see through their lies about "tax cuts for the middle class" (they're for the rich, just like always!) and "lower premiums" (your premiums might go up more slowly, but who cares if you're paying more out of pocket for lousier health care?). So call your Senators again, just to let them know we're watching them.

Meanwhile, among the multitudinous other nefarious things the Trump "hard power" budget would do is zero out funding for Amtrak long-distance service for passengers. Historically, Presidential budgets that have tried to cut Amtrak funding have met with fairly steadfast resistance even from Republican Senators -- remember Mr. Specter's blithe dismissal of a Bush Mobb budget cut proposal in 2005? -- but these are, as they say, interesting times. And ending federal funding for Amtrak's long-distance train rides would essentially destroy long-distance train travel in America, denying that service to nearly half of all Americans, particularly those in areas that don't have much in the way or airports or interstate highways. The truly stunning thing, of course, is that Mr. Trump's budget actually comes out and says it'd be better for Congress to concentrate on improving Amtrak's "corridor" services, meaning, essentially, densely-populated areas. And they say Democrats hate flyover country! MoveOn helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to end funding for Amtrak's long-distance passenger service.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: your state legislators are all hot to cut funding even further for the state Department of Environmental Protection, as well as the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Why? Because these things don't make money for some politician's crony -- they only protect our clean air and clean water and public lands. But cutting funding for these two departments has real-world consequences, ranging from the closure of beaches and trails to the backlog of clean water complaints the DEP can't address because it doesn't have the staff. I shouldn't even say "staff" -- I should say jobs. Maybe then the legislature will fund the DEP and the DCNR -- because they create jobs for people who actually do the hard work of (for example) inspecting mines and monitoring fracking waste. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to protect the commonwealth by properly funding the Departments of Environmental Protection and Conservation and Natural Resources.

Action: fair budgeting, and worker rights.

I've got plenty of action alerts that'll help you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Trump budget: from Food and Water Watch, the Sierra Club, the National Women's Law Center, Americans for Tax Fairness, Social Security Works, Student Debt Crisis, and Moms Rising. Also, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you write your local paper to oppose the Trump budget. But, really, this demands a phone call, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone). You could tell your Congressfolk that slashing Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, anti-pollution enforcement, renewable energy funding, food stamps, public lands administration, and student loan programs is just plain evil -- or you could tell your Congressfolk that in a better budget like the People's Budget, one which would actually create jobs and advance our environment and make taxes fairer, we invest in each other, whereas in the Trump budget we invest in more corporate welfare handouts to Mr. Trump's rich friends.

Meanwhile, the city of London will review Uber's license to operate there at the very end of this month, so Sum of Us helps you ask Transport for London to reject Uber's license, and thus its ability to operate in London, unless and until it respects its drivers' rights, including the right to paid a decent wage for good work. As it happens, London is Uber's only foothold in Europe, largely due to good Europeans' agitation against it; Uber casts itself as the future of the economy, but it's very old-school in one fairly important way: it exploits the labor of its workers on its way to sky-high stock prices and executive compensation -- in short, it redistributes income from its drivers to its executives. And it doesn't have to be that way! Using cell phone apps to get rides is not at all evil in itself, nor is folks making money part-time with the resources they already own. But with its insistence on calling employees "contract workers," and thus avoiding those pesky minimum wage and safe workplace laws, Uber isn't encouraging innovation, but exploiting it. And we don't need to stand for exploitation.

Around the table: from racial gerrymandering to Republican whining.

U.S. Supreme Court upholds federal district court ruling striking down two North Carolina Congressional districts, concurring with the lower court that the state legislature deliberately sought to dilute black voting power by adding black voters to those districts. The Court highlights the utter perversity of the Republicans' argument in re the 1st district -- that the Voting Rights Act mandates that black voters get black representation, even if that means getting less representation in other districts, apparently -- and Republicans may regret arguing that they redrew the 12th district on partisan-not-racial grounds if the Court ever gets around to ruling on partisan redistricting.

Justice Gorsuch didn't participate in the above case, but he did dissent (along with Justice Thomas, who, for reasons unknown to me, joined the 5-3 majority in the North Carolina case) from the Court's decision not to hear an appeal that could have struck down McCain-Feingold bans on large contributions to political parties. One can only hope Justice Gorsuch will be writing a lot of dissents over the course of his career, but we'd be unduly optimistic to think that'll be what happens in the short term.

Mark Travant at the OurFuture blog suggests that the Trump Administration "reality show" distracts us from Republican attempts to cut Medicaid. I'll admit I've been more obsessed with protecting Medicare over the years, but Medicaid provides insurance to over 60 million Americans, whereas Medicare insures over 40 million. So between those two, we're about one-third of the way to insuring everybody. Right-wingers will respond but everybody's already paying, but I'll respond that folks with millionaire income aren't paying enough, and that we could be spending what we're spending a lot more effectively -- you know, like they do in Canada.

Forget about Jon Ossoff's run in Georgia's 6th (his ads are still marred by "cut the deficit" and "high-tech jobs" messaging, which, like, yawn) -- Rob Quist has a real shot at grabbing Montana's at-large House seat for the Democrats. Partly he's got a shot because he's an unapologetic liberal populist, but he's also got a shot because his opponent (Republican Greg Gianforte) once sued the state to keep good Montanans from fishing on public lands near his land. That pushes all of Montana's buttons, but Mr. Gianforte already lost the 2016 gubernatorial race in Montana due in large part to this controversy, so I worry that Montana voters might be tired of hearing about it. I guess we'll see.

Finally, a Mississippi state House Rep says on Facebook that folks who remove Confederate statues -- statues "erected in the loving memory of our family and fellow Southern Americans," he says -- should be "LYNCHED!" (Shouty caps in original.) Even his fellow far-right Mississippi Republicans have slammed him for it, but he's so far apologized only for using the word "lynched" (or, rather, "LYNCHED!"), not for his sentiment. I'm sure his less-than-half apology was part of the plan all along -- to create drama and get attention coming and going. Here's your attention, clown: waaaaaaaaah!

Action: financial predators, "conversion therapy," and national monuments.

PennPIRG helps you tell your House Reps to reject the so-called Financial CHOICE Act, which would (among other things!) cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's ability to protect citizens from predatory lending. And where does a big chunk of predatory lending occur today? Why, in student loans, of course, since over 40 million Americans have them (and that's about one out of every eight of us). Earlier this year the CFPB sued the notorious Navient, America's biggest student loan servicer, for "systematically and illegally failing borrowers at every state of repayment," which sure does sound harsh. But the Financial CHOICE Act would hurt the CFPB's ability to go after bad actors, and thus leave more and more Americans open to getting ripped off. And here you thought conservatism was about cracking down on ripoff artists! I mean, that's what law and order is all about, right? Sadly, the reactionaries who call themselves "conservative" think any law restricting anything a corporation might do is itself evil. Let's not let them have all the say about everything.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 2119/S. 928, the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act, so that "conversion therapists" can't try to "convert" gay folks. The Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act would empower the Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to go after "conversion therapy" practitioners under its mandate to prosecute "unfair or deceptive trade practices." And given that scientists don't consider homosexuality to be a disorder anymore, and don't consider it something anyone can reasonably change, you'd be hard-pressed to call "conversion therapy" anything but deceptive. And, ah, we've gone over what "conversion therapy" entails, right? Among other things, it entails "exercises" full of nudity and inappropriate touching, "role play" full of violence, and the actual re-enactment of past sexual abuses, because who doesn't just love going through that again? Don't brook any silliness from your Congressfolk claiming they can't support the bill because "they're not scientists," because you don't need a doctorate in psychology to know what a snake oil salesman looks like.

Finally, as you know, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at knocking down a bunch of National Monuments. And as you may know, the Department of the Interior has separated the commenting processes for one recently-designated monumen (Bears Ears) and for the entire national monument "review" process in general. I expect this matter to die in court, as a lot of Mr. Trump's best-laid plans seem to do, but in the meantime, duty is duty, so American Rivers helps you tell our Department of Interior to, in American Rivers's words, stop "selling off our monuments." That is what the Trump Administration intends to do, after all -- sell off our public lands to fossil fuel drillers -- and though they're less subtle about their aim than any other President we've experienced or could imagine, that's of no great comfort if he succeeds. For Mr. Trump and his votaries, everything on Earth, including the water we drink and the air we breathe, ain't worth nothin' unless it can be converted to money. But to paraphrase a famous philosopher: if money is all you want, then money is all you'll get.

Action: health care, and clean water on public lands.

Today would be a good day to use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and call your Senators to tell them you oppose Republican efforts to "reform" or "repeal" Obamacare. Now, your Republican Senators might tell you what mine did last week: that any bill coming out of the Senate will be different from the House bill. Of course, they say that to trick you into thinking the Senate bill will be a good bill. So fire a pre-emptive strike, as it were, by listing exactly the things you don't want them to do: you don't want them to repeal taxes on the rich that would steal money from Medicare, you don't want them to let states start jacking up premiums for people with pre-existing conditions (and, as you can see from this list, just about everyone in America has one!), you don't want them to end or roll back the Medicaid expansion, you don't want them to change Obamacare subsidies so more working families can't afford health insurance, and (of course!) you don't want them to take health insurance from more than 20 million good Americans. When we make our demands plain, we paint our enemies into a corner. And we need to keep doing that, because you can never count a bastard out.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents take note: SB 624 would amend clean water laws in Pennsylvania such that corporations could pollute local streams with as long as they submit a plan to clean up the water later on. What are we supposed to do with the dirty water in the meantime, you wonder? Stop drinking, bathing, swimming, and fishing? Tough luck, good citizens of the Commonwealth -- your will to do what you want to do on your public lands and waters must take a back seat to some corporation's desire to make unearned money! And worse, actually -- the bill would apply retroactively, such that any corporation indulging in such pollution could simply whip up a "plan" to get rid of it and get off the hook. Just so happens the Consol corporation has been longwall mining in the southwestern part of Pennsylvania, and polluting public waters there, for years. Gosh, what could be the connection between the two? The Sierra Club helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislator to oppose efforts to legalize pollution on public lands.

Action: methane emissions, clean water, and advertising on Breitbart.

Word on the street is that this is the week the Senate finally brings H.J.Res. 36/S.J.Res. 11 to the floor; this is the notorious "resolution of disapproval" that would repeal the Bureau of Land Management's rules curbing methane emissions on public lands. What on Earth could a reasonable person have against the notion that we should have less pollution on public lands? Nothing -- this resolution is the work of lazy Congresspeople doing the bidding of lazy oil and gas drilling CEOs who prefer wasting methane in their operations to getting their act together the way we'd expect a messy child to get his act together. But I continue to insist, at the risk of tilting at windmills, that they don't get all the say around here, so the Environmental Defense Fund helps you call your Senators and tell them to protect public lands from pollution by rejecting H.J.Res. 36/S.J.Res. 11. Remember: it's not just the climate change punch methane packs, and it's not just the waste of usable methane -- it's the cheating of good Americans out of royalties for extracting usable methane from public lands. Doesn't Congress care about protecting good Americans' money?

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell four Northeastern Governors and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to permanently ban natural gas drilling in the Delaware River Basin." To think that you see drinking water catch on fire near fracking wells and you hear about gas drilling corporations trucking bottled water into towns where they've operated and some right-wingers still have the nerve to respond TEH NO ONEZ HAS EVER SUEDZ OVER TEH FRACKINGZ!!!!! Which, of course, isn't true, but Jesus Mary and Joseph must we wait for a lawsuit to be filed before we protect our water? And must we ignore the carcinogens scientists (including EPA scientists!) have already found in water tables near fracking areas, despite the gas industry's exemption from reporting the chemicals they use that the Clean Water Act would otherwise mandate? Must we ignore the moratorium the Delaware River Basin Commission imposed in 2010, or how quickly Pennsylvania's area state legislators moved to keep fracking out of the Delaware Valley in 2012, or the statewide ban imposed in New York last year? If we don't have clean water, we don't have health. It's that simple. And it's why our local leaders need to act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to break ties with the far-right, Trump-enabling, white nationalist-enabling "news" site Breitbart, then CREDO helps you do that, too. More than a thousand advertisers have stopped running ads on Breitbart over the last few months, no doubt because you helped pressure them, but Amazon, strangely enough, has kept running ads there, and it's not like Mr. Bezos is a BFF of President Trump, either. And it's also not like Amazon needs to reach these eyeballs there, either -- if you want to reach white nationalists, after all, you can find them in other ways, since white nationalists are, after all, human beings, and thus presumably have interests other than white nationalism (and it'd be better for them if we reached them through those other interests, too!). But more to the point: approximately half of all money spent on the internet moves through Amazon at some point or other, so why does the behemoth need to coddle the little monster? This, particularly when Amazon's own policy toward discriminatory ads is pretty tough. You'd hate to think Mr. Bezos was hedging his bets.

Around the table: the defense community vs. methane emissions, and other tales.

Democrats declare they won't work with President Trump on tax reform until he releases his own tax returns, presumably so we can see how his tax reform plans would benefit him. But we already know how his tax "reform" plans would benefit him (i.e., bigly), and we really shouldn't make everything about Mr. Trump, since he feeds on drama like a dung beetle feeds on dung. Instead, Democrats should be advancing ideas that would actually reform our tax code, like bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and closing corporate tax loopholes, but of course they won't do that, because they fear losing their big corporate donors, when they should fear losing American voters.

Have you been wondering why the Senate hasn't yet acted on the House's "resolution of disapproval" aiming to overturn the Bureau of Land Management's rules limiting methane emissions on our public lands? Well, apparently a significant slice of the defense community, including thousands of veterans and four Generals, support the methane emissions rule, arguing that (among other things!) venting methane as wastefully as we do hurts our efforts to produce our own energy, and thus also our efforts to stay out of wars over energy. Could we run ads saying those who want to get rid of the methane emissions rule are objectively anti-security? Hey, they'd just be getting some of their own.

Adrianne Jeffries at The Outline reminds us that stories about people who walk 12 miles to work every day are not "heartwarming" -- that they're "really indictments of a country that has the world’s largest economy but can’t promise a living wage," or at least not enough of a living wage to buy a car. Also, too, why can't we have nice things like public transportation, particularly in rural areas? Because we won't tax the rich hard enough to get them, that's why.

Alana Semuels at The Atlantic describes how four years of complete Republican rule have allowed coal ash pollution to hurt residential clean water in North Carolina. It's a big story, and note well that in Amy Brown -- the Belmont, NC resident and former Republican who now lines her walls with bottled water for cooking, drinking, and tooth-brushing and who agitates against coal ash pollution -- North Carolina has summoned a thundercloud, for hell hath no fury like a Republican utterly abandoned by her party.

Finally, Trump Administration spokeshack Sean Spicer suggests that public disclosure about such issues as Mr. Trump's tax returns and the identity of White House visitors is (as the Times puts it) "unnecessary, intrusive, or even harmful." People who talk about the importance of "privacy" not as it relates to your internet information but as it relates to "the President's ability to get the best advice" don't seem to understand that they work for America, and they also don't understand that Americans give the President all the advice he needs. It's a shame Mr. Spicer's position isn't an elected one, or we could pelt him with "public disclosure is harmful" ads until he has to get a real job.

Action: corporate tax evasion, and live town halls.

S. 863, the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, and H.R. 1932, the Corporate EXIT Fairness Act, would go a long way toward preventing corporations from pretending they're "foreign" corporations so they can avoid paying taxes here in America. Taxes pay for things, as you know, so when corporations pretend they're "foreign," they cheat good Americans out of bridges, libraries, police, schools, and firefighters, among the many good services we expect from our tax dollars. Of course you know what your Republican Reps and Senators will say in response? They sure won't say "let the corporations avoid paying taxes," because that would be awfully silly. Instead, they'll tell us that it's no wonder corporations offshore their profits, because they're taxed so much here (which, of course, isn't true, given that a little over half of Fortune 500 corporations received almost half a trillion dollars in tax breaks over the last eight years), or they'll say they're waiting to see what comes out of Mr. Trump's tax reform efforts, which could be, like, forever from now. I suggest you call your Reps and Senators, using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're using a cellphone), and tell them to support S. 863 and H.R. 1932, and stop corporations from offshoring their profits just to avoid paying taxes.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania's junior U.S. Senator, Patrick J. Toomey, has gotten quite the reputation in Pennsylvania for not holding public town hall meetings, a habit that's received much more scrutiny as of late, as Republicans across America try to avoid the wrath of their constituents as often as they can. But Mr. Toomey can claim to be something of a pioneer in this field, since he hasn't held a live town hall since 2013; one does wonder why his Democratic opponent, Katie McGinty, didn't make much of this four short months ago, and one suspects, unfortunately, that she didn't really want to hold them, either, being cut from the same corporate centrist cloth as the Democratic Presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. But there is only one reason you avoid your constituents the way Mr. Toomey has: you're selling them out and you don't want to face them after you sell them out. And perhaps not coincidentally, Mr. Toomey's record has thus far been one of siding with his big donors and ignoring the needs of regular Pennsylvanians. Hence this Change.org petition, which helps you tell Mr. Toomey to start holding live town halls with live people in them. (No, his "tele-town halls" don't count -- he can screen questions and, more importantly, not actually face anyone.)

Action: health care, war in Syria, public water, and fracking.

The House plans to vote on Obamacare repeal today, so use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or on the bottom of this page, if you're viewing this page on a smartphone) to call your Reps and tell them to reject the legislation. We have plenty of reasons to oppose it, chief among them that it repeals the Medicare-funding tax imposed by the Affordable Care Act on high incomes -- which means that, yes, Republicans are trying to steal money from Medicare in order to give handouts to their wealthy donors. It would not be "uncivil" to put it like that, since it is, in fact, true. Obamacare repeal would also deprive over 20 million Americans of their health insurance and replace the individual mandate with a 30 percent premium hike for people who've had gaps in their health insurance -- which means that instead of paying your government a fine for not having had health insurance, you'll be paying health insurance corporations that fine. All praise the "free" market!

Meanwhile, H.R. 1473, the Prohibit Expansion of U.S. Combat Troops into Syria Act, would, as its title suggests, prevent our President from "establishing or maintaining any presence of members of the United States Armed Forces or private security contractors on the ground of Syria, unless the purpose of such presence is limited solely to rescuing or protecting members of the United States Armed Forces from imminent danger," except in case of the need "to protect, rescue, or remove United States personnel." That's right, it's another succinct anti-war bill from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA)! And H.R. 1473 doesn't actually prevent the President from, you know, going old school and actually requesting a declaration of war from Congress like the Constitution demands. It does, however, prevent the President from using the 2001 AUMF as an excuse to send soldiers off to die wherever he likes, which is also a pressing matter. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to help put a stop to endless warmongering by supporting H.R. 1473.

In other news, the Nestlé corporation is doing its damndest to execute "water grabs" all over America -- where they pay a municipality a piddling sum to siphon off its citizens' public water so they can bottle it and make a shamefully huge profit -- but we are fighting back against these water grabs wherever we can. Even in Michigan, where Republicans have a stranglehold on state government, we've managed to stall their efforts to steal water from the town of Evart. But the Premier of British Columbia, has backed away from promises to review that province's water rate schedule "for industrial users" (i.e., corporations like Nestlé) -- promises she made only last year, after heavy action from the citizenry, of course. She faces the good voters of British Columbia again in less than six months, so help her do the right thing, but letting Sum of Us help you tell Premier Clark to keep Nestlé from stealing British Columbia's water. Especially given all the drought that's afflicted that province over the last few years!

Finally, Philadelphia residents take note: SEPTA still plans to build a fracked natural gas plant in the northern part of the city; perhaps not coincidentally, North Philly is the area of the city most neglected by the municipal government over the years. So perhaps they don't care if "those people" have dirtier air, since they already have the dirtiest air in the city. Why does no one think of building a renewable energy plant in economically-distressed areas? I mean, the gas'll be gone one day -- and will do plenty of damage in the meantime! -- but the sun and the win will always return. Now, the SEPTA board voted to pass this proposal months ago, but got caught not giving the public the legally-required amount of notice (I wonder why not!) and thus have to redo the vote. And Philadelphia's Mayor, Jim Kenney, can still veto the plan. You can call him at 855.969.5216 to tell him to veto the SEPTA fracked gas plan, and thus protect good North Philly residents from (even more) air pollution.

Action: protecting privacy, health care, and public lands.

H.R. 1313, the so-called Preserving Employee Wellness Programs Act, would actually allow corporations to force their employees to get genetic testing, assess thousands of dollars in penalties if they don't, and see that information if the tests are part of a "workplace wellness" program. If that sounds to you like something that should be against the law (because it's your private info and doesn't predict your job performance, among other reasons), well, it already is -- the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, among other things, forbids employers from using genetic information in major employee-related decisions, and the EEOC issued new rules on May 17 of last year (just ahead of the six-month window a "resolution of disapproval" requires, you may notice) requiring that all workplace wellness programs be voluntary and forbidding employers from taking any negative action against employees who don't participate in them. So this is how dystopian genetic engineering schemes will arrive -- through loopholes demanded by corporations. I think you might want to tell your Reps and Senators to oppose this bill.

Meanwhile, the House Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce committees both passed the Republicans' Obamacare repeal package late last week; now it goes to the House Budget Committee. If you're feeling ambitious, here's a list of House Budget Committee members, but you'll still need at least one more click per member to get to their phone numbers; certainly, while you've got your Rep on the phone about H.R. 1313 you can instruct them to oppose the American Health Care Act, too. Some folks have taken to calling the American Health Care Act "Trumpcare" -- which seems to annoy the Trump Administration, but hey, if they don't like it, maybe they should stop calling the bill they're trying to repeal "Obamacare"! The Coalition on Human Needs has a better name for it, though: "Wealthcare," as in, "this bill cares more about giving wealthy people more tax cuts than about ensuring all Americans have access to decent health care." People love rhymes, but I bet the "liberal" media ignores it, since it might hurt the fee-fees of some of their corporate owners. But feel free to call it "Wealthcare" to your friends and family. They matter more than the "liberal" media anyhow.

Finally, after over a decade of activism from locals, the U.S. Forest Service is mulling withdrawing the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota from its mining permits schedule for the next two decades; if they do, big copper mining corporations wouldn't be able to pollute the water there, and thus they wouldn't be able to threaten not only the multitudinous wildlife species that live there (lynx, bear, moose, like that) but also the camping, hunting, fishing, and canoeing industries that thrive there. And support almost 20,000 jobs, I feel compelled to add for the benefit of those who think only mining creates jobs. Possibly when Sean Spicer said the "deep state" was out to get Donald Trump -- which, as Mike Lofgren reminds us, is an absurd proposition -- he meant the various officials in the federal government still working hard to be a good steward of our public lands and waters, rather than the servants of mammon Mr. Trump would no doubt prefer. Hence American Rivers helps you tell the Forest Service to protect the Boundary Waters area from copper mining.

Action: free speech, clean air, whistleblower protections, and endangered species.

Hoo boy: the Arizona state Senate passes SB 1142, which would, get this, allow the state to seize the assets of anyone who plans or participates in a protest that could turn violent. Asset forfeiture is an unconstitutional blot on our nation's soul already, and it shouldn't be difficult to imagine how an agent provocateur, or a group of them, could make a peaceful protest go south right quick. But if you aren't being violent at a protest, why should we allow the state punish you? SB 1142's supporters want you to think that anyone who protests Mr. Trump is a paid provocateur -- a profound insult to our patriotism, and you're free to remind them of that! But folks who whine that we've-gotta-do-something-anything also expose themselves as weaklings. And if they don't like protests, maybe they should stop giving the people the back of their hand. SB 1142 goes to the state House now; state House Speaker J.D. Mesnard's phone number is 1.602.926-4481, and Majority Leader John M. Allen's number is 1.602.926.4916. You want more phone numbers? Here they are. Give 'em hell.

H.J.Res. 36, the "resolution of disapproval" that would roll back the Obama Administration's rules curbing methane emissions on public lands, passed the House, but still awaits Senate approval. If you're scratching your head wondering why anyone would think more methane emissions on public lands would be a goodthing, well, you're not alone. Methane emissions, as you know, pack a bigger climate-change punch than even coal emissions do, and "flaring" them on public lands not only pollutes those lands, but it represents energy that could be captured and used, and it represents royalties from capturing that energy and using it that the public could be earning. Since it is, you know, our land. But that's our Republican party -- objectively pro-pollution, objectively pro-wasting natural resources, objectively pro-wasting taxpayer money, as long as these things distribute more of your money upward to their big donors. So, yeah, H.J.Res. 36 warrants a phone call to your Senators today.

Meanwhile, Republicans aren't content with just unleashing more pollution -- they're also aiming to gut the Securities and Exchange Commission's whistleblower program, which has, over the last few years, recovered billions of dollars -- taxpayer dollars, I might add -- from fraud artists. If you're scratching your head wondering why anyone would want to make it harder to catch corporate criminals -- well, actually, you've already figured out that it explains itself. Any big campaign donor -- especially in an age that not only doesn't reward work but seems to hold contempt for work -- might be a corporate criminal, and we can't have any sunlight shining on that, or else some of these Congressfolk might actually lose their jobs. Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell Congress and the President that to reject any attempt to gut SEC whistleblower protections. After all, Congress may pretend it didn't happen, but we all remember that banksters crashed our economy in 2008, and though they feel no shame over that, we're not about to let it happen again.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to gut the Endangered Species Act, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. Now that we have a bill (H.R. 717, the so-called Listing Reform Act, always they burn down your house and call it "reform"!), we can guess at the specific aims of Endangered Species Act destruction: H.R. 717 would mandate that government agencies count the financial costs of protecting endangered species, and would even let more unscrupulous government agencies (uh, like the ones we have now!) put "lost" oil and gas profits or "lost" local tax revenue ahead of any other consideration! Because that's the civilization they want -- one that makes every decision not just based on money, but based on short-term gains. That all doesn't sound very conservative, does it? I mean, wouldn't an actual conservative would insist on taking the long view? Of course, our President and our Congress aren't conservatives -- they're reactionaries. But reactionaries don't get all the say. Not in my America.

Action: methane emissions, corporate taxes, and crackdowns on public protest.

H.J.Res. 36, a "resolution of disapproval" aimed at the Obama Administration's rule limiting methane emissions on public lands, passed the House last week and now goes to the Senate. Last week I bemoaned not just the damage methane emissions cause to clean air and climate, but also the sheer waste in venting methane into the atmosphere where it can't heat anyone's home. But I should also have added that this waste occurs on public lands, i.e., our lands -- and that methane could be earning us royalties if it weren't being vented away. Hence the Environmental Defense Fund helps you call your Senators and tell them to reject H.J.Res. 36, and thus protect not just our air, and not just our climate, and not just our public lands, but also our right to royalties from the use of that land. (Alternately, you can also use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' websites, which will ultimately lead you to phone numbers for their local district offices. Both of my Senators' D.C. numbers had full mailboxes yesterday, so we have to call their local offices more and more.)

Meanwhile, Rep. Rokita (R-IN) has introduced H.J.Res. 54, another "resolution of disapproval," this one aimed at the Treasury Department's recent guidance that cracked down on corporations that change their legal address to avoid paying taxes in America. So that's where our Congress is these days -- hell-bent on making it easier for their corporate donors to shirk their responsibility to help us maintain the roads and bridges and sewers and police departments that we all use. And dig Mr. Rokita's reasoning behind the bill: "(a) multinational company looking to expand its American operations would face large tax burdens if it tried to use its money earned outside of the United States to fund the expansion." Well, it's not like he can say he's objectively pro-corporate tax loophole! Seriously, though, corporations would already count money "used to expand operations" as an expense, since that's what it is, and doing so would reduce their tax burden, so I call horsedoodle! Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your House Reps to reject H.J.Res. 54, and make corporations do more to contribute to our commonwealth.

Meanwhile, our works calling our Reps and Senators and protesting inside and outside their public appearances is clearly working. How do I know it's working? Because now no less than 10 states want to criminalize protest in some way or other! That's also how I know Our Glorious Elites are morally and intellectually bankrupt, by the way -- if they had a point, about anything at all, they wouldn't need to throw their critics in jail! But they fear their critics, so much so that (to cite just one example) North Dakota is still mulling whether to let people off the hook for "accidentally" running down protestors in the street! I mean, manslaughter is manslaughter, so I presume North Dakota legislators' real point is that protestors aren't real people with real rights. But we Americans shouldn't have to put up with that kind of guff from our leaders, hence Fight for the Future helps you tell state legislators to stop trying to criminalize First Amendment-protected freedom of speech, even when they really, really don't like what we're saying. And remember, right-wingers: if you really can't stand criticism so much you're willing to chuck the First Amendment for it, then you're the weakling. And the whiner. And the tantrum-thrower.

Action: fighting discrimination and fracking.

Elections, as we know, have consequences, and here's one of them: the crowd who thinks they should have the "religious liberty" to discriminate against people they're scared of getting cooties from are now in charge of the Executive and Legislative branches of our government. President Trump reportedly readied yet another of his infamous Executive Orders, one that would permit federal contractors to discriminate in hiring, in benefits, and in public services on the basis of their supposed "religious beliefs"; supposedly Mr. Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband, both gay rights supporters, talked him out of it, but Americans United for the Separation of Church and State helps you tell Mr. Trump anyway to reject any plans to let Americans use "religious beliefs" as an excuse to discriminate against gays, women, and others. But Congressidiots are readying the so-called First Amendment Defense Act for reintroduction, which would let anyone discriminate against anyone else based on their "religious beliefs." And our opponents constantly claim we're oppressing them by not letting them do so! What whiners! Folks can have any religious belief they like, and can't be put in jail merely for having them -- but acting upon them in such a way that deprives other folks of their rights is evil. So CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the First Amendment Defense Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to permanently ban fracking in the area of the Delaware River Basin. The Delaware River Basin, as you might imagine, provides drinking water to some 15 million good Americans across four states (Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York), and fracking in the Basin would pretty much destroy that; there's a reason, after all, that the area's state Republican Senators made sure to slip a gas-drilling moratorium into the state budget back in 2012. The Commission doesn't derive its authority from the Pennsylvania legislature, of course, but from all four of the aforementioned states and our federal government; they've imposed a temporary moratorium on fracking in the Basin, but we need to make that permanent. And if you really want to indulge in some force message multiplication, find friends and neighbors who hunt and fish and get them to tell the DRBC to protect the Delaware River Basin forever. If they organize, right-wing politicians may shrink -- we just saw this happen with Rep. Chaffetz's sudden withdrawal of H.R. 621 (which would have enabled the selling of millions of acres of public land) after outdoor recreationalists joined the fight against it.

Action: public lands, assassination of activists, consumer protection, and Presidential divestment.

H.R. 621 would sell off over three million acres of public land in ten states; the bill's title (Congress.gov has neither text nor summary yet, wonder why) identifies this land as "previously identified as suitable for disposal," but what prevents our government from using this land to, say, build out a public, renewable energy grid? Welfare handouts for certain Congressfolk's big corporate donors (particularly those in the oil and gas industry), that's what. For his part, the bill's author, Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, says these three million acres were "identified as suitable for disposal" by the Clinton Administration, but why should we care? The American people are not as thirsty for "bipartisanship" as Our Glorious Elites would have us believe -- we only want good government, and just because that center-right President we had two decades ago also thought we should sell them off shouldn't mean a thing to us now. Congress has been moving very, very quickly lately to try to sell of as much federal land as possible, but you can only sell land once; land the people own, the people can use, and repurpose, for generations. Use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page to call your Reps and tell them to reject this bill.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that the indigenous activist Isidro Baldenegro López, who long fought with farmers against loggers in the Sierra Madre mountains, was assassinated on January 15, mere months after assassins linked to a certain dam project took out indigenous activist Berta Cáceres in Honduras. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Mexican law enforcement authorities to prosecute Mr. Baldenegro's murderer, or murderers. You may possess some skepticism that doing this will do any good, but the commitment we've made as Americans -- to fight for a nation, and a world, where justice wins out, and where good folks can live free from fear -- makes this, also, our duty. And we know he wasn't murdered because he had a spat with a neighbor -- we know he was murdered because he was doing good for his community, his nation, and his world. And anyway, how do we know it won't do any good? Plenty of countries bow before the Big Stick of Bad PR. And we want a world where governments fear informed public opinion.

In other news, PennPIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The news hook this time is the student loan corporation Navient, which manages some $300 billion in student loans (covering over 12 million borrowers, because college is pretty damn expensive nowadays). The CFPB found that Navient failed its customers "at every stage of repayment," which news presumably did not drive Navient's executives to exclaim WE GOT 100 PERCENT! Among Navient's crimes: incorrectly processing payments (which often leads to more late fees and I'm sure that's a complete coincidence!), failing to offer lower payment options to customers who had earned them (which, again, leads to more money for Navient), and slow-walking customer complaints (because what are they gonna do? Not go to college?). Don't take any guff from your Reps and Senators about "nanny states" and "burdensome regulations." A lot of financial corporations don't care about anything but money, and thus do a lot of people a lot of harm. Our government has a moral responsibility to stop that.

Finally, I know this seems a bit beside the point now that we're, what, almost two weeks in, but CREDO still helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 65, the Presidential Conflicts of Interest Act. Mr. Trump has brought an unprecedented number of conflicts of interest to the office -- which is to say, he is invested in so many businesses that he might have to make decisions about as President that we can have no faith that, given the choice, he'll serve the American people rather than serving himself. S. 65 would help him fix that, by requiring that the President and Vice President divest any and all interests that would create a conflict of interest in the course of doing their jobs as the people's servants, and placing all the proceeds from that divestment in a blind trust -- since any money they'd make from divestment is itself an asset, one that could be manipulated by the unscrupulous. Power is a temptation to anyone who takes high office, and bills like these restrain the powerful, so that they do not run roughshod over the rights of other people -- particularly when their job is to serve the people.

UPDATE. A reader points out to me that Mr. Chaffetz has withdrawn H.R. 621, to which the first paragraph above refers. Other assaults on public lands will come, but this is good news.

Action: bad Trump nominees, bad Congressional bills, and child marriage in Bangladesh.

Again, we're going to try to get ahead of the curve on votes on Trump nominees before they receive their final votes in the Senate; hence I advise you to use the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page and call your Senators to oppose the nomination of Rex Tillerson to Secretary of State, Betsy DeVos to Education Secretary, and Scott Pruitt to EPA Administrator. You can tell your Senators to oppose Mr. Tillerson because of his corporation's notorious human rights record abroad (as this article described). You can tell your Senators to oppose Ms. DeVos not merely because of her lifelong zeal to privatize public education -- a goal, as we mentioned a few days ago, predicated on entirely false assumptions -- but because of her trouble keeping her hands clean ethically, a problem that dogs most folks who support privatizing public schools and give only lip service to holding those private schools accountable. And you can tell your Senators you oppose Mr. Pruitt because you have no faith he'll keep our air and water clean, particularly when you examine his record as Oklahoma's Attorney General, soft-pedaling law enforcement when it might have affected his big donors. It's really like Donald Trump is trying to find the worst person to do every Executive branch job, but we don't have to take it just because he got 46% of the vote.

Meanwhile, Congress wants to roll back the Bureau of Land Management's rules limiting methane emissions on public lands. Why? Because this Congress apparently doesn't care if methane emissions (which pack a much bigger climate-change punch than coal emissions, as you know) befoul the air, as long as some big donor is making lots of unearned money digging into our land. No, it's really that simple. Of course even Donald Trump says we need some environmental regulation -- just not any of the environmental regulation we've got, or any we might want. You'd think, though, as nominal conservatives, that the Republicans running Congress would be aghast at the $330 million that methane leaks (and intentional methane ventilation!) costs the taxpayer in royalties every year. (If not for leaks and venting, corporations could sell the gas they're losing, and thus we could collect royalties on it.) But they're not aghast, so you can go ahead and conclude that Republicans are not, in fact, conservative -- reactionary, corporatist, evil, anything but conservative. So the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell your House Rep to oppose any effort to gut methane emissions rule that protect our air and protect our public lands.

In other news, the Project on Government Oversight helps you call your Reps and Senators to tell them to vote against repealing the Cardin-Lugar Provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. What does Cardin-Lugar do? It forces certain fossil fuel and mining corporations to disclose to the public the taxes and royalties they pay to our federal government, in exchange for the privilege of extracting natural resources from American lands -- including our public lands. And why would anyone want to repeal that provision? Because SOCIALISM COMMUNISM NAZISM KENYAN ANTI-COLONIALISM!!!! Gosh, I haven't done that in a while. Seriously, the only reason to repeal this reporting provision is to hide, from the public -- who are not only the true owners of public lands, but the true owners of our government -- what they're paying the public for the privilege of pulling resources out of the ground. They'll say forcing such disclosure "kills jobs" -- try figuring that one out! -- but they say everything people want that's good for them "kills jobs." And I'm tired of them getting all the say around here.

Finally, the government of Bangladesh is contemplating a bill that could end child marriage there -- which would be a big deal, since Bangladesh has, unfortunately, one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world. But they're also contemplating a clause that could force girls to marry their rapists! Why? Well, according to Bangladesh's Prime Minister, girls in rural areas don't have any better options to preserve their "honor" than to marry the men who force themselves upon them -- which won't convince you if you believe, as I do, that a government's job is to encourage hope, not stamp it out. And we protect children from sexual relations with adults for a reason, after all -- adults can overpower children, both physically and psychologically, hence no consent to sexual relations (which must happen between equals) is possible. Avaaz helps you tell the government of Bangladesh to pass a strong, anti-child marriage law without "special circumstance" loopholes that would make a mockery of their efforts.

Around the table: important notes about three Trump Cabinet nominees, plus some good news.

If you find you're on the fence about Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, this rather exhaustive article entitled "Rex Tillerson Could Be America's Most Dangerous Secretary of State" may persuade you to hop off it. It starts with human rights and environmental abuses overseas and at home, and goes on to analyze why Mr. Tillerson would take a job that's a "step down" from what he's currently doing; none of it bodes well for our country or our future. (And I have to say that the Exxon subsidiary doing business with Iran while our government imposed sanctions on Iran isn't a good look, either -- their rationalizations may get them off in court, but they won't win hearts and minds here in America.)

Upwards of one-thirds of donors who've given $5,000 or more to Sen. Jeff Sessions have known matters (including lawsuits and contracts) before the Department of Justice, which Mr. Sessions would head, if confirmed as Attorney General. If you're quick to respond BOTH SIDEZ DO TEH THINGSZ!!!!, you would do better to respond "is this right?" or "should campaign donations give you more access to our government than the vast majority of American citizens who don't poop money?" But it sure is a good thing Mitch McConnell demanded the President make sure his Cabinet appointees get their ethical and financial house in order before the Senate held any hearings! Oh, wait, that was 2009.

In other Trump nominee-related news, Rep. Tom Price has apparently established quite the record of bringing the bacon home to his big campaign donors. That includes battling certain Medicare cuts, apparently -- but only the ones that would affect his biggest donors in the medical device industry. He's also written letters to the FDA on behalf of some of his biggest donors, begging exemption from clinical trials for these "pillar(s) of the community," which is a surprise, given that the FDA hasn't lately been a stalwart defender of the public interest to begin with. At any rate, I'm sure he'll tell us he was "helping out his constituents," though why a big donor rates as a constituent and all the other folks in his district don't is a question well worth asking.

Bad news, folks: the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood informs us that the National Park Service has largely ignored the popular will and decided to dramatically ramp up corporate advertising in our national parks. And here we all thought we went to our national parks to get in touch with forces that existed long before mass media and commercialism -- and will exist long after. Wow, that statement just gave me a great deal more comfort than it ever has been before! But CCFC tells us that nearly 80% of public comments opposed more corporate advertising in public parks, and I do recall Newt Gingrich telling us once that if 70% of the public want something, they should get it.

Far better news: the city of Seattle has met with enough success in establishing three tiny-home encampment sites for homeless folks that they're going to establish three more. Kudos to Seattle for using publicly-owned space for the encampments; too many cities hold on to unused public space like grim death, hoping to make a killing or give it to a big donor as a favor. Putting homeless folks up, as we know from several recent studies (and from the state of Utah's efforts), actually costs less than providing services to the homeless on an emergent basis. (Oh, and in case you were wondering, tiny homes are typically so small that they can evade the bureaucratic processes that would slow their production -- not that I oppose these processes, necessarily, but you can move into your dream home now or later; homeless folks need somewhere to sleep right now.)

Finally, some potentially outstanding news: Indian scientist Manu Prakash has developed a device based on a whirlygig that can spin biological samples over 10 times faster than other similar machines -- and he built it with about 20 cents of art store supplies! The Paperfuge can get plasma out of a blood sample in 90 seconds, which beats the industry standard by about half a minute -- and, thanks to its inexpensiveness, can do the most good in the world's impoverished areas: "(t)here are a billion people on this planet who live with no electricity, no infrastructure, no roads, and they have the same kind of health care needs that you and I have," Dr. Prakash says, and they deserve the same kind of health care that you and I have, too.