Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning good House bills, bad methane regulations, and bad corporate acquisitions.

Happy Tuesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Do I "keep saying the same thing"? Yes, I do, if what I keep saying is the right thing. Let our Senators listen to anyone but their big donors for once, and then I'll count the colors in my garden. Until then, it's hammertime.

Meanwhile, our Administration has formally weakened methane emission regulations, by repealing requirements that oil and gas corporations install the technology that would detect and repair methane leaks. Ugh, one more time: methane packs a much bigger climate-change punch than even coal emissions, leaked methane is a waste of usable energy, and leaked methane also deprives the taxpayer of royalties if said leaking occurs on public lands. But what's all that pollution and waste and lost revenue next to gas drilling corporation executives being able to gild the plumbing on their 19th vacation homes? Seriously, that's all our Administration's new rule does: hand out welfare to corporations and rich people. Like everything else they do! Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to block this Administration's new methane emissions rule. Congress would have to accomplish this by passing a "resolution of disapproval," and you may be tempted to wait until a new President and a new Senate come into office, but I wouldn't count on that, and anyway, our duty is always to do the right thing right now.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to block the proposed sale of DNA-collecting corporation Ancestry to big private equity corporation Blackstone, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Hopefully I've identified the problem with the proposed sale by identifying what each of these corporations does -- it's bad enough that big corporations get their grubby hands so deep in your investments, so you certainly would not want their grubby hands in your private information, and your DNA is as private as it gets. And I do not accept the notion that "you give your DNA to someone to help figure out where you came from and you take your chances." Why must it be like that? Because the internet's a big place? Because the "free" market is sacred? I'm so old-fashioned I only think doing what's right is sacred, and letting big corporations buy your DNA info is wrong. And I've never believed the internet is "too big to civilize," no matter how much Our Glorious Elites want you to believe it. And I always choose civilization over chaos.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, our Post Office, Arctic drilling, and corporate welfare.

Happy Monday, good Americans! Now would be a good time to call your Senators (whose phone numbers you can find 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 to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, and H.R. 8015, the Delivering for America Act. At this writing, 122 days have passed since our House passed the HEROES Act, even though the HEROES Act would do everything a decent COVID-19 relief bill should do, like fund testing and tracing, extend enhanced unemployment benefits, and issue another round of stimulus checks. But, alas, Republicans hold our Senate, and the only thing Mob Boss Mitch McConnell knows how to do is stamp his foot and say no. The Delivering for America Act, which would roll back the changes our Postmaster General made to wreck our Post Office, has been awaiting a Senate vote for a somewhat shorter length of time, but this is no less shameful, considering the 2020 election could be at stake. So keep calling your Senators, because shame is all that'll get them to act. No, it works; I've seen it work before.

Meanwhile, opening ANWR to oil drilling was one of the "accomplishments" of the 2017 tax "reform," and our President has lately announced plans to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR). But bad politicians have been trying to open up ANWR to oil drilling corporations for decades, and at this writing five of America's six largest banks have said they won't fund any drilling efforts there. Whether that's because drilling on public lands is rather unpopular or because the big banks know there won't be enough oil in ANWR to justify the effort, I couldn't say. I can say, however, that the notorious Bank of America is the big bank that has not said they won't fund drilling efforts in ANWR, hence the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell Bank of America to reject the funding of Arctic oil drilling projects. Not just for the caribou or for the Gwich'in people, but also for the waste of effort -- it's just not worth destroying ANWR just so a few oil corporation executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Believe me, that's all that's going to come from ANWR drilling. Well, that and pollution and disruption of ancestral homelands.

Finally, H.R. 7781, the End Polluter Welfare Act, would increase royalties for drilling on public lands, prevent our government from offering "royalty relief" to big drilling corporations, repeal liability limits when oil and gas drillers pollute our lands, end new federally-funded fossil fuel research, stop internationally-sourced funding from going to fossil fuel projects in America, and get rid of a bunch of "tax incentives" toward fossil fuel development -- among many, many other things. Seriously, giving fossil fuel corporations welfare handouts would be a little like giving the New York Yankees extra money every year so that they can "stay competitive." Fossil fuel subsidies currently outstrip renewable subsidies by about 2 to 1; this, when renewable energy actually needs taxpayer help precisely because the fossil fuel corporations are so big they can stamp out alternatives. And if you've attended the fact that our West Coast is presently on fire, you know we need those alternatives post-haste. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support sane energy policy by passing the End Polluter Welfare Act.

Action: concerning good House bills, public land stewardship, and making billionaires pay.

Happy Tuesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yeah, give them the whole list! Senatorial staffers take down your will and communicate it to their bosses -- and then their bosses do the will of their bosses, i.e., us. At least, that's how it'd work in a sane and moral society. Until then, we must insist on sanity and morality -- again and again and again.

Meanwhile, Wild Earth Guardians helps you tell Interior Secretary Bernhardt to remove William Perry Pendley from his job as Acting Director of our Bureau of Land Management. That's right, another of our President's infamous "acting" officers, so installed as to bypass the Senatorial confirmation process -- a process our President is so confident will go his way that he is withdrawing Mr. Pendley's nomination to be the real Director. So he "bows" to our Senators' will, but flouts it by keeping him there in an "acting" capacity! Putting Mr. Pendley in charge of the Bureau of Land Management is fox-henhouse territory to begin with -- Mr. Pendley is yet another Administration leader who believes his own department shouldn't exist, plus he professes to be an adherent of the "shoot, shovel, and shut up" way of dealing with having endangered species on your land. But his numerous denigrations of non-whites and immigrants? Well, that's just special sauce for this Administration. Maybe we can make it a PR nightmare for Mr. Bernhardt, who's Mr. Pendley's boss. Particularly since we're really the boss of both of them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8020/S. 4490, the Make Billionaires Pay Act, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. As the pandemic rages and our economy craters, billionaires make out like bandits, so to speak, their wealth increasing by over $5 billion every day, and if that fact doesn't testify to how little billionaires have to work to make their money, nothing does. We'd all like to make money more efficiently, but this state of affairs isn't efficient if it's not doing our civilization any good. Can you even imagine what could you do with $5 billion? $5 billion wouldn't just pay off your mortgage, it'd pay off 10,000 mortgages -- if those mortgages averaged half a million dollars! You don't even know 10,000 people! No, not even on Facebook! So putting $5 billion in the hands of our richest Americans every day surely doesn't benefit the masses of Americans struggling with, say, health care debt. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Make Billionaires Pay Act would actually remedy that to some degree.

Action: concerning good House bills, taxing the rich, pollution, and health care data.

Happy Wednesday, good people! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. These bills promote voting rights, internet freedom, public lands, and consumer safety, among so many other good things, so our Senators have no excuse to ignore them. And ignore them they will, unless we make that impossible.

Meanwhile, you've heard about how well Jeff Bezos, Marc Zuckerberg, et al have been doing during this pandemic, even though you and I struggle to make ends meet? Well, S. 4490, the Make Billionaires Pay Act, would impose a one-time 60% tax on skyrocketing billionaire wealth, and would direct the proceeds toward Medicare so it can cover the out-of-pocket health care costs of all Americans for the next calendar year. The total take from this tax -- according to the bill's original sponsor, Sen. Sanders (I-VT) -- would be close to $422 billion, and would still leave said billionaires a little over $310 billion of their windfall during the pandemic, so brook no silliness from right-wingers about how extortionate this bill would supposedly be. Frankly, leaving them over $300 billion is extraordinarily generous -- I'd want to tax them until they stop acting like they're the only people who ever mattered. The 91% tax bracket sure did curb a lot of insanity in the old days, and we need only look to our whiny baby of a President to understand the damage the absence of the 91% tax bracket has done. Anyway, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to strike a blow for fair taxation by passing the Make Billionaires Pay Act.

In other news, our EPA has proposed new smog regulations that -- wait for it -- make literally zero improvements on the smog standard we already have, even though said smog standard is now inadequate to the amount of air pollution (and the resulting health care costs) we now face, and (this part is really important!) even though the law mandates that our EPA revise our smog standards every few years to adapt to changes in our atmosphere and in our scientific knowledge! It's beyond asking "how likely is it that our smog problem is exactly the same as it was five years ago?" and on toward asking "how likely is it that we now think smog is exactly as harmful as it was five years ago?" So, yeah, this is another pro-pollution "environmental" "regulatory" effort that will likely die a cold death in court -- but not if we don't weigh in with public comments! Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our EPA to do its damn job and enact more vigorous smog standards. In 2015, our EPA lowered the standard from 75 ppm to 70 ppm; now we want them to lower it to 60 ppm, and if big polluting corporations whine about it, we can just remind them that they're bold and can rise to new challenges. You know, the way Americans do.

Finally, if your head is still spinning from all the which-data-is-the-right-data drama that our President and his votaries like to foist upon us, then you'll be interested to know that H.R. 6585/S. 3850, the Equitable Data Collection and Disclosure on COVID-19 Act, would not only mandate that our CDC and our Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services publish daily updates on COVID-19 cases, testing, and treatment, but would also force these agencies to publish that data by race and ethnicity, among other categories (and would require our Indian Health Service to collect COVID-19 data for the populations it serves). We all know -- well, those of us who've thought about it for a minute and who aren't addled by devotion to this particular President -- that COVID-19 disproportionately hunts down poor folks and folks of color, and that's a damn shame. We also know that this President questions the data like he has a vested interest in the data being wrong or something, and his votaries like to muddle the waters with abject falsehoods. So the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to support accurate medical reporting by passing the Equitable Data Collection and Disclosure on COVID-19 Act.

Action: concerning our Post Office, facial recognition technology, vaccine profiteering, and our national parks.

Our House passed H.R. 8015, the Delivering for America Act, on Saturday after convening a rare August session; the bill would roll back the many changes Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has made to U.S. Postal Service operations, and would prevent him from making any more changes -- particularly those that result, and have resulted, in mail delivery delays -- until we get COVID-19 under control. Now's a good time to call your Senators and tell them to pass the Delivering for America Act. What reasonable objection they could have I could not say -- surely they wouldn't say it's "not Congress's place" to tell the Postmaster General how to run our Post Office? I hope not, but these are, as they say, interesting times; used to be folks would say outlandish things to get attention and then apologize to get more attention, but now they just say outlandish things and then say more outlandish things to get double the attention. I suppose our Senators could point to our President's threatened veto, but Congress can override vetoes, so really, they have no excuses.

Meanwhile, our Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) has lately contracted with Clearview AI for facial recognition technology, which we know tends to do a bad job of telling folks of color apart and thus get some 60-year naturalized citizen deported one day (if it hasn't happened already!). But Sens. Markey (D-MA) and Merkley (D-OR) have introduced S. 3284, the Ethical Use of Facial Recognition Act, which would ban the use of facial recognition technology until further legislation mandated by the bill establishes sound legal boundaries for its use. So few Americans seem to understand the whole concept of boundaries anymore -- folks tend to act like every issue in life is either-or; we can either have facial recognition technology or IMMIGRANTZ CRIMEZ RAMPAGEZ!!!!!! Of course, we can manage technological advancement so that it doesn't cause us harm; this is, in fact, one of the crucial challenges of maintaining a civilization. I know, how old-fashioned of me. Anyway, Ban Facial Recognition helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban facial recognition technology until such time as we can actually use it for good.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to prevent big pharma corporations from profiteering off any new COVID-19 vaccine, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Too many Americans (our President included) think of things like randomized double-blind tests as "bureaucracy." They're not -- they're how we get good science that actually helps people. Of course, for a big pharma corporation, the need to get a vaccine right -- which is to say, a vaccine that works, and without life-threatening side effects -- impedes the insane drive to profits. If we lived in a sane, moral, and decent society, big pharma corporations that made billions of dollars from rushed, bad vaccines would withdraw in deserved shame and humiliation, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society, these same corporations assume they have a "right" to get away with it. Making us a sane, moral, and decent society has, admittedly, been a crap-ton of work, but if we can keep big pharma corporations from profiteering off pandemic vaccines, we will make that work easier.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2491/S. 1311, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. The Roadless Area Conservation Act would (deep breath) tell our Administration that they can't actually just ignore the Roadless Rule in promoting development in federal lands (sigh). It's a shame we have to do that, but these are bold thinkers in this Administration. Wait, my attempt to make "bold" into a cuss word during Tha Bush Mobb years didn't take hold ? Well, we can't all have six-figure promotional budgets. Anyway, our Administration wants to (I'm paraphrasing here) ignore the Roadless Rule, but legally, mainly so they can drill in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the world's biggest intact temperate rainforest, where the trees are centuries (or millenia!) old and some of the animals there can't be found anywhere else. But yeah, let's churn yet another national park into fuel that'll just get burned up and pollute our air and water. That's real conservative of these fools.

Action: concerning voting rights, phony recycling, and Social Security.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Has our House passed all these good bills because they know our Senate won't pass them and our President won't sign them? It's quite possible! Would such cowardice matter if our Senate and our President bow to our will? Of course not! But if we don't communicate that will, it'll be a moot point.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: some state legislators want to, ah, innovate on the definition of "recycling" so that it includes things that are patently not recycling -- like converting single-use plastics into oil or fuel -- and this would mean big corporations could claim that facilities dedicated to that purpose are "recycling" facilities. Recycling ain't just about decreasing pollution (which converting single-use plastics into fuel decidedly does not do) or reducing trash (ditto, since pollution is trash), it's also about getting utility out of trash, and if fuel burns once and is gone, well, that's about as "single-use" as you can get. Even if we could agree that corporations should do it -- as opposed to, say, solar or wind, which won't increase demand for single-use plastics! -- they shouldn't get goodies from our government for doing it, and we certainly shouldn't murder the definition of "recycling" just so they can get those goodies. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislators to protect our air and water by rejecting HB 1808.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop our President's raid on Social Security funding which he calls a "tax cut," then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. We shouldn't regard his obsession with cutting payroll taxes as something unique to him; rather, we should regard it as part of the right's obsession with destroying Social Security by hook or by crook. The fact that he's taken it up only demonstrates that he's one of Our Glorious Elites -- not their enemy, as a lot of his votaries fantasize. Now, I think folks generally understand that taxes pay for services we may all use -- and all of us want to live long enough to collect Social Security. Unfortunately, too many of our media "personalities" act like they don't understand it, and you can catch people off-guard if you repeat lies with conviction, and if no other media personalities call them on their lies right there and then. This is how lies get spread in America -- not just because of malicious people, but because of the cowards who don't stand up to them. But we are neither of these, and we will keep fighting.

Action: concerning good House bills, plastic pollution, and healthy food.

Happy Wednesday, good folks! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. This week we add H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act, which finally passed the House last week. Our Senate has no business sitting on bills that fight discrimination and promote voting rights, internet freedom, and working families. And if we tell them enough, they'll learn it one day.

Meanwhile, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (or TCEQ) has proposed rules on regulating plastics so they don't wind up in our water, and surprise, surprise! They're not good enough -- everyone wants to keep Coke bottles out of rivers, but the TCEQ would do nothing about microplastics, which also wind up in our water and too often also wind up in our bloodstream, causing or exacerbating all manner of health problems. The TCEQ apparently did not take health care problems into account; only "environmental" problems, as if environmental problems somehow don't cause health care problems. The TCEQ, like any agency wishing a "smooth" relationship with the corporations it supposedly regulates, would give plastic manufacturing corporations another year to comply with the rules. And if people suffer for it, too bad! They must be sacrificed so that regulators and corporations can get along better! Seriously, government agencies should cultivate an adversarial relationship with the corporations they regulate; maybe then they'll do their job. So Public Citizen helps you tell the TCEQ to regulate plastics in water much more vigorously than they've thus far proposed.

Finally, our Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee -- which helps our Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services put together the Dietary Guidelines for Americans every five years -- has recommended that the Guidelines for 2020-25 advise that we limit added sugars and address how we grow food so we can actually have an agricultural sector in the coming decades. These are absolutely necessary recommendations! And of course there's no guarantee that this Administration will follow them. Word on the street, of course, is that our President -- with advice from former Bush Mobber John "The Crusher" Yoo -- has read our Supreme Court's DACA ruling (which went against him, you recall) as permission to do whatever he wants until someone sues him under the Administrative Procedure Act. And if you responded by saying I thought he was doing that already!, you win a prize, but consider that he now may feel even less constrained by the rules and norms of civilization than he did before, and consider, also, that he loves junk food and he thinks planning for the future (which "not eating sugar today" most certainly is) is for "losers." Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our government to adhere to the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee's recommendations.

Action: concerning good House bills, future COVID vaccines, and bear baiting.

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. It's July already, I know, and the best time for the Senate to pass these bills was last year. But the second-best time for them to pass these bills is now.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to mandate that any and all publicly-funded COVID-19 vaccines be available to everyone, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. Because if your taxpayer money funded the vaccine, you should benefit from it -- and, by the way, that's most drugs, not just a future COVID-19 vaccine Congress has allocated $10 billion on just this year. That's $10 billion of our money, folks! You don't think Congress just gets lucky at the casino, do you? And yet our Great and Glorious True American Administration says they can't guarantee we'll all be able to get it, because we need private corporations to do the work and they "deserve" to make whatever profit they see fit. They have the relationship exactly wrong: we don't need them to do the work; they need us to give them the work. And frankly, if we did the work ourselves -- that is, if our government hired the scientists and paid them to do the research -- we'd have a cheaper vaccine more quickly.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to reject bear-baiting in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Imagine people actually thinking they're TEH GREATEZTZ HUNTURZ EVAHZ!!!!! if they can lure a bear out of its den with jelly cream donuts and then shoot them dead! How sporting is that? And why should civilized people allow it? There lies the rub, of course: this Administration loathes civilization, because civilization prevents us from giving in to every conceivable impulse -- and impulse control sure is a problem with this President! And civilization also reminds us that there is not only a past but also a future; but for this Administration, the past only exists to put women and folks of color in their "place," and the future only impedes the mad drive to make money today. But those of us who value civilization will work for it, even if our politicians don't.

Action: concerning good House bills, renewable energy, methane regulation, and "conversion" "therapy."

Happy Thursday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Don't be swayed by the hype that "Mitch McConnell will never pass these bills." He ain't in charge; we are, and the more we assert that, the better off we'll all be.

Meanwhile, our Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (or BOEM) is now taking public comments on a "supplemental environmental impact statement" on Vineyard Wind, a proposed 800 megawatt offshore wind power project. But our BOEM has already done an environmental impact statement on Vineyard Wind, and given our President's vocal and loud opposition to any form of renewable energy, you might well decide this Administration is merely stalling until they can reject the project without criticism. Well, too bad! The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our BOEM to get on with issuing permits for Vineyard Wind already. Aside from the normal ridiculous arguments about noise and ugliness and avicide, you'll hear about "the need for wider transit spaces between wind turbines" -- but Vineyard Wind has already compromised on that, and asking them to do so again would all but announce that our Administration wants to kill the project while making Vineyard Wind look like the bad guys. So let's not get rolled here.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: our state's Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) has proposed methane regulations that fall short of what's necessary, so the Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our DEP to strengthen methane regulations for good Pennsylvanians, so we can breathe cleaner air. Clean air is a big deal in Pennsylvania, since we're third in America in greenhouse gases and second in natural gas production, and these are not necessarily things you want to say WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. (I'd prefer to be number one in renewable energy production. Pennsylvania ranks 42nd in that.) The DEP proposal would exempt "low-producing" wells, though their definition of "low-producing" happens to include most wells, and it would also reduce inspections on wells that had previously passed inspections, as if leaks can't happen at any time. That latter one sticks in my craw a bit -- the people who want to flood liberal cities with jackboots also want to go easy on corporations when they pollute our air and water. Some "law and order."

Finally, Change.org helps you tell North Dakota state legislators to ban "conversion therapy," the "therapy" by which "doctors" try to convert gay people into straight ones. You might as well try to convert a bulldog into an ocelot! And "conversion therapy" ain't "tough love," as some folks say -- it's abuse to make gay folks "relive" molestation and do naked touching and promise them they'll be cured when they'll more likely want to kill themselves. Republicans dominate North Dakota's state legislature, but that doesn't mean they're all a bunch of bigots. But some of them will pretend their "religious" "beliefs" mean more than the fact that no reputable medical or psychological professional association thinks "conversion therapy" is actually a thing with either scientific basis or good results. Those folks need to be exposed, whenever they stand in the way of real compassion and love, and demanding that they outlaw "conversion therapy" may well be a good way of outing them. So to speak.

Action: concerning law and order, small businesses, and public lands.

You heard about the string of "suicides" last month, where black men just happened to be found hanging in trees? Change.org helps you tell Morristown, NJ police to reopen an investigation into the death of Amani Kildea found hanging from a tree an hour from his home, whose death they ruled a suicide. Mr. Kildea, all of 20 years old, apparently aspired to join law enforcement one day, and what a bitter irony it would be if police officers lynched him! We don't know that they did, but the thought has occurred, even though I know police officers who would stop their fellows from lynching someone. And this has happened before. Some people say "every time we gave blacks something in the '60s they rioted," but that's not true in almost any sense -- setting aside that recognizing their rights would be a hell of a way to describe a "gift," the actual timeline was usually a) law got passed, b) police killed black man, c) folks rioted. Hopefully an investigation into Mr. Kildea's death would help break that wheel.

Meanwhile, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our government to ensure that taxpayer money meant to go to small businesses actually goes to small businesses. It's a shame we have to tell our government to do the thing it already said it was doing, but we got a lot of stories this week about big corporations getting CARES Act money intended for small businesses, and we haven't heard nearly as much about the (at least) 66,000 small businesses that have permanently closed since the beginning of this pandemic. Of course, our government has pretended, for a very long time, that everything it does for big corporations it does for small businesses. It wasn't that long ago that Republicans were telling us that taxes shouldn't go up on rich people because of "the effect it'd have on small businesses," though that was total BS. Big corporations have been using small businesses as a human shield for decades now -- often to avoid regulations that would never hit small businesses as much as they hit big corporations! At least we're on to them, and at least we can communicate to the politicians that we're on to them.

Finally, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness covers a million acres of northern Minnesota and receives more visits than any other wilderness area in America. You know what's coming, right? Of course a big mining conglomerate wants to mine copper and nickel there, hence H.R. 5598, the Boundary Waters Wilderness Protection and Pollution Prevention Act, which would withdraw nearly a quarter of the Boundary Waters Wilderness from mining leases and only allow similar kinds of development if they don't pollute the land, water, or air in the area. That's the most important thing about public lands, after all -- that they're clean enough for good Americans to enjoy for generations to come, not whether they can be converted into money that'll get spent faster than you can say "don't drink the water." You'd think "most-visited wilderness in America" would carry some weight with our government, but apparently not -- at least, not if we don't speak out! Hence Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect public lands by passing the Boundary Waters Wilderness Protection and Pollution Prevention Act.

Action: concerning good House bills, corporate welfare, and police brutality.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. They're good bills that would reduce poverty, discrimination, and vote suppression, among other evils, and your Senators have no excuse for sitting on them. They'll keep sitting, though, if we stay silent.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our state legislators failed to pass an elephantine $670 million tax break for fracking corporations earlier this year, so now they aim to attach it to an unrelated, non-controversial bill and hope no one notices. Too late! Penn Environment helps you tell your legislators to reject any bill that would hand out corporate welfare in the dead of night. This latest would-be abomination comes not even a week after our Attorney General's office issued a grand jury report detailing the pollution fracking causes and our state's poor record in controlling that pollution. And, of course, it also comes in the middle of a pandemic, when our leaders really should be thinking of other things than how much of our taxpayer money they can funnel down some fracking executive's gullet. That's what it's really all about, after all -- it's not about "jobs," it's about executives being able to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Maybe politics should be about us?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to end the 1033 program that supplies police officers with war weapons, then Fight for the Future still helps you do that. Don't get caught up in the hype that police officers' lives are so dangerous that they need bazookas to deal with it! Police officers' lives can be dangerous at times, obviously, but they won't bring down drug kingpins with bazookas -- they bring them down with superior detective work. The real reason they need bazookas, by the evidence, is to attack protestors who protest police brutality! And, yeah, that's a problem that creates itself. If you're still thinking they need bazookas to bring suspects in, ask yourself why officers so often shoot black folks dead without provocation but were able to take Dylann Roof to freaking McDonald's on the way to the station. Don't be tempted to respond with "because Dylann Roof came peacefully" -- to the degree white people "come peacefully," it's because police don't go at them with guns blazing.

Action: concerning good House bills, health care for Native Americans, and abortion.

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. And now we add H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, passed by our House. These bills would deliver (among other things) better health care, better voting rights protections, better internet protections, and better wages for working families -- if our Senators would do their jobs. We just have to get in their grills until they do.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to fully fund the Indian Health Service. Unsurprisingly, Native Americans have also suffered disproportionately from the COVID-19 pandemic, just like other folks of color and senior citizens. And yet our government spends less than a dollar on the IHS for every $10 it spends on health care generally. Why Native Americans should suffer even more by our hand after all we've done to them over the centuries is beyond me. Worse, some state and federal officials won't let tribal epidemiologists see the COVID-19 data they've amassed over the months, and other states won't help them with contract tracing so they can keep infections down. Everyone knows data sharing and contact tracing work -- well, everyone who's not so emotionally-invested in defending their Personal Lord and Savior Our President at all costs. So we should ensure that our Native American population gets the same access to health care that the rest of us do. (And, yeah, we should all have more access to health care.)

Finally, our Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that would have shut down all of that state's abortion clinics, but only because Chief Justice Roberts recognized that the Louisiana law was virtually identical to a Texas law our Court had already struck down. But we don't need to hold to that slim reed in order to protect abortion rights in America, because H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women’s Health Protection Act, would sweep away the limits states have placed on women over the last decade, including the absurdly high standards placed on providers and facilities that absolutely intend to keep women from getting abortions. I have no animus toward those who abhor abortion, but I do have a very particular animus toward those who simply don't want women to control their bodies. There is actually a difference between the two, and it's why I come down on the side of abortion rights. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect women's rights by passing the Women's Health Protection Act. (And, sorry, they are women's rights -- until men can give birth, at least.)

Action: concerning good House bills, racism on social media, and ancient forests.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! It's time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. This week we add H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, which would make Washington, D.C. our 51st state; the House passed this bill late last week. Our Senators really have no excuses opposing any of these bills, so get in their grills and tell them to pass them now.

Meanwhile, over 180 corporations have stopped advertising on Facebook because of their years-long enabling of Nazi wannabes; Mr. Zuckerberg has explained away all this enabling, however obliquely, by talking about his unwillingness to restrict "free speech." Of course, our First Amendment protects us from our government, not from publishing houses, which Facebook most assuredly is, even if communications law doesn't currently define them as such. Saying "I have to publish every dung nugget from obviously bad human beings because I'm Facebook" is a little like saying "I have to accept every single manuscript that comes across my desk because I'm a publishing house." And, like, that's not how that works! Hence Color of Change helps you tell big corporations to stop advertising on Facebook during the month of July. And Sum of Us helps you tell Reddit to ban racist hate speech on its platform. Reddit bills itself, not without justification, as "the front page of the internet," but the Southern Poverty Law Center found it also to be the home of "violently racist" content as far back as 2015, so why should they be exempt from our fury?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 2491, the Roadless Area Conservation Act, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. The Roadless Area Conservation Act would prevent our Department of Agriculture from permitting road construction in areas where Roadless Rule regulations already prohibit them; yes, we actually have to tell our Administration to do this, because they're trying to work around the Executive branch's own regulations. Why not just rewrite them? Possibly because their efforts will ultimately fail in court, like most of them do! Our Administration ultimately aims to let loggers into the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which is a rain forest, yo, with, like, thousand-year-old trees in it. But I guess making desks and toilet paper from thousand-year-old trees is better than keeping thousand-year-old trees around and being able to study them and learn from them. Put six beers into our President and I bet he puts it pretty much like that. He'd probably also call you a LOOOZER!!!! for disagreeing with him. But he'd just be projecting, as usual.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, clean water, law and order, and corporate welfare.

Happy Tuesday, good Americans! Now call your U.S. Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act. The HEROES Act is actual good stimulus legislation that would help fund states and localities, fund contact tracing so we can get a better handle on this pandemic, expand tax credits for working families (and repeal a massive corporate welfare handout for hedge fund managers), fund our Post Office so it can continue to do the good work it does which could very well include delivering your votes on Election Day, extend enhanced unemployment benefits for the tens of millions of Americans who will likely still need it after it expires at the end of next month, and provide bigger stimulus checks for good Americans making less than six figures. What is the reason for not passing this bill? It sure ain't THE DEFICITZ!!!!!, because our President proved with his 2017 tax "reform" that he can blow up deficits quite well, thank you very much. And that was before the corporate welfare-laden CARES Act passed! So let's spend our money on some good things for once.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that Consumer Reports found an awful lot of arsenic in Whole Foods-manufactured bottled water brand Starkey Spring Water -- it almost had the federal limit of 10 parts of arsenic per billion, and if you're saying, "well, it's still under the limit," remember that a) getting just under the federal limit for some poison or other is no reason to high-five oneself and b) all the other bottled water brands Consumer Reports tested finished with fewer than three parts per billion. Of course, any bottled water testing high for arsenic is quite ironic, since the big corporations have been telling us for years that bottled water is "healthier" than tap water; that the biggest health food chain in the nation sells it is just gravy. Now, I'd rather bottled water didn't exist at all, but if we must have it, it really shouldn't make us sick. Hence Consumer Reports helps you tell Whole Foods (and its parent corporation, Amazon) to protect its customers and stop selling Starkey Spring Water.

In other news, Moms Rising helps you tell your Mayors and Governors to help break the "school to prison pipeline" by getting police officers out of our public schools. As I've said, we use police officers as the Swiss Army knives of our civilization -- we put cops in schools before we put counselors in schools; we put cops in schools before we put social workers in schools; hell, we put cops in schools before we put nurses in schools! And no police officer, no matter how great, can wear that many hats. The science instructs us that schools with actual professionals like the three I listed above not only have fewer disciplinary incidents and suspend and expel their students less; they also show higher academic achievement and higher graduation rates, both of which you kinda want from a school. Not for nothing, but the kids in these schools also have less fear that a police officer will pre-judge you based on school and harass you repeatedly when you get out of school. So let's do the right thing, both for kids and for cops.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6707/S. 3611, the Resources for Workforce Investments, Not Drilling (or ReWIND) Act, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. The ReWIND Act would impose a moratorium on new gas and oil leasing (and drilling permits), prevent any banks that fed at the CARES Act trough from embarking upon new fossil fuel-related investments for the next two years, and ban our President from hoarding unneeded oil at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The bill would also roll back our President's recent drilling royalty cuts; these cuts mean the American people get less money from big fossil fuel corporations in exchange for the privilege of drilling on public lands. Our President casts this as a way of "stimulating the economy," but you'd be more accurate describing it as "corporate welfare" -- or, more pungently but no less precisely, as "our President taking food out of our mouths." Too harsh? Too bad: the truth is always harsh, though it always leaves us as better people.

Action: concering various law and order matters and conservation funding.

Public Citizen helps you tell your U.S. House Reps to impeach Attorney General William Barr. If we'd had our way, he'd never have been confirmed as Attorney General in the first place, and he hasn't exactly risen above our low expectations since then -- he acts like he works for our President and not for his real bosses, the American people. Earlier this week, a former Justice Department prosecutor testified before our House that our Justice Department weakened its recommended sentence for Presidential crony Roger Stone, and though he didn't come out and say Mr. Barr ordered that reduced sentence, well, we're not schmucks. (That sentence was for one count each of obstruction of justice and witness tampering, and five counts of making false statements, and not "nothing," as I'm sure right-wingers are yelling as we speak.) Of course, before that, he forced out a U.S. Attorney who was getting too close to some other Presidential cronies and tried to drop perjury charges against Michael Flynn to which he'd already pled guilty. And there's his lying about the Mueller report, and his defiance of Congressional subpoenas -- your law and order Administration, ladies and gentlemen!

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban facial surveillance technologies. Yes, we can tell our government to ban things that hurt us! Yes, we can tell our government that some technologies simply aren't good enough to continue to exist! And facial recognition technology, to put it bluntly, sucks -- it can't tell black people apart any better than your right-wing uncle. And "letting the market work out its problems" is a horrible idea, since it hurts good Americans now -- really, the reasonable, moderate thing to do would be to ban it unless and until its designers can actually make it work so that it can't be used simply to harass black folks and protestors. Then again, I suspect that's a feature, not a bug -- facial recognition software really exists not to find criminals, but to harass those who represent a "threat" to Our Glorious Elites, and if such harassment results in (say) a black man waiting 30 hours in jail before law enforcement figures out that he looks absolutely nothing like their suspect, well, I guess they call that gravy. I mean, I do prefer to believe the best about people, but they're making that damn hard.

Finally, Congress hasn't fouled up every conceivable legislative initiative this term -- Congress has not only authorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund permanently, so that it doesn't just expire every few years and we let our public parks wither and die, but our Senate has, in passing S. 3422, the Great American Outdoors Act (and by a veto-proof 73-25 tally), permanently funded the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and also created a National Parks and Public Lands Legacy Fund to address specific repairs in our public lands. Now the bill goes to the House, and you'd like to think our House would pass this bill with a quickness, particularly since it did so well in a Republican-held Senate, but you never know with politicians. Who's going to try to use a must-pass bill to get some unearned goody for some crony, one wonders? Like I said, you never know. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your House Reps to pass the Great American Outdoors Act with a quickness. Let's try to pass it with a two-thirds majority, too, because you never know what nefarious bee is about to enter our President's bonnet, either, and we do best when we make Presidents unnecessary.

Action: from good House bills to bad hunting regulations.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. These are all good bills: the Voting Rights Advancement Act, for example, would put the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act that our Supreme Court knocked out, while the Save the Internet Act would reinstate the FCC's pro-internet freedom net neutrality rules as the law of the land again. So tell your Senators to pass these bills, with no excuses.

Meanwhile, H.R. 7221, the Prohibiting Law Enforcement Use of Chemical Weapons Act, would (as its title suggests!) prevent police from using tear gas as a weapon. If you're of the mind that reforms such as these would "keep cops from doing their jobs," please think about it: how many crooks do police apprehend with tear gas? It is an enormously cumbersome and imprecise weapon, much more so than a handgun or a taser. Of course, crooks don't get apprehended with tear gas -- but peaceful protestors sure do! And that's who the tear gas is really for. You would also want to consider why police would need a weapon soldiers haven't been able to use since 1997; I would discard answers that include the phrase "because the streets are so much more dangerous now," because a) that's not true and b) I just said that tear gas is a bad weapon to fight crime with. No, really, people do pretend to be that stupid. Anyway, the Other 98 helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect peaceful protestors from police violence by passing the Prohibiting Law Enforcement Use of Chemical Weapons Act.

In other news, Amazon has stepped up its feel-good PR campaign -- you saw the ad with the deaf single dad? Yeah, they'll fire his ass, too, if he walks too slowly in the warehouse -- almost like they know they achieved their position as the world's number one online retailer mainly by doing evil! Amazon has also lately imposed a one-year moratorium on police use of its infamous (and pretentiously-titled, don't think any of that Kraftwerk coolness rubs off on you!) Rekognition software. You remember Rekognition, right? The facial recognition software that's almost as bad at telling black folks apart as your right-wing uncle is? A one-year moratorium is exactly the kind of thing that's designed to make people feel good about using Amazon again -- and then quickly forgotten once the PR storm passes over, as it will for a lot of Americans, though not for a lot of black Americans who still have to face random police brutality. Anyway, MPower Change helps you tell Amazon to cut all of its ties with law enforcement. They're still providing cloud computing services to ICE, after all; think that helps out anyone but Amazon?

Finally, our National Park Service finalized rules in several Alaska national parks allowing hunters to kill bears and cubs while they hibernate and shoot wolves and coyotes while they're with their pups; the rules also allow hunters to shoot coyotes from motorboats and lure bears out of their dens with donuts so they can shoot them. Well, that all sounds very sporting, doesn't it? It doesn't sound like "good Americans ritualizing how their forebears used to survive"! It doesn't even sound like "an excuse for a bunch of guys to hang out and get drunk," as one hunter described hunting's purpose to me years ago. No, the word we're looking for here is cruel, though Alaska's Congressional delegation supports the change, claiming that it -- hey, not my words, but Sen. Murkowski's! -- is a "matter of states' rights"! Who knew the "right" to own slaves was at play here? And on federal land, no less! So, in short: it's not just cruel, it's also bad law-making. And since our Administration wants to do this to other Alaska national parks, the Alaska Wilderness League helps you oppose similar cruelty in other federal parks in Alaska.

Action: concerning all those good House bills, anti-renewable energy desperation, and statehood for D.C.

Happy Wednesday, good folks! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. No we must not give up on all of these good works, which would protect voting rights, fight discrimination, make our internet free again, ensure minimum wage workers can better make ends meet, and help protect protections for pre-existing conditions -- among many other things! So don't let them tell you only one thing at a time matters! That's what they want you to think so you forget to fight for all the things that matter!

Meanwhile, an alleged nonprofit called the New England Ratepayers Association (or NERA) has filed a petition with our Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (or FERC) that could destroy the practice of "net metering," by which home solar users sell their unused power back to their local utility. Specifically, NERA claims that our federal government, not the states, should regulate net metering, because net metering is somehow by definition a "wholesale sale" (even if users get retail prices for their unused power, apparently) and only our federal government gets to regulate wholesale sales. That will baffle anyone acquainted with the defintion of the word "wholesale," to wit: "being sold in large quantities to be retailed by others." Solar users do sell their unused power literally "to be retailed by others" (since the power goes to the utility corporation), but the idea that solar users sell "in large quantities" is laughably absurd. Clearly NERA is counting on this Administration, which hates renewable energy with a passion bordering on the murderous, to destroy solar power for them. So Penn Environment helps you tell our FERC to reject NERA's desperate petition asserting that net metering is a "wholesale sale."

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunties to tell your Congressfolk to make Washington, D.C. our 51st state, then the Daily Kos Liberation League still helps you do that. I didn't think of this, but the Daily Kos Liberation League points out that our President deployed federal soldiers in D.C. neighborhoods to round up a few hundred peaceful protestors; when you consider, also, that our President displayed disgusting indifference in teargassing protestors out of his way so he could do a photo op at a church, you, too, might consider that making D.C. a state, which would have a Governor, might provide a useful check against future Presidential obnoxiousness. All the other arguments against D.C. statehood, in a word, suck -- D.C. can't be "too small" if it has more people than three actual American states, and if you're worried that they'll just elect two more Democrats to the Senate, then be a Republican who earns their vote. Sheesh, it's not that damn hard, and Republicans don't need any more welfare from our laws than they already get.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, Chaco Canyon, the quality of mercy, and working families.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, then you can still use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators' phone numbers. I know, it's been weeks since the House passed that bill, and all kinds of other things are happening right now, but guess what? No law or social more compels you to attend only one thing at a time, and to the exclusion of all other things! Our Glorious Elites pretend only one thing at a time could possibly matter to anyone, but we're still seeing over 20,000 cases of coronavirus every day, and a crapload of good Americans will still need unemployment benefits after the end of July, and we still need to fund a Post Office past the end of September, and states and localities still deserve assistance thanks to all the reduced revenues of this recession, and at least one big tax-cut-for-the-rich still deserves repeal and oblivion, and another round of increased stimulus checks for all of us sure wouldn't hurt, so get on the stick and communicate your will to your Senators before they imagine you've forgotten all about the hard work they still need to do.

Meanwhile, our Interior Secretary has actually extended a comment period concerning opening up the Greater Chaco Region of New Mexico to even more fracking. And you know what that means! It means he didn't get enough pro-pollution comments from the fracking lobby! I mean, this Administration never wants to hear more from the American people, since good Americans generally oppose all the things this Administration does! Even the 2017 tax "reform" suffered from so much opposition from the people that they could barely pass the damn thing! And that cost Democrats exactly nothing in the 2018 midterm elections -- this, after Our Glorious Elites have been saying for years that opposing "tax cuts" is "political poison"! But I digress. Food and Water Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to halt its plans to drill for gas in the Greater Chaco Region. Why? Well, not just because drilling tends to pollute our air and water (and, of course, drillers will pay less in royalties to us because that's how our 46% President wants it!) -- the Greater Chaco Region also includes land sacred to the Navajo. Our Administration cares so much about religion -- just not when it's Native American religion!

In other news, Willie Simmons committed a $9 robbery back in the 1980s -- and has served 37 years for it! How did this happen? Mr. Simmons had three other offenses (all nonviolent, naturally) on his record, and thus got a life sentence under Alabama's "habitual offender" law. I don't need to tell you that Mr. Simmons served our country in the Army or that drug addiction may have figured in his "crime spree" -- I need only reiterate, with the italics hammer, that he's serving a life sentence for stealing nine freaking dollars. If you know any supposed devil's-advocates who'll say if you can't do the time don't do the crime or he should've gotten a lawyer to help with his appeals, just ask them: is it fair to give someone life in prison for stealing nine dollars? Any answer other than "no" -- and that most definitely includes "no, but" -- deserves no further engagement; just let your little Glaucon go with God, because God might be their only friend at the end of the line. In the meantime, let's try to do some damn justice and tell Alabama Gov. Ivey to commute Mr. Simmons's sentence, as Change.org helps you do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell Walmart to give its workers a seat on its corporate board, then United for Respect still helps you do that. Because why the hell not? Are other CEOs the only people who know anything about running a corporation? Actually, given how badly so many corporations do at anything other than redistributing worker income upward to executives, I suspect most CEOs know just about nothing about running a corporation! And, in my lengthy experience as a worker bee, I've found that the people who actually do the work know more about how to do the work than the folks who bloviate all day about "the challenges ahead," which are always challenges for you, not for them! In any case, Walmart's situation is unique, and not just because it smashes any unionization effort with a frightening malice -- Walmart has been making a crap-ton of profits during this pandemic, but its executives have been dragging their feet ensuring their workers are safe at a store where it's almost impossible to socially-distance. So let's help our sisters and brothers help themselves! That's what a conservative would do, right?

Action: concerning good House bills, genocide in Burma, and carbon regulation in Pennsylvania.

Happy Thursday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. They've been avoiding passing these bills because they would actually do good things for Americans -- like protect voting rights, health care, and internet freedom -- instead of redistribute good Americans' wealth upward to corporate cronies, which is what politicians tend to prefer to do. You know what we prefer to do? Communicate our will until they can't ignore it.

Meanwhile, you may recall that the Burmese army has done its damnedest over the last few years to exterminate the Muslim Rohingya population, resulting in nearly a million Rohingya (i.e., almost all of them) fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh. But S. 1186, the Burma Human Rights and Freedom Act, would do a few things that would improve this situation. The bill would aid humanitarian efforts and reinstate certain trade restrictions, for one, but it would also prevent any taxpayer money from flowing to Burmese security forces until our State Department can certify that the Burmese military are behaving in a more civilized behavior -- admittedly a statement this State Department would rush to certify without evidence if our President decided it might make him look good, but maybe not the next one. The bill would also prevent our government from handing out visas to folks who've committed human rights violations in Burma and sanction any corporations controlled by such folks -- even if our President calls them "very fine people"! Hence the International Campaign for the Rohingya helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight genocide by passing the Burma Human Rights and Freedom Act.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our state legislature is chomping at the bit to prevent our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) from issuing any climate change-related regulations whatsoever! Oh, HB 2025's executive summary says it aims at carbon emissions regulations that impose a carbon tax, a matter about which reasonable people may be ambivalent, but Section 4(a) of the bill clearly prohibits Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection from enacting any climate change-related regulations, whether they come with a carbon tax or not! That is what we call a bait and switch, folks, and you have to wonder why our state legislators felt the need to lie to us. And by "you have to wonder," I mean "because lying is all you got left when you can't win the argument on the merits." There's really no excuse for opposing climate change action now -- no reasonable human being believes it's a hoax, and the only people saying it's a hoax are people who make money saying it's a hoax. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state legislators to protect our planet by rejecting HB 2025.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, law and order, and public lands.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, well, now's as good a time as any! Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to find your Senators' phone numbers; you might want to program all of your Senators' phone numbers (including their local ones) into your cellphone. No, seriously, sometimes I make 10 calls before anyone answers the phone, and that's when there's no pandemic! While you have them on the phone, you might also want to tell them to reject any effort to give "blanket immunity" from lawsuits to corporations relating to the pandemic, since that's the only thing Mitch McConnell seems to want to do. If it's truly a "frivolous" lawsuit, it'll die in court; what's the big deal? And be sure to mention all the good things the HEROES Act would do, like help fund states and localities, fund our Post Office, extend higher unemployment benefits, expand working family tax cuts, repeal a big hedge fund manager tax cut, and issue another round of (bigger) stimulus checks.

Meanwhile, the law nominally lets us sue public officials, including police officers, when they trample over our rights, but our Supreme Court has spent the last half-century-plus blowing a Mack truck-sized hole in the law in creating the doctrine of "qualified immunity," whereby courts can throw out lawsuits against government officials merely because the court hasn't heard such a case before, which sure takes "respecting precedent" to an unwarranted extreme. But H.R. 7085, the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, would prevent courts from dismissing cases against police officers after divining their' "good faith" or "reasonable" belief that their unlawful conduct was lawful, and it would also prevent them from throwing out cases merely because the defendants allege that "rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution or laws were not clearly established at the time of their deprivation by the defendant," since, actually, they are. Should we excuse evil merely because of good intentions? Of course not. Hence both Public Citizen and Defending Rights and Dissent both help you tell your Congressfolk to restore law and order by passing the Ending Qualified Immunity Act.

Finally, S. 3422, the Great American Outdoors Act, would not only fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund but would also establish a National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund to help preserve our public lands. That's been a bigger deal to a lot of good Americans these last few months, as public parks are now often the only places still open if you feel like getting out of the house. As we all do! A man could look at the list of 59 Senators (out of 100) co-sponsoring this bill and be heartened that 15 of them are Republicans; 15 plus 47 in the Democratic caucus equals a filibuster-proof majority in favor of the bill! But alas, it's not a veto-proof majority, and if Mob Boss Mitch doesn't bring the bill up for a vote then it'll get zero votes, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Senators to support our public lands by passing the Great American Outdoors Act. Our President didn't veto the bill permanently establishing the Land and Water Conservation Act, but then again, the Senate passed that bill 92-8 and the House passed it 363-62. We might need those kinds of numbers again, and we won't get them if we sit on our hands.

Action: concerning good House bills, corruption, and worker safety.

Happy Wednesday, good Americans! Now call your Senators and tell them to protect voting rights, health care, public lands, higher wages, and many other good things by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. And remember: every call you make moves the needle in our direction, and every call you make exposes our so-called "leaders" for the spineless and/or malicious tools they are, and even when it doesn't look like it's doing any good, all your good works do add up.

Meanwhile, with all the corporate welfare our government's been handing out in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we've seen far too many attacks on the federal Inspectors General who would be overseeing these handouts and making sure they don't abuse the taxpayer. Seriously, when you put it like that, how can anyone reasonably support our President's efforts to get rid of Inspectors General? He removes the Inspector General who handled the whistleblower complaint that led to his impeachment; he removes Glenn Fine from his position overseeing the "Paycheck Protection Plan" after Mr. Fine forges a career exposing actual corruption in our government; he removes the Department of State IG after he starts looking into whether that $8 billion-plus Saudi arms deal was really legal. Recall that our President wanted to fire all the Inspectors General upon taking office (because getting 46% of the popular vote is surely a mandate for that!); cooler heads talked him out of it then, but clearly he's had them in his sights all along, and why? Because he knows they can get him. Hence the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to better protect our Inspectors General from removal by obviously corrupt Presidents.

Finally, Walmart workers have been doing their job throughout this pandemic, but getting their management (which is making record profits, of course!) to ensure worker safety and offer paid sick leave has been like pulling teeth! Hopefully not too many Americans are still saying things like "how hard can it be to be a Walmart worker? How much skill can it take?" Remember that we said similar things about manufacturing workers fifty years ago -- we said they were mere machine jockeys, not "real workers" like the folks who built furniture with their bare hands -- and now that they're almost all gone, and we're a lot more used to the idea of machines making things than we were back then, we lionize them. Now we have so many more service workers than we used to have, and I hope we won't wait until we struggle with inattentive and unsubtle automated "workers" to appreciate them! Hence United for Respect helps you tell Walmart to give its workers a seat on its corporate board, so workers can communicate their needs more effectively to their bosses. What on Earth could be the harm in that? That executives make a little less money and have to do better by their workers? Oh, the horror!

Action: concerning good House bills and good farm policy.

Happy Thursday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to protect voting rights, internet freedom, secure pensions, higher wages, and many other good things by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. I wouldn't blame you for thinking we're doing no good, since it's been almost a year and a half for some of these bills. But these bills are good works on issues from voting rights to internet freedom to the minimum wage, and we can't stop fighting for them until we win.

Meanwhile, H.R. 6718/S. 3221, the Farm System Reform Act, would achieve its stated aim by banning new factory farm construction and the expansion of existing factory farms, plus it would phase out current factory farms over the next 20 years. Factory farms have created many evils -- we've gone into two of them, pollution and antibiotic abuse, at some length over the years. But you know what else factory farms have done? They've helped make the small family farmer almost nonexistent in America! Factory farms can scale down expenses and scale up profits better than any small farmer can, but to what end? So that America becomes dependent on miserable animals, dung-filled waterways, and rampant antibiotic-resistant superbugs just to have relatively inexpensive chicken parm? So that a few big ag executives can dictate policy to the American people, policy that'll benefit them a lot more than it benefits us? Big factory farms aren't just bad for our health, our air and water, and our small farmers: they're bad for democracy. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner agricultural policy in America by passing the Farm System Reform Act.

Action: concerning voting rights, corruption, toxic waste, and paid sick leave.

Happy Tuesday! Now call your Senators and tell them to protect voting rights, internet freedom, secure pensions, higher wages, and many other good things by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. And if folks say don't you know there's a pandemic going on, remind them that leaders (which our Senators are, sadly) don't get to take tine off from doing the right thing.

Meanwhile, our Justice Department so-called continues its quest to gut the False Claims Act, our most powerful weapon against governmental fraud, waste, and abuse, because DRAIN TEH SWAMPZ!!!!! Seriously, how does someone "serious" about corruption conclude that the False Claims Act is the problem? Probably the same way someone concludes that Medicare is the "real price-fixer" even though it has literally no authority to negotiate the price of drugs. Anyway, our Justice Department wants the power to dismiss whistleblower claims without said whistleblowers ever getting hearings. And what if whistleblowers aim to expose wrongdoing by our Justice Department itself? Aw, come on, you can trust our Justice Department! But we didn't earn a thriving democracy by trusting our leaders, we got it by checking them. And not for nothing, but with more than $3 trillion in new deficit spending these past two months, there's going to be a lot of corruption to find. Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our Justice Department to end its quest to gut the False Claims Act.

In other news, our Environmental Protection Agency, ever looking for important work to avoid doing, has allowed the number of unfunded Superfund sites in need of serious toxic waste cleanup to triple just since Andrew Wheeler became EPA Administrator. Maybe you'll say well, it tripled to only 34, but that's the most in 15 years, and you won't be impressed very much with the math if you live near one and thus face the prospect of lead, mercury, arsenic, and other toxins in your air and water, and all the health care issues that go with it. How many times must I tell these pimps! Spending money now to clean up the Love Canals of this nation saves us all money later in health care costs -- but it doesn't save some polluter corporation CEO enough money to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, I suppose. Seriously, this Administration does not care about you, unless you're a boss, too. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to do its damn job and clean up Superfund sites already. I know, we're always telling this government to do its damn job, but that's our duty as Americans, and we'll keep doing it.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell McDonald's to provide paid sick and family leave to all of its employees, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Hey, I'm not going to argue with all of the harried parents who just want to get something in their kids' stomachs, but if McDonald's is going to be an "essential" business, then its workers are essential, too, and McDonald's should treat them as such. And you know, I barely touched on this last time, but I should say more about it: fast-food workers are-so skilled. It isn't just that people who call them "unskilled" would melt down before the pressure of drive-through; it's that, basically, Our Glorious Elites have always spent all their time cutting down working people, in every era. You know how we hold manufacturing workers in such high esteem today? We didn't when they were the backbone of our economy -- we said they were mere machine jockeys with jobs monkeys could do. Let's try to remember that next time we're tempted to give a cashier the side-eye.

Action: concerning good pandemic legislation, medical supplies, stock trading, and drilling royalties.

The House passed H.R. 6800, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (or HEROES) Act, last Friday night, but the Republican-held Senate has described the bill as "dead on arrival," even though (as a pair of ITEP analyses instructs us) the HEROES Act is a lot more like a good pandemic relief bill than the CARES Act. The HEROES Act provides help for states and localities, extends unemployment insurance, expands the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC), funds our Post Office through an election during which they'll be quite busy, repeals a particularly noxious tax-cut-for-the-rich, and expands direct payments to Americans making less than six figures. So now would be a good time to call your Senators and demand they pass the HEROES Act -- not least so that we render irrelevant Republican "priorities" like a payroll tax-cut-for-the-rich and "blanket immunity" for corporations that open too early. Senators should only find their constituents' will relevant, but let's not give them the excuse that we never communicated that will.

Meanwhile, we've all seen how our President likes to hijack medical supplies, to the point where hospitals have marked trucks containing medical supplies as food trucks so the feds wouldn't take them. But now comes S. 3627, the Medical Supply Transparency and Delivery Act, which would help bring an end to this Wild West state of affairs by requiring our government to coordinate requests for medical supplies from states and localities, establish fair pricing for these supplies, and communicate with states and localities a whole hell of a lot better than they've been doing. Don't suppose we shouldn't leave such matters to our federal government, particularly this one, but COVID-19 doesn't respect state boundaries, as all those too-early-reopening red states are finding out as we speak, amirite? So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to help get medical supplies where they're needed by passing the Medical Supply Transparency and Delivery Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. We've long heard that our leaders don't need to follow the rules because they can be trusted to do the right thing, but that's un-American, if I may be blunt -- our duty as Americans demands that we never "trust" our leaders, but always hold them to the high standards that come with their leadership positions! Of course, with our current President apparently running a months-long seminar in How Not to Lead, I guess it's easy to see how we got confused. But with the FBI now formally investigating Sen. Burr's massive stock dump after he received a briefing on how bad COVID-19 was about to be, and with too many other members of Congress (roll call! Kelly Loeffler! James Inhofe! Dianne Feinstein! Donna Shalala!) under public scrutiny for doing similar things, we should now have enough evidence that we can't trust our leaders to place our interests above their own.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Interior Secretary to stop cutting the royalties that oil and gas corporations must pay to drill on public lands, then Penn Environment still helps you do that. One fine day -- preferably after we support renewable energy much better than we currently do -- we won't allow any pollution on public lands! But until then, they shouldn't pay less to the taxpayer (i.e., you) for the privilege! That's right, when gas and oil corporations get to drill on the land that belongs to the American people, they have to pay the American people for the privilege -- which means if our government rolls back drilling royalties, they are taking food out of your mouth. No, I think that's a perfectly valid way of seeing it -- your money pays for the services you need and deserve, and when you have less money (as you would, if our Administration continues to get its way on this matter), you get fewer services or worse services. And you're an American! So you don't have to put up with that.

Action: concerning unemployment, energy policy, public water, and factory farms.

One of the few good things to come out of the CARES Act was an expansion of unemployment benefits; now guess what our government wants to get rid of ASAP? The benefits expire at the end of July, but given the jones so many of our elected leaders have to "reopen" the economy, we could be back in the middle of an unflattened curve by then. And some of them say it's OK if some folks die if we "reopen" the economy faster! Apparently they do not know the definition of "mammon-worship" anymore. But over 30 million folks are out of work, the official U3 unemployment rate is over 14% (and the real U6 unemployment rate, which also counts the discouraged and underemployed, is almost 23%), and not that many Americans will be rushing into Best Buy even if they all open up tomorrow, so I think we should be prudent and prepare for the likelihood that workers will be unemployed past July. Also, too, when the answer to every question is GOVERNMENT SHOULDZ DO TEH NOTHINGZ!!!!, it's well past time to look at the man in the mirror. The Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend the unemployment insurance boost past its original expiration date.

Meanwhile, too many politicians want future pandemic relief legislation to include corporate welfare handouts for big oil and gas corporations, and our Administration has rolled back oil and gas royalty rates on public lands even though that's our damn money! But along comes H.R. 6707/S. 3611, the Resources for Workforce Investments, Not Drilling (or ReWIND) Act, which would keep big fossil fuel corporations from taking funds meant for working families and small businesses, roll back our President's drilling royalty cuts, block new gas and oil leases, and stop banksters from taking over any oil or gas corporations in trouble. The bill would also prevent our Administration from overstocking oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, since seizing resources and directing them to where they're not needed seems to be a pattern with this President. And if right-wingers respond by whining about the bill's "Democrat priorities," they run the risk of suggesting that preventing corruption and mismanagement is only a "Democrat priority." So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner energy policy by passing the ReWIND Act.

In other news, Nestlé plans to siphon off yet another source of public water at pennies a gallon, in order to make absurdly more expensive and not significantly more convenient bottled water -- this time at Ginnie Springs in northwestern Florida, and this though Ginnie Springs is dangerously low, and largely from overpumping. As it happens, the Suwannee River Water Management District has already heeded the thousands of public comments it received on this matter, and has thus denied Nestlé any new permits -- but Nestlé, of course, is taking the matter to court, because, as we know, corporations never ever file frivolous lawsuits! Only injured people ever do that, with the help of mustache-twirling trial lawyers! That's what right-wingers say, anyway. But big corporations don't need to take public water in order to make bottled water; rather, our state, local, and federal governments need to manage water effectively on our behalf and with the tax dollars we pay them. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell Nestlé to abandon its plans to drain Ginnie Springs merely for mammon.

Finally, H.R. 6718/S. 3221, the Farm System Reform Act, would not only ban new factory farms and the expansion of current ones, but would phase out current factory farms over the next 20 years. Factory farms aren't a more efficient way of delivering meat to consumers than small family farms: they're just a more efficient way of clogging up public waters with animal manure, and a more efficient way of redistributing income upward to executives. And they're also a more efficient way of making antibiotics useless, since some seven out of every 10 antibiotics in America still go to nominally healthy feed animals, so they produce more meat and so they better endure the squalid conditions of their imprisonment. To those who would still cite "high food prices" as a reason not to end this sordid state of affairs, we need but ask: how did Americans ever get enough to eat before factory farms came along? We did it through saner farming policy, of course, and not "big ag corporations know best" policy. So Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support better agricultural policy by passing the Farm System Reform Act.

Action: concerning good House bills, defense spending corruption, conservation funding, and tax-cuts-for-the-rich.

Happy Tuesday! Now call your Senators and tell them to protect voting rights, internet freedom, secure pensions, higher wages, and many other good things by passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Yes, it's a pandemic, but the Senate is meeting, right now, to confirm some more right-wing anti-law-and-order federal judges, so certainly they can consider some good legislation while they're in town.

Meanwhile, our Defense Department has proposed rolling back the few protections we have against the "revolving" door between defense contracting corporations and our Defense Department, which is (at least nominally) supposed to consist of public servants. And I bet our right-wingers defend this action, claiming that "our President's getting rid of burdensome regulations" (as if laws against burglary "burden" thieves) or "the only people who understand defense spending are the ones who spend the money" (as if only thieves truly understand how you should dispose of your property!) or, perhaps, that you can trust this Administration to do the right thing, because our President is a "disruptor"! And there you have the real reason right-wingers might support such corruption -- because Their Man is doing it. Loyalty to people is always dicey, to say the least, but loyalty to our shared heritage as Americans (which includes our efforts to make America a more perfect union) will never let us down. So the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our Defense Department to scuttle its own efforts to increase defense spending corruption.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to reject the current version of HB 1822, which aims to cut funding for 16 worthwhile conservation funds, then the Sierra Club helps you do that. One thing the latest Sierra Club missive mentions that I didn't last time: a lot more good Pennsylvanians are visiting our public parks these days, because with all the shops and restaurants closed, our public parks are about the only place you can go outside, enjoy yourself, and practice physical distancing, so cutting funding for them is a profoundly stupid thing to do during a pandemic. Of course the pandemic is their excuse in the first place -- let's stop spending money on these things, because we don't have as much of it. If only our politicians had that eye toward corporate welfare in state budgets! But they don't: they'd cut what actually keeps good Pennsylvanians' air and water clean long before they'd cut some unearned tax break for some corporate crony who didn't even use it to create jobs! Unless we remind them that we are their bosses, of course.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to repeal tax-cuts-for-the-rich passed in the CARES Act, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. That would be the $130-billion-plus tax break that only 43,000 rich Americans get! At a time when over 30 million Americans have lost their jobs and likely their health insurance as well, meaning they face crunching household debts at a time when they have no income! But all that's what you get when you put a "businessman" in charge of our government -- particularly a "businessman" who only cares about other bosses, not regular folk like us. And our Administration continues to swing how utterly out of touch they are in our faces, by sending out Larry Kudlow-who's-wrong-about-everything to propose more tax breaks for tourism and sporting events and more business expensing tax breaks as a way to solve this ongoing economic Armageddon. I don't imagine good Americans standing in line just to get in the supermarket finding any of that persuasive. Unless Democrats don't offer superior reasoning, that is.

Action: concerning internet freedom, worker safety, and conservation in Pennsylvania.

Battle for the Net helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate the net neutrality rules it repealed back in 2017. Why now? Because with more Americans working from home and more schoolkids taking classes at home, we are seeing, in real time, why we need our FCC to force internet service providers to treat all of its network traffic with equal importance. FCC Chair Ajit Pai says he's watching to make sure big telecom corporations don't just kick people off, but thanks to his own ideological predilections, he has absolutely no power to make big telecoms treat us all well! He can only beg! And begging big corporations to do the right thing sure is a great look for our government, which exists, after all, to serve us -- better to make big corporations do the right thing, and then punish them if they don't! Because if history has taught us anything, it's taught us that big corporations won't do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do -- but we get much better results if we make them do the right thing.

Meanwhile, you may not know that our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) uses private contractors to staff its call centers! And you may not know that one of them -- a corporation called Maximus, operating a CDC call center in Hattiesburg, MS -- trained 70 newly-hired employees without following physical distancing rules, and surprise, surprise! At least one got infected. And then Maximus didn't provide protecting equipment to its employees, or allow enough of them to work from home though "call center operator" seems like an obvious work-from-home job! I'd call all that irony, except for the nagging sense that irony should be subtler than that. Hence Good Jobs Nation helps you tell CDC Director Robert Redfield to ensure that all workers who answer calls for the CDC be able to keep themselves safe during this pandemic. Not for nothing, but Mr. Redfield could do that a whole lot more easily if our government didn't keep outsourcing vital services to private corporations. Our government's supposed to work for us, after all.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Commonwealth's reactionary state legislature continues taking a reaper's scythe to any government program that might actually benefit people, now with HB 1822,which aims to slash the Environmental Stewardship Fund, the Conservation District Fund, and the Keystone Recreation, Park, and Conservation Fund, and if that seems like "too many funds" to you, consider how much money our state gives away in corporate welfare to gas and coal, and consider how often legislators slash funding for good conservation programs over the years just so they can one day argue "hey, let's get rid of it, no one'll miss it." You'll miss the clean air, clean water, and parks to go hiking, fishing, and hunting in, I can guarantee you that! So let's not be like the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water who doesn't realize he's cooked until it's too late. HB 1822 has already passed the House but awaits a Senate vote, hence the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state Senator to protect conservation funding by rejecting HB 1822.

Action: concerning taking care of Americans during a pandemic.

All the trillions of dollars Congress hands out and they still don't protect good Americans who, through no fault of their own but certainly through great fault of their President, don't have jobs and thus can't pay their utility bills. More than a few localities have imposed moratoria on evictions and water shut-offs, but this pandemic is everywhere, so why not protect everyone? And this isn't a matter of giving "handouts" to people who don't deserve it -- like I said, they didn't ask to get laid off! And Congress hasn't had any problem giving out massive handouts to big corporations (under the guise of "helping small businesses," no less!), so maybe it's time to start protecting people. Hence both the Sierra Club and Consumer Reports help you tell your Congressfolk to make sure good Americans don't get their utilities shut off during a pandemic. Consumer Reports makes another good point: as good Detroit residents still have trouble getting their water turned back on, big corporations like Pepsi and Coke were taking public water, selling it, running up far larger unpaid water bills, and getting precisely zero shutoff notices. It's a shame we have to remind the politicians that they work for us, but we'll keep reminding them.

Meanwhile, you know what else good Americans need now that they can't send their kids to school and they're either not working or working from home? Internet access, that's what. I guess right-wingers will say is this going to be yet another thing we just hand out for free? Of course, that formulation describes precisely none of the services our government delivers, since we pay for them, with our tax money. And even though our FCC disagrees, the best way to look at our internet is as a utility, not a content provider (like, say, Facebook), since it supplies the entire community with something it needs -- information. Kids have to go to school over the internet now, for example, and we already charge our various state, local, and federal governments with the task of educating our children, so how can we deny internet service to anyone during a pandemic? Particularly since the internet bill is yet another bill people can't pay when they don't have jobs? Of course, internet service providing corporations tend to be private, and they deserve some competition from state and local governments (i.e., community broadband) on that front, but in the meantime, Battle for the Net helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure all Americans have internet access.

Finally, big food processing corporations have suffered enough work stoppages due to the pandemic that a spokeshack for one of them, Tyson Foods, has come out and said, and I quote, "the food supply chain is breaking." And I know a lot of right-wingers would cite exactly that statement as proof that we just can't give workers paid sick leave right now, but, as usual, the opposite is true: if "the food supply chain is breaking," that's precisely the time to ensure that workers have paid sick leave, so they can take time off, get themselves better, and -- I keep saying this, and I hope people are finally getting it -- not make other people sick. I keep saying this, too: if you fire a worker for being sick, you then have to replace that worker, and you have to find someone willing and able to do the work, and you have to train them to do the work, and a lot of bosses have come around to the notion that it's better for business to just give your workers paid sick time instead of churning them over constantly. And while Tyson sounds the alarm over the food chain breaking, they're not taking care of their own very well, hence MoveOn helps you tell Tyson to give its workers paid sick leave.

Action: concerning good works, bad tax policy, and good farm worker policy.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. At least one observer has said that our House passed all these bills so they could give the impression they "did something," without having actually done anything. But if we pressure our Senators to pass these bills, and then pressure our President to sign them, then we've done something, which is the whole point of a democracy.

Meanwhile, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Reps and Senators and demand that they repeal the millionaire tax break Congress slipped into the CARES Act. How does this tax-cut-for-the-rich work? It allows hedge fund managers and real estate speculators -- and why not just describe both occupations as "speculators? -- to avoid taxation by shifting their present-day losses to prior years, which would enable them to refile those years' tax returns and get a big refund check -- and by big, I mean an average of $1.6 million. So how does that $1200 stimulus check look to you now? Repealing the tax break would save at least $170 billion annually, and, perhaps more importantly, would send the message that speculators are not the most important people in America. Maybe people who, you know, actually make good products and provide good services are more important than the folks who make our economy into their version of Draft Kings. They've been saying for years that speculators do really important work, but if you've attended bankster behavior over the years, you know the most important thing they do is teach us how not to be.

Finally, the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell our Congressfolk to protect our farm workers during this pandemic. That means fair wages, paid sick leave, paid family leave, and better worker safety protections, among other things, and don't be the one who says they're just a bunch of illegals anyway, so who cares? People are people regardless of the status of their green card, particularly during a pandemic, which is the moment a great nation rises up and proves its greatness, amirite? And you don't prove your greatness by hair-splitting over whom you help. Besides which, as I keep saying, letting farm workers unionize under the National Labor Relations Act would solve all of these problems -- they could better get the wage and safety protections they deserve, and big corporations couldn't drive wages down by bringing foreign workers in. A lot of our problems have very easy solutions -- if our politicians would but solve them! Of course they don't solve them because their big donors have told them not to. That's why we have to make them solve them.

Action: concerning good House bills, the right to repair, Congressional corruption, and food safety.

It's Wednesday morning, so call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Our Senate will claim it has more important things to do than protect voting rights, equal rights, worker wages, internet freedom, and public lands, but it's bollocksed up that one more important thing (i.e., pandemic policy) it has to do, plus they actually do have time to pass good House bills. We'll need to communicate our will en masse to convince them of that, though, so let's get to it.

Meanwhile, our President is doing his damnedest to keep ventilators from getting where they need to go (i.e., versus where he thinks he can get more votes), but he ain't the only one: ventilator manufacturing corporations act like everything's a big trade secret and so they make it almost prohibitively difficult for hospitals to fix broken ones. It ain't like hospitals don't have people on staff who spend all day fixing machines, either -- a lot of things in a hospital can break, and a lot of very handy people do the work of keeping them going. Hence Color of Change helps you tell ventilator manufacturing corporations to let hospitals fix the ventilators they have, by releasing manuals, schematics, software, and other repair aids. Color of Change reminds us that -- contra what some observers tell us, that our President's votaries are the ones who are really going to suffer from his managerial incompetence/malice -- that COVID-19 has hit communities of color the hardest, and those communities tend to vote against our President. Gosh, if I didn't know better, I'd say he planned it that way. But let's fight for better health care management -- on every front.

In other news, at least four Senators dumped stock they owned right after hearing how bad the coronavirus pandemic was going to get -- and a few of them went out of their way to reassure their constituents that it wasn't going to be so bad! -- but somehow these Senators (of whom Richard Burr of North Carolina is perhaps the most famous now) have not resigned their offices in shame and humiliation. I'm old enough to remember when the scent of corruption was enough to send a Senator to an early retirement! Since our Senators clearly can't be trusted anymore, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban Congressfolk from trading any individual stocks while they serve their constituents in office. Don't brook any silliness about how you can "trust" Congressfolk to know the difference between right and wrong. Obviously we can't! And it's not our job to "trust" our representatives so much as it's our job to ensure they serve us. I mean, you wouldn't want to think they just create crises all the time so they can benefit financially from them, would you?

Finally, our USDA has been granting way too many waivers to big chicken processing corporations so they can speed up their inspection lines even faster! You can imagine the problem: speeding up slaughter lines allows more pus, more blood, more bile, and more pathogens to get by inspectors and get into your chicken parm. When our government allows a corporation to have one federal inspector doing three chickens per second -- or, worse, when our government allows a corporation to self-regulate its own safety inspections! -- well, that's not "relieving corporations of unnecessary regulatory burdens," that's relieving consumers of the healthy meat they expect to buy at the supermarket! Food poisoning, as you know, still makes the news virtually every time it happens; I'm just spitballing here, but that might be because people don't want their food to kill them or their loved ones. So Food and Water Watch helps you tell our USDA to stop making it easier for food processing corporations to make us sick with their meat.

Action: concerning good House bills and better health care policy.

Happy Monday! It's time once again to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. The House has passed a lot of good legislation that would protect voting rights, internet freedom, consumer safety, and working family wages (among many other things!), and the fact that Senate Republicans hate all of that should be immaterial. But it'll only be immaterial if we act.

Meanwhile, if this pandemic has taught us anything, it's taught us that our health care system -- which covers fewer people while still spending more money than just about any other developed nation -- needs an overhaul, and in poll after poll after poll most Americans support overhauling it by expanding Medicare to include all Americans. Now the haters love to tell you that this support falls after folks "realize they'll have to pay more in taxes for it," but that's rubbish from supposition to conclusion, since even right-wing think tanks tell us we'll save money under a Medicare-for-All system, and Sen. Warren's plan for funding Medicare-for-All would literally capture all that money we're currently spending on health care and use it to fund Medicare. And get more bang for our buck, frankly! Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Medicare-for-All legislation. After all, if unemployment goes up to 30%, and most folks get their health insurance through their employer, well, you can see the problem, I trust.

Finally, speaking of that problem, we can, in the short term, reopen Affordable Care Act enrollment to handle all the applications we're going to get anyway, but of course our President has already said he's not doing no way no how, since TEH OBAMACAREZ MUSTZ BE DESTROYEDZ AT ANYZ OF TEH COSTZ!!!!!! I'm pretty sure I have described the level of reasoning behind his decision fairly precisely. 17 million unemployment claims in three weeks is a literally unprecedented event, and that means up to 17 million more uninsured. Yes, the law already allows you to apply for health insurance via the ACA exchanges outside the regular enrollment window if you lose your job, but maybe our government would do better to have a Special Enrollment period, given the sheer number of applications they're about to get? Unless, of course, this Administration wants to fuck everything up. Even if they do, their "will" matter less than ours, and duty is duty, so Daily Kos helps you tell our government to reopen ACA enrollment to handle the coming onslaught of applications.

Action: concerning good House bills, good coronavirus policy, and bad media coverage.

Because we don't give up, it's time once again to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). When our Congressfolk have other priorities -- like giving away as much taxpayer money they haven't even collected yet amirite? to corporate cronies as possible -- it's time to get them focused on the important things, like voting rights, internet freedom, public lands, and health care. So let's get to it.

Speaking of the important things, the pandemic took the lives of at least seven folks in federal custody last week, and if you think that's no big loss, please do the following things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that five of them were there on drug charges, and we should be curing drug addicts, not putting them in jail, 3) consider that at least two of these had high-risk health conditions almost sure to kill them if they got the virus, and 4) prisoners can't freaking practice any form of physical distancing and once one prisoner gets infected, pretty much all of them are at risk -- and that would include all kinds of people the state is detaining without having convicted of a crime. But now H.R. 6400/S. 3579, the Emergency Community Supervision Act, would reduce the kind of overcrowding that leads to mass graves by releasing certain prisoners into community supervision -- not violent prisoners, since right-wingers are no doubt already claiming the bill would do that. So the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to practice both mercy and pragmatic public policy by passing the Emergency Community Supervision Act.

Finally, MoveOn helps you tell the big news corporations to stop covering our President's live coronavirus updates. It's a shame it's come to that, but it has, and when they say but it's news whenever the President says something, they're helping to ensure we live in a society where we all think our President is more important than we are. Well, he's not -- especially this one, amirite? Our news organs will also tell us that we're supposed to treat daily updates from our government about a pandemic with some importance. To which I respond: I wish our President would treat those daily updates about this pandemic with some importance! To him, it's just another opportunity to take all the credit for the good, blame everyone else for the bad, and otherwise act like a damn drama king. And the news already gives us too damn much drama! Our "liberal" media would also do well to learn that their job isn't covering the news passively so much as it's telling us the truth. If covering our President's clown car act gets in the way of the truth, then they need to stop covering it.

Action: concerning good House bills, internet freedom, and voting rights.

It's once again time to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). Why do I keep harping about these things in the middle of a pandemic? Because protecting voting rights and health care and public lands and internet freedom actually sustain us in pandemics and help us avoid future pandemics! So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, Free Press helps you tell big telecom corporations to provide cheap or free unlimited internet service during this pandemic. You've no doubt been inside a lot during this pandemic, so you've likely been, ah, availing yourself of the various entertainment our internet easily provides, but that's not the only reason to press for super-affordable internet during a pandemic -- you're likely to get most of your information about how to fight the pandemic via our internet, and why would we make such a thing too expensive for some people? Unless we're cruel and heartless, that is. If you've been attending this argument, you'll no doubt wonder why we don't regulate our internet like a public utility! The answer, of course, is that we did -- until this President got elected, and decided that anything the previous President did that actually helped people should be shat upon, and so he put his cronies in at the FCC and they stopped regulating the internet as a utility. In the absence of sound public policy, the people must resort to shame.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state elected officials to ensure we can all vote by mail during this election season, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. While it's true that voting by mail is a good response to folks' fears that they'll get coronavirus from the voting booth, it's also true that voting by mail solves a number of other vote suppression hurdles people face -- there ain't long lines when you vote by mail, and there ain't no voting machines to "lose" your vote (or switch your vote to some other candidate!) when you vote by mail. Voting by mail doesn't necessarily address gerrymandering or caging, but that's why we're also telling our Senators to pass H.R. 1 (the For the People Act) and H.R. 4 (the Voting Rights Advancement Act). It may be giving them too much credit to say so, but this Administration may have hit on the ultimate vote suppression scheme -- the pandemic that'll scare people into staying home even when it's over! But voting by mail can help defeat such a scheme.

Action: concerning good House bills, insider trading, and sanctions against Iran.

It's time to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). I know, I know, Congress is too busy working on a bailout, er, stimulus bill to pass all these good bills the House has already passed. Well, tough toodles! If they don't like us telling them what to do, they can always find another job.

Meanwhile, as you no doubt know, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) dumped over $1.5 million in stocks while getting daily briefs on the threat of a pandemic, well before the U.S. stock market tanked, and after telling the public things were going fine! Nice work if you can get it! And apparently he wasn't not the only one! Sens. Loeffler (R-GA), Inhofe (R-OK), and Feinstein (D-CA) also dumped a crapload of stock at around the same time. Now, none of these four Senators are stupid people, so maybe we can't actually convict them of insider trading in a court of law. Still, I'm old enough to remember when a Senator would rather resign than face the appearance of corruption, and maybe that's a time we need to bring back; we sure would have better Senators if we did. In the meantime, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban government officials from trading in individual stocks while they hold office.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell Treasury Secretary Mnuchin to suspend sanctions against Iran for the next 120 days. Why? Because the pandemic is hitting Iran harder than us right now and economic sanctions tend to prevent things like ventilators from ever getting to Iran. And why else? Because we don't need to be imposing sanctions on Iran at all! Our President reimposed sanctions on Iran after unilaterally pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal which was working I say for the 40th time, all so he could pretend to be tough. There's really nothing deeper at work with this guy; he loves looking tough, though having been a millionaire literally since the age of 8 he's never worked a job in his life that could have actually made him tough. And now innocent Iranians have to die so he can look tough? Yes, Iranians are also suffering because they, too, have a government that likes looking tough when it's actually full of weaklings. But we have more control over our government, and little over theirs -- unless anyone has a time machine we can take back to 1953 to prevent the CIA-aided overthrow of Mr. Mossadegh.

Action: concerning health care, encryption, banksters, and conservation funding.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to ensure that all Americans will be able to get a coronavirus vaccine if they need it. What does that mean, exactly? It means the coronavirus vaccine can't cost $700 a pop, for one -- in fact, it shouldn't cost the taxpayer any damn money at all, since it's, you know, a life-saving medicine. There's a reason I put "the taxpayer" in that sentence, of course, and that's because taxpayer money funds a lot of drug research and development in America, so certainly no big pharma corporation should have the "right" to charge an arm and a leg for something we all helped pay for. Sound "socialist" to you? Then don't take medicines, don't drive roads, don't call the cops, and don't take books out from the library, because if you do, then you are a socialist, and there are hypocrisies I won't abide. This is life and death, folks, and this everyone-for-themselves-make-all-the-money ideology we have ain't no hill to die on, figuratively or literally.

Meanwhile, Congress is contemplating S. 3398, the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (or EARN IT) Act, and if some overpaid and overfed Senator tells you that you have to "earn it," you should be skeptical. And so it goes with the EARN IT Act, which would, in the name of "preventing exploitation of children," destroy encryption in the United States by giving our Attorney General the power to shut down websites and applications if he doesn't like how big tech corporations are moderating the content that crosses their wires -- which, for this Attorney General, definitely means going after encryption. He said so! I think big tech corporations should act more like publishing houses than message board flame wars, but not by taking away a power we're all going to need more of in the future if Our Glorious Elites keep trying to destroy us. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to preserve our freedoms by rejecting the EARN IT Act.

In other news, our Administration wants to use the coronavirus pandemic to do a great deal of harm to the American people -- not just in their notorious "payroll tax holiday," a way of ending all payroll taxes (and thus Social Security and Medicare) if ever there was one, but also in letting big banksters evade the few requirements they have to prove they can actually survive a serious economic downtown. So Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to shut down any Administration attempt to ease regulations on banksters. It's not like banksters got more popular over the last 12 years, amirite? And it's certainly not like they've ever shown any penitence over what they did in 2008, or have taken steps to make sure it doesn't happen again -- all they've done is put more numbers on the roulette wheel. But, you know, this President thinks rules and regulations are only for little people like us, not big people like him. That's why we have to tell our Congressfolk what to do.

Finally, Congress did permanently reauthorize the existence of the Land and Water Conservation Fund last year, which was actually kind of unexpected -- but they still have to authorize its funding, for even though the Fund nominally gets its money from gas and oil drilling royalties on public lands, not only do certain Administrations think reducing royalties owed to the public is "sound policy," but Congressfolk do like to raid the Fund for other purposes. Also, this Administration's proposed budget would have cut funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund by a staggering 97%. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund so that it can actually, you know, conserve public lands and water sources. We wouldn't have the Grand Canyon, the Delaware Water Gap, or the Appalachian Trail without the Fund, and we should be proud of these things -- and we should be ashamed to steal from the Fund to compensate for our shortsightedness elsewhere.

Action: concerning good House bills and good coronavirus policy.

It's, well, close enough to Monday that it's time to call your Senators again and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). No, we do not excuse the Senate from doing the right thing because of the pandemic! They use anything as an excuse to ignore the people's will! And they'll continue to do so until we make it impossible for them to do so -- and that means a lot more phone calls.

Meanwhile, you know how they tell us we should wash our hands more frequently now to stop the spread of the coronavirus? It's good advice -- and it's advice people literally can't follow if their water's turned off. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to mandate that localities can't shut off folks' water service during the coronavirus pandemic. If you're tempted to think of this as a way of coddling people who should have paid their water bills, please do the following things: a) slap yourself; b) contemplate whether death is a suitable punishment for failure to pay your water bill; c) contemplate more fully the absurdity that some folks buy penthouse apartments just to leave them empty for tax purposes while most folks don't make enough money to pay all their bills all the time; and d) contemplate more fully that when some folks can't wash their hands, all of us still face the threat of getting the coronavirus. See? It's not about helping freeloaders; it's about helping all of us. If you still don't see that, repeat steps a) through d) until you do.

Finally, in the wake of the news that New York Governor Andrew "the Lesser" Cuomo (D) would pay prisoners less than a dollar a day to manufacture hand sanitizer, Color of Change helps you tell Gov. Cuomo to try more humane policies in dealing with prisoners at risk of coronavirus. It's not like they can even use hand sanitizer in prisons, since the state's own laws would regard it as "contraband"! (Hand sanitizers contain over 60% alcohol, as you may know.) Hence you would call for Gov. Cuomo to end forced labor in prisons and institute a living wage for prisoners, stop blocking cash bail reform and thus stop artificially boosting prison populations, and grant clemency to the most immunocompromised prisoners (who will not necessarily then come to your door and cough on you, if you're of the paranoid stripe). I know a lot of folks would oppose such moves because they're mean to criminals as a way of feeling less insecure about themselves, but if we can't be humane to those who have injured our civilization and thus been put in prison, then we can't be humane, period. And I would like to think better of us than that.

Action: concerning good bills and bad leadership.

Happy Monday, good citizens! It's time to call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment (and thus, in theory, smooth its entry into our Constitution). These are excellent bills that would secure our voting rights, protect our public lands, protect us from predatory health insurance corporations, and restore real internet freedom -- among many other good works! But of course our Senate runs on Mitch McConnell time, which is "never." So tell them they need to run on Do the Right Thing time, which is now.

Meanwhile, the notorious Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act -- which authorizes various federal agencies to spy on citizens without offering us the due process of law our Constitution requires -- expires on March 15, and you know what your Congressfolk are like: they're scaredy-cats who would rather let good Americans lose our rights than take a stand that'd be unpopular with the bullies among Our Glorious Elites. This, even though our own NSA shut down its metadata surveillance program last year! And word on the street is that Congressional leaders might use a coronavirus spending bill as the vehicle to ram through an extension or reauthorization of Section 215, which would be an act of unconscionable cowardice. And rather than wait for Rand Paul to stand up for our freedoms -- although, to be fair, he's gotten some of our freedoms back with his machinations in the past -- we should stand up for them. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to reauthorize Section 215 without reforms that would protect our rights, especially if they try to use the coronavirus as cover. Seriously, no one who would do such a thing should ever be allowed near an elective office ever again. Both Democrats and Republicans should attend that statement.

Finally, The Other 98 helps you tell our Administration to remove Vice President Pence from his position overseeing the American response to the coronavirus. All ye need know about Mr. Pence's ability to manage a crisis is that while Governor of Indiana, he let an HIV mini-epidemic spread in rural Scott County rather than let that county run a needle exchange program, arguing for two years that needle exchange programs encourage drug addiction, which, like, no it does not. And now he goes on Pravda TV and tells everyone what a great job he did for Scott County, since he did ultimately relent and allow needle exchange programs in Scott county two years later, which sure will comfort the families of those who died in the meantime. So we have an executive who knows nothing, thinks he knows everything, and then lies about his record of knowing nothing and thinking he knows everything -- gosh, it's like we learned nothing from George W. Bush. And not for nothing, but maybe, just maybe, if our President really wants to get the coronavirus under control, he should stop whining about how everyone's out to get him. People hate leaders who whine about the jobs they signed up for. They also hate leaders who make everything about themselves all the time, like our lives are their big drama.

Action: concerning good House bills, good housing policy, and bad Justice Department behavior.

Happy Monday, good folks! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, and H.J.Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. Don't worry about giving your Senators' staffers too much to write down, because if they truly aimed to do the people's will, they'd have debated and passed these bills already. After all, it's been over a year since all Senate clocks got set to "Mitch McConnell Time" -- i.e., "never" -- and we're on Do the Right Thing Time, which is now, and our Senators should set their clocks like we do.

Meanwhile, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has introduced H.R. 5072, called A Just Society: A Place to Prosper Act. The Place to Prosper Act would institute several necessary housing reforms: it would establish a national rent control program prohibiting landlords from jacking up rent higher than inflation (unless inflation is under three percent, in which case they could increase rent by three percent); it would amend the Fair Housing Act by preventing discrimination on the basis of income; it would fund removal of lead paint from public housing; and it would keep landlords who routinely abuse tenants out of the running for various forms of public funding (including public mortgages and public housing insurance). If you cringe at the words "rent control," just ask yourself: should landlords be allowed to squeeze tenants with virtual impunity? Particularly in areas of the country (cough California New York City cough) where housing prices are absurdly high to begin with? The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect Americans from predatory landlords by passing the Place to Prosper Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Justice Department's Inspector General to investigate the apparently pro-Presidential machinations of Attorney General Barr, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. I mean, we ought to use Inspectors General while we still can -- our President has already tried to get rid of all the Inspectors General in our government, and if he gets re-elected, he'll no doubt feel emboldened to try again. And our Inspectors General have long done good, independent work on our behalf, and the DOJ's IG would have quite a hornet's nest to probe where Mr. Barr is concerned -- he intervened to demand a lower sentence for Presidential crony Roger Stone, which action prompted four DOJ prosecutors to resign; he tried blocking an investigation into a money laundering case apparently at the behest of our President; and he used outside lawyers to review various DOJ actions our President opposed, including the indictment of then-NSA chief Michael Flynn and the non-indictment of former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe. Ain't none of this a good look for the President who constantly yells about "law and order," and we deserve real law and order in America.

Action: concerning good House bills and bad government policy.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. This week we add H.J.Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment, and (sorry this got by me!) H.R. 397, the Rehabilitation for Multiemployer Pensions Act (a.k.a. the Butch Lewis Act), which would help save at-risk pension funds and thus the workers who depend on them. I know the Senate's on Mitch McConnell Time (i.e., "never"), but we're on Do the Right Thing Time, which is always now, so let's get to it.

Meanwhile, we managed to (mostly) beat back a Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing proposal to use "risk assessment tools" when sentencing criminals, and if you thought about it (or saw Minority Report!), you'd see that you can't just use the past to predict the future like that, and you'd also see that taking data like "past encounters with law enforcement" into account when sentencing would hurt folks of color and poor folks the most, since our justice system seems to accuse and imprison a disproportionate number of these. Now our Commission wants to use a risk assessment tool just for domestic violence cases, which, again, sounds good, particularly when you consider how difficult it seems to be to get domestic abusers convicted, but you can easily imagine a Commission saying well, it worked so well there (whether it does or not!), so now let's expand it to all the other areas! And they're trying to slip this proposal by us a bit, which never recommends a proposal. Hence the ACLU helps you tell the Commission to scrap their latest "risk assessment tool" proposal. Because if our laws don't protect all of us, we're all in danger.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Administration not to enact regulatory changes that would essentially gut the National Environmental Protection Act, then the Union of Concerned Scientists still helps you do that. The NEPA mandates that our government tell the public about proposed drilling, mining, and logging projects on public lands, and also requires our government to conduct analyses of the impact of these projects on clean air, clean water, and climate. The NEPA also requires our government to take public comments on these matters. Now guess which three things our Administration wants to "streamline" as far out of existence as possible? Always when they say they're "streamlining" they're really streamlining us out of our own democracy, and not so that they can "create jobs" or "relieve" corporations of "unnecessary burdens," but so they can make their cronies richer. They don't care about you, and they don't care about me -- they only care about other bosses, and their "right" to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. But we care about each other, and we care about our country, so we can fight them and, ultimately, beat them.

Action: concerning public water, discrimination, and facial recognition.

At last, Michigan's government may be ready to rein in Nestlé's mad drive to siphon off public water at pennies a gallon in order to sell bottled water at dollars a pint, as three bills -- HB 5290, HB 5291, and HB 5292 -- would, respectively, bring the state's water under the public trust, ban the sale of bottled water outside of the Great Lakes area, and expand two state agencies' ability to protect public water. I guess right-wingers will squeal about bans and burdensome regulations, but let's read over the first phrase of the first sentence again: is there really nothing wrong with taking the state's public water at pennies a gallon and then selling it as bottled water at dollars a pint? Right-wingers would call that "capitalism," as if any conceivable money-making scheme is moral simply because it makes someone some money. But I would call it "stealing," and assert that ensuring everyone can have access to clean water is actually moral. Hence Sum of Us helps you tell Michigan state legislators to protect their state's public water.

Meanwhile, our Administration wants to expand "religious" exemptions under Title IX far beyond what common sense would require. Currently Title IX -- which states that "(n)o person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance" -- carves out limited exceptions for religious schools, but our Administration would of course allow anyone to claim any sort of exception based merely on their own "religious" "conscience." And when I tell them the kind of world my "religious" "conscience" would entitle me to have -- I've spoken about that matter at some length -- I bet they'd rush to tell me "well, that's different," or "your conscience is worse than my conscience!" At which point reasonable people would agree that Title IX should stay the way it is. So the National Women's Law Center helps you tell our Department of Education to scuttle its own pro-discrimination proposal to essentially gut Title IX.

Finally, you know facial recognition is evil technology, not just because it's one more tool that unscrupulous governmental and corporate actors use to snoop on good Americans, but also because it's bad at its stated purpose, all too frequently mixing black people up even more than your Tea Party uncle does. But tech corporations keep trying to find new markets for their lousy wares, and now they're eyeing schools. Can you say "school-to-prison pipeline," boys and girls? You would think that the debacle at the Iowa Democratic Presidential Caucus this past week would give bad "technological solutions" a permanent black eye, but then politicians of both parties love bad technology, and the big campaign donation money that inevitably comes with it. On the other hand, those of us who love freedom can tell our Congressfolk to prohibit schools from using facial recognition technology, as Demand Progress helps us do. Hey, we're never going to get them to do the right thing if we don't tell them to do the right thing.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, unconstitutional war-making, and freedom of the press.

It's Monday morning, and you know what that means: it's time to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. You may be tiring of telling your Senators to pass these bills, but the more they hear from us, the more embarrassed they'll be -- and the more they'll swing our way, as is their damn job. They need to hear from us that we want bills that protect voting rights, working families, public lands, disadvantaged minorities, and internet freedom. And they need to suffer the consequences of standing against these things -- you know, like losing their jobs.

Meanwhile, our President has declared that the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF), which authorized war with Iraq, also authorizes war with Iran! And that's reason enough to let Demand Progress help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 AUMF -- because all this open-ended authority for the Executive branch to wage war isn't a good thing, and certainly isn't how our Founders envisioned our government running. They envisioned Congress declaring war, after all, and the fact that Congress has largely abdicated that duty since the end of World War II doesn't change that fact, and certainly doesn't change what's right or what works. I wish I could say that our current President's claim was the most absurd claim I've heard from a recent President over his authority to bomb wherever he likes, but sadly, it's not -- President Obama's claim that various AUMFs gave him authority to strike in Libya and Syria were, frankly, more strained, and if our current President's votaries weren't so good at letting their pride erase their memory, they'd see that their Personal Lord and Savior is wrong, too. I'm not going to lay money on that happening any time soon, but I'd be happy to be wrong about that.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell the Brazilian government to drop cybercrime charges against journalist Glenn Greenwald. Mr. Greenwald's website, The Intercept, published articles last year exposing the infamous Brazilian "corruption" probe -- one which happened to put a lot of liberal politicians in jail, and just so happened to put the current President's opponent in jail while the campaign was going on! -- as an utter sham, and for that, the Brazilian government has arrested him. I like to believe folks are deeper than they seem, so I wish there were more to it than that, but there's not -- journalists who actually practice journalism, and expose the folly and venality of Our Glorious Elites, are more likely to wind up in jail than banksters who foreclose on grandmothers overdue by 27 cents on their mortgage. Of course, Brazil has laws, too, so they can't just put a journalist in jail for publishing leaked or hacked info; they have to insinuate that Mr. Greenwald somehow aided the hackers. But I'll believe the journalist who exposed government misdeeds over the government embarrassed by those misdeeds any day. It's not like we have a lot of journalists left, after all.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, Social Security, and public water.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. Bills that protect voting rights, health care, clean water, worker wages, and public lands (among other good things!) shouldn't have so much trouble passing in the Senate. And the more we demand they pass those bills, the more likely it'll be that they pass. Hey, it's not like Our Glorious Elites or their media enablers want them to pass! So it's up to us.

Meanwhile, our Administration wants to cut Social Security disability insurance, and will take comments on their proposal until January 31, so both Social Security Works and Moms Rising help you tell our Administration to scuttle their proposal. President Reagan tried cutting SSDI benefits for hundreds of thousands of people in the '80s, and helped cause over 20,000 deaths; he ultimately reversed course after public pressure, but that sure didn't help those 20,000-plus dead folk, did it? Our current President no doubt will yell and scream about making sure the people who actually deserve it get what they need, but everyone thinks of "those people" as "undeserving," and when we do that we're generally unaware that other people look at us exactly the same way! And our President's votaries seem to have more serious trouble realizing that these Social Security disability cuts could very easily affect them. And, really, folks who try to convince me SSDI is rife with fraud and abuse love to cite individual stories, but, as Neal Gabler has said, three incidents of chicken pox don't constitute an epidemic.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Suwannee River Water Management District to keep notorious water-bottling corporation Nestlé from pumping out over a million gallons a day from the Ginnie Springs along the Santa Fe River, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. We could go on about the cypress trees and underwater caves and species of turtles at Ginnie Springs, but let's keep it simple: why are we letting private corporations take public water for pennies a gallon so they can sell it for dollars a pint? That's rock-stupid, and it's not the "genius" of the "free market," either, since it requires governmental capitulation in order to work. Clean water is one of the great achievements of the last 150 years, and it does not belong to some corporation like Nestlé; it is our achievement, as a civilization. And it is kind of amusing that the corporate drive to undermine this achievement needs public water to work. Ultimately, though, it also needs public acquiescence to work, and we don't have to give them that.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, Mississippi prisons, and impeachment.

Happy Monday! Today you can call your Senators and ask them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. These bills have all passed the House, and would (among other things!) protect voting rights, fight discrimination, raise the minimum wage, protect immigrants, protect our public lands, reinstate real internet freedom, and help good Americans get better health care -- but Mob Boss Mitch won't let any of them come to a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." He's wrong -- we tell our Senators what they want, and if we tell them enough times, they do it.

Meanwhile, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate prison conditions in Mississippi. It's so bad in Mississippi prisons that it's even made the news! Our "liberal" media, of course, would rather talk about celebrities than about brown drinking water and no air conditioning in prisons, but human beings are suffering and dying, and no it doesn't matter that they're criminals! Jesus Mary and Joseph rights are for all people, and mercy is for all people, and a civilization that treats its prisoners well is a strong one, and a civilization that treats them badly is a weak one. Yes, that is the opposite of what the "tough on crime" crowd has been telling you all these years, but they were always weaklings, preying on our various insecurities. Hate to pile on, but no "rehabilitation" will happen if you can't breathe or eat healthy food or drink clean water. And folks who would call that "prisoners living the high life" really need to start with the man in the mirror.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to conduct a fair impeachment trial. That would include documents and witnesses, of course, and you'll never guess what then-Rep./now-Sen. Lindsey Graham said back in 1999, when he was anxious to remove a Democratic President: "in every trial that there's ever been in the Senate, regarding impeachment, witnesses were called," and not calling them against President Clinton would have "basically chang(ed) impeachment." But wait, there's more! "You can have three days of lawyers talking to each other on both sides...but when you have a witness who was there, who was engaged in it, who was in the middle of it telling you about what they were doing and why, that's a totally different case, and it's the difference between getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Maybe he'll explain this flip-flop -- or, after the manner of his new Personal Lord and Savior, he'll say you're an idiot for noticing it.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, discrimination, internet freedom, and a host of other issues.

Happy New Year, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act. All you need do in your phone call is tell your Senators to pass these bills -- you need not explain your will, you only need deliver it, and in my experience Congressional staffers don't make a habit of challenging your will; it's their job to pass your will to your Senators. Nonetheless, I'll explain in some detail why we should pass these bills, since (also in my experience) we feel better when we call if we have more to say than we have to.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would allow national automatic voter registration, require disclosure of large campaign contributions, create a public campaign financing system, make Election Day a national holiday, and mandate that states use nonpartisan commissions to draw up districts -- all things we've been fighting for in other bills over the years. Automatic voter registration, in particular, would automatically register a lot of folks when they move, since they'll have to change their driver's license (if they have one) when they move, and that will help counter state efforts to de-register people they "suspect" have moved. Not too many Americans actually favor "more big money campaign ads" or "more secret corporate involvement in political campaigns" -- most Americans, in fact, will tell you these things are evil. It often seems like the only people who don't think they're evil, in fact, are the ones who rely on secret corporate campaign donations to survive at the polls. But why should they get all the say about everything? Is that the world we would have made?

H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Act, isn't perfect, but our agitation for a better bill prompted some members of Congress to demand (and get) improvements; H.R. 3, as passed by the House, would allow Medicare to negotiate prices and upwards of 25 brand-name drugs that don't have any competition from generic drugs. H.R. 3 would also cap such drug prices at either the average drug price of six other developed nations or (if that info isn't available, i.e., because a drug is only available in America) 85% of the current American drug prices. If the Senate wants to amend the bill so that it lets Medicare negotiate for all drugs on the market, well, I won't complain -- indeed, bills from Sens. Sanders (I-VT) and Warren (D-MA) would be considerably more comprehensive than H.R. 3. But I don't let the perfect murder the good, either, so H.R. 3 deserves your support. Remember that when Senators say the "free market" should be allowed to work its will, it's OK to remind them that the market's "will" is apparently for good Americans to die because they can't afford insulin for their diabetes or an EpiPen for anaphylactic shock.

H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew in the Voting Rights Act in its Shelby County v. Holder ruling. Our Court said that singling out Southern states for pre-clearance of state-level voting law changes was unfair to them, but our Court also said that a different pre-clearance formula that didn't single out Southern states would likely pass their muster. Hence H.R. 4 would subject any state or locality with a demonstrated history of voting rights violations to federal pre-clearance, which would only "single out" Southern states if they're the ones doing the most vote suppression! Sadly, vote suppression is a national sport now, reaching as far north as Wisconsin (where folks of color somehow get targeted by de-registration efforts far more than white folks) and Michigan (where Interstate Crosscheck may have delivered that state's electoral votes to our President in 2016). Luckily, the Voting Rights Advancement Act would give us the tools to stop it.

H.R. 5, the Equality Act, would amend the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act (among other laws) to extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folk -- who can still get fired, denied housing, and denied credit just because of who they are and whom they love. You may be pleased to know that a lot of folks who don't like gays and don't have gay friends aren't necessarily in favor of firing them, denying them housing, and denying them credit just because they're gay or transgender! And that includes some of our President's most devoted supporters! Really, it's only the proverbial loudest wagons of our political discourse who insist that gay and transgender folk should remain second-class citizens forever; most Americans really are live-and-let-live types who don't want to get too involved with regulating other folks' genitals and what they do with them. Our laws should honor our best natures as Americans, and the Equality Act would do that, by giving gay and transgender folks the same tools to redress grievances that other historically-aggrieved classes have.

H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act, would reverse our President's executive order revoking the DACA (or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program which allows immigrants brought here as children (and therefore against their will) can continue to stay here if they contribute to American society. Seems like a fairly uncontroversial idea, right? Not for our President or his most nativist votaries, who would happily send immigrants back to countries they don't recognize, as long as it gives them an opportunity to stay enraged at something. Rage is a hell of a drug, as I'm sure you've figured out by now -- you can never get enough of it, and thus the worst of Our Glorious Elites move the rage-addled around from one manufactured outrage to another. Raging against childhood arrivals by saying THEY'RE TEH ILLEGULZ AND TEH ILLEGULZ MUST TEH GOEZ!!!! is not actually very "law and order" of them -- childhood arrivals, as I've said, had literally no choice in coming to America, and removing them just so you can indulge in rage is cruel. It'll bite you in the ass, too, but that won't help any of these immigrants in the meantime.

H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act would give women more tools to fight pay discrimination. H.R. 7 would outlaw clauses in employment contracts that prevent workers from talking about their pay, and would prevent retaliation against employees who do talk about their pay -- and these are important, since talking about your pay is usually how you find out you're being shafted. The bill would still allow employers to pay men and women differently based on bona fide factors like, you know, skill levels and qualifications, but would restrict employers' ability to manufacture a "bona fide factor" after the fact. And the bill would also stiffen penalties for discriminating against women workers. It's hard to actually argue against these things, since no one wants to be called "objectively pro-paycheck discrimination," so its opponents yell about "trial lawyers" -- how hysterically lazy! -- and "what about when men are more qualified than women?", which, hey, re-read the third sentence of this paragraph if that's you or someone you know. When someone yells something like that about a bill, you're right to question whether they've read it or understood it.

H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, would raise our minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour gradually over the next six years -- yeah, I made sure to put those last six words there, for all the haters who say IT'S TOO TEH FASTZ!!!!! -- and would increase that minimum wage every year thereafter in accordance with the rise in the median hourly wage. The bill would also hike the minimum wages for tipped workers and disabled workers gradually and close the gap between these and the regular minimum wage. The arguments against this bill might give a lot of people pause, but they fall apart upon closer (or, indeed, any) analysis. Fast food workers make $20/hour in Denmark, but that hasn't resulted in $20 Big Macs there -- Big Macs cost around $5.50 there, which ain't that much more than they cost here. And that CBO study that said a higher minimum wage would kill half a million jobs? Actually, that study said job losses could range from zero to a million jobs lost, that range represents jobs lost over 10 years, and the economy already needs to make a million jobs roughly every seven months just to keep up with population growth, so let's not go in for hysteria.

H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act, would roll back an Administration guidance issued in October of 2018 which actually weakened the Affordable Care Act's guarantee that health insurance corporations couldn't deny you health insurance (and therefore health care) because of your pre-existing health conditions. The Administration's guidance allows sub-standard health insurance programs to operate legally in the United States, even if they discriminate against folks with pre-existing conditions, a nefarious practice the Affordable Care Act would have ended (even if the ACA has dozens of other flaws which we have already discussed at length). The Administration's guidance was never about delivering "really great health care" to Americans; it's about letting health insurance corporations flout the law, and of course it's also about taking a crap over a Barack Obama legislative achievement because Mr. Obama made fun of the President that one time. Really, I'm pretty sure that's what it was -- and if it's not, it's likely something about as petty, and Americans deserve better than to be held hostage to a President's pettiness.

H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, would keep oil and gas drilling corporations out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) by repealing that part of the 2017 tax "reform" that authorized oil and gas drilling in the Arctic. H.R. 1146 would also impose inspection fees on corporations that drill offshore so that our government can actually fund these inspections. You know all the good reasons we shouldn't drill in the Arctic: because there's not that much oil to be drilled there, because it would threaten Alaska's salmon industry, because it would threaten local indigenous populations and wildlife, and because cleaning up a spill in the frigid Arctic is many times harder than cleaning up one in a more temperate region. What's the reason we would drill up there (aside from getting Sen. Murkowski of Alaska to vote on a tax "reform" bill she might have voted against)? Oh, you know, to make some crony oil or gas CEO rich. That's really all of it -- they'll say it's "jobs," but what of the actual jobs in the salmon industry that'll go away after the next oil spill?

H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act, would permanently withdraw over a million acres of Grand Canyon-area land from any drilling or mining considerations. It's a bit stunning that we would even consider drilling around the Grand Canyon -- I mean, you've been to the Grand Canyon, right? -- but uranium mining corporations have had a jones to do that for decades, and our President of course has a jones to give them whatever they want, since public lands exist merely for exploitation in his mind. This, even though uranium mining would inevitably pollute the Colorado River upon which citizens of five American states depend for clean water! The bill would also protect any additional land in the Grand Canyon area that our government acquires after the bill becomes law. So, to sum: we could preserve a national treasure and protect the drinking water used by tens of millions of Americans -- orwe could make a few corporate CEOs even richer. It's not much of a choice, really, though Our Glorious Elites do keep choosing wrong.

H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, would reverse the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstate the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order, which originally encoded the principle of net neutrality in law. All the bills I've listed have earned a lot of popular support, but none more so than the Save the Internet Act -- which makes this Administration's (and Mr. McConnell's) flouting of the popular will all the more offensive. Net neutrality guarantees that internet service-providing corporations deliver all files to your computer at the same speed and with the same priority, which does not amount to TEH BIG GUMMINT CONTROLZ TEH INTERNETZ!!!!, but our government preventing big corporations from controlling the internet, so that you can determine where you want to go and what you want to see on the internet, rather than having big corporations force you to watch Miley Cyrus twerking videos before visiting your favorite weblogs (ahem!). Yeah, they haven't tried that yet, but they will; they're not stupid enough to make your freedoms disappear all at once. And this is about your freedom, which will always be more important than some corporation's "freedom" to make more money doing less work.

H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, would force corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners" -- that is, the folks who create the corporations and, presumably, benefit financially from their existence -- and that would force banksters, terrorists, tax-evaders, sex traffickers, drug money launderers, and big campaign donors (who all use shell corporations to hide their wrongdoing) out into the light, and if they can't stand the light, well, that's the price of operating too long in the dark. According to a Global Financial Integrity study from 2014, America is the second-easiest nation on Earth to start an anonymous corporation -- behind only Kenya, where there just ain't as much money. Right-wingers will tell you that forcing such transparency would be Big Gummint spying on people -- and where are they when our government actually spies on us? Being outraged at football players kneeling, probably! -- but they would have to explain why revealing the beneficiaries of corporate crime should be guarded by the law.

H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, would mandate voter-verified paper ballots for federal elections, which is a big deal, since (as we saw in Mississippi earlier this year) a lot of electronic voting machines don't let you vote for the candidate for whom you want to vote! H.R. 2722 would also fund state efforts to update their voting systems, which you know some states "forget" to do in their black and brown neighborhoods. And H.R. 2722 would prohibit states and localities from connecting their voting machines to our internet, and that's also a big deal! After all, any fool can see that connecting voting machines to the internet is a profoundly stupid idea. I would say connecting your thermostat or your house lights to the internet is also a profoundly stupid idea, but as bad having your house hacked would be, having our democracy hacked would be even worse. Hacking our democracy has been in the news a lot the past few years, after all -- and not as much as it should have been in the years before that! A lot of times the most advanced technology is not at all the best technology.

Finally (cue cheers from convention crowd!), H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, incorporates most of the TRUE Fees Act, which would not only force big telecom corporations to reveal all the fees they like to hide in your cable or cellphone bill, but would force them to give you formal notice of these fees and would give you the right to cancel your contract with these big telecoms if you don't like the fees they give you. H.R. 5035 would not outlaw forced arbitration agreements in big telecom contracts, as the actual TRUE Fees Act would have done, and that's a backward step, but, as I've said, I don't let the perfect murder the good, and H.R. 5035 is good, because it will keep big telecom corporations from giving you surprises in your cable and cellphone bills. And we will one day bring about comprehensive arbitration reform, because just as the only people standing in the way of fee transparency are the big telecoms that no one likes, the only people standing in our way or arbitration reform are the corporate flunkies whom no one likes. Yeah, weakling politicians "like" them, I suppose, but all I want is a fighting chance.

If you've been reading with an open mind, you probably see that all of these bills would do good things that would improve our laws and our civilization -- and if you attend the ludicrous arguments opposing them, some of which I've touched on above, you'll likely be more convinced of that, not less. Most ludicrous, perhaps, is the reflexive smearing of many or all of these bills as "socialism." You know that words mean things, and you may also suspect that a lot of folks throw the word "socialism" at anything they don't like and hope it sticks because they can't win the argument on the merits. Nonetheless, ask yourself: is securing the vote, and protecting the vote, "socialism" -- or is it merely common sense? Is preventing cruelty to gay, transgender, and immigrant folk "socialism," or is it common sense? Are protecting internet freedom, lowering drug prices, and protecting good Americans with pre-existing health conditions "socialism," or are they merely common sense? I think all of these things are common sense, and I hope that knowledge will steel your spine as you talk to your Senators today.

Good luck, and God bless.

Action: concerning voting rights, health care, and pollution (among other issues).

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And this week we add H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act -- a better bill now, thanks in large part to your pressure -- and H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act, which would shine a light on those big telecom fees and taxes you find in your cable and cellphone bills. These are all good bills, advancing (among other causes) voting rights, consumer protections, and better health care policy, and your Senators have no excuse for rejecting them. No, TEH CREEPINGZ SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! is not an excuse.

Color of Change helps you tell Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) to reject attempts by Formosa Plastics to build a giant petrochemical plant in an almost-50% black community. Why? Because Formosa's plants tend to pollute more than virtually every other plant in America. Because this particular Formosa plant would emit ethylene oxide, which a 2016 EPA study found causes cancer even with "limited" exposure. Because big corporations have this nasty habit of plopping down their dirtiest plants in neighborhoods of color. Because the area where they'd build is already well-known as "Cancer Alley." Because Formosa has already paid Texas residents $50 million for illegally dumping pollutants in their communities. And because Gov. Bel Edwards -- fresh off a re-election more improbable than his first election in 2015 -- has demonstrated a willingness in the past to reward big polluting corporations even whey they don't follow the law. Hey, he doesn't have to run again, so maybe he should try not enabling big polluting corporations, particularly when they practice environmental racism.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to reject its own proposal to weaken coal ash storage regulations, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that. Our President's votaries like to think he's "gotten rid of burdensome regulations," though we know he really hasn't -- courts keep striking his regulatory changes down, because you can't just do whatever you feel like doing when you run a government! But the next time your War on Terror/Tea Party deficit hawk/Regulation Nation/Blue Lives Matter/anti-immigration-but-not-a-white-supremacist-I-swear uncle says our President has "gotten rid of burdensome regulations," feel free to ask if allowing big coal corporations to avoid closing their unlined coal-ash ponds that leak into our water tables is more "burdensome" to big coal corporations than water pollution is to, you know, the rest of us. I know the good citizens of Roane County, TN and Eden, NC -- to name the scenes of two infamous coal ash pond spills -- would tell you which is more of a burden.

Action: concerning good policy, the war on Yemen, and torture.

The list is back! It's time once again 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. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And this week we're proud to add H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed the full House on Friday afternoon. Why have all these good bills piled up? Because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (E-KY) won't bring them up for a vote; didn't know we elected Mitch McConnell Dictator-for-Life, did you? So let's tell our Senators to fight for voting rights, equal rights, public lands, internet freedom, and so much more -- and let's stay in their grills until they bend to our will.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that Democrats will abandon efforts to pass a defense spending bill amendment that would end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Sigh. And I bet Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, runs on proposing the amendment, even as he prevents its passage so it can actually do some damn good! And it would do a considerable amount of good -- it would get us out of yet another undeclared war, it would bring more good Yemeni back from the brink of starvation, and it would save more Houthi rebels for the fight against al-Qaeda that they're good at. Sometimes you think we get involved in these messes just so we can make everything worse. Ah, who am I kidding -- of course we're in Yemen to create chaos, just like Iraq! Rep. Smith's office number is 202.225.8901; his Armed Service Committee office number is 202.225.4151. These numbers are courtesy Just Foreign Policy; good luck finding phone numbers at his own House website, because they seem pretty well-hidden.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to release the full 7,000-page torture report to the American people, then Win Without War still helps you do that. There's no "looking forward, not backward" (in Mr. Obama's infamous phrase) when our CIA tortured at least 100 men in "black site" operations, and though Congress has released a 500-page summary of the report, they haven't released the whole enchilada, which hamstrings our effort to ensure this never happens again. The cynical will ask whom among our good Americans will read the full 7,000-page report -- and sadly, too many of our "liberal" media will ask the very same question, though the answer should be that they will read it, and report on its contents and its meaning. That is journalism, after all, and if too many contemporary "journalists" call it a day after they've trolled through Twitter for cruel and obnoxious crap uttered by fools who deserve their anonymity, that doesn't change their obligations to our Republic and our civilization.

Around the table: concerning our economy, our public lands and water, and several far more trifling matters.

Your right-wing uncle telling you about wages going up under our President? Well, Dean Baker reminds us that state minimum wage hikes and our Federal Reserve's low interest rates are actually driving recent wage increases. You know that high minimum wages cause wage hikes at the low end, but you may not know that low interest rates have helped drive unemployment down -- and Mr. Baker says that "low rates of unemployment give workers the bargaining power necessary to secure real wage gains." Naturally our President says minimum wages should be lower, though, admittedly, he also thinks interest rates should be lower. But low interest rates have been Fed orthodoxy since 2008, so we can safety say he deserves very little (if any!) of the credit for what gains we're making in this economy.

If you've been following Nestlé's attempts to gobble up as much public water as it can and then sell it as bottled water at an absurdly high profit, you'll be interested to hear that the Michigan state court of appeals has ruled that Osceola Township can block Nestlé from expanding its bottled-water operation within town limits, because bottled water is most emphatically not an "essential public service" or a "public water supply." I was a little surprised that any legal eagles at Nestlé would make such ludicrous claims -- even as part of a see-what-sticks effort -- until I learned that a lower Michigan court had approved them, and I note that the court of appeals also said that a bottled water operation might be "essential" in a place with no water, which I'm pretty sure could be stretched by some judicial activist to mean any of the many areas of desert in America.

Big pharma executives tell OHSU researchers that prices for MS drugs go up so damn much go up purely for profit-making reasons. Also, you can only gouge patients in America, since (to quote one exec) "(i)n the rest of the world, prices decline with duration in the marketplace," and prices never go down because then people would think "we're less effective, (that) we think less of our product." You do hear the quiet part out loud more than you used to even 10 years ago, when it seemed (to me, at least!) we heard the quiet part out loud all the time. Maybe big pharma execs are tired of pretending they're anything but thieves, not that I expect their behavior to change.

From the "How Do They Always Find Someone Even Worse?" file: Interior Secretary David Bernhardt wants to reduce fees oil and gas drilling corporations pay to drill in shallow Gulf of Mexico waters. It's not just the stench of an Interior Secretary lowering fees on corporations for which he used to lobby, or the horror that we could have another Spillageddon in the Gulf like we had in 2010 -- it's the fact that these are our waters and we, the public, deserve to make more money if our government is going to be so foolish as to allow more drilling in the Gulf. It's like they have literally no idea that they're supposed to serve the American people.

U.S. House Rep. Steve Watkins (R-KS) apparently listed a UPS store as his official residence, which just so happens to have had the effect of allowing him to vote in a different Topeka City Council district than the one in which he otherwise would have voted. Has the Fox News Channel "accidentally" identified him as a Democrat yet? After all, ONLY TEH LIBRULZ COMMITZ TEH VOTER FRAUDZ!!!!!

Finally, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has suspended her campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, citing a lack of money to keep campaigning. I don't actually think it's correct to say that "she struggled to define a clear rationale for her candidacy" -- actually, I think she was completely successful in "defin(ing) a clear rationale for her candidacy," since that rationale was "I'm here to trick the liberals into thinking I'm going to run this country the way they'd want me to when I'm really going to run it however my big donors tell me to." If I'm right, then it's heartening that Democratic voters have rejected that rationale, at least as far it manifested in her -- and almost two months before the Iowa caucuses, no less!

UPDATE. An alert reader pointed out that I'd gotten our President's position on interest rate cuts entirely wrong; I've corrected the first paragraph above as a result.

Action: concerning facial recognition, immigration, and shareholder power.

The more we fight facial recognition, the more our politicians try to protect it -- while pretending they're protecting us from it. Case in point: S. 2878, the so-called Facial Recognition Technology Warrant Act, which would allow police to use facial recognition tech to track people without a warrant. Our police would never abuse that power on, say, political protestors! And of course the bill would also exempt from its meager restrictions all the "foreign" surveillance that just-so-happens to catch good Americans in its web. Facial recognition is, as you know, crap technology that seems to think all black people look alike and also (in a recently-documented experiment) thinks it can spot Roy Orbison in a crowd. I mean, we wish! But, alas, Mr. Orbison passed over 30 years ago. Hence Ban Facial Recognition helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a real ban on facial recognition technology.

Our Administration now wants to send park rangers and park police to do border patrol work, and even if you believe in "caravans," you have to wonder why we'd send people out to do a job they're plainly not trained to do. Of course, reasoning is not a strong suit with our Administration's votaries, who lap up every lousy idea about immigration as evidence that this President is "finally doing something" about immigration -- this, after President Obama earned his reputation as the "deporter-in-chief," and our current President wishes he were deporting as many immigrants as Mr. Obama! Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our Administration to stop misusing park rangers and park police as border control agents. Which also happens to leave our public parks understaffed, not that our Administration cares -- they would sell all our public parks to their cronies if they could! Of course, we care, and that's why we fight.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to stop trying to undermine shareholder activism, then Demand Progress still helps you do that. Shareholders using resolutions to curb carbon emissions, stop discriminating against gays, or fight excessive executive pay -- all will be much harder to propose and enact if our SEC gets its way and makes you have to own 10 times more stock merely to propose such a resolution and make a resolution get more support before being reconsidered again. This is another occasion where you must ask: what are big corporations afraid of? Of course, we know what they're afraid of: they're afraid of anyone having a different opinion about how our world should be, and they're afraid of anyone getting their hands on their unearned moneypots. In other words, they're just like our President! But being like our President is something we must discourage.

Action: concerning voting rights, "free" trade, Social Security, and the Equal Rights Amendment.

Happy Monday, good peoples! Now go ahead and 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. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Don't worry that it's a long list; your Senators could always have prevented our phone calls by passing the bills! Especially since they're good bills strengthening voting rights, fighting discrimination, raising the minimum wage, protecting good Americans from predatory health insurance corporations, protecting public lands, and insuring internet freedom -- among other good works. And don't worry that our President would veto these bills, because we ought to make him veto them.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that Democrats are almost ready to come to agreement with our President on his USMCA trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, which would replace the nefarious NAFTA, and while the USMCA does represent an improvement as it stands -- it would roll back the notorious investor-state dispute (or ISDS) settlement system with Canada and drastically curtail its use with Mexico -- it could be better, in that it could have better labor and clean air/clean water standards, and in that it doesn't need to sacrifice good Americans' health care before the altar of corporate intellectual property by letting big pharma corporations hold onto their exclusive rights for even longer than they do now. Hence Public Citizen helps you call your Congressfolk and tell them not to pass the USMCA until we can fix its problems. Please add, in your phone call, that you will not give up our gains regarding the ISDS system in exchange for better labor/health care/clean air and clean water standards, because the ISDS system nullifies our laws and outsources our jobs.

In other news, remember when Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) -- in a move which suggests she doesn't think she's in any danger of losing her 2020 re-election bid -- told Iowa residents that what we need to let Congress meet "behind closed doors" to "fix" Social Security? Well, S. 2733, the so-called TRUST Act, would let "rescue committees" meet behind closed doors on any federal program the Treasury Secretary deems necessary, and consider any legislation that comes out of these committees in an "expedited" manner, meaning very little debate and very little opportunity to amend. That should sound to you like a way of doing something very bad very quickly, which is how folks who want to do bad things have to do them these days. Hence Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject "secret" legislation considered "behind closed doors" by rejecting the TRUST Act. If a bill can't stand sunlight, it doesn't deserve to become law, period. And I'm old enough to remember when the Social Security trust fund was supposed to run out in 2016, so let's not let hysteria rule our world, OK?

Finally, you remember that when Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment back in the '70s, they put a deadline on its ratification by the states? Well, H.J.Res. 79 would essentially remove that deadline (by stating that the ERA "shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution whenever ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States"). 35 (of the necessary 38) states ratified the ERA before the original 1979 deadline; two more states have passed the ERA since 2017, with Virginia perhaps mulling the issue once Democrats formally take control of both legislative houses early next year. However, five states also rescinded their ratifications before the 1979 deadline, and our courts haven't concluded whether those states could do that under our Constitution or not -- mainly because the deadline had already passed. How this Supreme Court would resolve these questions we don't yet know, but in the meantime, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight for women's rights by removing the deadline on the original passage of the ERA.