Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning corruption, education, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fight corruption, fund education, and keep pollution off our public lands. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps youtell your Congressfolk to restore the anti-corruption protections our Supreme Court just struck down in Snyder v. United States. Our Court said, in Public Citizen’s words, that “federal law does not prohibit paying state and local officials for favors if the money isn’t promised in advance.” You remember former Rep. Vance McAllister (R-LA) telling us that other Congressfolk told him that if he voted a certain way on legislation, a group would give him money? So that’s why our Supreme Court is wrong this time! The fact that no formal offer gets made is irrelevant if you know what’s coming after you perform a favor! Hence we must fix a Supreme Court mess, again.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject education funding cuts. Some of our Congressfolk sure have crap-ass priorities – more spending on weapons that don’t work, less investing in our children – but if they want a fight over this, we’ll give ‘em one, and we’ll win it. Because the only reason they’ve got to cut education funding, itself an unpopular idea, is the racism of the book-banning crowd, also an unpopular idea. Republicans only won the 2021 gubernatorial election in Virginia because a) Terry McAuliffe is a horrible candidate and b) the “star” of that ad about books in school was a professional book-banner pretending to be a random “concerned mom.”

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, which would, as its title suggests, reverse a transfer of public (and, to the Apache, sacred) land to a big mining corporation and permanently protect that land from future development. So we have two reasons to act: one, we shouldn’t allow polluters to despoil our public lands, since they serve as a sort of repository for clean air and clean water, and two, the Apache find the land sacred and religious freedom still matters in America. At least, if it’s about people actually practicing their religion, and not forcing everyone else to practice their religion. The latter ain’t happening here, no matter what Rio Tinto says.

Action: concerning pollution and collusion.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Mining Regulatory Clarity Act and hold hearings about possible collusion between American oil corporations and OPEC. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, which would let our government hand out public lands to big mining corporations with inadquate consideration for mining corporations polluting our air and water or desecrating sacred Native lands. Such is the “clarity” of desolation, the “clarity” of mammon-worship, the “clarity” of doing injury without taking accountability. And ironically enough, this bill’s supporters have resorted to parliamentary arcanity to keep it moving. I guess only the clarity of the people’s will can stop them, so we should get to it.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to hold public hearings on alleged big oil corporate collusion with OPEC, a heavily-reported matter about which our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has already sued. No one should smile at American oil corporations colluding with a foreign oil consortium that produces a little under 40 percent of the world’s oil and may sit on 80% of the world’s oil reserves – especially with gas prices going up, for no other apparent reason. And again, remember that when right-wingers say our FTC is “out of control,” this is what they mean – that they’re actually working for us for once.

Action: concerning election workers and Native American lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect election workers and sacred Native American lands. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Election Worker and Polling Place Protection Act, which would enact criminal penalties for folks who harass, intimidate, and threaten election workers when their guy loses. Let me be clear: the folks who went after workers like Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman (and all the good Americans who quit being election workers after the 2020 election) aren’t just assholes, they’re whiners, and frankly, being a whiner is worse, and I’m sick of folks getting their way by whining. And if we don’t put people in jail when they threaten election workers, then why do we even have laws?

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, which would once again protect the famous Oak Flat region in Arizona from being polluted by big copper mining corporations. Oak Flat already sits within federally-protected land, and that’s a phrase that should mean a lot more than it apparently does, otherwise we wouldn’t need this bill. You know another phrase that should mean more than it does? Religious freedom, not as in right-wingers’ “right” to tell you what to do and think, but as in protecting lands sacred to Native Americans.

Action: concerning Native Americans, health care, and executive pay.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act, cut funding for fake right-wing abortion “clinics,” and pass the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act, which would (as its title suggests) help Native Americans exercise their rights to cultural preservation and religious freedom on their historical lands. We have a long history of breaking every single damn treaty we ever signed with Native Americans, so establishing a Tribal Cultural Areas System (as this bill would do) would go some way toward repairing our relationship. And if it also enables Native Americans to keep polluters from spewing filth into our air and water, well, more power to them, then.

UltraViolet helps you tell your Senators to stop giving away our hard-earned tax dollars to “crisis pregnancy centers.” Our House just voted to take tax dollars away from poor children and give it to these “clinics,” but we are under no obligation to allow our Senate to do the same, whether it’s attached to a must-pass bill or not! We are not anybody’s damn hostages! And no, our hard-earned money should not fund right-wing “clinics” giving out fake ultrasound “pictures” and lying about the “connection” between abortion and suicide. Should our tax money fund efforts to spread lies about vaccinations? Well, this ain’t no different.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act. If worker productivity is up over 60% over the last 40 years, but worker pay is only up less than 18% while CEO pay is up over 1,200 percent, all ye need ask is this: did CEOs really do 1,200 times more work and only get productivity up 60%? Then how did they “earn” that money, exactly? Brook no foolishness about how CEOs deserve all that money because they “take risks.” Jesus Mary and Joseph even when they screw up they don’t lose money! It’s the cushest job on Earth!

Action: concerning health care, taxes, and labor.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to protect women’s health care, bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, and pass the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support legislation that protects women’s health care, including abortion and birth control. Polling consistently tells us that most Americans support abortion and birth control, which is yet another reason I don’t give up on the American people, even if their leaders are monsters. And supporting abortion and birth control is the right thing to do! No one salivates at the prospect of aborting a fetus, but the far worse thing to do is to re-create a society that values women only as breeders, and that’s where the pro-life movement aims to go. No use brandishing the word “religion” at me, either. Last I looked, both Judaism and Islam agreed with me, and they’re religions, too.

NETWORK, the Catholic social justice lobby, helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion from 2021. You remember, the one that put $250 and $300 checks per child in working families’ bank accounts every month? Seems to me if Virginia’s Republican Governor can schedule tax rebates to hit voters’ mailboxes the week before Election Day, Democrats could have reminded them of the $250 and $300 campaign ads that hit working families’ bank accounts every month. Sadly, they’re still too weak to do that, let alone keep those actual tax cuts coming, but that’s why we’ve got to tell them what to do all the time.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act, which would make it a lot easier for American workers to organize and bargain collectively for better pay and working conditions. We’re seeing how well unions work for good Americans even now with the United Auto Workers’ recent victory over Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, a victory that includes 25% pay raises over the next 4 ½ years and the reopening of a Belvedere, IL plant that had employed 1,200 workers. The PRO Act would, among other things, make it a lot harder for corporations to force workers to attend anti-union meetings, so Congress needs to get that done.

Action: concerning financial regulation, tax policy, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep our CFPB as independent as possible, reject any extension of the Trump tax “cuts,” and pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would subject our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to the annual appropriations progress. Congress has long found this method of funding perfectly acceptable for other agencies, so why not now, with our CFPB? Probably because our CFPB has done a lot of good work for us. You’d think that’d mean something to our House Reps, given that they’re supposed to represent us (that’s why we call them “representatives”), but apparently the whining of big donors means more, hence why right-wingers want to defund our CFPB, which is an awful lot like defunding the police, since our CFPB catches financial predators. I’d hate for America to be a land where all you have to do to get what you want is have a lot of money and whine a lot.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to extend the notorious Trump tax “cuts.” I put “cuts” in quotation marks because most Americans didn’t get nearly as much benefit from them as the rich and corporations did. I’d happily make tax cuts for lower brackets permanent, but I would never be a hostage to letting rich folks pay hundreds of thousands of dollars less every year and corporations paying millions of dollars less every year. One percentage point is a lot more money at higher incomes, after all. Politicians pretend not to get that, but we do.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act. Big corporation (foreign or not, I really don’t care) wants to mine for copper on Native American sacred land that also happens to be public land? Why, no, thank you. And I’m not particularly anti-copper – the health care industry found out during the pandemic that getting rid of all those copper tables years ago was a big mistake – but I am anti-pollution and pro-clean water and pro-clean air and pro-respecting actual religious freedoms. I guess, for some people, religious freedom only counts if you’re white – or if you’re Black or Brown but also a Republican. That’s not the America we want to pass on to our children and our children’s children.

Action: concerning taxes, stock buybacks, and sacred lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax the rich and corporations harder and pass the Reward Work Act and the Ruby Mountains Protection Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

You’ve heard about the debt limit deal President Biden and Speaker McCarthy negotiated, but Demand Progress still helps you tell your Congressfolk to get rid of the private jet tax deduction from the 2017 Trump tax “reform,” while Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. As they consider this deal, we need to remind them of what their real priority should be: making sure folks with enough money to ruin the world pay their fair share of taxes so we can all have health care and roads and bridges and cops. If nothing else, they’ll more likely remember next time – and if they don’t, we’ll remind them again.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act, which would ban stock buybacks and let workers elect a third of all corporate boards. If you’re not seeing right away how that would “reward work,” recall that quite a few corporations (Bed, Bath and Beyond most recently) have gone belly-up after using their profits to buy back stock rather than, you know, pay workers, develop new products, or improve their operations. Stock buybacks, in short, don’t “reward work,” they reward wealth. And getting more workers on corporate boards will also help keep executives from doing only what’s best for them – which will also reward work. So let’s get this done.

Finally, the Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ruby Mountains Protection Act, which would permanently protect the Ruby Mountains of Nevada – a sacred land to certain Shoshone nations – from oil and gas drilling. The energy you extract from the ground will get used up eventually, and the money big corporate executives make from oil and gas drilling will get used up eventually, but sacred lands are forever, if you can keep them. And the Shoshone have already prevented our government from drilling for oil and gas in the Ruby Mountains in 2019, so we know this can be done; our Congressfolk just have to have the will to do it. And they won’t, unless we express our will in numbers they can’t deny.

Action: concerning the debt limit, Oak Flat, and health care.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject Republican debt-limit bills and pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act and the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

You want action alerts against the Republican debt-limit bill? I’ve got ‘em, from Coalition on Human Needs, Moms Rising, and Daily Kos. They’re trying to justify their whole debt-limit drama by cutting services good Americans actually need, which is evil. The Moms Rising alert deals mainly with work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid, and some folks think that’s common-sensical, but they’re wrong: work requirements aren’t a good idea for a program that’s supposed to help you when you don’t have work. And finding and punishing fraud is a separate issue. How about we cut the budget of fighter planes that don’t fight?

The Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, which would pretty much do what its title says – save the Oak Flat region of the Tonto National Forest from the Rio Tinto mining corporation. Numerous Native Americans consider Oak Flat sacred land – I guess religious conscience only matters when it’s right-wing corporatists not wanting to cover their employees’ birth control! – and the mining would also poison and deplete the water there. Despite Native Americans' heroic efforts in keeping Rio Tinto out, the project still isn’t dead; that’s why we step up, as we have before, and we keep stepping up until our Congressfolk act.

Finally, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act. Banning anyone who might counsel abortion from providing health care overseas (as the Helms Amendment does) hurts our efforts to get birth control and other health care to other countries, so let’s not let philosophical purity murder what works – and, you know, let’s not let it murder people, too. I suppose right-wingers will try to hide their sexist objective by yelling AMURIKA FIRSTZ!!!!! But unsafe abortions and maternal deaths – which the Helms Amendment surely causes – are an atrocity anywhere.

Action: concerning drama, banksters, pollution, and abortion.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a clean debt limit bill, and pass the Secure Viable Banking Act, the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, and the Global HER Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to sign a discharge petition mandating a vote on a clean debt limit bill, one without any hostage-taking or drama. Seriously, no more drama! is the message our Congressfolk need to hear. They’ll pretend they’re hearing from constituents (or, possibly, “constituents”) about TEH RUNAWAYZ SPENDINGZ!!!!, but they really need to hear this simple message: no more drama! Do your damn job! Stop trying to force evil down good Americans’ throats! Social Security cuts, Medicare cuts – they know they can’t do them without drama. But it we get in their grills, they can’t do it at all.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Secure Viable Banking Act, which would repeal Trump-era banking regulation rollbacks. You know, like the one that increased the amount of rubbish a bank could hold without submitting to stricter regulations. Stricter regulations could have prevented those bank failures (and the resulting bailouts – the fact that taxpayers didn’t pay for them doesn’t make it that much better!), but big bankster CEOs didn’t want them, because waaaaaaaaaaaah. Seriously, that’s the reason – who complains more about fulfilling obligations to society than a bankster?

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Save Oak Flat From Foreign Mining Act, and though I wince at the phrase “foreign mining” – mining and polluting near sacred San Carlos Apache/protected public land would be just as wrong if an American corporation did it! – the bill would permanently protect the Oak Flat area of the Tonto National Forest, thus ending a shameful chapter in the careers of former Sen. Flake (who once lobbied for the same corporation that wants to mine Oak Flat) and the late Sen. McCain, whose attention to clean air/clean water/religious freedom issues was always erratic. So let’s redeem their souls and protect some sacred public land.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Global HER Act, which would end forever the “global gag rule” that Republican Presidents reinstate the day they take office. I hate having to revisit this issue every time the Presidency changes parties even more than I hate the fact that electing a President from a different party even matters! And the fact is, the global gag rule hurts people all over the world – right-wingers pretend it prevents us from “exporting abortion,” but it actually prevents us from exporting health care to developing nations, since abortion is only one service health care organizations provide. So let’s end this battle once and for all.

Around the table: I have seen the future; brother, it is murder.

“Brain-computer interfaces” (or BCIs) might enable soldiers to fight remotely, and might even allow soldiers to “turn off” their fear, but here’s an idea: don’t do any of that! "What might soldiers accomplish if they just weren’t afraid?" is the wrong question to ask, particularly in this era of guerrilla warfare, where hackers will probably win the battle with BCI-enabled soldiers anyway! BCIs have more humane uses (i.e., helping the disabled), and some folks have given the ethics a great deal of thought; if only America had a way of stopping the unethical use of technology, you know, like with laws and such.

An artificial intelligence agent gets good enough at Stratego that it now outranks almost every human on Earth. Machines may not have egos like people do – study any military history and you’ll be amused and/or disgusted by how badly Our Glorious Elites have botched wars just to appease their own egos – but again, how about we don’t leave wars up to machines? I mean, yes, it’s interesting that an AI agent play a game with “imperfect information” so well, but instead of imagining how we could “fight wars better” – again, a dubious notion in the guerrilla warfare era! -- how about we imagine how we can avoid wars better?

Ho hum, right-wingers claim that vaccines kill people with blood clots, naturally by blowing one fact (that the J&J vaccine, accounting for 3% of all vaccine administrations, cause a kind of blood clotting in literally four out of every million doses) way out of proportion, pretending that postmortem blood clots aren’t common, and repeating a whole slew of other debunked claims. Also, too, just because someone dies after getting the vaccine, that doesn’t mean the vaccine killed them. If I shoot a diabetic in the head, no reasonable person would claim he died of diabetes, but right-wingers would make a movie saying exactly that if they thought they could enrage enough people.

Marion County (IN) Superior Court Judge blocks Indiana’s abortion ban – on religious freedom grounds! After all, mainstream Judaism and Islam both authorize it in certain circumstances, so banning abortion more broadly interferes with those folks’ exercise of their First Amendment-guaranteed religious freedom. Will our Supreme Court, with its stated concern for religious freedom, uphold rulings such as these? I kid, of course – nothing matters to the far right wing of our Court except imposing their will on America. Why, I bet they’ll figure out a way to rule that the Jewish/Muslim/other non-Christian women who filed the suit “don’t have standing” to challenge it!

Our Senate has passed the Respect for Marriage Act. The bill they passed wouldn’t compel churches to hold gay weddings, but as long as our government recognizes them, most folks couldn’t care less if churches do. The bill would also repeal the noxious Defense of Marriage Act, confer federal benefits to any gay couple legally married, and force states to recognize marriages legal in other states. However, the bill wouldn’t compel those 35 states that have anti-gay marriage laws on the books – laws those states will enforce if/when our Supreme Court overturns Obergefell v. Hodges – to legalize gay marriage, and that’s a thing that’ll come back to bite us. Verdict: it's progress, but it's not quite justice.

Finally, our Senate has passed a bill that’ll keep railway workers from striking – but also rejected a separate measure that would have given railway workers seven days of paid sick leave, which had (justifiably!) been a sticking point in negotiations. One has to wonder why our House put the seven sick days in a separate bill, one more easily rejected by our Senate, instead of daring right-wing Senators to oppose the whole package because they hate giving workers time off. Sadly, the only answers I can come up with are “cowardice” and “evil," which reduces to "evil" or "evil."

Action: concerning workers' rights, data privacy, and saving our Post Office.

Long story short: tell our Department of Labor to crack down on bosses misclassifying workers as “contractors,” tell Uber to stop selling customer information to third parties, and tell President Biden to improve our Postal Service. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Department of Labor to crack down on worker misclassification. Corporations like calling their workers “independent contractors” even when those “contractors” come to the office every day and use their facilities to get their work done, and why is that? So they don’t have to cover their health insurance, workers’ compensation insurance, or (even!) pay the employer’s half of the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare. For too long we’ve just assumed that if a corporation calls its workers “contractors” we just have to put up with it. But we don’t! Of course, we need to tell our government that.

Fight for the Future helps you tell Uber not to sell its customers’ ride history to advertisers. Sound innocuous? You know, besides the fact that somebody knows what you’re doing and now wants to sell you something based on that, which is pretty creepy? Now imagine people using Uber to get to church, or a doctor’s office, or an abortion clinic, and I trust you begin to see the problem. And if you’re tempted to retort but it’s just for advertising, remember how many intrusive technologies have entered our lives by being “just for” something else. You may have brought an Alexa into your house so it could play music more easily, but now it’s recording your conversations.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell President Biden to replace Donald “Lee” Moak on our U.S. Postal Service’s Board of Governors once his term expires at the end of this year. Mr. Biden has shown a disquieting willingness to keep Mr. Moak on the Board, though Mr. Moak has been a key ally of the notorious Postmaster General DeJoy, so we have to get in our President’s grill. Of course, as Public Citizen reminds us, it’s not just about ousting Mr. DeJoy – who has slashed services and raised prices like Americans don’t depend on our Postal Service for life-saving medications or anything – but about improving our Postal Service with services like postal banking.

Action: concerning social media, monopolies, and intrusive government.

Long story short: tell big social media corporations to stop spreading election-related BS on their platforms, tell our FTC to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger, and tell Florida to stop collecting information on girls’ periods. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell big social media corporations Meta, Google and TikTok to stop passing along election-related BS. We’re all aware that lies spread on these platforms before the truth can even get its pants on, but if you recall Facebook’s role in helping Myanmar oppress Rohingya Muslims a few years ago, or have noted Meta’s rubber-stamping of ads calling for violence in Brazil (the runoff Presidential election is this coming Sunday), you know the situation is even more dire than that. And you also know that social media algorithms push evil right-wing content on you even if you’re King of the Liberals, so we need to brandish the Big Stick of Bad PR once again.

Both Demand Progress and Public Citizen help you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Kroger/Albertsons merger. Mainstream media reports make it seem like it’s just Kroger and Albertsons joining together, but these corporations already own over a dozen big grocery corporations, so why should they get to consolidate their power further? Our choice is clear: either we allow big corporations to funnel even more unearned money toward their executives, which right-wingers seem to think is our only duty as a civilization – or we stop corporations from gaining even more power to price-gouge, which more closely resembles our actual duty as a civilization.

Finally, UltraViolet helps you tell the Florida High School Athletic Association (or FHSAA) to stop collecting information on female athletes’ periods. Yes, this is where we are in some areas of the country: where anti-gay and anti-trans insanity reaches a fever pitch, they start monitoring when you have your period, for your own safety and security, of course. How offensive: they do it for the “safety” and “security” of the small, weak people whom right-wingers herd from one manufactured outrage to the next, so they don’t ever connect with the real outrages that should drive them to act. “Leave girls alone” should be the motto of our public education system, even in places that aren’t Florida.

Action: concerning pollution, labor, corruption, conservation, and education.

Long story short: tell our EPA to enact vigorous cross-state pollution rules, tell Dollar General bosses to treat their workers fairly, tell New York’s Governor to keep the Manhattan D.A.’s moribund Trump investigation going, and tell our government to protect the Castner Mountain Range and move more vigorously against predatory for-profit colleges. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Penn Environment helps you tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous cross-state air pollution rule possible. I did not know they call this rule the "Good Neighbor Plan"! That’s actually pretty good messaging — which means, of course, that Democratic politicians just about never describe it that way! Nothing prevents us from describing it that way, of course — of describing states that limit the pollution that travels with the wind to other states as "good neighbors." And the politicians who would fight that rule, and doom kids in downwind states to higher levels of asthma and cancer? OK, I’d call them a lot of things, but "bad neighbors" would do.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Dollar General bosses to start paying their workers fairly and ensure they have safe workplaces. It’s not so damn much to ask! Especially since Dollar General’s CEO makes 934 times what the average Dollar General worker makes! And to those who'd say but what will happen to the low prices we all love at Dollar General? I would respond refer, again, to the CEO making 934 times what the average worker makes! Too many working folks worry about other working folks making "too much" money at their favorite shopping spots. They gotta fight the real enemy.

Daily Kos helps you tell New York Governor Hochul to transfer the now-dormant Manhattan D.A. office’s investigation into the Trump Organization either to the state Attorney General’s office or to another District Attorney within New York state. If the Trump axis pressured Alvin Bragg into abandoning the investigation, then the people need another weapon to hold the powerful accountable. Besides, state courts have already established that she has the legal authority to do it, so she ought to do it. It might help bring law and order back to our great nation.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell President Biden to designate the Castner Mountain Range around the El Paso area as a National Monument. The Castner Range has been a pretty good flood control tool over the years — what’s that? You haven’t heard of much flooding in that area? Well, now you know why! — and its proximity to the Franklin Mountains State Park means we’ll be able to protect a much larger area from pollution. And not for nothing, but the Castner Range is home to numerous sites of archaeological and religious significance to Native American folks; a big part of being conservative, it would seem to me, is conserving areas of historical importance, not rubber-stamping any and all development.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Biden Administration to move vigorously against predatory for-profits colleges. The Biden Administration has lately forgiven a few billion dollars in outstanding federally-banked loans used at Corinthian Colleges, and that’s a big deal, but there are other predatory for-profit colleges using federal loans to bilk college students, so our Administration has more work to do. Our government’s record on this hasn’t been good for over a decade now: the Obama Administration enabled too much of this crap, and the Trump Administration enabled far more of it; now we need justice.

Action: concerning taxes, drug prices, paid sick leave, child care, and Oak Flat.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on billionaires, millionaires, and corporations, enact a windfall tax on oil corporations, lower drug prices, pass paid sick leave and child care legislation, and pass the Save Oak Flat Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax on billionaires, while Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a surtax on millionaires and raise corporate taxes. Billionaires made about $2 trillion during this pandemic while we struggled to make ends meet, and a wealth tax (of roughly 2% on wealth over $1 billion) would raise a lot of money. A millionaire surtax would essentially raise the top tax rates on millionaire income by five to eight percentage points, which wouldn't be the 91% rate I want to bring back, but which would do a lot of good. And, of course, we need to tell the 50 Republicans plus Kyrsten Sinema they're wrong about corporate taxes every chance we get. So let's get back to it.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act. I didn't know the other day that the bill -- in addition to taxing big oil profits whenever they decide to use inflation or Ukraine (or whatever!) as a cover for hiking the price of gas -- would remit the money it collects from big oil corporations back to working families making less than $150,000 (or, if only one parent works, $112,500), which should help the folks hardest hit by price hikes endure them a little better. Now let's see how many Republicans decide to go on record as voting against taxing big oil corporations and rebating that money back to good Americans. West Virginians, please clog Joe Manchin's phone lines; I don't want him giving those Republicans any more cover.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to, well, lower drug prices for all Americans. The news hook this time? Sen. Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told Politico that "if we want to reduce drug prices, then we need to do it now," because of "the difficulty of passing something like this in a Republican Congress." In other words, if Republicans win back our House and Senate, they simply won't do it; that's a hell of an admission from the man who'd be Senate Pro Tempore again if Republicans take back the Senate, and it allows his 2022 opponents a campaign angle: if you want to reduce drug prices, replace Charles Grassley with me. Anyway, we already know that Congress won't do a damn thing unless we make it impossible for them not to do it, and that starts with communicating your will to your Reps and Senators until they get it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund paid family/sick leave. Yes, 50 Republicans and Joe Manchin don't want it, but they're wrong there, too -- why, even a lot of CEOs will tell them that paid sick leave at least gives them some certainty as they deal with employee absenteeism. And the United States is virtually alone in the world in not providing some sort of paid sick leave to working families. Sen. Gillibrand's bills all funded paid sick leave with a tiny payroll tax, amounting to about $8 every month for workers making $50,000 annually; I'd prefer to tax the rich for that as well -- I mean, really, when is Jeff Bezos going to spend $180 billion? You can only go to the edge of space so many times with so many Star Trek actors before it gets old! -- but that should demonstrate how easy it'd be to fund it.

Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass child care legislation much like Senator Murray proposed in recent legislation and President Biden included in the Build Back Better Act. Basically, it would subsidize child care so that working families pay no more than 7% of their income in child care, and that's become a big expense for folks anymore, and you know why? Same reason college and health care have become such a big expense for folks anymore: they can't do without it. This ain't a "free" market at work, this is a captive market at work, and our government has to step in anywhere a captive market develops. What can right-wingers say in response? Don't have kids? Be happy you have jobs? I kid, of course -- right-wingers can't say anything about that, which is why they yammer on so much about critical race theory.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1884/S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. You recall former Arizona Sens. Flake and McCain delivering the Oak Flat region of the Tonto National Forest to the big mining corporation for whom Sen. Flake used to work as a lobbyist? The Save Oak Flat Act would reverse that giveaway, and never lease that land to any mining or fossil fuel corporation again, thus protecting Oak Flat from both pollution and desecration, since Oak Flat is also sacred land to the Apache. Sadly, neither of the Democrats who have replaced Messrs. Flake and McCain (Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly) have joined as co-sponsors of the bill. Arizona residents might as well call them both, though I doubt Ms. Sinema will do anything but laugh at them.

Action: concerning pollution, worker safety, clean water, and dumping Fox News.

Long story short: tell Brazil to reverse an Amazon-killing rail project, tell our Postal Service to use electric trucks, tell the Biden Administration to protect Chaco Canyon, tell UPS to treat its injured workers better, tell our EPA to get all the lead pipes out of our water, and tell big telecom corporations to stop carrying Fox News in their cable packages. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell the government of Brazil to reverse course on building the Ferrogrão railway project, which would cut through indigenous lands and destroy nearly a thousand kilometers of Amazon rain forest. Naturally Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro -- who, with Donald Trump out of power, may rank as the world's worst political leader -- doesn't care about indigenous peoples, or about the ancient that do more to fight climate change than perhaps any other spot on Earth, but we care, and frankly we matter more than he does. And, frankly, so do the indigenous people who have heroically fought the Bolsonaro government. At least, in a sane, decent, and moral society, that would be true. But we must work to create and preserve that society every day of our lives. Hence we do it here, regardless of what he or his corporate cronies want.

Penn PIRG helps you tell the Board of Governors of our U.S. Postal Service to change direction on their new fleet of mail trucks and make them all electric instead of gas-guzzling. That'll have a big effect on climate change, since these trucks go all over the country every day. Now some right-wingers will do a victory lap after saying all mail trucks use electricity from coal ha ha ha snort. But even the electric mail trucks that would run in West Virginia (the only state that gets nearly all its energy from coal) won't be pumping tailpipe carbon emissions into our air, and in states that use more renewables, of course, running those trucks will cause even fewer climate emissions. This is progress! Right-wingers want you to let the perfect to murder the good, so that you never do good. We've gotta fight that.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell our Department of the Interior to keep mining and drilling out of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park and its surroundings. By now you may be able to recite the reasons why we'd do that -- mining and drilling pollutes the water, pollution kills wildlife, Chaco has religious significance to nearby Native nations. The Biden Administration has proposed a 20-year ban on new gas and oil leases within a 10-mile radius of Chaco, but we'd like that to extend rather past that, ideally to "forever." I've said it before and I'll say it again: when you blow up land that folks lived on for thousands of years, that land is gone, forever -- and the fuel you'll make from it will be gone almost as quickly, as will the money you make from it. As far as renewable energy, the sun may set and the wind may die, but they always come back.

More Perfect Union helps you tell UPS to stop retaliating against injured workers and start doing right by them. UPS runs a lot of warehouses, as you know, and its workers handle a lot more heavy packages than you or I do, so they get hurt a lot -- and UPS tries to keep them on the job, or catch them in "lies" so they can fire them (if you get asked 50 times exactly what time you got hurt, you think you'll give exactly the same answer 50 times?), or send them to Concentra, a corporate clinic chain that apparently specializes in pushing workers back to work without giving them basic health care like X-rays or MRIs. Not for nothing, but Concentra has close to three dozen complaints on the Better Business Bureau website, where they're ranked one star out of five. UPS needs to do better.

Environmental Action helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to get all the lead pipes out of our water systems. There's money to do that now, thanks to the infrastructure bill Congress passed last year, but our EPA still has to mandate that the lead pipes be gone, or else we risk losing some of that money. There's literally no benefit to having lead pipes in our waterways -- lead leaches out of those pipes and into our water eventually, and there's no safe amount of lead one can imbibe, because any amount of lead can cause brain damage, which then leads to other intractable health problems. You know how you get preventive health care for no additional cost now? Well, we should also get clean water from our government at no additional cost.

Inequality Media helps you tell big cable corporations to take the Fox News Channel off the air. It's not censorship! Censorship is when our government takes something off the air; good Americans joining together to pressure private corporations to take something off the air is just the churn of civilization. And no, Fox doesn't have a First Amendment right to get carried by other big corporations! If folks really want to diddle their rage glands all day, they can go find Fox News on the internet, where big telecoms should deliver all files at the same speed (per net neutrality principles); needless to say, we'd fight algorithms that shove Fox News down your throat. We've got to win civilization every day.

Around the table: why Russia will lose the war, and other truths.

Ho hum, states are rushing to cut taxes, using money from the American Rescue Plan Act as an excuse, though that money was a one-time expenditure. They'll use any excuse to cut taxes! And remember: when they cut taxes, usually they cut taxes a lot for their cronies and only a little, if any, for regular folks. At least the Nebraska Senate is currently filibustering one of the more nakedly pro-wealthy tax cuts out there. Some of these states have proposed cutting sales taxes, and I approve of that in a general sense, but most of them have not addressed how they're going to raise the resulting shortfall, and every state but Vermont, you may recall, has passed balanced-budget amendments to their constitutions.

Kamil Galeev argues, convincingly I think, that Vladimir Putin will lose his war with Ukraine. Long story short: Russia's more concerned with strutting its stuff than doing the hard work victory would require. Long story somewhat longer: Mr. Putin wanted to basically blitzkrieg the hell out of Ukraine without planning very much for what would happen if that didn't work -- and his blitzkrieg wasn't going to work, since he didn't even plan that well. There's even more to the story -- Russia made its military more efficient until the mid-2010s, when it turned to making its military look more impressive, and Ukraine basically went in the opposite direction. And hate to sound like a broken record, but a lot of this will sound familiar to those who followed our adventure in Iraq closely.

Samuel L. Boyd at The Conversation discusses "Why Translating 'God's Law' to Government Law Isn't Easy." The answer has nothing to do with woke mobs or deep states, of course, and more to do with the fog of passed time: what we, in retrospect, conceive of as "laws," like the Code of Hammurabi and a lot of laws described in the Torah, weren't actually laws -- Hammurabi issued plenty of decrees at odds with his Code, and how many folks during the time of Deuteronomy stoned their kid to death for drinking and rabble-rousing? Not when there was choring to be done on the farm, I bet! In addition, folks may have come up with the concept of a code of law that comes from God, as in Exodus, in order to fight the Kings who oppressed them with their laws. Folks who insist on punishing transgender folks as often as they draw breath won't be swayed by any of these notions, but the folks who would see Leviticus more as a book about universal precautions will. Note well that the latter crowd is considerably larger than the former crowd.

When I read that "Activists push Biden to Expand Renewables for Energy Independence From Russia" -- and entirely reasonable plan we would already have implemented if not for the intransigence of Joe Manchin -- I'd still be happier to read "Americans push Biden to expand renewables," not just because that's generally true of how Americans feel, but also because I'd like us all to think of ourselves as activists, since that's what defending democracy and defending civilization requires. I'd like us all to think of ourselves as activists even though some Americans only discovered their love of activism because they didn't want to wear masks at Costco. I'd also prefer to read that "big energy corporations push Biden to expand renewables," since they're the biggest obstacle to a more renewable energy grid. The article's still very good, though, namely for its lengthy refutation of the notion that fracked natural gas will solve our energy problems. I mean, gosh, you've got sun and wind everywhere.

Our Centers for Disease Control (or CDC) finds, after analyzing over 70,000 blood samples, that over 140 million Americans, including a majority of our nation's children, have had COVID through late January. That's way more than official reports give -- Worldometers.info counts a little over 80 million infections total in the United States, which doesn't even mean 80 million people infected -- and it also maps on to The Lancet's finding from January that official sources have way, way underreported COVID infections.

Finally, President Biden delivered his State of the Union address on Tuesday night -- it was a good speech, a little heavy on solutions, if anything -- but Republicans didn't waste any time acting like idiots about it. Sen. Marco Rubio (E-FL) boycotted it because he'd have to take a COVID test beforehand, and because "I only take a test if I'm sick." Why, it's like he hasn't learned after two years that some 40 percent of all COVID infections come without symptoms! I spy something that's going to wind up in Val Demings's campaign ads; she might even call it "Where's Marco?" Meanwhile, Reps. Boebert (Q-CO) and Greene (Q-GA) heckled Mr. Biden while he was talking with a "build the wall" chant; if Democrats have any brains/guts at all, they'll run at least the photo accompanying the story in campaign ads. Ain't nothing an independent voter likes less than a person shouting on TV.

Action: concerning war, education, student loan debt, violence against protestors, payday lenders, and social media.

Long story short: tell your government to avoid another senseless war, this time in the Ukraine; tell Florida state legislators to reject the "Don't Say Gay" bill, tell President Biden to forgive student loan debt, tell our Justice Department to fight anti-protestor laws at the state level, tell our FDIC to fight payday lenders, and tell Facebook to release its human rights assessment in re hate speech in India. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. Do we want yet another stupid war, whose proponents will constantly accuse us of treason when we don't support it because it's stupid? No, we do not! Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk and your President to stop warmongering and fearmongering about the Ukraine/Russia crisis. Also, World Beyond War helps you find an anti-war protest near you. If Russia invades the Ukraine, they will quickly find themselves bogged down in the same sort of decades-long quagmire like we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, yet Western nations still go on about the "threat" to world peace if Russia invades. Don't worry that plenty of Trumpholes also oppose a war in the Ukraine; I welcome their help and their activism. Plenty of conservatives opposed the Iraq War, after all, not that you knew that from watching cable "news" at the time.

Change.org helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject HB 1557/SB 1834, the notorious "Don't Say Gay" bill, which would (among other things) prevent Florida school teachers from bringing up homosexuality in class "in the primary grades." The bill's sponsor says that's grades K-3, and goes on to lament that all third-graders need to learn about in school is reading and math, but guess what? All of my 3rd grade classmates back in the day knew what "gay" was, even if they didn't actually know what sex was. Right-wingers pretend kids aren't ready for that stuff, but they're not just wrong about that, they're insulting those kids. And it's never too early to learn to not alienate other people just because they're different from you. Next they'll say kids can't hack masculine and feminine articles in Spanish.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to release the memo detailing his authority to forgive student loan debt, and then forgive up to $50,000 of that debt per student. His office prepared that memo almost a year ago; I wonder why we haven't seen it yet! By which I mean, of course, that it tells us something he doesn't want us to hear. He promised to forgive $10,000 of student loan debt on the campaign trail, then told us he doesn't really have the authority to do that, but since our federal government holds most student loan debt, I really doubt that's the case. Why would we forgive student loan debt? Because we promised them a secure and lucrative life if they went to college, and they don't have it! We broke a promise to those students, so we ought to make that right.

Color of Change helps you tell our Department of Justice (or DOJ) to fight anti-protest laws at the state level. Because those laws violate our rights, that's why! Even if you're blocking a road, you don't deserve to get run over! That's something those anti-vax truckers are going to find out about next month when they come down to D.C., amirite? Of course, states aren't passing anti-protest laws because of right-wing protestors; they pass them because of Black Lives Matter protestors and anti-Trump protestors and climate change protestors, and we know this because of the timing. In Tennessee you can't camp out at the state Capitol or else you'll be convicted of a felony, which would then deprive you of your right to vote; in Georgia, folks can threaten protestors with violence with immunity. We have to stop all that stupid crap.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell our Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or FDIC) to stop letting payday lenders use banks as a front for their usurious loans. Because it's illegal in addition to being immoral! The Trump Administration actually allowed payday lenders to evade state interest caps by essentially laundering their loans through banks from states without interest caps; even after courts overturned their rule, the Trump Administration let those payday lenders keep at it! Now our FDIC has a chance to actually enforce the law, but we still ought to tell them to do it, lest some future Trump Administration try this kind of crap again. If our FDIC enforces the law and keeps good Americans out of runaway debt, we can truly say they've helped drain the swamp.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell Facebook to release the full internal human rights report assessing hate speech on Facebook in India. They did it in 2020, but they're not releasing it, and although that's kind of a way of saying Facebook bears a lot of responsibility for Muslims in India fearing they're going to get beaten up or killed, you'd still like to see that responsibility broken down to cases. Facebook has already taken some well-deserved PR hits over its facilitation of hate speech in Myanmar (helping to bring about an ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims there), and hell, its algorithms in America help Nazi wannabes find each other without folks even creating or administering a group! Facebook should come clean; I mean, if they've done nothing wrong, they've got nothing to fear.

Action: concerning campaign finance, taxes, conversion "therapy," and travel bans.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fight big corporate campaign donations, pass the Get Foreign Money out of U.S. Elections Act, give our IRS the money it needs to catch rich tax cheats, ban conversion "therapy," and pass the NO BAN Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to amend our Constitution so we can restrain big campaign finance donations again. Virtually everyone in America wants that, which I guess is why our Congressfolk haven't done it -- they think "bipartisanship" is "what corporatists on both sides want," not what Americans on both sides want. Now some folks argue for even more corporate money in campaign ads, but luckily their arguments all suck -- they range from "incumbents will pass laws restricting spending by challengers" (you can think of about a hundred other laws that would prevent that from happening!) to "campaigns cost money, you know" (which doesn't justify spending just any amount of money on a campaign). Stupidity can't keep winning in America!

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6283, the Get Foreign Money Out of U.S. Elections Act. Because they're American elections, that's why! If they were world elections, we wouldn't be having this discussion! Our laws already ban individual foreign citizens from donating to American campaigns -- so now those folks just buy American corporations and use them like a wet dishrag. We can of course blame our Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United ruling for that (as well as for everything I describe in the preceding paragraph), but H.R. 6283 would close that loophole. And if that corporation's American employees want to contribute to campaigns? Gosh, there are hundreds of ways to do that these days, so shed no tears for them.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to give our IRS the funding it needs to catch all the rich folks who cheat on their taxes. Infamously, our IRS has lately told us it only has the money to catch poor tax cheats, since they can't poop out the money they'd need to fight back, so we need to fix that. No matter how many stupid, lying ads right-wingers run about it! During the infrastructure bill debate, an organization somehow called the Coalition to Protect American Workers ran ads equating hiring more IRS agents with higher taxes, and also insinuated that they'd find the money to fund that by "defunding the police." But let's not have people without shame getting all the say in how we run our country.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban conversion "therapy" in America. Canada just banned it, and nations such as Germany and Malta have also banned it, but our mania for pandering to the weakest, most bigoted among us has thus far prevented us from doing it, and our politicians need to adult up about it. Conversion "therapy," you may recall, tries to convert gay folks into straight folks by using such "techniques" as having the gay person re-enact past sexual abuse while naked. I'd call that unscientific, just like our Surgeon General did 20 years ago, but I guess doing so would just provoke the masks-are-abuse and vaccines-don't-work crowd. But those people just live to be provoked anyway, so I don't care. Someday they'll learn they're not the center of the universe.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1891, the NO BAN Act. The NO BAN Act would prevent a President from unilaterally enacting anything like Donald Trump's infamous "Muslim ban" -- or Joe Biden's unjustly-not-infamous late 2021 ban on eight African nations supposedly in response to the Omicron variant of COVID. You see how well that did in containing Omicron, right? The NO BAN Act would prevent our President from enacting any travel ban based on religious discrimination or racism, and would require our President to create the narrowest possible ban if it's based on a "compelling government interest." Frankly, I'd rather make Congress pass such bans, if they're ever necessary, but I don't let the perfect murder the good, and the NO BAN Act would do some good.

Action: concerning methane emissions, Oak Flat, war in Yemen, the Hyde Amendment, and the Equality Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep the methane emissions tax in the Build Back Better Act, pass the Save Oak Flat Act, end our involvement in the war on Yemen, and repeal the Hyde Amendment, and tell your Senators to pass the Equality Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Did you know there was a methane emissions tax in the Build Back Better Act? I didn't! So you may want to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to tax methane emissions in the Build Back Better Act. They'll never see it coming! This would be a tax corporations pay, not people, no matter how much corporate cronies tell you "people will just wind up paying for it." Sure, if corporations want to be even less popular than they are now! And seriously, why would civilized people tolerate "just passing on the cost to the consumer"? Possibly because corporatists have gaslit us into believing we can't do any better than letting corporations have whatever they want! But methane emissions pack a massive climate change punch, and it's well past time for us to punch back -- and taxing methane emissions could end methane leaks, which would leave climate change with fewer teeth.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1884/S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. Oak Flat is an area within the Tonto National Forest in Arizona that just so happens to be sacred to several Native American nations -- but also the site of a planned copper mining project. The two former Arizona Senators Jeff Flake and the late John McCain snuck the Oak Flat copper mine authorization into a 2014 defense authorization bill, since it would never have survived as a stand-alone bill, not least because the corporation operating the project, Resolution Copper, is owned by Rio Tinto, which used to employ Mr. Flake as a lobbyist. If we pass this bill, we can begin to make amends for treating sacred lands like a used dishrag -- unless we're only going to let white people have religion in America, I guess. That seems to be the Republican preference! But they don't get all the say around here.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end our complicity as a nation in the killing of Yemeni civilians. We've been trying, and jackboot lockstep agreement with Saudi Arabia's aims ain't pervasive in Congress anymore -- as evidenced by the Biden Administration's proposed $500 million sale of "arms maintenance," which is further from "arms" than we used to be -- but when you've got the advantage, you don't sit back, you press it. People who try to argue with you about this try to tell you BUT IRANZ IZ TEH WORSEZ!!!!, which sure ain't a way of saying "Saudi Arabia is awesome!" or even "what we're doing in Yemen is sad, but it has to be done." They may be handing us victory with their bad arguments, but we still have to take victory.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the notorious Hyde Amendment, which prevents any taxpayer money from funding abortion. Yeah, I would never want an abortion to happen either if I could help it, but I'm not about to tell someone carrying a fetus with no organs, or a fetus that could kill or maim her once delivered, to stand on principle. Hell, I'm not about to tell someone with one more uterus than I have to stand on such principles! When men can give birth, we'll reopen that conversation. And I know, Joe Manchin actually insisted the Build Back Better Act include the Hyde Amendment, probably just so he could do the helicopter dance in front of us yet again. Nyah nyah I'm the 50th vote! Suck on this, liberals! But he doesn't get all the say around here; we do. And all we have to do is act like it.

Finally, since Monday was Coming Out Day, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. This bill represents a major civil rights boon for gay and transgender folk -- no longer could banks, employers, and landlords discriminate against gay and transgender folk merely because they're gay and transgender, and no longer could states pass "bathroom bills" that do nothing but enrage the easily-enraged and hurt transgender folk. And right-wingers call all that discrimination "religious freedom"! But one more time: you do not have a "religious" right to abridge other folks' rights. Some people act like citing one's "religious" "conscience" is a get-out-of-being-civilized card, but it ain't. A lot folks claiming religious exemptions because they don't want to get a vaccine are about to find this out.

Action: concerning Social Security, social media, saving our Post Office, fuel efficiency standards, and pollution.

Long story short: tell President Biden to fire two Social Security Administrators, tell Facebook to permanently ban Donald Trump, tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General DeJoy, tell our EPA to enact more vigorous fuel efficiency standards, and tell President Biden to block the proposed Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. You can call President Biden at 202.456.1111 or use the White House contact form, or use the email/petition/comment tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to fire two Social Security Administrators Andrew Saul and David Black, and fix the Supplemental Security Income (or SSI) program. Messrs. Saul and Black have done their damnedest to set fire to as much of our Social Security programs as they can, making it unnecessarily harder to apply for SSI benefits and "forgetting" to send info to our IRS so seniors could get their stimulus checks. You'd also ask our President to increase benefits so they at least meet the federal poverty level -- contrary to what Rand Paul might thnk, $794 a month ain't inducing anyone to fake back pain -- and raise asset limits, which are stuck at 1989 levels. Among other things! Making programs work better and firing bad workers ain't "socialism." Actually, it's what we expect and deserve from our government.

Left Action helps you tell Facebook to make its ban of Donald Trump permanent. Yeah, Facebook extended his suspension for two years, but if you lose an election and then whine about it being "stolen" without any damn evidence and then incite an attempted coup at our Capitol, then Facebook can err on the side of caution and just wash its hands of Donald Trump. Folks who still think this is about "free speech" -- as if anyone's put him in jail for spewing his filth! -- need to remember that this is 2021, where virtually anyone can publish their rants, however good or bad, on the internet. Why, Donald Trump just started writing a blog not even a month ago! And then, not even a week ago, he stopped. So he certainly has little standing to complain about "free speech."

People for the American Way helps you tell our USPS Board of Governors to fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who tried to throw the 2020 election to Donald Trump by gumming up the works at our Postal Service and is trying to raise prices and cut services as we speak. Of course, the news that our FBI is investigating him for illegal campaign finance is just icing on the cake -- and could this be the thing that finally spurs our USPS Board of Governors to move? I kid, of course -- the only thing that should spur them to move is our will, communicated vigorously. And we'll keep communicating it until we get the Post Office we deserve, again.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to overturn the notorious "clean car" "standards" issued by the Trump EPA, and then set more vigorous ones. Because saving money on gas and polluting less are actually very popular with the American people! You can only get them to go along with less fuel-efficient cars by lying to them ("it'll reduce car prices," as if you won't lose that sticker price discount over the years you're paying more for gas) or demoralizing them ("accept the results," "then win more elections," etc.). Neither of those is a lasting strategy for governing, or, indeed, for preserving and perfecting a civilization. So, yeah, let's fight that.

Finally, Presente helps you tell President Biden to halt construction on Enbridge's notorious Line 3 pipeline. As we speak, over a thousand activists have blocked further construction of Line 3, and they're calling attention not merely to Line 3's path through Ojibwe holy lands but to Enbridge's, ah, not-so-steller pipe safety record. Remember when an Enbridge line ruptured and created the biggest inland oil spill in American history? It was only a decade ago, and you can bet the good folks of Kalamazoo, MI remember, since that spill dumped oil into 40 square miles of the watershed there. President Biden can stop this pipeline, ignore the right-wing wailing about TEH JOBZ!!!! -- and then stop negotiating with Republicans so he can actually help create jobs. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, defense spending, gouging of prisoners, drug policy, discrimination, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell your state legislatures and redistricting commissions to cut out all the partisan gerrymandering, and tell your Congressfolk to cut defense spending and to pass the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, the MORE Act, the Equality Act, the For the People Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Common Cause and Demand Progress help you tell your state officials to reject any and all partisan gerrymandering this term. Are state legislators and redistricting commissioners used to this sort of attention? No, they are not! Many of them will no doubt profess to a complete and utter surprise that so many of their constituents care about this! At which point they'll think they've put us off our guard and then go back to doing whatever nefarious works they planned to do anyway. Which is why we'll stay on them. Gerrymandering is the last refuge of politicians who can't win arguments on the merits, and why should they continue to win when they haven't earned it?

Both Daily Kos and Win Without War tell our Congressfolk to cut defense spending already. Because we are number one in military spending on Earth, and we spend more than numbers two through twelve combined. And has that made us more secure? Apparently not, since we still go bananas about nonexistent "border crises" and "crime waves." Yet President Biden, apparently having forgotten that right-wing media gave Barack Obama precisely zero plaudits for increasing defense spending, has just asked for $13 billion more than even Donald Trump got last year. I mean, you want to do better than Trump, but not in that way, certainly not when we have so, so many other needs as a nation.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, which would prevent big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners and their families when they try to make phone calls. See, this is simple: there's rehabilitating prisoners, there's punishing prisoners, and then there's gouging prisoners, and why should a civilized nation tolerate the last item? Particularly since making it prohibitively difficult to pay for contact with loved ones makes rehabilitation a lot harder? Prisoners need to talk to their loved ones while they're paying for their crimes, and it's not "coddling" to, you know, not gouge them. Some kid at some big telecom corporation came up with the idea of overcharging prisoners and their families, and probably even called it a "captive market," ha ha ha snort. I wonder how he'll do at the Pearly Gates.

Both the Drug Policy Alliance and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, which would take pot off Schedule I (where it's never belonged), invest in communities most harmed by the "war on drugs" (which was always putting down protestors and Black folks), and expunge pot convictions from a lot of folks' criminal records (pot convictions help prevent them from getting jobs, and therefore puts them back on track to commit crimes to make ends meet). Why did we fall for things like Reefer Madness again? Because the cotton industry didn't want hemp as a competitor, basically. Think of all the pain we've caused because one group wanted to keep their advantages unfairly; it doesn't reflect well on us. Ending that pain does reflect well on us, though, so let's do that.

The Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. The Equality Act, contrary to what you've heard from right-wingers, would add gay and transgender folk to the protected classes in the Civil Rights Act. Also contrary to what you've heard from right-wingers, the Civil Rights Act already has a fairly broad exemption for religious organizations, so there is literally no truth to all the right-wing whining about how the Equality Act is TEH BIGGESTZEZ INJURIEZ TO TEH RELIGUZ FREEDUMZ EVAHZ!!!!! No, the bill is mainly about preventing banks, doctors, and landlords from discriminating against gay and transgender folks. Most people are actually against that sort of discrimination now. (And if you're about to whine about transgender boys playing girls' sports, read almost any of my other paragraphs about this topic. I don't reinvent the wheel for anyone's amusement.)

Finally, Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Hey, weren't we just talking about gerrymandering? The For the People Act would fix that (among other things) by making states use redistricting commissions, rather than self-interested legislators. And the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would plug the hole our Supreme Court blew out of the Voting Rights Act with Shelby County v. Holder -- and make it better! Republicans in the Senate won't vote for any of that, etc., but it's still our duty to communicate our will -- and to communicate that our will hasn't changed.

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise corporate taxes to pay for the American Jobs Plan, tell our Post Office to reject Postmaster General DeJoy's plan to cut services and raise prices, tell President Biden to help hold nursing homes accountable for neglect, tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family and medical leave, tell our Interior Department to reject oil drilling in the Everglades, and tell your Senators to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting, and have a happy and safe Memorial Day weekend!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning voting rights, civil rights, paycheck fairness, Muslim bans, and D.C. statehood.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Equality Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, the NO BAN Act, and the D.C. Admission Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to contact your Senators -- or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. I've heard little from right-wingers about the For the People Act lately, but I doubt that's shame -- it's more likely the complacency of knowing Republicans will filibuster it and Joe Manchin won't let the Democrats overcome such a filibuster. So what would we be missing out on, so Joe Manchin can preserve the "sanctity" of Senate "process"? An end to partisan gerrymandering, 15 days of early voting in every state, automatic and same-day voter registration all over America, and an end to certain racist caging practices including the notorious Interstate Crosscheck. So that's what we'll lose by keeping the filibuster as a tool of wanton obstruction.

Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As you know, our Justice Department can't stop Southern states from passing restricting voting laws, thanks to our Supreme Court's ruling in Shelby County v. Holder -- that would be biased against the South, they said, but they explicitly said that our Justice Department could have that power if it applied to all states and localities. Well, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would enact that very thing, and then we could stop any state or locality with a demonstrated pattern of vote suppression from passing more vote suppression laws. I'm looking at you, Ohio!

The Daily Kos Liberation League and People for the American Way both help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. My state's junior Senator writes that H.R. 5 "would eviscerate religious liberty protections." Guess what? That's complete rubbish! In H.R. 5 amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that it includes gays and transgender folks in its protected classes, but the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already gives fairly broad exemptions to religious organizations, and H.R. 5 doesn't change that! So, either they know they're lying, or they don't know when it's their damn job to know. I don't know which is worse; I'm not sure finding out matters.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act. Congress passed an Equal Pay Act in 1965, which nominally makes it illegal to pay women less than men for the same work, but the pay disparity still exists, because (for example) employers still get to threaten employees with termination if they discuss their pay with each other, even though that's often the only way workers figure out they're getting screwed over. The Paycheck Fairness Act would prevent employers from doing that, among other good works. Do not admit any objections with the words "trial laywers" in it. If employers didn't try to get away with so much shadiness, we wouldn't need so many trial lawyers.

People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1333, the NO BAN Act, which our House passed last week. The NO BAN Act would prevent future Presidents from passing Trumpian travel bans obviously aimed at Muslims, even if our Supreme Court ignored Mr. Trump's words to that effect (he wanted to enact "a Muslim ban, but legal," according to his wingman, Mr. Giuliani). The bill would not "open the floodgates to terrorists" or whatever right-wingers say it's about, since our President would still have the ability to keep folks from entering, but our President would have to restrict folks based more on facts and laws than on the need to keep rageheads raging. The less say rageheads have over American policy, the better, that's what I say.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 51/S. 51, the D.C. Admission Act, and thus make Washington, D.C. a state. D.C.'s netherland status continues to hurt its citizens -- over 700,000 American citizens have no voting representation in Congress, while they pay more taxes than the citizens of at least a dozen American states while facing more direct Congressional meddling in their affairs. Plus, of course, we just had an attempted coup on January 6; think a Washington, D.C. National Guard unit might have helped deter that? I think so, and the good citizens of our nation's capitol deserve so. And to those who whine that Democrats will get two more Senators: try persuading people to vote for you!

Around the table: "law and order" in its proper perspective, part 223.

One more time, from Carey Shenkman and Ahmed Mohamed at TruthOut: "After Capitol Breach, More Domestic Terrorism Laws Aren’t the Answer." The authors remind us that plenty of laws already exist, but typically our governments use these laws to crack down on Muslims and anti-racism protestors, not actual seditionists. And just as our brethren on the right (but not all of them!) applauded the USA PATRIOT Act after 9.11, we shouldn't applaud new laws that constrain our enemies after 1.6, because that always comes back to bite ya.

Surprise, surprise, among Donald Trump's last-minute pardon spree were "at least seven doctors of health care entrepreneurs" who committed massive Medicare and Medicaid fraud. One was a nursing home CEO who used part of the $1 billion he bilked from American taxpayers to buy a $360,000 watch (in case you were fixated on Joe Biden's Rolex!), and you could be forgiven for your skepticism that he really "has been devoted to prayer and repentance" or "is in declining health" at the ripe old age of 52. Law and order!

Uh oh: Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) told the Twitterverse that he met with the "Stop the Steal" seditionists on January 3, and that it was a "great meeting" and that they should "keep fighting." He deleted the twittering the day after their attempted Capitol coup, of course, and said a bunch of tepid things about the importance of law and order that I'm sure he'd have said much more passionately if the seditionists had been blacks or hippies. Plus, by way of excusing their actions, "it comes out of frustration." I'm plenty frustrated with our government, as you may have noticed, but I have attempted exactly zero coups.

Right Wing Watch runs down the various "prophecies" about that Trump second term that did not come to pass. Because he lost by seven million votes, I feel compelled to say with the Italics Hammer. I sure do hope our "liberal" media do a better job keeping these people out of mainstream discourse. I'm old enough to remember when folks who predicted an apocalypse that never arrived were actually ashamed to show their faces in public again.

Been thinking that maybe the whole QAnon conspiracy theory can fit any piece of data into it, and is thus utterly useless as a theory? Well, here are a few more examples of that -- and don't fixate on the folks who feel "betrayed" because their man didn't arrest all the Democrats, because they'll get over it in a couple of days and go right back to being batshit. Also, too, how stupid is it that we're saying the phrase "the best is yet to come" is "popular in QAnon circles"? "The best is yet to come" is one of the oldest phrases anyone knows! What's next, QAnon's appropriation of "yes" and "no"?

Finally, Julie Hollar at FAIR reminds us that "Media Allow Republicans to Use ‘Unity’ as Tool of Division." "Unity" is the new "bipartisanship" -- just as calls for "bipartisanship" actually mean "capitulating to Republicans," calls for "unity" mean "capitulating to Republicans." Ooh, and Joe Biden didn't put a Republican in his Cabinet! Next up in the New York Times: Quislings deserve affirmative action!

Action: concerning various forms of racial and religious oppression.

H.R. 6210, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, passed the House by an impressive 406-3 margin; the bill would impose sanctions on China for its government's human rights violations in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (or XUAR), and would prevent that government from exporting goods made from Uyghur slavery to the United States. China's repression of nearly 2 million Uyghur Muslims into slavery camps is well-known by now, as is the complicity of American corporations (cough Amazon Apple cough) in that repression, and not coincidentally, the bill would also require big corporations to tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) if they've taken any sort of part in this noxiousness. 406-3 is a pretty nice margin, but not too many years ago, our Senate couldn't even pass a bill passed unanimously in the House (that would be the Email Privacy Act), so we shouldn't get complacent about this bill, either. Hence Rethink Trade helps you tell your Senators to pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act -- without the kind of poison-pill amendments some Senators used to sink the Email Privacy Act.

Meanwhile, Charleston (SC) Councilmember Harry Griffin held a rally with the so-called Proud Boys last week; the Proud Boys are a notorious group of Nazi wannabes, though of course they prefer the term "Western chauvinist" like they're post-modern or something. Our FBI, excuse me, even this FBI has designated the Proud Boys an "extremist hate group," and good Americans have captured their violent doings on camera, so there's little wiggle room for on-the-other-hand silliness when discussing them. (Yes, their current Chair is a person of color, and their founder married a person of color, but such phenomena, to be frank, aren't as uncommon as people think.) Anyway, Change.org helps you demand that Councilmember Griffin resign his job. Are we really going to demand his resignation over one mistake? Of course we are! Murderers commit "one mistake," and we don't blink at putting them in jail; we're not even putting Mr. Griffin in jail for associating with known racists, and a career in politics isn't a Constitutionally-protected right. Actually, it's the very definition of a privilege.

Finally, our soon-to-be-ex-President is rushing to do many favors for his corporate cronies before he leaves office, and one of these favors is a mining contract in the Oak Flat district of Arizona, which is also home to lands sacred to several Native American nations. Do you recall Arizona's two then-Republican Senators ensuring that the 2015 defense appropriations bill rolled back a prohibition on mining in those areas declared by none other than President Eisenhower? Do you recall that one of those Senators (Jeff Flake, far too well-congratulated for his opposition to our soon-to-be-ex-President) used to work for the corporation that would mine Oak Flat? Do you recall Apaches travelling 2,000 miles from Arizona to Washington, D.C. in 2016 to protest the taking of their sacred lands? And it's not just about not screwing Indians even further, or protecting actual religious freedom -- it's also about the pollution mining would unleash upon the region's land, air, and water. And for what? For more gilded plumbing in some mining executive's 19th vacation home? Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to save the Oak Flat region of Arizona.

Around the table: in which we confront another secessionist tantrum.

Our Supreme Court, citing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, unanimously rules that Muslims can sue FBI agents for monetary damages for placing them on a no-fly list as a way of coercing them into informing on other Muslims. I think the ruling is fairly narrow -- our Court didn't rule on whether folks could sue under the RFRA for injunctive relief, because our government took the original plaintiffs off the no-fly list about a year after they originally sued -- but it's still welcome. And remember what Paul Craig Roberts once said: if over a million people are on no-fly lists, why don't we have terrorist attacks every day?

More good news: after public pressure (and public likely includes you, if you read about it here), Bank of America has declared it won't fund efforts to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR), despite our soon-to-be-ex-President's most fervent efforts. We're not, as they say, out of the woods yet -- the Office of the Comptroller has proposed a rule that might force banks to look at "individual client risk" rather than effect broad exclusionary policies, which would seem, ah, problematic -- but, again, this is a welcome development.

Given how many times I've said we should "get in our elected officials' grills" about pressing legislative matters, you may wonder if I approve of anti-mask protestors banging on the door of a Boise, ID health official's house as she was meeting to mull new COVID-related restrictions. The answer is no: folks should "get in their grills" in public, not in private; that could mean banging on the doors of their office, but not their home. Going to someone's house to intimidate them may seem "courageous," but it's actually cowardly -- if you're that sure you're right, you'll do it in front of everyone.

Surprise, surprise, Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), who'll face Georgia voters in a runoff race in less than a month, apparently sold his Washington, D.C. townhouse to a bankster lobbyist who had business before the Senate Banking Committee upon which Mr. Perdue sits. Their excuses are strained, as usual -- it was fair market price (although not everyone agrees about that, and another possibility would be no market price, if he didn't find another buyer), he didn't know the buyer (meaning he'd have been derelict in his duty on the Banking Committee!), and my personal favorite, the organization hasn't lobbied Mr. Perdue specifically, as if buying someone's house for $1.8 million isn't an act of lobbying itself! I'm old enough to remember when even the appearance of corruption ended careers, but in recent years I've seen too many people defy the rules and get away with it.

Finally, hot on the heels of our Supreme Court slapping down (by an apparent 7-2 margin) the Ken Paxton-led lawsuit attempting to overturn election results in four states, Texas GOP Chair Allen West suggests that maybe Texas should secede from our union. The last time Texas politicians threw a similar tantrum, in 2009, my reaction was more or less "don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya," and if I were playing *realpolitik* I might still say that, though we'd need to prepare for the fact (no, not the "possibility," the fact) that Texas would wage war on America sooner or later. But plenty of *good* people live in Texas, too -- after all, Mr. Trump only won it by 6 points, so Texas might only be one Stacey Abrams-calibre organizer away from flipping like Georgia did.

Action: concerning good House bills, bad bureaucrats, and bad pro-pollution bills.

Happy Thursday, good Americans! Now's as good a time as any to 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. Doesn't matter that they don't want to do it, or would rather confirm more right-wing judges -- all that matters is that we want them to do it, and if we speak out enough, they'll be afraid not to do it. Don't laugh; I've seen it happen.

Meanwhile, Roots Action helps you demand that our government abolish the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. If abolition seems a little extreme to you, I wouldn't blame you -- I'd vastly prefer to reform government agencies before abolishing them myself. But I don't blame the folks who get beaten up by ICE officers for wanting it abolished, either. And, ah, one other thing to consider: our soon-to-be-ex-President used ICE officers this year essentially as a brownshirt force to beat up protestors at otherwise peaceful protests this year, and anytime a President decides to use law enforcement for his own purposes, rather than the ones mandated by our laws and our Constitution, well, that's a tool we've got to take out of the toolbox right quick. Recall, also, that our Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, under which ICE operates, ain't been around that long -- our government created it out of anti-immigrant hysteria during Tha Bush Mobb years, so it ain't like we just don't know how to live without it.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 619 would, and I can't believe anyone thinks this is a good idea, exclude from the Clean Stream Law's definition of pollution any "accidental discharge, spill or release that does not cause a violation of any of the numeric water quality criteria under 25 Pa. Code Chapter 93 (relating to water quality standards)." The kicker there, of course, is that Pennsylvania law doesn't define water quality standards for every conceivable pollutant, so SB 619 would essentially redefine pollution to exclude pollution. And SB 790 would do even more damage, by increasing pollution, lowering clean drinking water standards, and handing out big chunks of corporate welfare to big gas drillers. Always they hand out the welfare to those poor, poor big corporations, and never to the needy, so once again, we must remind our legislators that they work for us, not just their big donors. Hence the Center for Coalfield Justice helps you tell your PA state House reps and your PA state Senators to fight pollution by rejecting SB 619 and SB 790.

Action: concerning good House bills, clean water, and anti-Semitism.

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. Yeah, our Senate just put another right-wing stooge on our Supreme Court, which is demoralizing, but we have to be like Nick Foles and just bounce back up -- and when our Senators see us do that, they'll fear us the way they should.

Meanwhile, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) contemplates updating our Lead and Copper Rule (authorized by the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1991), which limits pipe corrosion as well as the amount of lead and copper at the tap -- and with this EPA, you know which way they want to "update" the rule! That's right, they want to update it so that it allows more lead in your drinking water, even though lead causes brain damage in everyone who ingests it, which (not to give our EPA any ideas!) is why we don't allow lead in gas emissions anymore. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to make the Lead and Copper Rule stronger, not weaker. Like, for example, let's get the lead out of the service lines that connect houses to water mains, since that's usually the biggest source of lead water contamination, and those lead service lines still serve over nine million homes and businesses. And some of those customers are child care centers, so, like, let's do that now. It would create jobs for people who refit the lines, after all. Even though right-wingers will call that "socialism" as they drive roads, call cops, and use libraries.

Finally, Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell our government to stop calling organizations "anti-Semitic" merely because they advocate for Palestinian rights. Why? Well, partly because it's not true, and partly because the resulting PR hit from being called "anti-Semitic" can be very damaging (just ask Jeremy Corbyn!), but also because calling organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International "anti-Semitic" is a profound insult to all those who suffered and died -- and who continue to suffer and die -- from real anti-Semitism. And it is a bit rich to watch this Administration pretend to be concerned about anti-Semitism after openly cultivating supporters from the ranks of America's Nazi wannabes. We are, all of us, friends of Israel, and we are, all of us, fully aware that being a friend doesn't mean blindly supporting whatever our friends do, but calling them out when they do wrong, so that they (and we!) can be better friends. But too many folks call people who don't agree with them "anti-Semitic." We should stop listening to such people, since they act like they don't understand that civilization is actually pretty hard work.

Action: concerning good House bills, internet privacy, and methane emissions.

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. Yeah, our Senate only wants to put another right-wing stooge on our Supreme Court, and we'll get to that, but we still must remind them of their duty to do right by us.

Meanwhile, if you're wary of how much personal data big tech corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple collect from you, and you should be wary, then Consumer Reports helps you tell your legislators and regulators to do a much better job protecting our personal data. You'll recall that our FCC actually issued pretty good regulations that protected consumer privacy on the internet, but the last Congress couldn't crap all over that effort fast enough, moving quickly to repeal those regulations via the notorious "resolution of disapproval" process. The Consumer Reports petition asks that consumers get more control over their personal data, that corporations be more transparent about their use of that data, and that corporations don't get monopoly control over our internet. Our FCC may not be able to issue new regulations about the matter (yet another unfortunate aspect of the "resolution of disapproval" process), but nothing prevents our Congressfolk from passing bills about the matter. Well, nothing but their own cowardice or avarice, but what else is new?

Finally, our EPA just rolled back Obama-era regulations preventing big oil and gas drilling corporations from leaking methane into the air, and this rollback offends on so many levels -- it causes more pollution, it makes climate change worse, it wastes usable energy, and it deprives good Americans of royalties when it occurs on public lands. But, hey, some bossman somewhere gets to gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home, so it's another round of "screw the people" for this Administration. And you know how right-wingers always say they'll just pass the costs of regulations on to the little guy? Well, the "little guy" winds up bearing the costs of methane emissions in all the ways described in the first sentence -- we lose royalties, we pay more for health care because of pollution, and we eventually don't get a livable planet to inhabit because methane emissions pack a much, much higher climate change punch than even coal emissions. That never makes it into the right's "cost-benefit analysis"; as I've said, they only care about the "cost" or "benefit" to executive paychecks. Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to do whatever it takes to roll back yet another Administration rollback.

Action: concerning good House bills, sanctions on Iran, and Chad Wolf.

Happy Wednesday, 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. Why do we keep doing this? Because we need to establish our will, as we communicate it to our Senators -- and thus also establish how badly they're doing at adhering to our will, which is their sole job, and a job they're doing much worse than our House is. And the more we do it, the closer we get to fulfilling the promise democracy.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and Secretary of State Pompeo to reject any more sanctions on Iran. We could go on at length about the damage more sanctions would do to good Iranians, who will certainly bear the brunt of sanctions more than their rulers, but all we need say is, well, calling this Administration's policy toward Iran piss-poor would be a grievous insult to piss. The Obama Administration helped craft a successful agreement that kept nuclear weapons out of Iran's hands, but this Administration withdrew from that agreement, apparently as part of a plan to create international chaos that could only be resolved by war with Iran, which is so 1980, you know. You could argue, I suppose, that Mr. Bush's Iraq policy only strengthened Iran in the region, thus tying our current President's hands, but just as two wrongs don't make a right, two stupids don't make a smart. So let's not remain hostage to bad foreign policy, because that would be un-American.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to the permanent Homeland Security Secretary position, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. They'd have plenty of reasons to reject the nomination, including Mr. Wolf's ardent support for family separation and illegal detainment of protestors, as well as his refusal to accept new DACA applications even though our Supreme Court told him to do it. But now that we're less than a month away from Election Day, our Senators would probably just prefer to wait this whole thing out and see how things go, given that voting for Mr. Wolf would be tough to defend to the voters who are about to decide your immediate future. It's funny that none of them have said confirming Mr. Wolf is essential given "the grave threats we face," since you know that's what they would have said in Tha Bush Mobb years. Still, we must remind them that cowardice is evil, and the time to do the right thing is always now.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning good House bills, 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 good House bills, big telecom shenanigans, and water conservation.

Happy Wednesday, good peoples! Now call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 2, the Moving Forward Act; H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act; H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 6, the American Dream and Promise Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act; H.R. 397, the Butch Lewis Act; H.R. 535, the PFAS Action Act; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 986, the Protecting Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act; H.R. 1373, the Grand Canyon Centennial Act; H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act; H.R. 2474, the PRO Act; H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act; H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act; H.R. 5035, the Television Viewer Protection Act; H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; and H.J. Res. 79, which would remove the expiration date from the original Equal Rights Amendment. These bills would make America a more perfect union -- by raising working family wages, protecting voting rights, and restoring internet freedom, among other good works -- which must be why Sen. McConnell (E-KY) refuses to allow a vote on any of them! But he ain't the boss of us! And our Senators need to know that -- but they'll only know it if we speak out.

Meanwhile, Charter Communications, the second-largest cable corporation in America, has lately petitioned our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) for permission to institute data caps! In the middle of a pandemic, while millions of kids are learning from home, no less! And Charter pledged not to institute data caps if our FCC green-lit its merger with Time Warner Cable, which should remind us how much a corporation's "word" is worth. In a typically whiny retort, Charter spokeshacks say that since other corporations get to do it, they should get to do it, too, but nobody should get to do it, because it doesn't serve any real purpose except to make money. I'm old enough to remember when our government forced corporations to serve customers, but now our government pretends that's never an option, as they let big telecom corporations jack up prices for ever-worsening service. But we don't have to take that! Free Press helps you tell our FCC to reject Charter's request to institute data caps. After all, this is the year it could cost your kids at school -- and it may not be the last year that happens, either.

In other news, our Administration has proposed loosening showerhead water efficiency standards, by redefining "showerhead" so that individual parts of the showerhead can count as a complete showerhead! And thus the entire showerhead can waste more water while still nominally complying with the standards! Our President complained a little over a month ago that showerheads don't put out enough water to help him make his hair "perfect," and while we shouldn't give one rat's hind-quarter about whatever our President's hair issues are, we should also note that we're staring at a future with a lot more drought in it, and appliances which actually help us conserve water will also help us deal with that drought. There's that word "conserve" again, the root word of that other word, "conservative," which a lot of reactionary rageheads pretend to be these days without understanding that it's really not all about yelling and screaming and getting attention and pissing off liberals. Hence Penn Environment helps you tell our Department of Energy to reject its proposed plan to loosen showerhead regulations.

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 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, law and order, and birth control.

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

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

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

Action: concerning health care data, unemployment benefits, concentration camps, and Muslim bans.

As you've no doubt heard, our Administration ordered American hospitals to send their data directly to the Department of Health and Human Services instead of the Centers for Disease Control, where they'd been sending it. What's the difference? Why, the public can view the CDC's data, but not HHS's data! Which will of course be managed by a private corporation from Pennsylvania which of course received a noncompetitive contract for the data and whose CEO of course has donated to Republican politicians! It's a two-fer: they hide data from the public and funnel taxpayer money (i.e., your money) to a crony corporation! Hence MoveOn helps you tell your Congressfolk to prevent our Administration from playing a shell game with vital health data in the middle of a pandemic. Our CDC makes our President look bad because CDC scientists know what they're doing and our President doesn't. But we're Americans, dammit, and we don't have to take that. Particularly since it could be a matter of life and death.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make sure they extend expanded unemployment benefits past July 25. That's right, those benefits expire in less than a week, and for a minute there Congress seemed happy looking more at the 6 million jobs created the last two months and less at the almost-40 million jobs lost the previous three. But if you possess the ability to subtract a one-digit number from a two-digit number, then you know why good Americans still need those benefits. The HEROES Act would already extend them, and we'll tell our Senators to pass that bill tomorrow, but in the meantime, they should hear from us, loud and clear, that we want the unemployment benefits extended -- without the nonsense about how "lazy" unemployment benefits supposedly make people, and certainly without the poison pills Mob Boss Mitch loves attaching to must-pass legislation. Oh, and not for nothing, but this pandemic's getting worse.

In other news, Sign Here Now helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) for its response to COVID-19 in its concentration camps. We might reasonably expect such an investigation to conclude that it's no better than our Administration's disastrous COVID-19 response generally, but our Congressfolk should still investigate on our behalf. True, learning that ICE is wantonly spraying cleaning chemicals on immigrant and refugee detainees, for example, won't move any of our President's votaries -- who generally interpret any cruelty toward non-white folks as "toughness" and any perceived slight against white folks as "bullying" -- but learning about such things may move good Americans who already have a lot to think about in their lives. Personal to those who claim anyone who opposes cruelty to immigrants and refugees in concentration camps must ipso facto support "open borders": God doesn't like trolls.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. To review: the NO BAN Act would not only reverse our President's notorious and nefarious Muslim ban (i.e., his travel ban on six Muslim-majority nations, with North Korea and Venezuela thrown in solely so he could claim he didn't base his ban on religion), it would prevent future Presidents from enacting similar bans in the future. If you're still thinking that maybe keeping Muslims out of America is a way of reducing terrorism, please remember that a) we've got plenty of domestic terrorists who we can't just keep out of their own country and b) if we stopped interfering in Middle Eastern affairs, then we'd go much, much farther toward reducing the possibility that Muslims will fly another plane into another building. Also, appeals to fear are always wrong.

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 bankster welfare, slave labor, and school lunch nutrition standards.

You've heard that the "economic stimulus" ideas our Administration is contemplating as a response to the coronavirus are mostly give-rich-people-more-money-they-haven't-earned? Well, banksters think that the coronavirus justifies letting them out of passing "stress tests" that would demonstrate their ability to weather another financial Armageddon. We can go ahead and call that corporate welfare. I guess your kids can use the coronavirus as an excuse to get their cookies before they eat their dinner, too! And burglars can use the coronavirus as an excuse to get off scot-free when they break into your house! More to the point, of course, is that banksters would use the coronavirus as an excuse to shirk their duty not to smear dung all over our economy again. And you know our Administration thinks duty isn't for big people, but only for little people like us. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Reserve not to use the coronavirus crisis as an excuse to enable banksters. These people really act like diaper-loaded brats, but at least babies are more charming once you change them.

Meanwhile, turns out Apple ain't just providing China with technological help oppressing the Uyghur Muslim population there -- it's also using Uyghurs as slave labor in its supply chain! It's a double-whammy! I'm old enough to remember when the corporatists would scold you for protesting slave labor in supply chains by saying you like your cheap consumer goods? And now we have a corporation using slave labor in its supply chain to make consumer goods that aren't even cheap. You have to wonder if Our Glorious Elites planned to take our outrage hostage to cheap stuff, then replace the cheap stuff with expensive stuff. It is the logic of the drug dealer, after all. But we won't fix it by meditating on our own alleged hypocrisy, or by building our own cellphones, which requires expertise most folks don't have and can't acquire on the fly -- we'll fix it by continuing to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR, and continuing to demand that corporations do right by their employees. So MPower Change helps you tell Apple to stop using slave labor from oppressed Chinese folk in its supply chain.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our USDA to scuttle its own efforts to roll back school lunch nutrition standards, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. If I seem strident about this matter, it's mainly because I've seen so, so many stupid arguments about getting our children to eat less junk food, and more fruits and vegetables, in school. People say some variation of GUBMINTZ DON'TZ TELLZ TEH KIDZ WHAT TO DOZ!!!!, when, actually, we have legally charged our government with this very task for our children while they're in school. And you'd think more people would want more support from our government when they try to get their kids to eat a banana instead of a bag of chips! I also hear that "some kids throw their apples away," as if the behavior of "some kids" means we should do nothing for any kids, or that "some districts are having trouble meeting the standards," when most districts aren't having that trouble and, again, do we stop doing good works because of a few stragglers? And when our USDA decides that french fries can count as fruit, they've all but said they're losing the argument.

Around the table: Democrats charge headlong into oblivion! And other horrible truths.

From the "Even More Appalling Than I Thought" file: Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs discourse at considerable length about why a Joe Biden nomination would be absolutely disastrous for the Democratic party and for America. Long story short: Mr. Biden has spent almost a half century capitulating to Republicans, and once our President pretends to be a populist again and points out all the times Mr. Biden has disappointed us, then what, exactly, will Mr. Biden do? Also, too, Bernie Sanders is totally electable, for the 219th time. If we all "get behind" Mr. Biden because the alternative is a dramatic bully, what do we get? Another eight or 16 or 24 years of malicious Republicans kicking spineless Democrats in the teeth, and as I've said many times, we need to break that wheel.

Greg Palast at The Guardian notes that California has been making independent voters jump through hoops just to vote for their choice in the Democratic Presidential primary, which could have cost Sen. Sanders over half a million votes (by Mr. Palast's count). Yes, you can vote in a party's primary if you're a California independent, but you actually had to tell them you intended to do so by responding to a postcard that looks pretty much like a piece of junk mail. Ask all those disenfranchised Ohio voters about that! Also, too, two-hour wait times at USC and three-hour wait times at UCLA? If you're wondering why young folks and independents "aren't turning out" for Mr. Sanders, you may want to consider the possibility that governments are preventing them from voting.

New Zealander visits social justice movements in 14 cities and describes "four things that struck me" about them: social welfare programs encourage folks to take risks, racist subjugation in America has virtually obliterated any shared memory of how things used to be different and better for black folks, shutting your mouth to avoid causing harm might seem like a good idea at the time but that's now way to practice really being there for other folks, and you're better off working through your misery when you confront injustice than you are just rolling up your sleeves and pretending you weren't moved. I hope that summary does this article justice; if not, I'll point you to the satirical cartoon shows a left-wing activist cutting down folks and a Nazi wannabe activist actually being more nurturing, and remind you that it ain't good satire if it ain't true.

Ho hum, some Administration officials say Iraq is dangerous for Christians when it suits them politically and then others claim it's not so dangerous when it tries to deport Iraqi Christians, and here we have yet more proof of what I've been saying for years, that different forces within our Administration will appear to be at odds with each other to give the appearance of "vigorous debate," when we know that a) they march together jackboot-lockstep when it matters and b) the "vigorous debate" doesn't even necessarily mean they don't know what they're doing -- when you suck at running things, you create chaos, because chaos creates drama, and drama distracts people. Particularly when the opposition party is doing its damnedest yet-again to present no alternative to the drama.

I'm sure some knucklehead will say that this article explaining how one of the major reasons "Artificial Intelligence is Biased Against Women" is because our whole civilization is biased against women is water-is-wet territory, but the fact is we go to great lengths to hide how sexist (and racist) we are, and then we relentlessly gaslight the folks who figure it out. And when AI workers are overwhelmingly white and male, then the folks who would change things for the better (like Olga Russakovsky's team at Princeton) face an even more uphill battle. Usually I say that while the arc of history bends toward justice, that arc looks awful flat when you're underneath; let me reassure you that there are times that doesn't make me feel better, and this is one of them.

Finally, Masha Gessen at The New Yorker reminds us that the New York Times's reporting about Bernie Sanders's 1988 trip to Russia wrenches that event out of virtually every possible useful context. One could shout ZOMG TEH SOVIETZ TRIEDZ TO PROPAGANDAZ TEH BERNEEZ!!!!! all one wants, but we still wouldn't learn whether that "propaganda" (a word the Soviets used a lot more broadly than we do!) actually worked on Mr. Sanders. Furthermore, President Reagan was encouraging these cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, but I guess Mr. Reagan isn't conservative enough for today's world.

Action: concerning religious freedom, health care, and pollution.

Avaaz helps you tell big pension fund corporations to divest from China's long-term effort to oppress its Muslim Uyghur population. What do the big pension funds have to do with the Uyghurs? They invest in big tech corporations that provide China with surveillance tools including (sigh) facial recognition software and DNA testing. And what do the Chinese do to the Uyghurs? Oh, you know, imprison them in internment camps, ahem, re-education camps, and inflict torture, rape, forced sterilization, and forced labor, among other things, all as part of a "people's war on terror," a phrase I hope dies a horrible and humiliating death one day. Investing in anything China does is dicey enough -- China's government is really the worst of capitalism and the worst of Communism rolled up into one monstrous entity -- but investing in detainment of citizens for religious reasons should make pension funds run away in horror. And they will, if enough of us speak out -- and if we can help cut off this money-flow, China will have a tougher time keeping them going, and we will save lives.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4996, the Helping Medicaid Offer Maternity Services (or Helping MOMS) Act, would give states the option to offer one year of post-birth Medicaid coverage to both mother and child; the bill has 11 Democratic House sponsors and 8 Republican ones, which might make it actually bipartisan! Of course Medicare-for-All would make this problem moot, but this bill will still do a lot of folks a lot of good, and if a few Republicans get re-elected because they're able to tout their support for expanding health care coverage for poor mothers and children -- and doing so effectively, too, since most health complications relating to pregnancy occur within the first 100 days after childbirth -- that's not too high a price to pay for progress. Of course, a state could just say no and say 60 days of coverage (which current law mandates) is just fine, and if state-level politicians want to run on denying health care to poor mothers and children, I say let 'em. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand health care to poor mothers and children by passing the Helping MOMS Act.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: the state Assembly still plans to take up the notorious SB 790, which would commit all manner of foul deeds against our clean air and clean water, even though we've told them many times to reject the bill, so Penn Environment helps you tell your state Assemblyfolks to protect our air and water by rejecting SB 790. SB 790 would, among other nefarious acts, prevent localities from protecting themselves from gas and oil drillers (now there's small-government conservatism for you!), let oil and gas corporations replace any water they pollute with unsafe drinking water, weaken state standards for reporting oil and gas spills, and allow the state to spray drilling wastewater on state roads to keep dust down. They're not trying to help corporations pollute because of "burdensome regulations" -- they're trying to help them pollute because they care more about big donors than their bosses, i.e., you. That only means we have to remind them, again and again and again if we have to.

Action: concerning *a la carte* cable packaging, the Muslim ban, and the Electoral College.

Just the other day we discussed, as we do, how awful cable news is and why we need a strong a la carte cable packaging law, one that would allow us to stop paying for cable channels we don't want to support, and though no one has introduced an a la carte bill this session, what prevents us from calling our Congressfolk (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page) and demanding one? Nothing, that's what -- and our agitation is likely all that'll ever get us one. It's tempting to think social media and streaming video are reducing our dependence on cable, but most folks still get their news from the TV (despite my best efforts!), so we need tools to ensure we can all get better news from the TV. You can always challenge a license of a a traditional over-the-air TV station, but with cable news channels, you have to go after their moneypot -- and if large numbers of us stop paying for their act, they'll change their act right quick. So let's get to it.

Meanwhile, the soon-to-be-introduced NO BAN Act would not only repeal our President's hated Muslim ban, but make it tougher for him and those who follow him to enact more of these bans. Yeah, I know, our Supreme Court said the Muslim ban didn't violate our Constitution (likely only because our Administration finally had the sense to include a few non-Muslim majority nations in their travel ban), but the credibility of that ruling is strained, to say the least -- the Court utterly ignored that time our President told Rudy Giuliani that he wanted to do a "Muslim ban, but legally" ("I'd like to commit murder/burglary/arson, but legally!"), but went very far out of its way to find some mean thing a Colorado commissioner said about far-right religious folks that apparently justified striking down a ban on discrimination against gays there. Hence Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to support actual religious freedom by passing the NO BAN Act once it's introduced.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to abolish the Electoral College. Why? Because literally entrusting the election of Presidents to an unelected body of 538 folks betrays our democratic ideals, and because two madmen have won the Presidency while losing the popular vote just since 2000. In that order, too -- the latter may have reminded us of the former, but the former is more important. Don't believe that if we abolish the Electoral College that heartland states will have no say in our government, because these states already enjoy disproportionate representation in the Senate. And feel free to detect racism in statements that parties will just turn out the vote in the cities if we dump the Electoral College. And when folks say "I don't want New York and California picking my President," you can say "I don't want the South picking mine." Some people profess to like the popular vote, until their candidate doesn't win. Those people just need to grow up.

Around the table: featuring a series of unsurprising developments.

It may be surprising at first to contemplate a study concluding that social media usage actually has very little effect on folks' beliefs, but when you think about it, most of us seek out sources that we already more or less agree with (and can do so more easily than ever before). The study's author concludes that something else compels Americans to hold to ridiculous beliefs; I submit that cause is a Republican party that makes ever more desperate and hysterical arguments to hold onto power it hasn't earned.

Adam Johnson at FAIR reminds us that "Renouncing Violence is a Demand Made Almost Exclusively of Muslims." After all, can you remember CNN dragging a white nationalist on to renounce violence? More likely CNN will wring its hands over whether the KKK can "rebrand" after 150 years of murder! We should also remember that only folks with socioeconomic privilege have the option to renounce violence; George W. Bush never had to commit violence himself because he was able to get other people to commit violence on his behalf.

Our Supreme Court stops execution because Texas wouldn't allow a Buddhist cleric to attend, a far cry from last month's decision not to stop a different execution because Alabama wouldn't allow a Muslim cleric to attend. Boy, I really wish it were more complicated than this -- the word "Muslim" juices up a rage gland the way "Buddhist" doesn't. Didn't conservatives tell us that confirming their judges would ensure that judges wouldn't interpret the law however it suits them?

U.S. District Court Judge strikes down Administration plan to water down the definition of "Association Health Plans" so that virtually any organization or corporation could evade the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. Requirements like, you know, making health insurers cover certain health conditions that everyone but this Administration and its cronies want to cover. Sometimes this Administration's animus -- in this case, toward pre-existing condition bans -- is really hard to understand. Except, of course, as wanton evil. But voters won't punish them, as long as Democrats keep putting up candidates who don't mean what they say.

Lisa Beach at Yes! magazine describes an Orlando, FL farmers market that helps fight teenage pregnancy, crime, and dropouts. Not just by "putting those ungrateful kids to work," but by putting them to work maintaining our civilization, as farmers markets most assuredly do, far more than, say, penny stock trading. And this farmers market just so happens to serve a primarily African-American community largely bereft of grocery stores. This would be a thing that would help stop school shootings, too -- as I recall from my youth, kids desperately need something to think about other than themselves, and running a farmers market would surely do that.

Finally, speaking of folks who clearly never thought very much about other people as a child, our President thinks the two FBI officials having an affair with each other and exchanging negative texts about our President while investigating his ties to Russia should be in jail for treason. How many times must I tell these pimps! Working with someone's political enemies -- and we'd still have to prove that Messrs. Strozk and Page actually did that! -- does not violate Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution, which requires an actual enemy, not just "someone the President doesn't like." File this, too, under "The President is Not America."

Around the table: legislators try to thwart the people's will, part 273.

Utah's voters approved a Medicaid expansion in November, so naturally state legislature are working to subvert their will via a scaled-back Medicaid expansion. With a bill that would be more expensive and cover fewer good Utahns, no less! I'm reminded that South Dakota's voters approved a campaign finance reform initiative at the polls in 2016 only to see their legislators repeal it in 2017. Legislators all over America seem to think they know better than their bosses, the people; I wonder how long the people will put up with that.

If, indeed, the "total mess" at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya really does turn into another Benghazi, don't expect our Congressfolk or our "liberal" media to take a critical attitude toward this Administration the way they did toward the Obama Administration. Certainly don't expect them to look into whether privatizing our security services at our embassies is really a good idea (spoiler alert: it's not), not when it's far easier to demonize workers striking over wage theft.

Our Supreme Court rejects an Alabama death row prisoner's request to be executed with an Imam at his side, because the prisoner took too long to make his request, or something. Alabama prisons employ Christian chaplains who can fulfill such requests for Christian death row prisoners, but the state claims having an Imam with a prisoner presents "unacceptable safety concerns," because of course they do. How many times must I tell these pimps! Everyone has rights! And yes it is civilized to allow even a man who raped and murdered an underage girl to die with a modicum of dignity! Doing so shows that we're a civilization worthy of outlasting our rapists and murderers! It's sad that I have to say any of this out loud.

This Venezuela coup must not be going so well, because now our Secretary of State says we're in Venezuela because Iranian terrorists have "active cells" there. But if that were significant, or even true, wouldn't we have heard about it weeks ago? Continually this Administration takes weeks to come up with these kinds of excuses for what it does, which I guess would be heartening, if our "liberal" media didn't just lap it all up.

Finally, Matthew Yglesias explains "Why Millions of People Are Getting Hit With a Surprise Tax Bill This Year," i.e., why folks aren't getting the refunds they've come to expect. Long story short: our federal government has withheld less tax money this year than in previous years years, which might actually qualify as a good work, though of course that wouldn't justify all the tax "reform"'s multitudinous evil works. But I still find it hilarious that the 2017 Republican tax "reform" stands to become even more unpopular by this April, and that this President may well go down in history as the one who "raised our taxes." It might even be as hilarious as the Obama Administration actually designing a tax cut so that good Americans wouldn't notice it.

Around the table: what we must do when the next financial crisis hits the fan, and other lessons.

Thomas Hanna at In These Times reminds us that the next time the banksters collapse the economy, we'll need to have a better response than "save the banks" -- like "require a public ownership stake, with full voting rights, in any financial institution that has to be bailed out due to its own fraudulent or speculative activities." I'd just say "nationalize the banks," and anyone who responds by calling that a BIG GUMMINT TAKEOVURZ!!!! ought to take a good look around and see what all that "freedom" for banksters has done for us. And public banks now make up about a fifth of the banks in Old Europe, while the Bank of North Dakota made sure that state didn't go in the tank after the oil and gas bubble burst there (oh, and North Dakota weathered the 2008 economic armageddon pretty well, too).

Chinese government bans one of its many non-state-sanctioned Protestant churches, for, you know, refusing to allow the government to install closed-circuit cameras within. The Zion church is one of China's many "black market" churches -- or, as we'd call them in America, churches. Memo to right-wingers still gnashing teeth over transgender folks in their bathrooms: this is what government oppression of religious freedom actually looks like. Then again, the lesson may be lost on them, since this tale also has actual Communists in it, rather than the "Communists" in America whose main crime is "not being a cruel and heartless Republican."

Surprise, surprise, North Korea still seems to be going to some trouble to conceal its nuclear weapons program. Also, North Korea doesn't appear to have gotten rid of any of its nukes, and appears to have made new ones. But what happened to we don't have to worry about it anymore? We must remember that all of our President's pronouncements have an expiration date, and that expiration date is generally "just after now."

Ho hum, Dept. of Treasury Inspector General finds that the outsourcing of IRS functions to private corporations is going very badly. Not just because they've only collected one percent of the money these deadbeats owe, but also because the IRS isn't holding these corporations accountable, and because private corporations are contacting taxpayers over the phone, just like pretty much every identity thief (and precisely unlike the IRS). This is the third time we've tried to privatize IRS debt collection; when will we learn? When we stop electing politicians whose one dream is to destroy everything about government that works, that's when.

Finally, Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis spoke to the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 2017, which has, over the years, hosted a flotsam of racists and other unjustifiably aggrieved speakers. Naturally Mr. DeSantis calls the Freedom Center's apparent obsession with multiculturalism and diversity straight-shooting and truth-telling. But why would anyone expect any differently from a teabagger who has so obviously (and successfully) courted our President's support? And I wish I could say associating with this crowd would hurt him in Florida, as it would in, say, New Jersey.

Action: concerning citizenship and breastfeeding.

The state of Assam, in India, is "updating" its National Citizens Registry, apparently for the first time in almost 70 years, purportedly as a way of attacking their "immigration problem." But they're asking good folks to prove their citizenship, and it just so happens that a lot of Muslim citizens can't -- they've lived there all their lives, but they may be (for example) farmers who never went to school, and thus can't prove their citizenship with school certificates. Remind you of anything? Like, say, the Voter ID madness in this country, where folks have to produce documents they might be too poor or old to have before they can vote? Up to seven million Muslim citizens might get "deleted" from citizenship rolls in Assam, so Avaaz helps you tell the international community to pressure the Assam government into dropping these plans. And not just because they might give our President any more ideas -- "deleting" folks from citizenship rolls is how a lot of genocides start.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that our Administration -- acting virtually alone in the world, as seems to be its preference -- almost scuttled a World Health Assembly resolution promoting the health benefits of breastfeeding, not just by trying to water down the resolution, but by threatening the sponsoring nation (Ecuador) with cuts in economic and military support. What prompted this tantrum? Apparently, infant formula-manufacturing corporations in America got in our Administration's ear about the matter. Not that our Administration needed very much convincing, I'm sure -- they stand with bosses in all things, and everyone else be damned. The benefits of breastfeeding over formula are not only obvious, but scientifically-proven, so Moms Rising helps you tell American infant formula-manufacturing corporations to stop trying to scuttle public health efforts. Sadly, I expect they'll be more responsive to popular pressure than our Administration.

Action: poisonous pesticides, and national parks.

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

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

Action: tax "reform," and "free" trade.

The Republicans' tax "reform" bill has taken further PR hits as more and more Americans have realized that it won't be much of a Christmas present for them, so 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 Reps' and Senators' phone numbers so you can tell them to reject any tax "reform" bill that comes out of the conference between House and Senate tax "reform" bills. You already know the Republican tax "reform" plan would cut corporate taxes and repeal a lot of the tax breaks (like property tax deductions and state and local tax deductions) that working families take. You may also know that their plan also would get rid of renewable energy tax credits and would repeal the Johnson Amendment, which latter item would turn many American churches into money-laundering operations for big campaign donors. But the best way to think about the damage the tax "reform" plan would do? Think of big pharmaceutical corporations that would reap hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare while still price-gouging good Americans. And then ask yourself, why do these assholes deserve a tax cut?

Meanwhile, our government will be renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (a.k.a. NAFTA, a.k.a. SHAFTYA) next week. I commend President Trump for putting a stake in the heart of the Trans-Pacific "Partnership," but he'll undo that good work if he doesn't improve NAFTA for the benefit of the American people. Given that his own Commerce Secretary has said, out loud, that the aforementioned TPP would be a good model for NAFTA renegotiation, and given President Trump's own refusal to demand that a renegotiated NAFTA get rid of the "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanisms that nullify our laws and outsource our jobs, you can see where a reasonable person might be a bit skeptical that President Trump really wants to act in the best interest of the American people. But again: it doesn't matter what he wants; it matters what we want. So Public Citizen still helps you demand that your Congressfolk oppose any renegotiated NAFTA that contains an "investor-state dispute settlement" mechanism therein. They responded to us last year, but as civilized people, we understand that we must win our freedoms over and over again, because evil people keep coming to take them away from us.

Action: national monuments, methane emissions, and ALEC.

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

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

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