Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning all kinds of corruption.

I know, this Administration's a total crapshow right now, but before we give the proper amount of attention to their drama, please use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Our House already passed all these bills, and our Senate has no business ignoring our will on voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections, respectively. It's a shame we ever have to remind our Congressfolk that the people actually have concerns other than the miserable dramas Our Glorious Elites force upon us day after day, but nobody said our duty as citizens was easy. And they need us more than we need them.

And now, to the drama: you can also use the aforementioned tools on this page to locate your House Reps' phone numbers, so you can tell them to impeach our President; if you're still not entirely sure why you should do that, David Swanson gives us approximately 25 reasons. And yes, our Administration's Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, did actually say that our President withheld foreign aid to the Ukraine so Ukrainian investigators would get dirt on Democrat servers; as for the fact that he tried to walk it back later, well, you can't unring a bell. But worse than that, he said you are stupid if you think there's a problem with that! I'm not sure how else to interpret "I have news for everybody: get over it. There's going to be political influence in foreign policy." If you are proud of your "worldly" cynicism, you probably find this argument persuasive, but if you find a civilization's moral standards worth upholding, and you demand that our politicians be better people than they are, you won't. Cynicism is evil, and evil demands only one response -- a fight to the death.

Finally, in the wake of the news that the next G7 meeting would be held at a property owned by our President, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our President's habit of profiting from his office as part of their impeachment effort. Our President has since changed his mind about holding the next G7 summit there, but I'm old enough to remember when politicians would avoid such corruption merely because it looked bad, and violating our Constitution's emoluments clause actually is bad, and you don't need a polisci degree to see why: when our President decides to hold a world meeting at one of his own properties, he's showing us that he doesn't care so much about us as he does his own pocketbook. Again, it's a shame I have to spell any of this out -- and it's a bigger shame that our President has spelled it out himself by saying, out loud, that he's not supposed to "dislike" the Saudis because, after all, they spend a lot of money at his hotels. But corruption doesn't smell better just because folks laugh about it more than they used to.

Action: concerning civil rights, impeachment, and law and order.

First things first: use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Yeah, I know, there's an impeachment effort going on, and we'll get to that, but our House has already worked to pass good legislation supporting voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections, and your Senators should work to pass this legislation, too. And if our President vetoes all of it, as I'm sure he would, then let him be accountable for it. It comes with the job, after all. Too often we excuse the inaction, or the bad actions, of our leaders. Let's stop doing that.

Meanwhile, you can use the aforementioned tools on this page to find phone numbers for your House Reps, too, so you can call them and tell them to impeach our President for his wrongdoing. Don't call your Senators, though. They're supposed to try the impeachment. It's annoying to hear some of our Senators currently running for President call for impeachment, because that's rather like a judge demanding an indictment. But other Senators get their role wrong, too: Sen. Alexander said last week that though what our President did was "inappropriate," an impeachment proceeding would "only divide the country further." At least Mr. Alexander wasn't Administration crony Roger Stone, who said that impeachment would bring about "a spasm of violence and insurrection in this country like you’ve never seen" and that "a politician who votes for it will be endangering their own life." I don't know about you, but when evil people try to scare me into doing the wrong thing, that only makes me twice as resolved to do the right thing. Which is to call my Rep and tell them to impeach this arrogant, ignorant, unprincipled, sorry excuse for a President.

In a related note, Daily Kos helps you tell our Congressfolk to hold Administration officials who ignore their subpoenas in contempt. Like me, you probably thought the law-and-order issues were pretty cut-and-dried, but apparently not! Apparently if our 46% President believes he can't be touched while in office, or that the impeachment proceeding against him is somehow "illegitimate," he can direct his underlings to defy legal writs to show up in court and testify! Actually, he can't do that, or else anyone could simply refuse to comply with the law, but Democrats in the House seem to be answering his defiance with a shrug, and though you might argue that we could interpret this collective shrug as a shrug of confidence, well, come on, these are Democrats we're talking about -- they're either weak, or they're actively collaborating with evil while merely appearing weak. But that's why we're here: to provide the steel in their spine so they can do the right thing.

Action: concerning cable fees, abortion, and public lands.

Tired of surprise cable TV fees that inflate your bill by over $35 a month? Well, H.R. 1220/S. 510, the TRUE Fees Act, would essentially outlaw those fees by forcing cable corporations to include all of them upfront in a base subscription price. The bill would also let you get out of your cable contract without penalty if your provider pushes some new fee on you. Big cable corporations of course oppose the TRUE Fees Act, and they might well be telling you that TEH BIG GUMMINT FORCEZ UZ TO IMPOSEZ TEH FEEZ!!!!!, but you should know that they've lied about that in court before, and you should also consider that such an objection really doesn't matter, since the TRUE Fees Act requires transparency. And if the big cable corporations call it a "rate-fixing" maneuver (which it's not!), they should be prepared for your reaction to be we can only hope! Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to support cable customers by passing the TRUE Fees Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1692/S. 758, the EACH Woman Act, would repeal the Hyde Amendment that has (except in very limited circumstances) prevented our government from funding abortions over the last 40-plus years. The problem with the Hyde Amendment is that it essentially makes a matter of right (you have a right to have an abortion, after all, per our Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade) into a matter of means -- folks who have the right to have an abortion but can't afford abortions can't get them (if Medicare, Medicaid, or other government-subsidized health insurance won't help them). I guess for some folks that's a feature, not a bug, but a right is a right for everyone, not just for the people who can afford it, and none of us should use the powerless as a political pawn in order to gain a small advantage. Do I particularly want abortions to happen? Of course not! No one does! But a right is a right, regardless of what we "want," and we don't ask of rights that they never challenge us. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support abortion rights by passing the EACH Woman Act and thus repealing the Hyde Amendment.

Finally, H.R. 4273/S. 2467, the Transit to Trails Act, would fund more public transportation buildout to public parks, so that everyone can enjoy the public parks we all pay for with our taxes. After all, why should only people who can afford cars get to visit public parks? Why shouldn't everyone? Remember: anyone whose answer would include words like "riffraff" is an elitist, and elitism is un-American. At least, that's how I was brought up. And anyone would would answer with a statement like THEY GET TEH GOODIEZ WHY CAN'T I!!!! very likely isn't counting the goodies they already get with their tax dollars. Seriously, if you pay taxes, as prescribed by law, you should get to enjoy the things your taxes buy. And folks who ask WHEREZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!! should note the $10 million annual price tag, which ain't much in the context of an annual $4 trillion federal budget. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to improve our access to our public parks by passing the Transit to Trails Act.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, trade agreements, and surprise hotel fees

It's Monday, which means it's the day we call our Senators and tell them to support voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers. We give Mob Boss Mitch a lot of guff, and justifiably so, for refusing to even hold votes on any of this legislation because he thinks he's the boss of us and he knows better than us, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Democrats might have passed all these bills because they knew they wouldn't pass and it would make them look good without actually accomplishing anything. But their 13-dimensional chess games don't matter; only our will matters.

Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them not to vote on the USMCA trade agreement (a.k.a. "NAFTA 2.0") until our Administration fixes it. Specifically, you'll ask them to ensure our Administration gets rid of the corporate welfare for big pharma and improves the labor/environmental standards, and I think you should also make a point of saying that you want the changes to the investor/state dispute settlement (or ISDS) system either kept or made even better, because the USMCA isn't all bad just because the President who negotiated it is an irredeemable asshole. If they renegotiated the deal to get rid of the corporate welfare and the lax standards but also put back the ISDS system that enables foreign investors to nullify our laws and allows corporations to outsource our jobs, I'd say that's an even worse deal. So be sure you communicate your will precisely to your Congressfolk. They just love "mishearing" you, or telling you their pile of crap is exactly the meatloaf you asked for.

Finally, if you're fed up with surprise fees in your hotel bills -- fees that bleed almost $3 billion a year out of our bank accounts -- then Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4489, the Hotel Advertising Transparency Act of 2019. H.R. 4489 -- per one of its sponsors, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) -- "would require the prices regularly advertised by hotels and online travel agencies to include all mandatory fees that will be charged to a consumer, excluding taxes." Hence they won't be able to hide their "WiFi fees" and their "in-room safe fees" and their "resort fees" and even their "towel fees" (I know, right?) in their "low" prices. Gosh, how long before they start charging "bed fees" and "wall fees" and "floor fees" and "no secret camera behind your mirror fees"? Hotels have largely concocted these hidden fees in response to the pressure of winning in online comparison shopping, which only proves (as if we needed more proof!) that the future ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and war with Iran.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act, well, you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find your Senators' phone numbers. Regardless of what they say, it is absolutely your Senators' job to be supporting voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections. Don't be thrown off by Mob Boss Mitch's recent embrace of $250 million in federal funding for secure elections, either. The SAFE act would provide more than that, plus it would mandate paper ballots, which would be a lot better than having our votes simply disappear into the ether. Though some Senators would want them to disappear.

Meanwhile, with ramped-up saber rattling over Iran in the news lately, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure the recent must-pass defense bill explicitly forbids our President from waging war in Iran without Congressional approval. I know, our President fired long-time Iran war-monger John Bolton, and told Lindsey Graham to stop trying to push him into a war he doesn't want, but that's all drama -- our President (who still loves another Iran war-monger, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo) could merely be waiting until Iran does something, or possibly "does something." Don't tolerate the folks who whimper that "we don't want to tie the President's hands" by forcing him to go to Congress for a war declaration as our Constitution requires. How many times must I tell these pimps! Congress is supposed to tie the President's hands in exactly this manner, so that our President doesn't haul us off to war after war after war. This is one of the reasons we broke away from King George III, for Christ's sake!

Action: concerning war on Yemen, public water, and public lands.

So what else is up with the must-pass defense spending bill? The House version restricts our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen -- a war where we're somehow helping kill some of the best al-Qaeda fighters on Earth! -- and prevents our government from selling weapons to the Saudi/UAE coalition; the Senate version, naturally, doesn't have these provisions, but it's conference time, and why should we settle for weak conference bills when we could demand strong ones? Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep strong anti-war provisions in the defense spending bill. I don't care that our President might veto it -- wasn't he supposed to bring a different kind of foreign policy to the Oval Office, instead of doing whatever Israel and Saudi Arabia want him to do? Meanwhile, good Yemenis starve to death and watch their children get bombed at school.

Meanwhile, Nestlé is at it again, this time trying to get its permit renewed to draw over a million gallons of public water per day from Florida's Santa Fe River. How many times must I tell these pimps! People need all the water they can get! They sure as hell don't need some big corporation siphoning it off and selling it back to them! Naturally, the Suwannee River Water Management District (which covers the Santa Fe) has declared the Santa Fe to be "in recovery" as of 2014 -- meaning that it didn't meet the District's minimum requirements for river flows and water levels -- and back then, Nestlé was "only" siphoning off a quarter of what it's proposing now! I doubt the Santa Fe would "recover" from Nestlé suddenly drawing off four times the water it used to draw off. Hence CREDO helps you tell the Suwannee River Water Management District to reject Nestlé's petition to siphon off even more public water than it did before the Santa Fe declined.

Finally, our President has been trying to get our National Forest Service to re-evaluate whether the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which applies to national forests, also applies to the Tongass National Forest, and perhaps suspecting he'd lose that argument (as evidenced by the fact that the name "Tongass National Forest" does, in fact, contain the words "national" and "forest" in it), he's now told our Secretary of Agriculture to open up some 10 million acres of the Tongass to loggers! Brazil's Mr. Bolsonaro told farmers and loggers to burn whatever they wanted out of the Amazon, and then our President did what? He got jealous! Our President really does teach us all about the Seven Deadly Sins. And we can in turn teach him about, you know, the rule of law and the fact that words do actually mean things by telling our Department of Agriculture to reject any plans to allow logging in the Tongass National Forest, as CREDO helps us do.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence and public lands.

It's a new week, so it's time once again to call your Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Why would your Senators be afraid of bills that support voting rights, civil rights, fair pay, better pay, internet freedom, and secure elections? I mean, these are all popular things. Of course their leader, "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell, won't allow the bills to come to a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." But when we flood our Senators' phone lines with calls demanding votes on these bills, Mitch McConnell's opinion won't mean a damn thing, and his power will disappear. After all, his power isn't rooted in good works, and (despite appearances!) that's the only sustainable power there is.

Meanwhile, with the Amazon rainforest literally on fire as we speak, CREDO helps you tell big private equity corporation BlackRock to stop investing in the Amazon's destruction. How is BlackRock investing in the Amazon's destruction? By putting its money into the logging, mining, and big ag corporations that are deforesting the Amazon -- and thus, not incidentally, injuring the Amazon's ability to sequester the carbon dioxide that causes climate change. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen -- you'd think more big corporations and big investors would respect that simple truth, but the only "truth" they respect is the money that'll do them no good at the Pearly Gates. Still, with the burning Amazon all over the TV news, maybe we can make BlackRock feel the Big Stick of Bad PR. (Hate to pile on -- OK, I really don't -- but BlackRock also invests in the destruction of the indigenous folks who live in and protect the Amazon. How about that -- folks who live in a place are actually invested in protecting it! It's like an actual conservative value or something.)

Finally, H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would delete that section of the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that authorizes oil and gas drilling leases in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve (or ANWR). The New York Times recently reported that our Administration said we'd get about 40 times more money out of drilling in ANWR than we're actually going to get over the next decade, but that's not news to those of us who've been following the issue since Tha Bush Mobb tried to drill the hell out of these public lands, and seriously, what kind of public servant would be persuaded by the promise of a mere one-half of one percent of our annual federal budget, and over 10 years? The kind who only listens to big donors, that's who, and that's who passed that damn tax "reform" in the first place. But we can at least rectify the injury done to our public lands by telling our House Reps to pass H.R. 1146, as the Alaska Wilderness League helps us do.

Around the table: in which we examine a lot of whining and bad arguments from right-wingers.

The National Review publishes a 13-article issue called "Against Socialism," and the incomparable Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs rips it apart. Seriously, read the whole thing, and witness how right-wingers consistently set up straw men because that's all you can do when you can't win the argument on the merits. (Former Bob Novak protege/antiwar.com contributor Timothy Carney survives Mr. Robinson's scrutiny much better than the others, which isn't surprising, since Mr. Carney's a good egg.)

Thinking maybe this particular Administration, having promised to do better on terror-related issues than its predecessors, might actually be living up to that promise? Well, Dave Lindorff at The Nation finds our government's terrorism watch lists have expanded -- apparently to include him, as he has been searched several times at airports. And surprise, surprise, our government has padded these watchlists mainly with journalists and activists. Recall that Paul Craig Roberts has more than once asked why, if a no-fly list has a million people on it, we don't have a lot more terrorist attacks.

Dahr Jamali at TruthOut examines the ongoing fires in the Amazon rainforest and finds, guess what, a right-wing asshole in charge of a government that's bending over backwards to hand over more and more of the Amazon to logging, mining, and big ag corporations. And of course Mr. Bolsanaro, as disgusting a human being as has ever walked the Earth, plans to target the indigenous populations who have done the most to protect the Amazon from corporate pollution. Which is a big deal, actually, as the region, popularly known as "the lungs of the world," produces about one-fifth of Earth's oxygen.

The New York Times begins a "1619 Project" that puts slavery more at the center of American history, and right-wingers whine about it. Rebecca Onion is absolutely correct to note that we liberals shouldn't waste our "good faith on old, dead-end conversations" with right-wingers who can't take criticism, so I'll that I think it's more patriotic to face your sins and correct them than to whine about the people who actually do it. Also, hasn't the right been telling us for years that whining isn't conservative? You do have to wonder why they do it so often.

Finally, you know our President said a lot of stupid crap on Twitter this week, and I can't even say any of it is worse than any of the other crap he's said in that forum; perhaps I'm just weary of the pile. Thus I'm going to make a simple rule for this blog: if our President said it on Twitter, I'm not covering it. Also, I have blocked our President's Twitter account, and I think all y'all ought to do the same. It'd be nice if our media would follow suit, too. We might even call it "starving the beast." (And if anyone tells you you're "violating his free speech rights," remind them that our First Amendment does not require us to sit passively while someone screams in our face.)

Action: concerning public lands, racism, and equal pay.

Our Administration is desperate to open the Tongass National Forest to road-building, which seems innocuous on its face -- except that logging and mining corporations have long angled to get roads built in the Tongass so they can get their logging and mining operations in there! Hence H.R. 2491/S. 1311, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, which states that our government "shall not allow road construction, road reconstruction, or logging in an inventoried roadless area where those activities are prohibited by the Roadless Rule," as adopted in early 2001. That's right, yet again we have to tell this Administration that they have to follow legally-enacted regulations, which we might otherwise describe as "the law." But duty is duty, no matter where it takes us, so Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect public lands by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act. Obeying the law, protecting pristine areas from development -- why, that all sounds conservative, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard by now that our FBI considers black protestors a more important security threat than white racists, even though, ah, recent events would seem to counter that assessment. I mean, when mass murderers repeatedly say out loud how much they hate non-white people, wouldn't you have to pay attention? And even though police commit most of the violence that purportedly "accompanies" black protestors, our FBI has cooked up a "black identity extremist" category, which is even more absurd when you consider that for hundreds of years we systematically denied black folks any sort of identity other than chattel. Hence CREDO helps you tell our FBI to get its priorities straight, and go after white supremacists more than black protestors. If you really think black protestors have nothing really to protest anymore, well, a) you're wrong and b) that would have literally nothing to do with a reasonable assessment of whether black protestors or white supremacists are more dangerous. We fought a World War against the latter, after all.

Finally, H.R. 3804/S.2083, the Athletics Fair Pay Act, would mandate that our government pay U.S. Women's Team soccer players the same as U.S. Men's Team soccer players. Seems like a no-brainer to me, particularly since the U.S. Women's Team has won four out of the eight women's World Cup tournaments ever and the Men's Team has only been to one men's World Cup final and didn't even qualify for the tournament in 2018. And if your Tea Party uncle objects by saying oh, so now we're going to pay the WNBA the same as we pay the NBA?, well, you may be tempted to say why not?, particularly if you're not all that emotionally-invested in what your favorite athletes make (or if, like me, you're working toward that 91% tax bracket on millionaire income which would pretty much end the era of absurd pro athlete salaries). But comparing it to the NBA/WNBA is actually beside the point -- the NBA and the WNBA are private entities, but the U.S. Men's and Women's soccer team play for our country. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to promote equal pay by passing the Athletics Fair Pay Act.

Action: concerning trademarks, national forests, and bad leadership.

Big construction equipment corporation Caterpillar has actually asked the U.S. Trademark Office to remove trademark registrations that have the word "cat" in them, particularly that of Cat and Cloud Coffee of Santa Cruz, CA! Where do we begin with this? With the implication that anyone would ever confuse the maker of asphalt pavers and backhoe loaders with a freaking coffeeshop? With the notion that any apparel sold by a coffee shop could possibly be confused with any apparel sold by Caterpillar? Folks, this is what happens when we, as a civilization, decide that corporations should police themselves because they know their businesses best -- instead of innovating new products and processes, as a heavily-regulated civilization would force them to do, they just look for ever-more convoluted ways to make money without working, like frivolous patent requests. Hence Change.org helps you tell Caterpillar to stop bullying small businesses and stop acting like the world's biggest trademark troll.

Meanwhile, our Administration is totally hot to open up Alaska's Tongass National Forest to logging corporations -- thousand year-old ecosystems apparently being a profound insult to our Administration's ongoing program of inculcating short-term thinking into every governmental decision process -- but H.R. 2491, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, would revoke the U.S. Department of Agriculture's power to grant exemptions to the famous "Roadless Rule," which, as you may know, keeps roads and the associated development out of national forests. Of course big corporations would like to have roads in national forests, because that would make it a lot easier to extract the natural resources from national forests -- and, ah, to ruin national forests with their pollution, though big corporations will never admit they've ruined a forest even after they cut the last tree down. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect national forests and (as Penn Environment says) "keep wild areas wild" by passing the Roadless Area Conservation Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject our Administration's nomination of Barry Myers to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA), then a consortium of good government groups (including CREDO and People for the American Way) still helps you do that. Mr. Myers used to own AccuWeather (more on that in a minute!), and as its owner constantly banged his saucepan to privatize our National Weather Service, and now our President wants to put him in charge of the National Weather Service? Also, when Mr. Myers divested from AccuWeather, he sold his ownership stock at cut-rate prices to family members; does that seem on the up-and-up to you? And the numerous sexual harassment claims filed by AccuWeather employees during Mr. Myers's tenure there -- claims that resulted in a six-figure fine assessed by our government -- also call Mr. Myers's leadership abilities into question generally. NOAA administrator is a leadership position, after all.

Action: concerning pollution and racism.

Our Administration plans to open up public lands near wildlife refuges and wilderness areas in California to oil and gas drilling. One wonders if this is their revenge on California for being a liberal paradise, but there's a bigger issue here: California is still woefully short on water, even a year after a seven-year drought finally ended, and supports an agriculture sector that produces about two-thirds of America's fruits annually. And California farmers responded to the drought by irrigating their crops with fracking wastewater, which testifies to that water shortage and suggests that, well, maybe gas drilling isn't the best use of our water tables to begin with. Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to reject its own plan to open up relatively untrammeled California lands to drilling. Remember: they'd rather ignore us, but if they do, we can stop them in court.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell our FBI to stop trying to hide the onslaught of white supremacist violence in its official data. How are they doing this? By lumping all sorts of phenomena into one category, called "racially-motivated violent extremism," which would allow our FBI to lump white supremacists who shoot people with black protestors who get shot at by police. And that also means that the new category would also allow inattentive evil media outlets to run rampant with bogus statistics "mistakenly" attributed to black protestors! Well, as they say, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on, but our government should not enable lies to get around so quickly. And the problem isn't black protestors getting loud with people who don't listen; the problem is white racists shooting black and brown people dead. And our FBI needs to confront that, just as we all do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end our President's Muslim ban by passing H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then People for the American Way (among others) still helps you do that. The NO BAN Act would repeal all three of our President's Muslim bans, would prevent future Presidents from issuing similar travel bans, and would strengthen the Immigration and Nationality Act by explicitly preventing discrimination on the basis of religious belief. Would it be too much to ask of our government to make decisions on who can travel to and from our country on a rational basis? Would it be too much to ask of our President not to stoke rage and hatred on our fellow citizens with his Executive Orders? I'm an eternal optimist, so my answer to both of these questions would be "no, it would not be too much to ask." But that's only true if we demand that it be true.

Action: concerning "national emergencies," the death penalty, and national monuments.

As you know, the House has passed a "resolution of disapproval" which would nullify the "national emergency" declaration that our President is using to build his vanity border wall; now the resolution goes to the Senate, which by law must vote on it within 18 days, hence Moms Rising, Public Citizen, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass the resolution. You may want to remind your Senators that our President said, out loud, in the presence of reporters, that he "didn't need" to declare a "national emergency" but did so because he wanted to build his vanity wall "faster." You may also want to remind your Senators that tantrum-throwers shouldn't get their way, just like their mamas taught them. A few Republican Senators have already said they'd support the resolution, but not Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who has said our President was wrong to declare a national emergency over the Southwest border but says a "resolution of disapproval" is too "partisan" for him to support. All together now: waaaaaaaah! If Beto O'Rourke is contemplating another Senate run, he might consider this an opening.

Meanwhile, the state of Alabama plans to put an intellectually-disabled man, Rocky Myers, to death for murder, so the ACLU helps you tell Gov. Kay Ivey to grant clemency to Mr. Myers. The problems with Mr. Myers's impending execution don't end with the cruelty of putting a man to death who doesn't understand what's about to happen to him, of course -- in fact, if you've followed death penalty cases at all over the years, the additional problems will be all too familiar to you: a suspect with zero history of violence before his capital murder charge, the complete absence of forensic evidence establishing his guilt, conflicting testimonies given at his trial, a judge who overrode the jury's finding that life in prison would be a better sentence, a juror who referred to Mr. Myers with a racial epithet. Even death penalty advocates will tell you that putting someone to death is something you really ought to get absolutely right the first time, since there are really no takebacks. So let's all encourage Gov. Ivey to do the right thing here.

Finally, you recall that our President has lopped off big parts of the Bears Ears National Monument, apparently because a) Barack Obama created the monument and our President must urinate all over anything Barack Obama ever did as President and b) because a few fossil fuel corporate cronies would benefit from being able to drill on these lands. Well, along comes H.R. 871, the Bears Ears Expansion and Respect for Sovereignty Act, which would re-expand the Bears Ears monument to its former size, and CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support public lands by passing the Bears Ears Expansion and Respect for Sovereignty Act. The "Respect for Sovereignty" part comes from the fact that five Native American nations share in the management of Bears Ears, which makes five Native American nations whose rights our President completely ignored when he slashed the size of Bears Ears. There's some controversy, of course, over whether our President can even legally slash the size of a national monument. But why not settle the matter with H.R. 871?

Action: concerning Social Security, conservation, and paid family leave.

The Social Security Expansion Act (for which Congress.gov has no entry at this writing) would lift the payroll tax cap so that Social Security can tax income over $132,900 into the system. That would allow Social Security to expand the benefits it pays and meet the budgetary shortfalls that might afflict it decades from now should wages never, ever go up again. If your right-wing uncle bellows about liberals always wanting to spend money and never telling you where it comes from, remind him that lifting the payroll tax cap describes exactly where the money's going to come from. If he then objects that rich folks should therefore get six-digit Social Security checks every month when they retire, remind him that Social Security's objective is to ensure that all Americans can retire with dignity, not so that some retirees can buy a new Rolls Royce every month. Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to help more good Americans retire with dignity by passing the Social Security Expansion Act.

Meanwhile, to my amazement, the Senate has passed S. 47, a giant public lands bill that (among other good works) just so happens to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund forever, by a staggering 92-8 margin. Let's not go praising the Great God of Bipartisanship, though, because I'm pretty sure the fact that we have been agitating for a more permanent Land and Water Conservation Fund for several years (Congress let it lapse in 2015 and then let it lapse again late last year) has a significant amount to do with the Senate's good work here. So now the bill goes to the House, and you might think it's not a big lift to remind your House Reps that the Land and Water Conservation Fund gave us some of our most iconic public landmarks, but you never really know with these politicians, do you? Someone could get a bee in their bonnet that they can hold this popular bill hostage to some obscure lump of poison they've been trying to enact for years, so the Wilderness Society helps you tell your House Reps to pass S. 47 and protect the Land and Water Conservation Fund forever.

Finally, Sen. Gillibrand has reintroduced S. 463, the FAMILY Act, which would create a national paid family leave program in America -- you know, like the ones nearly every other nation on Earth have! Being without a paid family leave program is not something to shout WE'RE NUMBER ONE!!!! about, after all. The FAMILY Act would provide for 12 weeks of paid family leave for all Americans -- whether it's because they're sick or they need to care for someone in their family who's sick -- and would pay for it with a minuscule payroll tax of four-tenths of one percent, half paid by the worker and half by the employer, such that a person making $50,000 annually would only pay $100 annually toward the program. And if your right-wing uncle says there won't be enough people working to pay into the system to sustain it, remind him to look at the phrase "12 weeks" again; that leaves 40 weeks (and usually more!) to pay into the system. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by supporting the FAMILY Act.

Action: concerning transparency, drug prices, and the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve.

You remember how reporting on the Standing Rock protests exposed police abuses? Well, North Dakota's state legislature is going to fix that! SB 2209 would restrict public access to state records relating to "critical infrastructure," which of course would include the Dakota Access pipeline that prompted all those protests and all that police brutality in the first place; the state Senate has already passed the bill, and now the state House is mulling it. And here you thought these legislators would want their bosses, the good people of North Dakota, to know what's going on with their "critical infrastructure"! A few legislators say it's all about "cybersecurity," but if it were, you have to wonder why so many more legislators aren't running with that; it sure looks like they're just trying to ram a bad bill through without anyone knowing about it. But you can call North Dakota House leadership using this page; just click on a member and get their office phone number. And call legislators from both parties, because this is a bipartisan mess.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1046, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, would let Medicare negotiate drug prices on behalf of its recipients. You may recall that when Congress created the Medicare Part D drug benefit during Bush the Lesser's first term, they forbade Medicare from negotiating for better drug prices, because BIG GUMMINT!!!!!, and you may also recall how little the Obama Administration talked about Medicare drug price negotiation during the Affordable Care Act process. But if you understand how much negotiating power Medicare would have -- negotiating on behalf of some 44 million Americans, most of whom are seniors, who are (as you might imagine) the biggest consumers of prescription drugs by far in America -- you also see that such power could help bring drug prices down, by almost $85 billion annually, so says even the Koch brothers-funded Mercatus Center. Hence both Social Security Works and Public Citizen help you tell your Congressfolk to support Medicare drug negotiation by passing H.R. 1046.

Finally, the Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) plans to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) to oil and gas drilling, which of course we've been fighting to prevent for decades, not just because the ANWR is a unique wilderness, but because scientists tell us there won't be that much oil to get out of it to begin with! Luckily for us, the BLM must take public comments on the matter before proceeding, hence Penn Environment helps you tell our BLM to keep oil and gas drilling out of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Is it worth it to try, you may ask? I wouldn't blame you for asking, since this Administration really doesn't seem to care about the people's will at all. The answer is yes, you should try, not just because doing the right thing is always better than doing the wrong thing, but because if enough of us speak out against it and our BLM fails to do our will, we might be able to nail them for law-breaking in court. Indeed, that's all that's stopped this Administration's pro-pollution agenda so far.

Action: concerning health care, nativism, and pollution.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support real health insurance reform in America by passing legislation expanding Medicare to all Americans. The health insurance industry won't like it, of course, but they've bollocksed up health care so badly in America that tens of millions of Americans still don't have health insurance, meaning they skip visits to the doctor because they can't pay for them, meaning some of them die. And if a single-payer health insurance system brings down health care costs everywhere else in the world, there's no reason it won't do the same here. Oh, I know there are "reasons," but they aren't good reasons -- whining about TEH 34 TRILLYUNZ!!!! a Medicare-for-All system would cost over the next decade, for example, makes no sense in a nation where we're going to spend $49 trillion on health care costs over the next decade. So let's take control of our health care system and get better results for less.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to reject our Administration's nomination of Heather Nauert as U.N. Ambassador. I mean, if we labored to keep John Bolton out of that job, why would we want Heather Nauert? And should a nominee's main qualification be that she makes her predecessor look better? Ms. Nauert used to work for Fox News, where she (surprise!) routinely attacked immigrants and Muslims, and she's spent the last 18 months as a State Department spokeshack. Clearly our President has fast-tracked her because he likes how she talks! But, frankly, we shouldn't be sending nativists or nativist-wannabes to the U.N. I mean, that seems self-evident, doesn't it? Maybe our Senators will grill her and expose her unfitness for the job, but they didn't exactly stop Ms. DeVos's nomination; is it too much to ask that our Senators at least expose their unfitness for their own jobs if they can't stop this nomination?

Finally, with the impending resignation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, the Sierra Club helps you tell your Senators to demand a new Interior Secretary who will actually protect public lands and not rush to sell them off to big corporations. As seems to happen a lot with this Administration, Mr. Zinke got a lot of notoriety for his taxpayer-funded trips and his profligate spending (remember the $140,000 door? Good times!), but he also did more palpable harm as Interior Secretary, by scaling back national monuments, auctioning off public lands to corporate polluters, and rolling back protections for threatened species. And his number two man, former fossil fuel lobbyist David Bernhardt, sure as hell won't do any better, even if he doesn't literally ride into his first day on the job on a horse, like Mr. Zinke did. Mr. Bernhardt has never met a regulation he didn't consider a burden, and that's not the attitude that'll protect our public lands.

Action: concerning prison slavery, fraudulent fees, and methane pollution.

Color of Change helps you tell the state of California to stop exploiting prison workers (who make as little as $1/day!) to fight wildfires. I have nothing to say to folks who think of prison workers as a giant pool of people they can use and abuse as they like, but to folks who wonder how California will ever make ends meet if they spend all more money paying prisoners to do the back-breaking work of fighting wildfires, I have this to say: your wonderment is a hostage situation -- don't pay prisoners what their work is actually worth, or we'll all burn up!. Too often we imagine that the world around us is the only world that can be, but we can bring back a world where states tax rich folks hard and stop funneling taxpayer money to crony corporations. At that point we'll actually find it a lot easier to do the right thing, but let's tell California to do the right thing anyway. Doing the right thing builds character, after all.

Meanwhile, Comcast has lately agreed to refund well over half a million dollars to Massachusetts customers who signed long-term cable contracts only to find themselves slammed with fancy-sounding fees that inflated their bills up to 40% above advertised prices. And when they realized they'd been had and tried to cancel their cable, Comcast slammed them again with a $200 "early termination" fee! Nice work if you can get it! And since it's absurd to think Comcast would only try this in Massachusetts, Consumer Reports helps you ask your state Attorney General to investigate whether cable corporations' add-on fees in your state amount to a fraudulent price hike. We imagine America as some kind of "free" market Wild West, but we must insist on laws (and law enforcement) that won't let corporations pull this kind of bait-and-switch on us. Indeed, things like this used to be a law-and-order issues for conservatives. I wonder what changed.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject its proposed plan to weaken its own methane emissions standards, then both the Sierra Club and the Union of Concerned Scientists still help you do that. You probably know the drill by now: oil and gas drilling corporations leak methane the way some folks leak gossip, methane emissions pack a far larger climate change punch than even coal emissions do, and when corporations ventilate methane into our air willy-nilly from drilling projects on public lands, they're also cheating American taxpayers out of royalties (since methane is a usable energy source, and, you know, public lands belong to the public). Always it seems like our Administration's EPA cares more about protecting polluters than protecting good Americans from polluters. But luckily, we are always here to remind them whom they are really pledged to protect.

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.