Thieves in the Temple.

Around the table: evil shows its ugly gnarled face, part 748.

First, some good news: our Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division has successfully stopped the proposed JetBlue/Spirit merger in court, thus guaranteeing that Spirit will still be able to offer lower prices to airline passengers. Because you know JetBlue was going to end that! And you know that because Spirit executives said so! The Antitrust Division literally hadn’t stopped an airline merger in over 40 years, so this is, as our President might say, a BFD. Personal to the corporate executives and the business press who can’t stop whining about this stuff: c’mon, fellas! Bootstrap yourselves! Oh, and Joe Biden: how about running for re-election on good works like this one?

And now some bad news: the Bernie Sanders resolution that would have required our State Department to report on Israeli human rights violations in Gaza failed by a 72-11 margin, and though some observers say “hey, it got 11 more votes than it probably would’ve gotten last year,” it still only got 11 “yea” votes out of 100. (If you really want to bright-side this vote, you may note that 17 Senators missed the vote entirely. How did they really feel about it? Surely they would have shown up to protect Israel, right?) The only Republican who backed the resolution was Rand Paul of Kentucky; I’m tempted to say he knows how to count as well as anyone else, but not without mentioning that he almost single-handedly made the USA PATRIOT Act significantly less repulsive in 2016.

“With Donald Trump's Iowa landslide,” writes Amanda Marcotte at Salon, “evangelicals reveal who they really are.” Yes, evangelicals really are fascists who see this patently un-Godly man as their best hope for gaining absolute power over the rest of us! Of course, right-wing evangelicals have revealed who they really are many, many times over the years – as Ms. Marcotte patiently and meticulously recounts! – but maybe we need all the reminders we can get. I will say that I don’t think regular Americans are falling all over themselves trying to reintegrate these evangelicals into the human community; I think only our “liberal” media tries to do that.

At the risk of diddling right-wing rage glands, ProPublica presents evidence that a solar energy project in Washington state isn’t respecting local indigenous cultural sites enough. Of course, the point of this article, I would think, is not never do renewable energy ever ha ha ha you stupid liberals, but rather do renewable energy right, and you shouldn’t have to run roughshod over folks’ rights in order to do the right thing. And generally, treaties with Native American nations already protect the right to continue ancient cultural practices, which makes this, guess what, a law and order issue as well.

Ho hum, Tucker Carlson’s still out there hawking viciously stupid crap about COVID vaccines, to the point that over one-third of Americans actually think the COVID vaccine has killed thousands of good Americans; now, most of those folks are actually insane, I’ll grant, but I’m bummed that lies about COVID vaccines have some appeal to the merely cynical among us. Hate to sound like a broken record, but Democrats can counter all of this insanity by providing good services to Americans without letting rich people whining about it. Joe Biden’s been the best at that in my lifetime, but that hasn’t exactly been a high bar to clear.

Finally, Nikki Haley actually says “we’ve never been a racist country” in an interview, and while her longer answer is actually considerably better – get-less-racist-every-day isn’t just pablum, and only a cynic or a liar would claim that the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act simply don’t represent progress – it’s still well worth it to note that “we’ve never been a racist country” is utter horseshit one could refute with a cursory investigation of American history. And the people who call everything racism are still more my people than the folks who want to scrub racism from history because it hurts their feelings. “We’ve never been a racist country” obviously aims at the latter, but of course their hearts are spoken for.

Around the table: the trials and tribulations of evil, part 989.

I hear that several airline corporations are finding fake parts in their planes, but Jesus Mary and Joseph it’s not a “supplier scandal,” regardless of how badly any particular supplier acts, but an executive pay scandal. I mean, why aren’t airline corporations making their own damn parts? Because that would require them to employ people who do that, and everyone knows slashing jobs is the way to goose up stock prices. Fly the friendly skies!

Ho hum, producer of putatively anti-child trafficking film gets nailed for fondling an underage girl’s breasts. He can say he was going undercover to expose evil and playing a part all he wants, but if he does that, he can’t also say anyway, I thought she was 18! That’s what they all say when they get caught, and saying so means he wasn't confident in your excuses, for some reason. Because they’re lies. That's the reason.

University of Toledo scientists develop method for keeping snow off solar panels, so now would be a good time to mention that when you hear that snow causes a 5 to 15% power loss, keep in mind that’s not a reason to abandon all renewable energy like right-wingers would have you do, but it is a reason to work to make solar panels more effective. We don’t let the perfect murder the good, as right-wingers would have us do, but we still strive for the best.

Judge orders loanshark freed by Donald Trump to repay millions to all the small businesses he bilked. Please don’t let Donald Trump’s follies sour you on the concept of mercy, since that’s almost certainly what he’s trying to do, by being so bad at doling out mercy. I am a little confused as to how going after financial predators could be “partisan.” “Because Letitia James’s doing it” is not a reason.

If I were more (or less) spiritually-advanced I might laugh at the news that several of Rudy Giuliani’s former lawyers are suing him for $14 million in unpaid legal bills, given that Donald Trump appears to have stiffed Mr. Giuliani for similar reasons. As they say, shit rolls downhill. But maybe these clowns can write them off as pro bono hours?

When I hear that Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) might be looking for a gig as a punditoid on CNN, I feel compelled to say that he’s a better Congressman than I ever thought he’d be after his awful Tea-Party-by-the-numbers 2010 Senate campaign, but I also feel compelled to say that all the things he’s been good on (tech monopolies, the Biden impeachment) haven’t yielded actual results. Why, it’s almost like that’s the whole idea, again. I’d be happy to be wrong! But I’m probably not wrong.

Finally, when I hear that now-former Fox News Chair Rupert Murdoch hired Tucker Carlson because he thought he was a moderate who’d balance out Sean Hannity’s rabid Trumpism, all I can say is: pimp, stop lying. Rupert Murdoch knew perfectly well what he was doing, which was continuing to make money off keeping Americans in a feedback loop of masturbatory rage. After all, it beats working for a living!

Action: concerning facial recognition, the care economy, and renewable energy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban facial recognition software at performance venues, invest more in our care economy, and ensure that any effort at permitting reform benefit renewable energy exclusively. 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 Congress to prohibit performance venues from using facial recognition software on event-goers. You don’t even have to know that facial recognition can’t tell Black people apart any better than your January 6-addled uncle can to tell Congress to ban its use; you only need know that facial recognition enables law enforcement fishing expeditions, and opposing those, I would think, would be something conservatives could get behind as well as liberals. If your right-wing neighbor retorts BUTZ I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!, just remind him that could be him getting profiled and wrongly-arrested the next time Bruce Springsteen rolls into town.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell Congressfolk to invest in our care economy. Sound like a tall order for a Republican House that cares only about drama? Doesn’t matter! Right is right, and duty is duty, and Congress has a duty to help us make our lives better, not stand by while nursing home corporations and child care corporations continue to gouge good Americans who can’t do without them. They say inflation is bad, but inflation has, for a very long time, been really bad in areas of our economy that folks can’t simply refuse to participate in – if you have kids or elderly parents, they need care. So our Congressfolk have got to help, not hurt.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that any effort at permitting reform benefits renewable energy producers exclusively. Because there’s enough filth in our air and water already, and when politicians talk about the shift to clean energy “killing jobs,” they’re full of soup. Solar and wind and geothermal all create jobs; what they don’t do as well as coal and oil and gas corporations is redistribute more of your wealth upward to executives so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) are trying to take us toward more pollution and unearned income for bosses, so we’ve got to step up.

Around the table: the best people running as Republicans! And other follies.

Ho hum, George Santos actually thinks he’s going to run for a second term and thinks they-got-me-like-Jesus is the argument that’ll earn him victory, but what George Santos doesn’t get is that, no matter how much you act like him, acting like Donald Trump works only for Donald Trump. Ain’t nobody running through a wall for George Santos just because he’s dramatic like Donald Trump. On the other hand, given his fundraising activities, he clearly gets at least one thing exactly as well as Donald Trump: that grift is the only thing that really matters.

Also ho hum, Rep. Andy Ogles (E-TN), last seen arrogantly ignoring federal disclosure laws, has also said an awful lot of different things in his various résumés, such as how he’s an “economist” when he appears to have received no extensive training in the subject. But in the post-January 6 era, people like George Santos and Andy Ogles are the only folks left Republicans can run! No “sane” “moderates” are coming to the rescue! (Also, I wouldn’t tout my “expertise” in a damn thing based on a connection with Arthur Laffer. That man is the OG of BS.)

At least one California startup is recycling used batteries from electric cars for solar power storage, which will certainly help keep them out of landfills for at least a few more years. And this is exactly the kind of entrepreneurship that results from Big Gubmint stewardship! If states weren’t investing in renewable power grids, this market might not exist, and we’d be putting more toxic crap into our planet. I know more than a few right-wingers will howl HAHAHAHA TEH ELEKTRIX AREN’TZ SO RENEWABLEZ ARE THEYZ!!!!!!, but surely we know better than to let the perfect murder the good.

Heather Digby Parton at Salon reminds us that Donald Trump has been ramping up the “ghastly homicidal rhetoric” about crime lately – why, he’s even talking of bringing back the guillotine and televising executions! – but ball-swinging about crime sure didn’t work for Republicans in 2022, or else they’d have a comfortable margin in our House and any margin in our Senate, plus they’d have done a lot better in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Of course, if the economy’s in the toilet by mid-2024 – and Our Glorious Elites, furious at our President’s ramped-up efforts at trust-busting, will do their damnedest to bring that about! – I guess anything could work, not that we’d ever really know.

From The Intercept we learn that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (N-AZ) started a consulting firm with a fellow Democratic state Rep who later became a payday loan industry lobbyist. Why, it’s almost like she’s twirling a mustache – or brandishing a Fuck Off ring! Everyone involved wants us to believe the firm has never done anything in 15-plus years, but it sure seems like there’s no unpopular bankster Kyrsten Sinema won’t kowtow to. I wonder if her veterans advisory board told her that payday lenders trap our veterans in a cycle of debt. And I wonder if she then told them to stay in their lane.

Finally, let’s have a little more good news today! A group of formerly-incarcerated folks have convinced the city of Atlanta to recognize them as a protected class, which could shield them from the kind of discrimination that former prisoners face every damn day when they get out of prison. I’m sure some “well-meaning” right-winger stands ready to say that our Constitution doesn’t allow just anyone to be protected from discrimination, but fact is Our Glorious Elites come up with new ways to discriminate all the time, and if our Constitution can’t prevent bad people from discriminating against good Americans, then what’s it for?

Action: concerning taxes, drug prices, and fossil fuels.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass legislation raising taxes on the rich and lowering prescription drug prices, tell your PA state legislators to stop investing in gas infrastructure, and tell your Congressfolk to pass a big oil corporation windfall profits tax. 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 our Senators to pass a bill that will raise taxes on the rich and lower prescription drug prices for all of us. No, it literally does not matter that Joe Manchin torpedoed just such a thing this past week! Nobody made Joe Manchin our One Great and True and Real American President, and if this was your will last week, and it’s still the right thing to do, then why wouldn’t it be your will this week? Because of one spiritually and morally corrupt Senator? Our Glorious Elites have created a Second Gilded Age in America, where corporations gouge us so lazy executives so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, so we ain’t got time for Manchinean drama.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn PIRG helps you tell your state legislator to end all new gas infrastructure investment. They’ll say what Tom Corbett used to say – “I want the jobs” – as if there’s just no other way to create jobs! You know what’s actually a pretty good way to create jobs? Invest in renewable energy infrastructure like there’s no tomorrow, and not just because there’ll actually be no tomorrow if we don’t. A lot of out-of-work coal miners would take to building out solar and wind and geothermal infrastructure pretty well – a lot better than they’d take to “just learning to code,” which seems to be Our Glorious Elites’ answer to everyone they’ve ever displaced through their laziness and apathy.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall tax on big oil corporations. Rule one is “when prices and profits go up at the same time, corporations are stealing food out of your mouth.” And rule two is “if you’re tempted to think they’re raising prices because of Russia’s war on Ukraine, see rule one.” Seriously, we live in such a sick, immoral, and decadent time that CEOs just come out and say they’re passing costs on to the consumer, and investors just come out and say you should invest in a corporation which has a lot of control over pricing. There’s another name for such a corporation, though, and that name is evil. And we need to start punishing evil in America again.

Action: concerning climate change, corruption, pollution, mine reclamation, and peaceful protests.

Long story short: tell Home Depot to stop using the Canadian boreal forest for its products, tell our government to investigate FDA corruption in re our baby formula shortage, tell our Army Corps of Engineers to examine pollution from pipelines more vigorously, tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, and tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the removal of peaceful protestors outside Supreme Court Justices' houses. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Environmental Action helps you tell Home Depot to stop sourcing its wood products from the Canadian boreal forest. Our reasoning is the same for our world's largest intact forest as it would be with the Amazon rainforest or the Tongass National Forest: old trees are our best weapon against climate change; they don't call them "the lungs of the planet" for nothing. Thus turning them into cabinets or toilet paper is, in this context, rather short-sighted. And if we can prompt the world's largest hardware store into abandoning logging in the forest, we'll likely get others to follow. If not, the Big Stick of Bad PR is always ready for deployment.

Progress America helps you tell our government to investigate our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) for its role in our current baby formula shortage. And I don't care what corruption at our FDA this uncovers! If you don't want to get shamed and shunned by your civilization, then don't hurt people. Chances are that investigators will find that the revolving door between industry and our FDA doesn't help us deal with food safety crises, and they might also find that our FDA has given established baby formula-manufacturing corporations too much of a free pass on safety inspections. That'd be a shame to learn that, but knowledge is power.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to close the loopholes that big oil and gas drilling corporations use to evade scrutiny about the pollution their proposed pipelines cause. Specifically, we'll call for less "fast-tracking" of pipelines. We should be "fast-tracking" solar and wind projects, if we must "fast-track" anything at all! Yet big oil and gas drilling corporations constantly assert that their pipelines are "too urgent" to ensure they don't spew filth into our water tables. But no one will be sitting around a campfire in a hundred years saying we can't drink the water now, but at least CEOs made good money for a while!

The Sierra Club helps you tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. We should blame our Senate for dragging their feet on confirming Mr. Biden's nominees, but this one's on our President, because he hasn't even put a name forward. The long name gives you the idea that this is some bureaucratic rando, but with all the coal mines closing up around America, reclaiming and repurposing that land becomes a lot more important, and someone's got to run things at the department that would do that work. And, ah, this is the kind of thing that actually helps potential Trump voters in Appalachia. So how about we do it?

Finally, FAIR helps you tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the repression of peaceful protesting outside of Supreme Court Justice's homes. They actually suggested these protestors were totalitarians! By suggesting that they were "(e)rasing any distinction between the public square and private life"! Key word there, of course, is any -- protesting outside of the private homes of public figures who have, very publicly, made known their opposition to the popular will does not erase literally "any" distinctions between public and private spheres. And, ah, who exactly "harassed" or "intimidated" these Justices? If anything, protestors have been too polite.

Around the table: featuring yet another parade of pretenders!

As Hungarian Prime Minister/irredeemable asshole Viktor Orban proves even harder to dislodge than Bibi Netanyahu, the American right-wing press heralds his most recent re-election "as a victory against secularism and wokeness" and "an example for the Western world." I've always said we live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society, but Mr. Orban is the very emblem of that decadence, not a warrior against it. And all the folks who think the absurdly high costs of rent, college, child care, and health care aren't the "real" problem with our society, but some kid who prefers "they" as a pronoun is? They're nothing more than Useful Idiots for decadence.

Cory Doctorow asserts that "gig companies" are either "violating employment law, or they’re violating antitrust." "(A) neglected -- and powerful -- aspect of antitrust is its prohibition on 'vertical restraint': when a company seeks to control the business of its suppliers," he writes, and when corporations like Uber and Doordash prevent their "contractors" (who are their suppliers, essentially) from working for other corporations or setting prices they can charge customers, that's "control(ling) the business of its suppliers." So: big gig corporations violate minimum wage and health care laws if they call their employees "employees," and violate antitrust law if they call them "contractors." They obviously counted on never seeing another President who'd go after monopolies. Ha ha!

For those of you keeping score at home, Starbucks workers at 200 stores have now filed for union elections, with at least 13 of them successfully forming one. Starbucks has nearly 9,000 stores in the United States (with close to 6,500 more that it licenses to operate within other stores), but note well that workers hit the 100-store milestone in close to six months and then hit the second 100 in a hair under seven weeks. Starbucks is still pretty powerful, and surely can peel off inattentive workers with even the stupid arguments they've made so far, so I wish these folks the best in their efforts to organize one of the largest chain-store corporations in America.

This article describing Congressional candidate Daniel Lee's work on the Culver City Council successfully enacting rent control, tenant protection, and single-family home zoning ordinances during the last few years may be even more valuable revealing the workings of one of Mr. Lee's main opponents, the notorious "assassin journalist" Ron Bassilian. (So does he shoot journalists, or is he a journalist who shoots other people? The world may never know.) Mr. Bassilian founded Protect Culver City -- which sure sounds innocuous enough, until you ask from whom -- and describes himself as a "moderate," but not only did he write an early "alt-right" tract and spew racist filth on Twitter, he just so happens to be most energized by things that also offend Our Glorious Elites, who don't want any of the little people to tell them they can't charge whatever they want for rent! In short, he's another Useful Idiot for corporate power pretending to be jes' folks.

When you read about Great Plains farmers fighting the prospect of a network of CO2 pipelines crossing their land, with the aim of pushing carbon emissions deep into the ground like that's going to undo climate change, you may be compelled to wonder what all the "salt of the earth" types who preen in Congress think about that. Don't they love the small farmer above all else? Don't they have a unique connection to those people, and to the land? More likely these peacocks will dismiss the grievances of actual small farmers as "special interest agitation" or conflate them with the Lakota "terrorists" who have fought alongside small farmers against previous pipelines. (And not for nothing, but most corporations won't even sequester the "recovered" emissions in the ground, but use them in future fossil-fuel projects.)

Finally, Stanford University engineers develop solar panels that can work at night. Solar cells actually have a lower temperature than the air around them at night, so by attaching a thermoelectric generator to a solar cell, you can produce a small amount of electricity. While some observers say you can't produce very much electricity this way, the Stanford engineers say they see "no intrinsic difficulties" in scaling up their product so that it can produce a lot of power; I suspect the truth is in the middle, which would still represent progress. Now watch the Fox News crowd guffaw over the prospect of "solar panels at night," like they think their own ignorance is a power source.

Action: concerning taxes, gas prices, corruption, energy policy, public lands, and saving our Post Office some more.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, tax the windfall profits of oil and gas corporations, prohibit themselves from trading on the stock market, pass legislation promoting renewable energy, pass legislation protecting public lands and rivers, and confirm two USPS Board of Governors nominees so they can fire Postmaster General DeJoy. 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.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion that put extra $250 and $300 monthly checks into working families' bank accounts. "Don't Take Away Our Monthly Checks," the petition's title reads, and sadly Congress has already done that, because Joe "the Penguin" Manchin said folks spent those checks on drugs, and no, I will neither forget nor forgive that evil lie. And he wonders why no one wants to talk to him these days! In real life, the CTC expansion helped good Americans buy groceries, clothes, and school supplies for their kids, and with so many good Americans still unemployed this time last year, it gave more than a few families breathing room. And now with inflation at almost 8%, wiping out the otherwise impressive gains workers have made in wages over the last year, we should bring it back.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall tax on oil and gas corporations. Gasoline prices have shot up, and big corporations use the Ukraine war as an excuse to do what they were going to do anyway, just as other corporations have used inflation as an excuse to drive other prices up, so we've got to discourage them somehow. Don't listen to your right-wing friends and neighbors when they whine that a windfall tax would "tax success," because, frankly, that demonstrates a very warped view of success. Scientists who develop new vaccines and teachers who help a generation do better are successes, but people who game themselves into a position to price-gouge a nation aren't successes -- they're parasites, and we should deal with them as such.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to prohibit themselves from trading or owning individual stocks. And why should they do that ha ha ha snort say the cynical, but they should do it because it clouds their decision-making and interferes with their oversight duties. If you've got a million bucks invested in a corporation that makes facial recognition software, how likely are you, really, to regulate their lousy racist technology the way you need to? Not likely, one would think. They get so pissy when you don't trust them, but it's not our job, as Americans, to trust them -- it's our job to make them do our will, and hold them accountable when they don't. Making sure they get rich sure doesn't do anything for their bosses, the people.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that makes renewable energy, not fossil fuels, the future of energy in America. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently issued a rather dire assessment of what we're doing to our planet, but the Russian war on Ukraine has also, I would think, given a lot of good Americans pause about getting fossil fuels from other countries when we've got plenty of sun and wind here at home. Oh, some right-wingers do see this as an opportunity to make our government allow oil and gas drilling everywhere, but oil and gas ain't gonna be around forever, while the sun rises every morning and the wind always comes back. When they said always said oil and gas were more "dependable," they meant that oil and gas delivered executive pay dependably. We gotta do better.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a slew of bills that would help keep our public lands and rivers clean. It ain't just wildlife that depends on clean public lands and rivers, after all -- we depend on them, too, to provide clean water and to give us places to go and explore. And small businesses also depend on public lands and rivers, because folks who come to enjoy them need to buy stuff just like we all do. Do we think bait shops and canoeing services support any old pollution because "it's the price of a free market"? Hopefully we won't find too many big corporations convincing people that we've "gone too far" in protecting land and water from development, because once they pollute public lands and rivers, it's hard to bring them back to health. We should know by now that we're better off solving problems before they start.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Senators to confirm two more USPS Board of Governors appointees so they can fire our Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Getting the Postal Service Reform Act passed was important, but we've also got to get Mr. DeJoy out, not just for trying to hamper our Postal Service's ability to get votes where they needed to go, and not just for his allegedly corrupt dealings with former Board of Governors member Ron Bloom, whom President Biden sacked. Fact is, Mr. DeJoy has actually tried to convince everyone that slowing down the mail and charging more for worse service were good ideas, and not some sort of pretext to privatize our Post Office. They're bad ideas, in a can-do America that always finds a way. To deliver life-saving medications, I feel compelled to add.

Around the table: the pragmatism of fighting pollution, and other truths.

Sonali Kohatkar delves into "greenwashing," and finds corporate promises of getting their act together vis a vis climate change wanting. She says their "net-zero emissions" promise "is akin to saying that it’s okay to litter all over your neighborhood if you also pick up trash elsewhere in the future because the net amount of trash you will have thrown onto the street will someday be zero." Of course, whatever we pollute today will make people sick today, regardless of how little we pollute tomorrow. Defenders of continued dependence on fossil fuel have nothing in response except, of course, hostage situations -- don't make us pollute less, or these contact lenses get it! Which shows a profound lack of imagination -- I mean, a solar power grid would make contact lenses impossible to manufacture? I thought this was the can-do country!

Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-NY) says she'll retire from Congress at the end of this term, and though most "liberal" media coverage focuses on the horserace aspects of her decision (ZOMG 30 DEMOCRATZ RETIRINGZ BIGZ REPUBZ WAVEZ!!!!!!), I rather think her retirement means that opposing Medicare drug price negotiation is now political poison. She was one of the big House voices against Medicare drug price negotiation; in fact, her position on that was probably the first anyone had heard about her. Anyway, Rep. Rice, don't let the door hit ya where the Good Lord split ya.

In a peripherally-related note, Joe Manchin says he wants to raise corporate tax rates and capital gains tax rates -- though he says nothing about higher tax rates for the rich! -- but Kyrsten Sinema remains as elusive as ever on these goals. Note well how her spokeshack answers questions about Sen. Sinema's current stance on taxes: "there are many ways to pay for (social spending plans) that do not include tax-rate increases that hurt small businesses and our economic competitiveness while we continue to emerge from a pandemic and economic downturn." That whole thing is a fecal blast from 2011 -- Paul Ryan used to say higher tax rates on the rich "hurt small businesses" and reduce "competitiveness," plus we're in a pandemic should remind you of we're in a recession, which induced Barack Obama to wait until he got re-elected to roll back some of Tha Bush Mobb tax cuts. Sen. Sinema should emulate Kathleen Rice's example and retire in 2024.

Jesus Mary and Joseph Starbucks has created a website for its anti-union propaganda. Called "We Are One Starbucks," no less! Referring to the employees it mistreats as "partners," no less! And they required workers to sign off having received an email about it! And they got a Starbucks worker to intone this before the camera: "Do you wish to continue to have your voice used independently? Or do you want your voice to be represented by a union?" When you don't have a good contract, your boss says your "independent" opinion means nothing, because it only comes from you (and he probably says that to everyone with the same opinion!). Get a good contract, and it's a lot harder to ignore you. (And what a bunch of BS about dues! When I started in my current field, I paid around 30 cents an hour in dues, and made $12 an hour more than local non-unionized workers in the same field did. Arguing about dues works better in an economy where folks don't make enough to make ends meet, I'll admit.)

Ho hum, the state of California files suit against Tesla for some old school racism in the workplace, including segregating Black workers, giving them the most physically-demanding jobs, and calling their work areas "porch monkey areas" and "the slave ship," among other things. Oh, and "among other things" includes racist graffiti in the bathroom. I'd bet that if you put six beers into Elon Musk he'd have an attitude about it, but sadly I don't think anyone would take that bet. (As an aside, I didn't know he was from South Africa! I'd hate to think that has anything to do with the behavior described in this complaint.)

Finally, Gabriel Filippelli at The Conversation describes "How Poisonous Mercury Gets From Coal-Fired Power Plants Into the Fish You Eat," and I might not read this over dinner if I were you. When mercury first emerges from a coal plant and makes its way to the ground and to waterways, it's actually quite benign, until a bacterium transforms it into the toxic methylmercury. (Right-wingers will leave off that last phrase when justifying cutting mercury emissions standards.) Worms eat the mercury, and fish eat the worms, and you eat the fish, and at every step more mercury accumulates. Note well that the presumed cost of reducing mercury toxics from coal plants just about equals the estimated lost productivity from mercury poisoning, so vigorous mercury emissions regulations aren't just moral, they're practical. Strange how often doing the right thing is also doing the pragmatic thing.

Action: concerning free speech, monopolies, drug prices, pollution, and public lands.

Long story short: tell our government to protect the right to protest, reject a bankster mega-merger, allow generic manufacturing of an anti-prostate cancer drug, ban fracking wastewater use in the Delaware River, and ban oil and gas drilling in or near Chaco Canyon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Color of Change helps you tell our Department of Justice to protect the right to protest in America. States have passed a slew of laws aiming to put protestors in jail -- or worse, allow people running over protestors to get off scot-free like they didn't just murder someone either because they inconvenienced them or because they want to create drama -- so now our federal government needs to act. And just guess how many of these laws states will ever use to convict the coming caravan of whiny truckers! Luckily for us, when those truckers do come, everyone will see them as the whiny, diaper-loaded brats they are. Protesting a mandate for a vaccine that'll save your life! I swear, these people drink rage juice or something. Anyway, states are going after peaceful folks protesting real injustices, and our DOJ needs to stop that.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Federal Reserve and our Comptroller of the Currency to reject a proposed U.S. Bank/Union Bank merger, which will put over $660 billion in assets under control of one corporation. Our government hasn't rejected a bank merger in 15 years, which has contributed to our loss of 70% of our banks in the last 40 years, which has in turn led to banksters monopolizing markets and raising prices for consumers because they can. You know, like how corporations are stoking the 7.5% inflation rate now? Not only that, but when all the banks are big, they don't go to rural and urban areas, leaving their residents at the mercy of payday lenders and pawn shops. And they deserve better, which is why we must stop this merger, and all that are like it.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell President Biden to allow other drug corporations to manufacture a generic version of the noted anti-prostate cancer drug Xtandi. Xtandi pills cost $400 per pill (not per bottle or per thousand, per pill), and for some patients that'll amount to nearly $190,000 annually! Plus we pay five times more for it than folks in other countries, and if you were anticipating that the next phrase was going to be all about how taxpayers paid for 100% of the research that brought forth Xtandi, well, you're right! Generic manufacturers could sell Xtandi for as little as $3 a pill and still make a profit, and President Biden does have legal authority to force generic manufacturing of a drug, said authority coming from the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980. This should be a layup, really, so let's get to it.

Food and Water Action helps you tell our Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) to ban fracking waste and use of Delaware River water for fracking. Fracking does use a lot of water, after all, and we've got better uses for it than enriching gas corporations' executives. Yeah, I know, gas is cheaper than most other kinds of energy, but how can we say that's a good thing if we can't drink the water? Go solar and go wind and you might pay more in the short run, but you'll cause less pollution, plus you'll save money in the long run. Our DRBC did ban fracking in the Basin last year, but they did not ban big corporations from drawing water out of the Delaware to go frack somewhere else, and once that water's gone, you don't get it back. And our DRBC's own proposal to keep frackers from taking our water is weak, so let's try to make them do better.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to protect the Chaco Culture National Historical Park from gas and oil drilling. More specifically, you'll ask them to protect Chaco Canyon and the area 10 miles out from it in all directions from gas and oil drilling. We've supported a Chaco Canyon drilling ban because of pollution and because it's holy land to nearby Native populations, but we've got another reason to support it: as drilling and grazing creep ever closer to Chaco Canyon, more and more wildlife flee to the Chaco Canyon area as a refuge, and it's more than a bit cruel to drive wildlife out of an area you drill in and then go drill in the area they've sought refuge. Some would call that the circle of life, but it's not; it's just a circle of money, and money don't last.

Action: concerning Congressional corruption, saving our Post Office, climate change, algorithms, and Supreme Court ethics.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, the Postal Service Reform Act, the Future Generations Protection Act, the Algorithmic Accountability Act, and the Supreme Court Ethics 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 pass H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. This bill would prevent Congressfolk from trading almost any stock while in office, which makes sense -- even if your Congressfolk have no oversight power over the financial sector, they probably have oversight power over another economic sector, and folks trade stocks in pretty much any sector. And n.b. Sen. Burr's massive health care stock sell-off not long after he received an early 2020 briefing revealing how bad the COVID pandemic would be -- at the same time he told his constituents not to worry too much about it! And we don't just note hypocrisy here; how many of his constituents stood pat on their portfolios because of his public advice, while he made over $1 million on more inside info?

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act. The "big," "bold" "entrepreneur" Donald Trump installed as Postmaster General thinks the solution to our Postal Service's troubles is, get this, higher prices and worse service! That'll thrill you to death if you're relying on the mail for your insulin! Of course, his true aim is to privatize our Postal Service, so that prices can be even higher and services can be even worse, but he and his CEO buddies can rake in the dough! The Postal Service Reform Act can help stop this, by removing the yoke Congress placed on its back in 2006, the one that requires our Postal Service to prefund retiree benefits almost a century in advance. Our Postal Service is ours, and we gotta take it back.

Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6168, the Future Generations Protection Act. I'm sure a lot of right-wingers would read H.R. 6168 and declare it "radical," but then they call any necessary act "radical," as part of their program of preventing you from doing anything to make our world better, and preventing new electric plants from emitting greenhouse gases, banning fracking on land and offshore, and banning exports of most domestically-produced oil or gas are all pretty good ideas. Take fracking, for example: is clean water or cheap energy more important? The answer's obvious, but this is America, so we don't even need to pick one or the other if we move to solar and wind. The "problem," I guess, is that gas makes executives richer, but that's a bad reason to make big decisions.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6580, the Algorithmic Accountability Act. This bill would direct our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to regulate "automated decision systems" and the like that big corporations use so they can hire fewer workers and so leaders can evade accountability for their decisions. Oh, sorry, said the quiet part out loud again! Seriously, the bill would require our FTC to oversee a wide range of algorithm-made or algorithm-assisted decisions, with hiring, education, energy bills, health care, and financial services being just a few of them. And yes this is within our FTC's purview! Denying someone a loan or rejecting a job application because computer said no are absolutely matters of trade! They're also matters of morality, of course -- at least, to civilized people.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4766/S. 2512, the Supreme Court Ethics Act, which would impose an ethical code of conduct on our nine Supreme Court Justices, currently the only federal judges who are not covered by such a code. We must not have thought we needed it in the past! After all, these were the best of the best! But we don't think that anymore, more than half having been appointed by men obviously unfit to be President. We also don't think that because Justices Thomas and Barrett have failed to recuse themselves from obvious conflicts-of-interest over the past year. And boy, do Supreme Court Justices blow a gasket when you point out things like this to them! They forget that even though they get appointed by our President to lifetime jobs, they still serve the American people.

Action: concerning solar power, voting rights, protecting democracy, corruption, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell Florida's legislators to reject an anti-solar power bill, tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Protecting Our Democracy Act, tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading by members of Congress, and tell your Senators to confirm nominees to our MSPB and our FCC. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. The Florida state legislature is mulling a bill that would cut rebates by utility corporations to solar power users, which would slow solar development in Florida, almost like that's the whole idea. And apparently it is, in fact, the idea of Florida Power and Light, which stands with state legislators against just about the entire rest of the state in favor of this absurd policy. Seriously, when only one corporation benefits from a bill, isn't that enough reason to oppose it? Let's help put a stake through this bill's heart, by calling House Speaker Chris Sprowls at (850) 717-5065, Senate President Wilton Simpson at (850) 487-5010, and Gov. Ron DeSantis at (850) 717-9337. Yeah, I know, he doesn't care what you think. Tell him anyway.

Hazmat America helps you tell your Senators to end the filibuster and pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Why? Because they'd deal body-blows to gerrymandering, campaign finance bribery, and racist vote suppression, that's why. And yeah, I know the Penguin and the Joker said they wouldn't kill the filibuster in order to pass bills they supposedly both support very fervently, but Common Cause helps you call voters in West Virginia and Arizona and urge them to call Sens. Manchin and Sinema to tell them to kill the filibuster in order to pass these bills. Yeah, I know Sen. Sinema gave this big, long speech on the Senate floor that professed her deep and abiding love for these bills she won't nix the filibuster to pass, but as a famous philosopher once said, everything before the "but" is bullshit. If we can't move them, we have to humiliate them.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5314, the Protecting Our Democracy Act. The bill would, as you know, keep future Presidents from profiting from their office, abusing their pardon power, declaring "national emergencies" whenever they feel a sad, and firing Inspectors General for actually stopping corruption, and if this all seems a little like closing the barn door after the horses have run out, it's not, because the guy who did all those things stands a good chance of running again and winning in 2024, and if he does he'll do all of this again, and worse. If Republicans are shouting in your ear that this is a "Democrat bill," read that list of things the bill would do again. Those aren't "Democrat things," they're American things.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban stock trading. The bill currently before Congress -- H.R. 1579/S. 564, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act -- would mostly prohibit stock trading by members of Congress, but Sen. Ossoff (D-GA) plans to introduce a bill that would prohibit stock trading by members of Congress and their spouses, since a lot of Congressfolk just so happen to have husbands and wives who make a lot of money trading stock. Think these couples never discuss Congressional oversight? Don't be like Nancy Pelosi and retort that this is a free market, because Congressfolk oversee big corporations as part of their job, and should avoid not just corruption, but the appearance of corruption. And so should their spouses! Hey, no one put a gun to their heads and told them to get married.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Senators to confirm three qualified nominees to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which helps protect federal employees from retaliation by their bosses. Or it would, if it had any members! That's right, the Trump Administration let the MSPB function without a quorum during its entire tenure, virtually guaranteeing that any federal employee who, say, dimed out corruption by their higher-ups would have virtually no recourse against retaliation by those higher-ups. Like, say, President Trump himself! Remember that when the Steve Bannon-types talk about "dismantling the administrative state," they mean to dismantle that part of the administrative state that fights corruption and protects good Americans from being stomped on by powerful people.

Finally, upon hearing that big telecom corporations are actively trying to sink the Gigi Sohn nomination to our FCC -- couldn't be because she fights for net neutrality, could it? -- Free Press suggests we call Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA) at 202.224.3441 and tell her to call a vote on Ms. Sohn's nomination before the end of the month. Free Press also helps you tell your Senators to support the Sohn nomination. Sadly, the reason that vote hasn't happened yet may well be Kyrsten Sinema, who has come out against net neutrality in the past, because bipartisanship maverick independent streak getting to yes. Of course the whole point of democracy isn't getting Republican bullies to yes, but getting Americans to yes, which Ms. Sohn -- through her support of internet freedom for you, not for big corporations -- has already done. Odd how politicians burnish their "bipartisan" bona fides by opposing things Americans actually want -- things that actually prove that real bipartisanship is possible in America. And when I say "odd" I mean "so stupid it's boring."

Action: concerning gerrymandering, pollution, landmines, and Guantánamo.

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject a fake gerrymandering reform bill, tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous methane emissions regulations possible and start monitoring factory farm pollution, tell President Biden to keep his promise to outlaw certain landmines and close Guantánamo Bay, and tell our USDA to stop oil trains from rumbling through Utah. 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.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA informs us that the recently-introduced HB 2207 only pretends to create a citizens' commission for redistricting, in that it give the political parties far too much power over its composition and direction and would actually amend our state constitution to let one party have complete control over the process. They'll call that the voters' will, when gerrymandering Rorschach-blot districts that excise sides of streets and individual houses is the perfect way to subvert the voters' will! They got some cojones, these clowns, but that's all they got. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom, if you're on a cellphone) to find your state legislator's phone number so you can tell them to reject this bill -- unless it includes the Samuelson amendment that would at least give good Pennsylvanians a real independent citizens commission, which would negate all the bill's horrors.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to enact the most vigorous methane emission rules possible. Best to get to stepping, though, since their deadline for comments is Friday. Methane packs a bigger climate change punch than coal, and when big corporations let it leak from their oil or gas drilling facilities, they're not just moving the coastlines uncomfortably closer to you, they're wasting perfectly good energy -- and if they're drilling on public lands, they're also cheating you, the taxpayer, out of royalties. In short, nobody likes methane leaks -- except the big gas and oil corporations that don't want to do their part to keep our planet livable because it means the CEO can't gild the plumbing in his 19th vacation home. And they shouldn't get their way about that.

US PIRG helps you tell our EPA to start monitoring factory farm pollution. Which cause the most water pollution in America, and which our EPA pledged to start monitoring 17 years ago; what's the holdup? The holdup, I suspect, is that big ag corporations get even more deference from our government than all the other big corporations to which our government defers -- all these big corporations have to do is dangle the spectre of high food prices and they get whatever they like. Well, we're not hostages in America -- we're free people. And asking our EPA to start monitoring (not even stopping!) factory farm pollution is not so damn much to ask. Rivers of hog poop have a lot of methane in them, too, and too much hog poop makes people sick. Don't people count for anything?

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to re-ban anti-personnel landmines. Donald Trump lifted this ban during his deleterious four years as President, and President Biden promised he'd undo it, but he hasn't, yet, and it's not like he hasn't had the time -- a stroke of a pen is all it'll take. Put five beers into Donald Trump and I'm sure he'll tell you other countries get to do it so we should too, but the whole point of America is to be the best possible example to other countries. It's like none of these folks in politics remember that -- or, more likely, they think they don't have to earn it anymore. But we must always earn America. And landmines have been known to blow people's legs off 50 years after the war's over, so let's not let cruelty be the example we set for the rest of the world.

Amnesty International helps you tell President Biden to close Guantánamo Bay already. Again, he promised to do this, and it's not like he can't get something done if he puts his mind to it -- like, you know, our withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he should have done a lot better but at least he did it; get us out of this now 20-years-going-on humiliation and he might actually start stacking up some accomplishments. Guantánamo still has almost 40 detainees, held without charge or trial, and if they'd really done something so bad you'd think our government could charge them with something. That tells you they didn't do a damn thing! Someone already stands ready to say if even one terrorist was there it was all worth it, but they'd never say that if they were detained at Guantánamo for years on end. So we can blow them off.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to revoke permits for an oil railway running through the Ashley National Forest in Utah. Jesus Mary and Joseph what is it about Utah that makes big corporations want to screw with it? Utah has some of the most beautiful country in the world! And this railway won't even dig out the minerals that big corporations often covet in Utah -- but it will ruin wildlife habitat and wetlands there, and for what? If we don't move past oil -- which is more than possible in a world where solar and wind now cost less in some places than fossil fuels -- then we're not going to have a planet left. Why, even those jerks at Fox News who spend all their time laughing at people who want more solar and wind won't have a place to go.

Action: concerning Medicare, methane emissions, pensions, "forever chemicals," Arctic drilling, and "sacrifice zones."

Long story short: tell our government to abandon a long-term plan to privatize Medicare, tell our EPA to cut methane emissions in the most vigorous way possible, tell our Department of Labor to help protect pension plans from climate change, tell REI to get PFAS chemicals out of their products, tell the Biden Administration to reject the proposed Willow drilling project in Alaska and stop a massive drilling lease in Alaska's Cook Inlet, and tell our EPA to stop corporations from using working-class neighborhoods as their dumping grounds. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to scuttle a Trump-era plan to privatize Medicare. This would be the "Direct Contracting" plan, which allows Medicare to assign seniors to private health care plans managed by private corporations and insurers, even if the senior signed up for traditional public Medicare. In other words, Donald Trump told seniors that what they want doesn't matter, which should ring a bell. The fact that the Biden Administration hasn't thrown this program in the trash where it belongs means either they haven't gotten around to cleaning up that particular corner of the Augean stables or they secretly hope nobody notices it. If it's the latter, well, too late! And if enough of us speak out, Medicare will have no choice but to scuttle the program.

The Environmental Defense Fund helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to issue the strongest methane emissions-cutting rule possible. We have many good reasons to cut methane emissions -- methane emissions pack a much bigger climate change punch than coal emissions do, methane emissions also represent lost usable energy, and on public lands methane emissions also represent lost royalties for the taxpayer. Also, you know, air pollution; you're going to be breathing the air all your life, after all, and there'll be no gated community to run to if we can't breathe the air. You'll also ask our EPA to ensure that the rule includes older gas and oil drilling plants; too many of the biggest polluters get "grandfathered" out of anti-pollution regulations. Word on the street is the EPA's rule is pretty good, but we've still gotta fight.

The Environmental Defense Fund also helps you tell our Department of Labor to approve a proposed rule to allow retirement funds to take climate change into account when making their decisions. After all, if you don't have a planet to live on, all your 401(k) money won't mean a thing! And the Labor proposal also reflects a reality too often overlooked (or, perhaps more precisely, "overlooked") by our "liberal" media -- that solar and wind have achieved parity of cost with fossil fuels more and more over the years, and sane investors wouldn't want to be caught with all their money in dying industries. Usually that's the thing you don't see until it's too late -- especially when you're obsessed with investing in "stuff that has worked for a long time." And a lot of stuff that has worked for a long time still works! But you've also got to know when to jump ship, and now's the time.

Consumer Reports helps you tell outdoor gear corporation REI to get the PFAS chemicals -- that's right, the "forever chemicals" -- out of their products. My guess is that REI would find that challenging, what with all the PFAS in their jackets and boots and tents and such, but tough toodles, because Americans deserve corporations that can change with the times. America certainly deserves corporations that live up to their "we're so green" PR, and REI certainly pumps out plenty of that. And you can probably recite this from memory by now, but PFAS chemicals are everywhere, and they don't break down, and they easily find their way into our bodies and wreak all kinds of health care havoc there. Getting the PFAS out of even one corner of one industry would be, as a famous philosopher has said, a BFD. So let's help make that happen.

The Alaska Wilderness League helps you tell the Biden Administration to keep ConocoPhillips's notorious Willow project from moving forward, while the Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell the Biden Administration to scuttle plans to offer over a million acres from Cook's Inlet to gas and oil drilling corporations. The American people hardly ever make any money from those sales anyway, given how much say big corporations have in the royalty rates to begin with! And both of these projects will pollute the hell out of Alaska, a land about which we don't know nearly enough to go fiddling about with new drilling projects. Remember when George H.W. Bush said the caribou like the Alaska pipeline, because they brush up against it? Our civilization doesn't appear to have advanced very far from that analysis. Which is one reason we keep fighting Arctic drilling.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our EPA to fight big polluting corporations from creating ever more "sacrifice zones" where good Americans can't live anymore. It's been a matter of popular knowledge for more than two decades -- at least since the time I saw Mystery Science Theatre 3000 reference it in an episode! -- that big polluters love building near communities with lots of Black and Brown folks in them, figuring, I guess, that nobody will miss them and/or that the folks who live there won't organize to fight them. Of course those folks do organize to fight them, but what a big help it would be to have our government standing with them for the first time ever! But they'll only stand with those communities if we demand they stand with them.

UPDATE. I apologize for messing up the link in paragraph 3, and I've now corrected it.

Action: concerning pollution, farming, prisoners, food safety, and racism.

Long story short: tell your PA state Assemblyfolk to reject pro-pollution bills, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Farm System Reform Act, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, the Baby Food Safety Act, and the GI Bill Restoration 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.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject a pair of objectively pro-pollution bills, HB 1947 and SB 275. They would, guess what, explicitly forbid Pennsylvania cities and towns from enacting laws that would help them get off our national addiction to fossil fuels. Very conservative of them! What ever happened to "the smallest body of people should make the most important decisions affecting that body of people"? Money, that's all -- if a municipality decides to buy only solar or wind power, then big gas and oil executives won't be able to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Sad! And Pennsylvania's Supreme Court found similar legislation unconstitutional, so let's save our legislature from further embarrassment by communicating our will.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4421/S. 2332, the Farm System Reform Act. The Farm System Reform Act would place a moratorium on the building of new factory farms, restore country-of-origin labeling laws for meat, and help break meat packer monopolies by reinstituting "spot market" meat sales, so that meat packing corporations don't force farmers into sales agreements that ultimately crush them. Hopefully you don't look at phrases like "no more building of factory farms" and say "but won't that drive prices through the roof?" We're seeing, right now, how oversized ships are actually driving inflation upward, simply by making themselves the only conceivable option in shipping. We're not there yet with oversized farms, but if big corporations get their way, we will be. Thus we have to stop them before they do.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act. Some folks pay over a buck a minute to talk to their loved ones in prison, and folks can't afford that. And prisoners certainly can't afford that, since they don't even make anything close to minimum wage in prison. If you find yourself thinking then they shouldn't have done the crime then ha ha ha snort, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) consider that folks who can stay in touch with loved ones without paying an arm and a leg have a much better chance of staying out of prison once they get out than folks who can't stay in touch with loved ones, and 3) consider that just because you're in prison doesn't mean big telecom corporations should take advantage of you. If you need to slap yourself again, go ahead. Wisdom ain't easy.

Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2229/S. 1019, the Baby Food Safety Act. If you've heard of toxic metals like cadmium, arsenic, lead, and mercury in baby food, then you see the need for such legislation. And this bill's pretty comprehensive -- it'd impose maximum levels of toxic metals in baby food, require our FDA to review and lower those levels if necessary, expand our FDA's recall authority over toxic baby food, and even commission research on agricultural methods that'd reduce toxic metals in baby food. Our government, commissioning research -- why, that sounds like our government doing their job! And if the thought of government research makes you guffaw, just remember: without it, you'd have no COVID vaccine. No, really. You didn't think private corporations did all that, did you?

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5905, the Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act, which would extend G.I. Bill benefits to survivors and descendants of Black soldiers who fought in World War II. Why? Because the G.I. Bill enabled a lot of good American WWII soldiers of Italian, Polish, and German descent to get into the middle class for the first time -- but denied that access to Black soldiers, using methods of discrimination you won't have to work too hard to imagine. We made them a promise, and we reneged on it; now, with the GI Bill Restoration Act, we can make it right. Naturally, right-wingers will call this "reparations," like that's a bad word. They'll try to make any word a bad word! But that shouldn't keep us from doing the right thing.

Action: concerning pollution, campaign finance, patents, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our Justice Department to review Steven Donziger's case, tell big corporations to stop donating to anti-voting rights politicians, tell big insurance corporations not to insure the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline, tell our government to ensure that our NIH gets listed on the Moderna vaccine patent, tell our EPA to to ban PFAS chemicals in food storage products, and tell our government to break up Amazon. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

MoveOn helps you tell our Department of Justice to review the Steven Donziger case and get justice for him. Steven Donziger is the lawyer who helped the Cofan indigenous people of Ecuador the biggest pollution judgment in history -- $9.5 billion -- from Chevron, after the big oil corporation illegally dumped billions of gallons of oil waste on Cofan land. That was a decade ago; after all that time, Chevron hasn't paid, but that doesn't mean they haven't been busy, trumping up a racketeering charge against Mr. Donziger in Ecuador and a contempt charge in the United States; soon he'll be reporting for a six-month prison sentence here, and if you're thinking he's really paying for daring to hold Chevron accountable, well, I couldn't blame you. Luckily, we have some say about whether justice happens in America, too.

People for the American Way helps you tell big corporations to stop donating to anti-voting rights politicians. And if that means "stop donating to all Republicans except for Lisa Murkowski," hey, that ain't my fault, just as it ain't my fault Republicans' response to any setback is to run even farther to the right. That's their fault, and it is also weak Democratic politicians' fault. And it is also the fault of big corporations that talk a good game about voting rights but still send campaign donations to politicians who suppress the vote. Corporate PR hacks no doubt stand ready to tell you their donations aren't about voting rights but about economics, or something. Trouble is sending a politician money enables them to do everything they do, and withholding campaign donations will help discourage bad behavior.

Public Citizen helps you tell big insurance corporations to steer clear of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline. You know how usually we fight pipelines that run through big aquifers which provide drinking water to millions of people? Not imagine a pipeline that not only runs right through Africa's largest lake, Lake Victoria, and also runs right beside the second-largest freshwater lake on Earth -- no, really, that's in Africa! It's Lake Tanganyika, which sits on the border shared by Tanzania, Burundi, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo border -- but which also runs through one of Africa's few earthquake zones, virtually guaranteeing a pipeline burst even more than bad pipeline safety already does. A lot of sun falls on Africa; they should concentrate their efforts there, maybe? First, let's kill this project.

Public Citizen also helps you tell our government to ensure that our National Institutes of Health (or NIH) gets listed as a co-inventor of the Moderna vaccine patent. Sounds like not such a big deal, but it is: the corporations get all the credit for the vaccines, when actually our government does a lot of the research that makes them possible. Not to mention a lot of the funding, or in the case of the Moderna vaccine, almost all of the funding. Seriously, instead of Republicans picking stupid fights over Dr. Seuss and Big Bird, let's make them fight over our government getting the credit it deserves for making the vaccines that have saved so many good American lives. They'll lose that fight every time. Which is one big reason they pick the other fights.

Penn Environment helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to keep PFAS chemicals out of plastic food containers. They call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals," because they're just about impossible to break down and because they get into your body and cause all sorts of health care problems -- and one of the main places you'll find them is in your plastic food containers, many of which probably advertise themselves as "microwave-safe" but, ah, no. I'm old enough to remember when "shatterproof" plastic was The Future, but now I'd take the relative fragility of glass over all the pollution and ill health plastic has caused. And I'm pretty sure we didn't really understand how bad it would get! But once you do know, you have a duty to your civilization to help fix it.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our government to break up Amazon. Not just because its former CEO, the ubiquitous Jeff Bezos, is the richest man on Earth, and not just because it handles about half of all online sales, and not just because it killed all the smaller bookstore chains like B. Dalton and Encore and Waldenbooks, but because it collects so much data on its users that it can offer the same products small businesses offer at a lower price and thus crush small businesses. I used the Italics Hammer there so folks who yammer on about small businesses would see it. And no, breaking up Amazon won't mean you'll wait forever to get stuff! And even if it did, gosh, do you remember 1993? Do you remember special-ordering books you didn't see on the shelf? Gosh, do people even understand hardship anymore?

Action: concerning Afghanistan, Facebook, Steve Bannon, nuclear weapons, fossil fuels, and forever chemicals.

Long story short: tell our government to help suffering Afghans, investigate Facebook, charge Steve Bannon for defying a Congressional subpoena, and curtail development of nuclear weapons; tell big banks to stop funding big fossil fuel projects, and tell our EPA to regulate "forever chemicals" as vigorously as possible. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Win Without War helps you tell the Biden Administration to release and monitor Afghan assets. Key phrase in that formulation is "and monitor" -- nobody wants to release good Afghans' assets and just see the Taliban seize them. The former government of Afghanistan kept their citizens' money in international accounts, which is why this is even an issue in the first place, and now those citizens are at risk of starving to death and running out of medicine -- never mind that they can't even buy supplies or run businesses! -- and civilized people don't wish that fate on anyone. And it is their money, after all. Don't calculate that starving a few Afghans is the price we pay for isolating the Taliban. Again, civilized people don't do that, and besides, the Taliban live in a world where even ISIS hates them.

The American Economic Liberties Project helps you tell various Executive branch agencies (including our Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Federal Trade Commission) to investigate Facebook for possible crimes. Such crimes, per the incomparable Matt Stoller, may include: wire fraud (in inflating both video numbers and advertising "reach" numbers), securities fraud (in its failure to disclose such inflation to investors), violating the False Claims Act (an inflated number is a false claim), insider trading (Mr. Zuckerberg sold a lot of stock after learning of the Cambridge Analytica imbroglio), and price-fixing (Facebook allegedly got preferential treatment from Google in exchange for not competing with them). That's all illegal for good reason, and criminal charges may be the only thing that'll bring Facebook to heel. So let's demand that.

Left Action helps you tell our Justice Department to charge Steve Bannon for defying a Congressional subpoena. Our House subpoenaed Mr. Bannon in the course of its investigation of the January 6 attempted coup, but Mr. Bannon has claimed he could not testify until various executive privilege claims make their way through the courts. Presumably he has noticed that Donald Trump isn't President any longer, despite the fever dreams of right-wingers (including himself). Our House has since voted to hold Mr. Bannon in contempt; now the ball's in our Justice Department's court to decide whether to enforce that holding. If they care about law and order, they'll enforce it; you shouldn't be able to defy a Congressional subpoena during an investigation into an attempt to overthrow our government without consequences.

Peace Action helps you tell the Biden Administration how you want their Nuclear Posture Review to proceed. Chiefly, you'd argue for fewer nuclear weapons (and no new nuclear weapons) and you'd argue to take nuclear weapons off of "hair-trigger" alert, since we already have enough nukes to destroy the world hundreds of times over and they've never been particularly precise weapons. And how good a response is a nuclear strike to most of what happens in the world today? Should we have used nukes on Osama bin Laden after 9.11? Of course not, and too much of what harms our soldiers in the field are improvised explosives, suggesting that the future of warfare might be more about guerilla warfare. All new nukes do is make defense contractors rich, which ain't a good enough reason to do anything.

Daily Kos helps you tell the big banks to stop funding big fossil fuel projects. A lot of big banks express concern over the effects of climate change -- so why do they continue to fund big oil, gas, and coal projects? Possibly because they're not really telling the truth about their commitment to fighting climate change? It's a question worth asking! It's not just about pollution, either -- it's also about running roughshod over the rights of indigenous folks who live on the lands that big corporations would like to dig up. It sure seems like they'd do less harm to the indigenous if they concentrated more on solar and wind investment. They'd enable a lot less pollution, too. We deserve more of these win-win situations in our lives, but we won't get them unless we speak out.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to regulate "forever chemicals" as vigorously as possible. They call PFAS "forever chemicals" because they don't break down and once they get in your body, they stay there -- and then they wreak havoc, causing cancer, thyroid disease, reproductive issues, and liver damage, among other things you don't want to happen to you or anyone else. Unfortunately, you can find PFAS chemicals in damn near everything, from non-stick pans to fast-food wrappers to stain-resistant carpets to water-repellant jackets to firefighting foam. Maybe that all seems to big to fight. Who could blame you for thinking so? But back in the day, slavery was too big to fight, too, but we fought it and won. And we can win here, too -- but not if we stay silent.

Action: concerning, once again, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the Build Back Better Act, invest in our care economy, fund paid family/medical leave, let Medicare negotiate drug prices, expand Medicare, expand our fight against climate change, and permanently expand the Child Tax Credit. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the full $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Billionaire's Income Tax in the Build Back Better Act and assess a 2% tax on corporate stock buybacks. Yeah, I know, Kyrsten Sinema said no, but she has completely soiled her reputation -- no, independents aren't going to see her as all tough and mavericky after she defied public opinion (not "the special interests"!) time after time. But she ain't the boss of us, and even though she has assured this won't go our way this time, our duty is to communicate our will until they do our will.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in the care economy in the Build Back Better Act. Some Democratic Senators seem to care more about the total price of the package than what it does, but investing in the care economy is no less important than anything else, given that we're all going to need care one day, whether for ourselves or for our loved ones. It does appear that the Build Back Better Act would subsidize day care so as to limit spending on day care to 7% of one's income (at least up to a certain salary, which I'm sure was Joe Manchin's idea), and since day care is yet another one of those things everyone charges an arm and a leg for because working families need it, that would be a vast improvement, and communicating our will about the care economy should at least get that much done. This time.

Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Originally President Biden wanted 13 weeks of paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act (currently Americans get 13 weeks of unpaid leave); now it looks like we'll get four. Four is fewer than most other civilized nations (and some not-so-civilized ones!), but four is also more than zero, which is where we are now. That doesn't mean we shouldn't fight for more! Why, it doesn't even mean we should shut up now! We are not hostages to Democratic "moderates," no matter how much other Democrats give themselves over as hostages to Democratic "moderates." And they're really supposed to negotiate with us. They didn't do that. So we need to ensure they do that from now on.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make large investments in climate change action. That would include investing in solar and wind power, and also a methane emissions tax, which would slash carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry. Yeah, Joe Manchin put the kibosh on big climate change action because West Virginia is a coal state, but do we really think good West Virginians are that emotionally-invested in coal? I think they'd throw coal overboard in a minute! Of course, Joe Manchin is, ah, personally invested in keeping coal around, and that's just one reason he'll lose re-election by 20 points in 2024 no matter what he thinks. Still and all, communicate your will now, and we can win the future.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, and Penn PIRG all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act, while Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Kyrsten Sinema (again) and Bob Menendez killed Medicare drug price negotiation this round, but 80% of Americans want it, so we ought to have it, and we certainly ought to keep fighting for it until we do have it. And Democratic "moderates" have just about succeeded in gutting the expanding-Medicare plank, so we have to tell our Congressfolk that $800 vouchers for dental care (and $0 for vision care, apparently) ain't enough for our seniors.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Moms Rising, and the Juggernaut Project all help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent in the Build Back Better Act. Again, because of Mr. Means Tester, Joe Manchin, the Build Back Better Act will only extend the Child Tax Credit expansion for a year, but again, $250 and $300 checks in your bank accounts every month is actually quite popular with working families, who sure could use all the breathing room they can get. You'll want to demand that they don't cap CTC expansion eligibility at $60,000 annually -- another brilliant Joe Manchin idea! -- because that ain't much. Should we expect Millionaire Joe to understand that? Doesn't matter! We should expect him to listen to his constituents who make him understand that.

In case I haven't been obvious enough about it: the fact that the Build Back Better Act will not meet our expectations doesn't mean we should stop fighting for the things we wanted to have in it. Joe Biden will, God willing, have at least another three years in office, and though the punditoids are all saying Republicans will take back the House and maybe the Senate too in 2022, we have something to say about that. No one should ever vote for a Republican again, for any office -- particularly after the January 6 near-coup! -- and we should also demand far better Democrats than party leadership would want to give us. And more than that, whenever they say it's hopeless, we should act like they're disrespecting us -- not least because they are. They want us to throw up our hands and treat politics like a big sporting event. Don't ever do that. This is our America -- but only if we speak out.

Action: concerning Medicare drug price negotiation, climate change, Medicaid, the filibuster, and federal corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices, fight climate change, plug gaps in Medicaid coverage, end the Senate filibuster, and protect Inspectors General as they expose government corruption. 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.

Both Daily Kos and Drug Prices Are Too High help you tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices. The latter action alert starts off saying "Shame on you, Senators Menendez and Sinema!" And that's entirely appropriate -- Sen. Menendez botches the art of argument in trying to avoid saying big pharma corporations control his actions, and Sen. Sinema creates chaos by opposing something 80% of Americans want. Newt Gingrich used to say if 70% of Americans want something, they should get it. I'm sure he has excuses ready for why Americans shouldn't get this thing they want, but doing their constituents' will is a Congressional representative's job. So let's do our job, and communicate our will to those representatives, as often as we need to.

Daily Kos helps you demand that the Build Back Better Act make the historic climate change-fighting investments we need to make. Because as much as we need health care and higher taxes on the rich and on corporations, we also need a planet to live on, and pretty much everyone who doesn't imbibe rage-addled masturbatoria from right-wing news channels wants solar power and wind power to be a big part of our future. And don't fear Joe Manchin suggesting he'll leave the Democratic Party if he doesn't get his way (which is no climate change-fighting legislation). If he leaves the party over this, he becomes the villain -- not to our "liberal" media, which loves drama more than truth, but to anyone who's actually watching. And that's more people than it used to be.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to plug the "Medicaid gap" between states that have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and states that haven't. No reason why poor folks in 12 American states should be left out, after all, except that the Affordable Care Act left that loophole open for our Supreme Court to notice, which is a stupid reason to let people get sick and die. Thanks to certain drama- and chaos-addicted Senators, the Build Back Better Act stands poised to do a whole lot less about health care than we have demanded (which is, now that I think of it, the reason Democrats haven't been pushing what's in it -- they'd rather run on what they pass than what they promise!). But plugging the Medicaid gap would help a lot of good Americans in states with reactionary legislatures who don't listen to them.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to get rid of the filibuster in order to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. Republicans filibustered that bill yesterday, because chaos, but we still must do our duty to communicate our will to our Senators, and, if need be, tell them how to do our will. Making the filibuster a talking filibuster -- i.e., one that Senators would have to keep going by actually talking for 12 or 24 or 48 hours straight, rather than just signaling that they don't want to end debate and then going out to the dinner or the theatre, which action ends debate -- remains my preference. But you know what? If Senators don't want to work for their chaos and obstruction, then I say take their toys away from them. Because I think I speak for most of America when I say we're done.

Finally, the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Senators to do more to fight federal corruption. You go to swing states and you don't find millions of people committed to "bipartisanship" or "right-sizing regulations" or whatever -- you find people who hate government corruption and hate that politicians don't do enough about it. But if we give our Inspectors General the tools they need to investigate and expose government corruption, then they'll be able to expose a lot more of it. Hey, it's not for nothing Donald Trump tried to replace them all when he became President! If they were bad at exposing corruption, after all, he would have let them hang around. And indeed, in 2020, he did replace a bunch of them with "acting" IGs he hoped would do his will, and not the American people's. So let's put a stop to all of that.

Action: concerning, once more, the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations (including enacting a Billionaire's Tax and a stock buyback tax) to pay for the Build Back Better Act, and make sure the Build Back Better Act invests in our care economy, funds paid family/medical leave, lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, expands Medicare, expands our fight against climate change, and permanently expands the Child Tax Credit. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the full $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act by raising taxes on the rich and on corporations. Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include the Billionaire's Income Tax in the Build Back Better Act and assess a 2% tax on corporate stock buybacks. Remember when they said the 2017 tax "reform" would put thousands of dollars in everyone's pockets? What it actually did was let big corporate CEOs buy back stock, so that shareholder power is even more concentrated in executive hands. That used to be illegal, by the way! And it should be again. In the meantime, we should discourage it with taxation, and then use that money to do good works, which we will describe below.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in the care economy in the Build Back Better Act. What do we know about child care and elder care? That we'll all need one or the other one day, and they could both be a damn sight cheaper. And none of that is about "creating an entitlement society," but about relieving real burdens on working families that cripple their ability to contribute more to our society -- burdens that only exist to make corporate executives rich. Yes, that's your bootstrap society for you -- this civilization, such as it is, redistributes our income upward to the undeserving rich, and then harangues us to "just work harder." I want this income-redistribution-upward scheme dead before I leave this Earth. Supporting the care economy is just one way to do that.

Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Every other wealthy nation on Earth does it, but our leaders would apparently prefer to churn out corporate executives who buy 18 homes and a hundred classic cars, fly to the edge of our atmosphere and call it "space travel," and build atomic clocks in mountains. You can have one or the other, not both, and I know which one I'll take -- I'll take the society that gives everyone a chance to succeed, rather than worship the folks who've already "succeeded" and indulge their lust for mammon even more. And paid family/medical leave would cost so little! And don't tolerate any whining about "workers abusing the program" -- just catch and punish the ones who do. This ain't rocket science.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make large investments in climate change action. That would include investing in solar and wind power, and it'd also include a methane emissions tax, which would slash carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry. Yeah, you heard Joe Manchin doesn't want to do this in the Build Back Better Act, either! But he already got his corporate welfare for fossil fuel corporations in that "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" he insisted on having, so where does his greed end? I say "his greed" because of his own large investments in the coal industry, of course. I mean, you'd have to explain his ignorance of his constituents' will somehow! And I think they ought to be heard, for once.

Drug Prices Are Too High, Daily Kos, and Penn PIRG all help you demand that your Congressfolk put Medicare drug price negotiation in the Build Back Better Act, while Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare services for seniors in the Build Back Better Act. Medicare drug price negotiation (which Bob Menendez still opposes, can't someone in New Jersey primary his sorry ass in 2024?) would save tens of billions of dollars annually, and remember what Bernie Sanders said: dental care for seniors isn't an "entitlement." It's more than Medicare covers now, and that has to change.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Moms Rising, and the Juggernaut Project all help you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent in the Build Back Better Act. Working families in America have been getting $250 or $300 checks every month since mid-July, but those will end at the end of this calendar year -- yes, for 2022, working families will still get the expansion in the form of one lump sum at tax time, but why not keep doing it monthly? Families stimulate the economy better with smaller sums of money than they do with large windfalls. And, yeah, it'll be like a political ad every time the check arrives; why on Earth would Democrats refuse such a gift? Oh, right, because they're geniuses at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And that's why we offer our counsel to them at critical moments like these, when they're about to let big donors crash their entire agenda.

Around the table: from "voter fraud" to voting aginst fascism.

Now this is interesting: four North Carolinians are suing for libel after former Governor Pat McCrory's defense fund accused them of voting illegally in the 2016 gubernatorial election (an election Mr. McCrory lost to Roy Cooper). That should teach right-wingers who lose elections to accuse specific people of "voter fraud," but then, if we keep demanding proof of right-wing "voter fraud" accusations, they'll have to get down to names eventually. And yes, North Carolina was using the notorious Interstate Crosscheck database at the time, so I bet that's how the McCrory group got its names. I sincerely hope the plaintiffs prevail.

Here's some more good news: Dollar General workers at a Barkhamstead, Connecticut store are aiming to unionize. Did we not just discuss how unions should have been going after retail workers all this time? Well, these six workers contacted the United Food and Commercial Workers Union in mid-September, filed for an election just a few days later, and will vote on the matter on October 22. In the meantime Dollar General corporate flacks have descended upon them with anti-union propaganda, and one of the six workers got fired, I wonder why? I wish them the best, and I hope I can continue to believe that the Biden NLRB is way, way better than the Trump NLRB.

Jennifer Rubin wonders why Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema seem to be trying to kill the Build Back Better Act when it would benefit their home states greatly. Pedants would argue that Joe Manchin actually has supported Medicare drug price negotiation, but he sure ain't "out front pushing for this item," as Ms. Rubin says, and (as I've said) maybe he only came out for it because he knew Ms. Sinema would oppose it anyway. He has also favored rolling back the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich, but again, he ain't out front on that, and again, he also knows Ms. Sinema opposes that rollback. Ms. Rubin's many other points -- not very many rich folks in West Virginia, big solar job growth in Arizona, lots of Medicare recipients in both states -- withstand more serious scrutiny.

You know I have little patience for folks who say "you can make polls say anything you want"? Well, that doesn't apply to cherry-picking poll data, like the kind David Moore describes at FAIR. In buttressing his absurd claim that Joe Manchin totally gets his constituents, a Washington Post columnist reports that 49% of independents, in one mid-August poll, and not just in West Virginia, think the Build Back Better Act aims to spend too much, which is a little like saying the 1974-75 Washington Capitals were a pretty good team because Tommy Williams scored 22 goals that year. (That team won eight games and had one other 20-goal scorer.) Think the actual West Virginia polling referenced herein occurred to that Post writer?

As Republicans "ramp() up" attacks on giving our IRS more enforcement power, dig Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) saying "I can’t ever recall anyone saying that they want the IRS to poke into their business more on a day-to-day basis." But has anyone told him I wish the IRS could catch tax cheats who break our laws and make the rest of us pay more? Because I'm pretty sure that's what this is really all about.

Finally, noted conservative Max Boot reiterates that he's going to keep voting for Democrats"until the GOP ceases to pose an existential threat to our freedom," and of course I sympathize, but again -- as with George Will, who has made very similar noises -- I wonder how much sway Mr. Boot has with his brethren on the right. I'd say he has sway with no more than 3% of the electorate -- judging by how well Michael Wood did in the Texas's 6th special, when he leaned hard (and effectively, I thought) into never-Trumpism -- and while 3% ain't nothing, I'd caution against thinking very many of the folks you disagreed with back in the day have now come to their senses, even after the events of January 6.

Action: concerning the Build Back Better Act.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for the Build Back Better Act, and make sure the Build Back Better Act lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, expands Medicare, funds paid family/medical leave, permanently expands the Child Tax Credit, and addresses climate change. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise all $3.5 trillion for the Build Back Better Act by hiking taxes on the rich and on corporations. Virtually everyone in America wants them to do it, so it shouldn't be such a big lift -- even to the "moderate" Democrats facing stupid Club for Growth ads about the tax hikes. If you're a Congressperson, and you can be swayed by big corporate advertising, then you should resign immediately. The number of folks who actually believe taxing the rich will put people out of work or take money from working families is laughably small, and most of them are rageheads anyway. And they shouldn't get all the say about everything in America.

Daily Kos helps you tell Democrats to ensure the Build Back Better Act allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Which will save the taxpayer at least $450 billion over the next decade! It's a pay-for, not a service we "just can't find the money for." Providing the service also provides the money! Anyway, what day of the Kyrsten Sinema Hostage Crisis are we in now? Has she explained her objection to letting Medicare negotiate drug prices? I kid, of course -- she'll never tell us, because we're the people at the other end of her fuck-off ring. But word on the street is that her actual constituents in Arizona have been giving her an earful about it, so let's all do that with all of our Congressfolk.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to include Medicare expansion in the Build Back Better Act. Specifically, you'll tell them to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60 and give our seniors vision, dental, and hearing care. It's a bit of a surprise they can't get that now, actually -- unless they get Medicare Advantage, which isn't really Medicare but a private health insurance plan that Medicare funds. Why does Medicare fund a private health insurance plan? Because George W. Bush, that's why. Naturally a prominent "moderate" Democrat opposes expanding Medicare in this way, but this time it's the notorious Joe Manchin of West Virginia (who, as recent reports tell us, also doesn't listen to his constituents). How about making sure all seniors get the "advantage"?

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to include paid family/medical leave in the Build Back Better Act. Like everything we've discussed so far, paid family/medical leave is popular with large majorities of Americans -- so why won't Democrats talk about it? If they'd go on TV and say we're trying to expand Medicare, enact paid family/medical leave, and let Medicare help lower drug prices, "moderate" Democrats would feel pressure to change their stupid tunes. Which I guess answers that question -- Democratic politicians act like "unity" is more important than doing the right thing, but if they don't do the right thing -- and, this is very important, take credit for it -- their unity will mean nothing, because they'll be back in the minority. Oh, and fascists will be the majority. So wakey wakey, House and Senate Democrats!

Both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Moms Rising help you tell your Congressfolk to include a permanent Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion in the Build Back Better Act. The American Rescue Plan Act included a temporary CTC expansion, which delivers $250 or $300 checks into the bank accounts of working families with children every single month, which is rather like a campaign ad every single month. But you just know the Manchin/Sinema axis waits for Just the Right Moment to demand an end to the CTC expansion expire, because "fiscal responsibility" or something. That's why we need to get in our Congressfolk's grills now -- to make such machinations harder to pull off. And seriously, why should we let Democrats constantly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Again, the alternative is fascism. And that's no alternative.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make large investments in climate change action. I haven't said enough about this, perhaps, but it's a no-brainer: invest in renewable energy and we'll create jobs and beat back the ill effects of climate change. If Democrats don't do it, because fiscal responsibility job killing international competition unity über alles, then, again, they're Ben Simmons standing right under the basket and failing to dunk. The only people who don't like solar power and wind power are a) big fossil fuel corporations and b) the Americans who let right-wingers propagandize them about wind turbines making people sick and solar panels losing their effectiveness to gamma radiation that the Van Allen belt keeps out anyway. And, again, they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

A final word about this issue: don't get caught up in Democratic "negotiations" over these bills -- simply communicate your will, and often. The only folks they're supposed to negotiate with are us. And every time we hear about media pundits and corporate lobbyists opposing higher taxes, lower drug prices, and better policy generally, our politicians and our media insult us. They're supposed to serve us, after all -- and we Americans aren't anywhere near as divided as our politicians and our media would like us to think. As long as they whine about critical race theory, abortion, Dr. Seuss, etc., we look divided. But on everything I've described above, we're not divided. Only they are divided, by their own corruption and venality. And so we've got to get in their grills until we bring them to heel.

Action: concerning vaccines, jobs legislation, and the filibuster.

Long story short: tell employers to give their workers time off so they can get vaccinated, tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich to pay for the reconciliation bill, ensure that climate change, care economy funding, and paid family/medical leave all get attention in said reconciliation bill, expand Medicare, and get rid of the Senate filibuster already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell employers to give paid time off to their workers so they can get vaccinated. Some folks won't get the vaccine because they think it Owns the Libs, but others won't get it because they can't get time off from work, so telling employers to give paid time off to workers to get the vaccine should help with that. And if a boss says I can't afford it, ask him if he can afford to train a new worker when the old one dies of COVID because he wouldn't let him go get a damn vaccine. And ask him if he'd like to have a mini-epidemic at the workplace and lose a ton of money because of that. There's a reason we all hate bosses -- they never think of anything but the short term anymore. But they shouldn't get all the say about everything.

As Congress prepares for its wholly unearned vacation this month, you'll want to give them a call and list all the tax hikes on the rich that'd pay for reconciliation bill -- a corporate tax hike, raising the capital gains tax, treating dividends as income, a financial transaction tax, the Millionaire's Surtax, the wealth tax, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, a 91% tax bracket on millionaire income, did I miss any? Feel free to add to your list! After all, Joe Manchin is already making his "how are we going to pay for this?" noises. Good folks of West Virginia, tell him this is how we pay for it! He can only pretend he doesn't hear, and that act will get old fast, if it isn't old already. I think it's old.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to center climate change in the reconciliation bill. You can bet the big polluters will be yelling in your Congressfolk's ears about how stupid solar and wind power are and how we shouldn't be touching big oil's corporate welfare, so we've got to be louder. This has always seemed like a no-brainer to me -- spurring renewable energy production not only creates jobs (and jobs with similar skill sets to those that displaced coal and oil workers would have!), but reduces pollution and slows the ill effects of climate change. The problem, of course, is that our Congressfolk too easily act like they have no brains. Well, you know how it is with people who act stupid -- you just have to tell them again and again and again.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the reconciliation bill includes funding for home- and community-based care and paid family/medical leave. These were, after all, stated priorities of Joe Biden's, and we always knew a reconciliation bill would follow the infrastructure bill that Joe Manchin insisted had to be "bipartisan," and we always knew that reconciliation bill would have more so-called Democratic priorities in it. And I say "so-called" because these things are actually popular with the American people broadly, so we should communicate our will to our Congressfolk about them. After all, do we really suppose that the good citizens of Wyoming reflexively oppose paid family/medical leave just because their "representatives" in Congress do? I sure hope not.

The Hero Action Fund helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare, by lowering the eligibility age, giving Medicare the ability to negotiate its own drug prices (which will save the taxpayer money!), and offer hearing, dental, and vision care. You'll hear from right-wingers that "Medicare Advantage already offers hearing, dental, and vision! Ha ha ha another libtard owned!" But Medicare Advantage is a private health insurance plan funded with taxpayer money, and why should hearing, dental, and vision be an "advantage"? It should be a standard. And again, do the citizens of Idaho reflexively oppose letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices just because their "representatives" in Congress will move mountains to prevent it from happening? I sure hope not.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to get rid of the filibuster that Republicans have used to block every good thing Democrats have tried to do over the last dozen years. The "success" of the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" doesn't "prove" that we should hold on to the filibuster. Republicans got just about everything they wanted out of that "deal"; its existence only proves that "bipartisanship" means "Democrats and Republicans coming together to do whatever Republicans want." Politicians should do what the people want, and the people want their politicians to do the right thing and stop making excuses about why they can't. And "because the filibuster" sounds exactly like an excuse.

Action: concerning taxes, Medicare, home care, weatherizing, defense spending, and inspectors general.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the rich and corporations pay more taxes, expand Medicare, increase funding for home- and community-based care, fund weatherizing for low-income homes, end funding for the notorious F-35 plane, and pass the IG Independence and Empowerment 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, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk that you want corporations and the rich to pay at least $4 trillion more in taxes over the next 10 years. Their machinations, their dramas, don't matter -- the message they need to hear right now is that we need to tax the rich a lot harder than we're doing, or we won't have clean water, we won't have a livable planet, and we won't have jobs. Taxing the rich and corporations more is actually quite popular in every poll that asks about it, so don't let insane Republicans and "moderate" Democrats kill all progress -- particularly when they're all just going to blame us liberals for their failures later!

Strengthen Medicare Now helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare -- which is to say, expand what Medicare covers (include dental/vision/eye care) and whom Medicare covers (people 60 and older, versus 65 and older). Again, these are all popular things, and frankly, lowering the Medicare age to zero is also pretty popular, so we're not asking for "too much" here. And frankly, let's make the Party of Sedition defend its position that "more people shouldn't get Medicare," or that "folks who get Medicare shouldn't get more out of it." If they say it'll kill Medicare, tell them to explain how. They can't. Of course, if they start yammering on about inflation, feel free to walk away. "Inflation" is the new "socialism."

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to jack up funding for home- and community-based care services. This is a main feature of President Biden's American Families Plan, and this'll be the part of the legislation Democrats will have to pass via budget reconciliation, so hostile is the Party of Sedition toward the kind of services we're all going to need a lot more of as we get older. And a civilization that progresses should make those kinds of services -- for children, for seniors, for folks with disabilities -- part of its, dare I say, infrastructure. And, ah, not for nothing, but the COVID pandemic which ain't over and is getting worse, heckuva job, anti-vaxxers! has, I think, impressed upon us the need for home-based services.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund weatherizing for low-income homes. Remember how much fun Fox News used to make of "Cash for Caulkers"? Well, they were wrong about that, too, and not just because weatherizing homes for working families will save a lot in heating bills, but because, well, we just saw in Texas this past winter what happens when the big utility corporations don't prepare for rough weather -- people die, Senators flee to Cancun and blame their daughters for it, and Governors blame solar and wind power for the problems caused by unregulated utilities. Don't forget the "people die" part, though. There's a reason I put that first.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop trying to build the F-35 fighter jet. Roll call! It flies badly! It puts its pilots at risk of injury and/or death! The Navy doesn't want it and the Marines almost certainly don't want it either! We've thrown billions of dollars away on this plane for the last 20 years! A boondoggle this big, you have to wonder why it happens. It happens for a lot of reasons -- watchdogs have a lot to watch, individual Congressfolk have cronies who benefit from it, Congress generally doesn't have a whole lot of courage when confronting defense spending either in general or in its many particulars. Well, I didn't say they were good reasons. The only good reason they need to stop building them is that we tell them. So let's tell them.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2662, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. "IG" stands for "inspector general," as in the kind of person who exposes Executive branch waste and fraud -- and, also, the kind of person Donald Trump constantly tried to replace with a crony. H.R. 2662 would make it harder for the next rogue President to do that, plus it would give Inspectors General more power to actually do their job. And I wouldn't declare this one dead on arrival in the Senate as long as Charles Grassley's there. I just worry about the price Mob Boss Mitch would extract in exchange.

Action: concerning taxes, child care, drug approvals, renewable energy, Exxon lobbyists, and racist podcasts.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and invest in child care, tell our FDA to rescind its approval of a controversial Alzheimer's drug, write a letter-to-the-editor supporting renewable energy investment, tell your Congressfolk to shun Exxon lobbyists, and tell Google to get rid of racist podcasts. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact at least $4 trillion over the next decade in tax hikes on the rich. Republicans keep pretending that the point of all these the-rich-don't-pay-taxes stories is TEH IRS IZ TEH EVILZ!!!!, rather than, you know, the rich don't pay enough in taxes. And then they throw up their hands and say "nothing can be done!" when you press them on Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk paying zero dollars for entire calendar years and 55 big corporations paying nothing in 2020. You know what, though? Something can be done -- you can change the law, and then you can enforce the law. What else do we ask of our government, after all?

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in child care. Republicans say that's not "real infrastructure," but what builds a civilization, other than people? They brag about how much more money households have made since Reagan without mentioning that households were one-income households before Reagan and generally two-income households thereafter, and in two-income households, who's doing the child care? Grandma can't do everything, after all, and deserves a break, quite frankly! Investing $700 billion over the next decade in affordable child care every American can get without paying an arm and a leg is investing in the infrastructure of our civilization, no matter how pedantic Republicans want to be about it. And investing in child care also means investing in jobs, done by people. So let's do it.

Public Citizen still helps you tell our FDA to revoke its suspicious approval of the putative Alzheimer's drug, aducanumab. Our FDA has narrowed its recommendations for prescribing aducanumab, after a long and sustained public outcry (of which you may have been a part!) over all the suspicious activity surrounding aducanumab's approval, but that ain't good enough: the drug caused 40% -- 40%! -- of test subjects to get brain bleeding and swelling, and our FDA's own independent advisors urged them not to approve it. Plus, it'll cost over $50,000 annually per patient, which will surely test Medicare's ability to provide other drugs to seniors, since it may not be able to afford them. So, yeah, let's stop this.

Environment America helps you write a letter to the editor of your local paper supporting more investment in renewable energy. I surely don't need to say why by now! But, OK: renewable energy uses the sunlight that's already falling and the wind that's already blowing, pollutes less, and contributes less to climate change, plus it encourages more self-reliance, rather than reliance on electric utilities. That's right, more self-reliance! This is why you occasionally see Tea Party groups jump on the renewable energy bandwagon -- and it's why right-wing opposition to renewable energy so frequently devolves into absurdity. Having your own power source, one that helps conserve the planet -- you see what I did there, I trust.

In a peripherally-related note, 350.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to pledge never to meet with Exxon lobbyists again. You'll know the news hook, of course: Exxon lobbyists got caught on tape bragging about how they've stymied efforts to include climate change-related initiatives in the American Jobs Plan. Yikes, who the hell brags about that? You brag about your kid hitting three home runs in a baseball game, not about slowing down progress so you can make more money. Of course, journalists in 2015 found that Exxon had spent close to 40 years knowing climate change was coming and lying about it so they wouldn't have to change. That's another hell of a thing to take to the Pearly Gates. And that's why our Congressfolk should shun them.

Finally, ParentsTogetherAction helps you tell Google Podcasts to get rid of all the Nazi wannabes, conspiracy theorists, and other nutjobs. Kids listen to this stuff, after all! You have a responsibility not to let your podcasts tell kids to kill the Jews! And the specious "free speech" argument should be losing by now. Do Nazi wannabes have a right to free speech? Of course they do! But they do not have a "right" to have their speech broadcast. In a sane, moral, and decent society, Nazi wannabes would have to fight like dogs to get heard; in our sick, immoral, and decadent society, which cares only about drama, they don't. Let's make Google help us work for the former and against the latter.

Action: all jobs, all day.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk you want renewable energy, lead-free water pipes, paid family/medical leave, and Medicare drug price negotiation in the American Jobs Plan -- and no military spending! And then tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the wealthy and on corporations to pay for it. 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.

Today would be a good day to call your Congressfolk and tell them you want renewable energy in the American Jobs Plan that President Biden is inexplicably trying to pass in a "bipartisan" manner. Again, it doesn't matter that he wants the two sides to work together; it only matters that your Congressfolk do your will, and the more we keep our eye on the latter item, the better. You may mention that the OFF Fossil Fuels Act, introduced in previous Congresses but not this one, remains a good blueprint for what the American Jobs Plan needs. It would have mandated 80% renewable electricity and 80% zero-emission cars by 2035, and it would also have funded retraining for fossil fuel workers. And not as computer programmers, either! Jesus Mary and Joseph why insist that everyone learn to code when you can retrain the folks who work in coal mines to install solar panels and wind turbines? Of course, Republicans don't think any of that is "real infrastructure" either. But they're a party full of seditionists and whiners, so why do we listen to them?

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in getting the lead out of our drinking water. That is literally an investment in our future, since lead from lead pipes causes brain damage in children, and it would be entirely appropriate to put such investment in the American Jobs Plan that President Biden is inexplicably trying to pass in a "bipartisan" manner. If you want to support specific legislation that would reduce lead in our drinking water, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1376, the GET THE LEAD OUT Act (the acronym isn't as bad as it looks), which would fund lead-free pipes all over America by hiking the number of estates subject to the Estate Tax and closing the "carried interest" loophole that allows hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate than bus drivers. Hard to imagine people being against those things. Then again, it's hard to imagine people being against clean water!

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a paid family/medical leave bill. It would be entirely appropriate, etc. to put this in the American Jobs Plan, etc., and though our law does grant 12 weeks of unpaid family/medical leave annually, we're just about the only "wealthy" nation on Earth that doesn't grant paid leave, and as I always say, that's not a thing you want to chant WE'RE NUMBER ONE! about. And, you know, our Congressfolk act like they know everything, when all they do is say "that won't work" whenever we tell them what they should do. But that's a damn un-American attitude, if you ask me. Isn't this the can-do nation that always finds a way? And hasn't every bit of progress we've made met with "that won't work" at the beginning? It works just about everywhere on the planet, so it can work here -- if our politicians would just grow a spine.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to include H.R. 3, the Elijah Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act, in the American Jobs Plan. Not just because letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would, well, lower drug prices across the board, but because it would save the taxpayer money, which means it could well help fund all the other good works we've been talking about, like renewable energy, clean water, paid family/medical leave, and the like. What will Republicans say in response? It's not "real" infrastructure? What a weak response -- they're like the kid you knew in junior high who was always correcting the tiniest grammatical errors you'd make. So, yeah, it would help now to think of that kid growing up to be a Republican Senator, just trying to find a reason, any reason, to piss on whatever the American people want.

Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any new military spending in the American Jobs Plan. Because they love to hide defense spending wherever they can! And because we already spend more on "defense" than the next 12 nations on that list combined. Why, you'd never know we had an ocean on either side of us! But spending on defense deprives us of spending on clean water, renewable energy, etc., and not because federal spending is a zero-sum game (just ask the folks who passed the 2017 tax "reform"!), but because politicians always use "defense" as an excuse not to spend on the things we actually need. Seriously, we can already destroy the planet 300 times over; what, we won't be safe until it's 400?

Finally, in case you thought I forgot about funding the American Jobs Plan: Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a "millionaire's surtax" that would raise the top tax bracket from 37% to 47%, Inequality.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, and Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the corporate tax rate. Does that all sound too tax-the-rich for you? Well, they've spent the last 40 years demonstrating that they deserve to pay higher taxes! And the smoke-and-mirrors pay-fors Republicans prefer -- user fees which always fall on working people, and "asset recycling" that's just a fancy-schmancy name for "selling off public works to build other public works" -- won't get the job done. Why do we listen to Republicans again? I mean, just six months ago they were trying to literally nullify the 2020 election. When will Democrats learn? When we speak in numbers they can't deny.

Action: concerning endless war, public trans, government spying, corruption, voting rights, and polluter welfare.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Iraq war AUMF, create zero-emission public trans, release COINTELPRO files to the public, and pass the IG Independence and Empowerment Act, the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the End Polluter Welfare 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 and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) that "authorized" war with Iraq and which all subsequent Presidents have used to fight unconstitutional wars all over the world. I put "authorized" in quotation marks because only Congress can authorize war, and they have to go through the trouble to declare war, not "give the President power to fight wherever he pleases." This is one of the reasons we broke off from England, folks! And Presidents have been abusing the AUMF for over 18 years now. Which means this mistake's old enough to vote, and it's damn near old enough to drink! So let's kill it already.

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you demand that Congress pass legislation creating a zero-emission public transportation system. Yeah, we keep telling our Congressfolk what we want from this jobs bill, but they keep ignoring us -- so perhaps we should change tactics and demonstrate that the people want public transportation that doesn't choke the world with pollution. It's not so much to ask, right? Right-wingers act like people who like electric buses are weak. Of course, they then go around whining endlessly about how everyone thinks they're racist, but that's beside the point. The point is, having a livable planet in 30 years isn't "weak." Even if a few oil and gas executives don't get to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Which is what right-wingers really favor, whether they'll admit it or not.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2998, which would release all of our FBI's COINTELPRO files to the general public. I guess this bill's opponents will argue "bygones!" and "look forward" and "saying any part of our past wasn't absolutely perfect is treason!" But COINTELPRO went after protestors and activists ranging from anti-war and civil rights organizers to the Ku Klux Klan. Hey, maybe that's how you get right-wingers to support H.R. 2998! I kid, of course -- today's racists know well enough to disavow any love for the Klan. And yet our most recent departed President's campaign slogan was a Klan slogan from the '70s! So, again, learn about the past, and we can make a more perfect union in the future.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2662, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. "IG" stands for "Inspector General," and you may recall, particularly during 2020, how much maneuvering that irredeemably corrupt President did just to avoid the scrutiny of Inspectors General, who spend all their time investigating waste and fraud and abuse of power. You may even remember that Mr. Trump had to be talked out of firing all of them at the beginning of his term! Well, the IG Independence and Empowerment Act would place more limits on a President's ability to fire IGs and allow IGs to subpoena folks who've left our government if they can shed light on wrongdoing. It's bad if all that stands between us and oblivion is an Inspector General. But, ah, it's a lot worse if they're not there, or if they're a Presidential lackey.

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. And Public Citizen helps you tell them to do both. I know, I know, One True Real and Great American President Joe Manchin has expressed a preference, but he ain't the boss of us. And, toward that end, Daily Kos helps you sign up and call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator to vote for the For the People Act. 79% of them support the For the People Act, after all! And if he's going to write 299 stupid paragraphs about why he won't, at least we can get his constituents to embarrass him.

Finally, both the Sierra Club and Food and Water Action help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. Our government shovels $15 billion annually toward oil and gas drilling corporations that don't need it; how would you feel about that if it were your money? Oh, right: it is your money. The bill would also prohibit federal funding (which is, again, your money) toward fossil fuel R&D and/or international fossil fuel projects. Solar and wind power aren't pie-in-the-sky technologies anymore -- walk around your neighborhood and count the roofs with solar panels if you're unconvinced. Also attend the ridiculous stories you hear about wind turbines; if wind really didn't work, wouldn't they just tell you that?

Action: concerning jobs, war, debt, pollution, and law and order.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk that you want a jobs bill that invests in the care economy and invests in renewable energy, tell President Biden to end all arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, tell our CFPB to protect us from debt collector harassment, tell Pennsylvania state legislators to reject yet another pro-pollution bill, and tell Louisiana state legislators to ban the "panic defense." 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 phone numbers for your various state and federal legislators, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. Good hunting!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to invest in the care economy as part of the American Jobs Plan and invest in renewable energy as part of the American Jobs Plan. We're all going to need more care someday, and our seniors need more care now, so investing in the "care economy," as they call it, is as much an investment in our future as investing in roads and bridges. And n.b. "investing in our future" when considering whether we should build out more solar and wind in an infrastructure bill. Investing merely in more gas drilling and more oil drilling is going to give us an uninhabitable planet one day; investing in renewable energy will give us, as Millie Jackson would say, a fighting chance. Politicians need to start putting our needs above their rich cronies' "needs."

Win Without War helps you tell President Biden to end all arms sales to the Saudi/UAE coalition currently raining death and misery upon Yemen. He has ended "logistical and military support" for the coalition, and has frozen arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and these ain't nothing, but people are still dying in Yemen -- the U.N. estimates that 400,000 kids under 5 could die this year from hunger -- and we're still following through with all of Donald Trump's midnight arms sales to the Saudi/UAE coalition, so we need to communicate our will again. Remember that the big arms manufacturing corporations don't really want this war to end, because that'll be less money for them. You'd think some of our big "free" marketeers would just respond that those corporations ought to be able to adjust if they want to survive, but as usual, you can't count on them. But we can count on us.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to roll back its proposed rule that would allow debt collectors to deluge you with unlimited emails, text messages, and direct messages on social media platforms. Plus the rule would let them call you every day if they want, and the rule would let them harass you without even determining if you owe them any money! Which latter item you could very well construe as an attempt to defraud you! This rule was, of course, a Trump-era CFPB rule, since Donald Trump only lived to serve other bosses; the Biden-era CFPB may yet approach the level of the Obama CFPB, which was one of that Administration's best Executive branch agencies -- but only if we make our voices heard.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to reject yet another pro-pollution bill, SB 275. SB 275 would prevent any PA municipality from "(a)dopt(ing) a policy that restricts or prohibits, or has the effect of restricting or prohibiting, the connection or reconnection of a utility service based upon the type of source of energy to be delivered to an individual consumer within the municipality." Sounds wordy and harmless, right? Wordy is never harmless! The bill wants to prevent municipalities from making their utilities more renewable; the only "restricting or prohibiting" the bill cares about is ""restricting or prohibiting" oil and gas. It's corporate welfare, in other words. And how conservative, to want to prevent smaller governments from having more say in the decisions that affect them! Let's deliver this bill to the oblivion it most richly deserves.

Finally, Change.org helps you tell Louisiana state legislators to outlaw the "panic defense" tactic in murders of LGBTQ+ folks. Yes, Louisiana is one of 38 states that doesn't explicitly prevent lawyers from deploying the "panic defense," but from whence does this "panic" supposedly issue? Oh, from the "panic" a defendant feels when propositioned by someone gay or transgender or otherwise not prototypically "straight." I'm going to go out on a limb and say that almost every man in America has gotten hit on by a dude without murdering him. Murder equals unlawful death plus malicious premeditation, without the absurd excuse that he just couldn't cope with the guy who hit on him! So I would say folks who deploy the "panic defense" are anti-law and order.

Action: concerning taxes, voting rights, food safety, polluter welfare, law and order, and Medicare for All.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to be cowardly about raising taxes on the rich, tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Baby Food Safety Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All 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, or use the email/petition links (where applicable) in the following paragraphs.

First things first. Dan Pfeiffer, clearly one of the better political thinkers to emerge from the Obama Administration, argues that Democrats ought to "lean into" tax hikes on corporations, because, and I quote, "(t)he idea that Biden’s proposals to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy are a political liability flies in the face of all of the polling as well as basic common sense." Hear, hear! Voters reward courage; they don't reward "this is the best we could do" or "Republicans wouldn't let us do more," and they sure as hell don't reward "I couldn't do the right thing because I'm in a swing district." You know what "swing" voters crave most from their reps? That they do the right thing! And they'll settle for the "courageous" thing, so you want to do an actual courageous thing before Republicans do the fake courageous thing. So go ahead and call your (Democratic) Reps and Senators and tell them they'll only get to keep their majorities if they do the right thing and raise corporate taxes. You can also tell them, if you're feeling ornery, that you wouldn't want to suspect that they're pretending not to understand this very basic calculus so that they don't offend their big donors. Votes win elections, not cash.

While you've got your Senators on the phone, tell them to pass H.R. 1/S. 1, the For the People Act. The Senate Rules Committee deadlocked on the bill on Tuesday, but Sen. Schumer used his power as Senate Majority Leader to advance the bill to the full Senate anyway, so now's the time to put the pressure on your Senators. They're no doubt hearing from the other side, though I'm not sure what arguments the other side could reasonably advance -- how can they say it's "a solution in search of a problem" when numerous state legislatures have repeatedly demonstrated the problem? How can they argue "record turnout in 2020" when states scurry to pass laws to ensure that turnout doesn't happen again? How can they say "bills like this should be passed in a bipartisan manner" when Republicans have acted in an entirely partisan manner for over a dozen years? Seriously, their arguments are dung. They need to hear that killing gerrymandering dead, disclosing big campaign donors, and ensuring same-day and automatic voter registration are actually pretty popular.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1019, the Baby Food Safety Act. Because baby food sure as hell shouldn't have high levels of lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury in it! And the Baby Food Safety Act would actually set maximum levels for these toxins' presence in baby food, and establish mechanisms for lowering those levels as advancing scientific research would require. Why would we give babies food that might expose them to cancer and brain damage? The more pertinent question might be "why did big food manufacturing corporations do nothing about these things even when they knew about them?" Because a President Trump would let them get away with it no matter what we said, that's why. We have a better chance of influencing a President Biden in our direction, and that's why we need to tell our Congressfolk to pass this bill.

The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. The bill would, as its title suggests, cut some $15 billion annually in subsidies to big polluting corporations (like oil and gas drilling corporations) who hardly need the taxpayer help. And yet they'll fight to the death to keep them! Even as they admit to each other that tax breaks hardly matter in the decisions they make! (Hey, don't take my word for that -- take former Bush Mobb Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's word for it!) And, ah, why are we giving these handouts to polluters when we could be giving more of a hand up to solar and wind and geothermal? These things don't pollute anywhere near as much as fossil fuels do, and it ain't like the sun and the wind and the ground are going anywhere. Unless we destroy them all! How about we do the hard work of not doing that?

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. Big telecom corporations can't sell your personal data to law enforcement -- but they can sell them to private data broker corporations, which can sell your data to law enforcement! The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would close that loophole right quick, which would not only protect your right to privacy on the internet (I never agreed with folks who throw up their hands and say you just don't have any privacy on the internet; it's a species of cynicism), but would also save the taxpayer money! Yes, it would, since it's easier to just buy up a bunch of data ("WE NEEDZ IT TEH NOWZ, SO PAYZ UPZ!!!!!!") than it is to get warrants. Which is why we make law enforcement get warrants.

Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. Which would expand Medicare to everyone and (by almost everyone's estimation, though they often don't put it quite like this!) cost less than funneling trillions of dollars into our current health insurance system, the system that slams you with surprise thousand-dollar medical bills all the time and moves doctors in and out of networks all the time. With Medicare for All, we'd have one network, and we'd have the bargaining power with private hospitals and doctors that a 330-million-strong pool would have! Plus we could fund it merely by capturing the money big corporations already pay private health insurers in an employer-side payroll tax (and please note that "employer-side" means "employees don't pay one penny more"). Sounds like a win for the American people all the way around.

Action: concerning jobs, privacy, health care, corporate welfare, encryption, and Arctic drilling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk what you want from the Biden infrastructure/jobs bill; tell your Congressfolk to support the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, the Medicare for All Act, and the End Polluter Welfare Act; and tell your Congressfolk to support encryption and stop Arctic drilling. 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.

It's time to be a bit more explicit with what we want from the Biden infrastructure/jobs bill: first, we want real tax hikes on the rich -- the top income rate needs to be 91% and the top corporate rate needs to be 55%, we need to tax investment income equally, we need to cap the mortgage interest deduction so homeowners can still get it but corporations can't game it, and we need to say no to any new sales or use taxes. Second, we want our government to create public renewable energy utilities to compete with the private (and less renewable) utilities -- hey, the Tennessee Valley Authority is still working for its people, and the Republicans there won't touch it! -- and we want fossil fuel workers retrained to build out these new renewable utilities (which sure is better than teaching them to code!). These aren't "impossible" things just because Senate Democrats are wilting under the pressure to raise the corporate tax rate even a little bit! They clearly need some steel in their spine -- and we clearly need to give it to them.

The Center for Rights and Dissent, Free Press, Restore the Fourth, and the Project on Government Oversight all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. This bill would prevent our government from buying location data from your phone and computer apps from "data mining" corporations -- as our government is presently doing from phone apps that tell Muslims which direction Mecca is in. You see what's wrong with that, right? I mean besides the racism? That's right, our government didn't get warrants for that data! When your government wants to investigate you, it's supposed to get a warrant from a judge; buying up data (with your taxpayer money, I feel compelled to add) gets around that. And we shouldn't allow that.

Demand Progress, MedicareforAllNow.org, Black Lives Matter, and Roots Action all help you tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 1976, the Medicare for All Act. Think of health care that covers everyone, with no "networks" for your doctors to slip in and out of, and thus no surprise bills -- that could be Medicare, if we pass H.R. 1976. And when they say how are you gonna pay for it, liberal?, you tell them "we're going to convert the money big corporations already pay private health insurance corporations into an employer-side payroll tax and no one will have to pay a penny more." And when they say "oh yes we will," either repeat the words "employer-side payroll tax" like they're stupid, or congratulate them on their hard-earned cynicism which prevents anything good from ever happening ever.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. The bill would do pretty much what its title says it would do: stop the flow of billions of dollars in taxpayer money into the pockets of big fossil fuel developers. Why do they need handouts, after all? They're well-established technologies which make big money for a handful of corporations. And certainly we should not be funneling taxpayer dollars toward technologies that might well make our planet unlivable within a few generations. We have alternatives like solar and wind that deserve taxpayer assistance more. And we'd only be assisting ourselves in funding them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to refuse to fund any government effort to undermine encryption. Former Secretary of State Pompeo loudly assumed that anyone who uses encryption in their personal communications must be a criminal, but as usual he's wrong -- journalists often use encryption to talk to sources who might die if someone discovers their identity, and activists often use encryption to avoid getting wrongfully arrested by the state, too. Yeah, I'm sure quite a few aspiring January 6-style terrorists will use encryption as well, but I'm not going to trade liberty for security just to get at them a little more easily.

Finally, the League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (or ANWR) from fossil fuel development. ANWR has been a political football for over 20 years, and given how little oil will ever come from it and how important the land is to the Native Americans who live there, you have to wonder why. For a long time I supposed that our leaders just thought oil corporation executive salaries were that important, but now I'm starting to wonder if the ANWR "controversy" is just another decades-long attempt by right-wingers to piss off liberals. We can end such a wholly-manufactured drama by permanently protecting ANWR from fossil fuel drilling, and then right-wingers will have to find stupider things to throw fits about.

Action: concerning marketing to children, public lands, and law and order.

Long story short: tell Facebook not to launch an "Instagram for kids," tell our FDA to outlaw flavored tobacco products, tell our President to restore Bears Ears and stop the Byhalia Connection Pipeline, and tell our Justice Department to investigate the alleged crimes of ex-President Trump. The following paragraphs will provide email/petition tools for all of these actions. Good hunting!

Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood helps you tell Facebook to scrap plans to create an Instagram platform just for children. Because children don't need more attention-diverting, crazy-making internet crap, that's why! Adults can handle it a lot better. You may well be asking yourself, self, didn't they worry about my grandparents reading too many pulp Westerns when they were children? I'm sure they did, but I'm also sure that reading pulp novels is far, far safer than imbibing images far faster than any generation has done before. And giving kids one more way to plug in to the virtual world ain't gonna help them in the real world. So let's tell Facebook to do better by them, rather than prime them to be the good consumer drones of the future.

Progress America helps you tell our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) to ban the sale of flavored tobacco-based products, including e-cigs, menthol cigarettes, and flavored cigars. Again, making these products taste like gummy worm or cotton candy is a way of setting kids up for lung cancer when they're adults; after all, luring adults into smoking now that everyone knows it causes cancer will only go so far. Better to harvest the addicts young, I guess they think, if not say. (And behind closed doors, I'm sure they are saying it.) Seriously, should any product for children be literally addictive?

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell President Biden to restore the famous Bears Ears National Monument to its original size. I guess the courts can one day decide whether the Antiquities Act really gives Presidents the ability to scale down national monuments (Mr. Trump did it, so I lean "no"), but scaling down Bears Ears in the first place was a profound insult to the Native Americans who both pushed for the Monument's creation and took care of it once it was created. Mr. Trump, of course, took about 85% of it away so oil and gas drilling corporations could enrich their executives and befoul the land. I would think anyone would find that offensive.

The Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell President Biden to revoke federal permits for the Byhalia Connection Pipeline. Why? Because it would run through the Memphis Sand Aquifer and thus pollute the drinking water used by good Americans in and around Memphis, TN -- I don't say "potentially pollute" because pipeline leaks are just about a near-certainty, particularly in an age where the corporations that run the pipelines do so with near-impunity. Just so happens the pipeline would run through mostly Black communities as well; you hear enough about that to think that might have been the idea, too. This ain't tough: do more solar and wind and you won't be polluting our air and water so much, particularly in neighborhoods that got it bad enough.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate the various allegations against Donald Trump. I say "allegations" even though we all heard him try to get the Georgia Secretary of State to "find" 11,000 more votes, and we all watched him do a lot of other crap one would think would get you put in jail. If your Trump-loving friend comes at you with "but this is unprecedented!", go back at him with "oh, you wanted a President who'd smash traditions and now you want tradition to protect him?" If you still have Trump-loving friends, of course.

Action: concerning "bipartisanship," the filibuster, whistleblowing, public broadband, methane emissions, and corporate spying.

Long story short: tell Joe Manchin to stop Joe Manchining; write a letter-to-the-editor favoring filibuster abolition; tell your Congressfolk to pass the Peace Corps Reauthorization Act, the Broadband Justice Act, and a resolution of disapproval overturning weak Trump-era methane emissions rules; and tell Spotify to give up its creepy surveillance scheme. 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 Congressfolks' phone numbers -- or use the email/petition/letter-to-the-editor tools in the links below. And good hunting.

Well, Joe Manchin's really done it this time, not only announcing he'll support no effort to "eliminate or weaken" the filibuster, but that "the time has come" "to usher a new era of bipartisanship." "Bipartisanship" with the party that opposes any and all good proposals and tries to overthrow governments and rewrite voting rules when election results don't go their way? How about "no"? Future historians will point to this moment as the moment Republicans captured the House and Senate in 2022 -- unless we act! Mr. Manchin's phone number, as you likely know by now, is 202.224.3954. Now that he's provoked two action alerts in one week, I'm starting to think he wants to be Donald Trump. No one on Earth should want to be Donald Trump. Even Donald Trump should look in the mirror and say, "wow, I don't want to be that guy."

In a related development, Common Cause helps you write a letter-to-the-editor about the need to get rid of the Senate filibuster. You enter your zip code and see a list of local newspapers to which you might write, and then Common Cause provides a set of talking points you might use to write your letter. Don't fret that Republicans will one day get to impose their will on Americans, because guess what? They do that now, precisely because they exploit the filibuster. Next they'll put holds on bills and demand a physical quorum to turn the lights on and off, but they'll look like little whiny-ass babies when they do that. It would help if Democrats would point to them and say see, they don't want to pass automatic voter registration, that's why they're acting like little babies. But we'll continue to do that if they don't.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Peace Corps Reauthorization Act, not merely because the Peace Corps is generally a good thing, but because the bill would create protections against discrimination and retaliation for whistleblowers. That would have helped Sara Thompson in 2010 after the Peace Corps gave her the anti-malaria drug mefloquine, which our own military won't use because it's too dangerous; Ms. Thompson had no recourse, because our Peace Corps would have simply fired her, and now she suffers from mefloquine toxicity. And remember: whistleblowers ain't out for an easy buck, because after they've suffered through years of harassment and unemployment after they blow the whistle on wrongdoing, ain't no easy bucks ever coming again.

BroadbandJusticeAct.com helps you, as you might guess, tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1904, the Broadband Justice Act. The bill would essentially subsidize broadband as a public utility in public housing -- a thing poorer working families might well need, given that so many folks work and go to school over the internet during a pandemic -- and it might be a good first step toward a national broadband service. If you're worried that Big Gummint would oppress you with a broadband service, just remember that plenty of big private corporations already do that (and for an example of that, see the last paragraph below). And if you're worried that your taxes would subsidize someone else's broadband, don't worry, because our tax money subsidizes plenty of things you use, too.

Here, at last, a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act that would roll back a Trump-era regulation! EDF Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to roll back the Trump EPA's methane regulation, which actually increased the amount of red tape our government would have to hurtle to regulate methane. They said Donald Trump wasn't a conservative -- and they were right! I mean, don't conservatives think more bureaucracy is a bad thing? In any case, methane pollutes our air and packs a bigger climate-change punch than coal -- and not for nothing, but the methane emissions that big drilling corporations vent into the atmosphere represent energy we can't use and (on public lands) royalties our government can't collect. So, what's good about more methane leakage? No, CEOs getting lazier and fatter isn't a "good."

Finally, Stop Spotify Surveillance helps you tell Spotify to abandon its plan to spy on your conservations in order to "better" target music and ads. And here you thought the future would be full of solar panels and cures for intractable diseases and peoples of the world getting along! No, it's full of big corporations trying to get you to buy more stuff, and with Spotify's filing for a patent using voice recognition software, it's also about spying on you to do it. All that fear of government spying we had in the '60s seems so quaint now! It isn't, of course, and we must still fight government spying wherever we see it, but we must also fight corporate spying, too, particularly if our government isn't going to control corporate power on our behalf.

Action: concerning pollution, the right to repair, abortion, marketing to children, Social Security, and banning Donald Trump from Facebook forever.

Long story short: tell PA state legislators to curb pollution and pass "right to repair" legislation, tell Texas state legislators to reject an anti-abortion bill, tell big tobacco corporations to stop aiming their products at children, tell President Biden to fire two notorious Social Security Administrators, and tell Facebook to keep Donald Trump off their platform permanently. The paragraphs below offer email and contact tools for each of these alerts.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to protect our clean water from longwall coal mining. What's longwall mining? That's when you dig into the ground to remove a long wall of coal (hence the name); this "wall" can be 1500 feet wide and two miles long, and, as you can guess, it can cause an awful lot of pollution and property damage. As it happens, coal corporations don't fill in the "wall" they've removed, so if your house sits above it, you're in big trouble. And of course state officials have found longwall mining responsible for nearly all the mining-related damage our streams have suffered in southwestern PA. Best to switch to solar and wind, which don't churn the earth anywhere near as much as coal corporations do.

Staying in PA for our next alert: Penn PIRG helps you tell your PA state legislators to pass "right to repair" legislation. We heard a lot about this when we were short on ventilators for COVID patients, and ventilator manufacturers didn't make it easy for third party repair techs at hospitals (who have been, in my own personal experience, excellent) to fix them. It's no better for farmers, who can't fix their own tractors (despite being, in my own personal experience, quite handy) because big corporations like John Deere don't make their manuals very accessible. They'd rather you go to them, or to one of their hand-picked "authorized dealers"! But trying to make good Americans so dependent on corporations is not very bootstrappy, you know.

Care2 helps you tell Texas state legislators to reject HB 3326, which would ban all abortions without exception and would charge anyone involved with an abortion with homicide -- which could result in someone getting the death penalty for abortion, since Texas still punishes some murders with the death penalty. The bill cites a dissenting opinion in a recent Supreme Court case concerning Louisiana's anti-abortion law, but seriously, facing the death penalty for seeking a medical procedure literally protected by our federal Constitution, as per the actual majority decision in Roe v. Wade? Some people can't help but do the helicopter dance in front of us. But they aren't "tougher" than the rest of us, they're weaker; otherwise, why would they strut?

Progress America helps you tell big tobacco corporations to stop offering flavored tobacco products to children. You know how Jeff Sessions says pot is a gateway drug to much worse stuff? That's rubbish, but flavored tobacco products actually are a gateway for kids to pick up a cigarette habit as adults, as some four out of five kids who smoke started out with a tobacco product that tasted like chocolate or apple or bubble gum or any number of things. And giving kids a damn nicotine habit? Gosh, I guess big corporations just want a nation full of harried, overworked people, and they want them to start early! I hate to say "children are our future," but they fucking are, and we need to treat them like they are.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to fire the two Social Security Administrators who are trying to bollocks up Social Security, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. How have Andrew Saul and David Black tried to bollocks up Social Security? Roll call! They delayed seniors' stimulus checks! They added extra disability benefit reviews just-because! They pressured SSA judges to deny people disability benefits! You worked for Social Security, you fought for it, you paid into it, and you've earned it -- and you sure as hell deserve better than to have assholes steal it from you.

Finally, Free Press helps you tell Facebook to ban Donald Trump from its platform permanently. Hasn't America been a much nicer place since he hasn't been able to bombard us with his obnoxious spew? Yes, it has. Facebook has no moral or legal obligation to keep enabling Mr. Trump's horridness -- especially now that Mr. Trump has announced he's going to start his own social network! This is something people with too much money can do! They're not being "oppressed" by existing social media keeping them off their platforms! They're not being "canceled"! Rage-filled people do nothing but whine, and they still get too much say in our civilization. But we can contain them. We do outnumber them, after all.

Action: concerning corporate welfare, our Post Office, pollution, and internet freedom.

Congress might actually let a "clean" coal tax credit expire this year, after at least two studies find that "clean" coal plants actually pollute more. Now, remember how Congress works: they leave all the unpopular corporate welfare, er, research and development tax incentives for the end of the year, so that they can rubber-stamp them under the "pressure" of finishing their work for the year. It's a cowardly gambit, but we can make that gambit toxic, if we all call our Reps and Senators and tell them we don't want to give "clean" coal our hard-earned taxpayer money if all it does is cause more pollution. They'd prefer not to say it, but it's true: the "tax credits" they hand out to big corporations is your money, money we could spend in ten thousand better ways. And no, they don't need "incentives" to develop new products. Here's the incentive: they get to deduct research and development from their revenues as expenses -- hence the more actual research and development they do, the less they pay in taxes to begin with! So let's not put up with this particular species of Congressional gaslighting any longer.

Meanwhile, President Biden has sent the names of three USPS Board of Governors nominees to our Senate, so Progress America helps you tell your Senators to confirm these nominees post-haste. One is a former deputy Postmaster General; another used to be general counsel of the American Postal Workers Union, and a third is currently CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, and the quicker our Senate gets them in, the quicker they can fire current Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and help get our Post Office running well again. In a related note, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reintroduce and pass the Postal Banking Act, which would allow our Post Offices to offer basic banking services again, like they did from 1911 until 1967. Post Offices can not only raise money this way, but they can do a lot of good in communities where banks won't go but loansharks and payday lenders will. Combine these two actions with the USPS Fairness Act -- which would lift the retiree benefits pre-payment mandate Congress absolutely designed to cripple our Post Office -- and we should get the Post Office we deserve as Americans.

In other news, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell big insurance corporation Liberty Mutual to divest from Arctic drilling and tar sands projects. Maybe getting them to divest from Arctic drilling won't be such a big lift -- as you'll recall, the lease sale from early January had rather fewer bidders than anyone expected! -- but Liberty Mutual may need more convincing that tar sands oil production is not some kind of "clean" energy solution, or even an "alternative" one. Oil corporations will transport tar sands oil on pipelines that will spill and will pollute the water we drink and bathe in, and if big corporations and our government won't get with the program, why should big insurers bail them out? Hate to pile on, but tar sands oil is also thick as molasses, and often you need lighter oil to properly refine it. This just sounds more and more like a boondoggle. Might as well get with solar and wind, which'll be around approximately forever -- and if Liberty Mutual won't get on board, we can wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against them until they do.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell President Biden to nominate an internet freedom champion as our 5th FCC Commissioner and tell our Senate to confirm said individual, then Free Press still helps you do that. We ain't getting neutrality back with a 2-2 vote, and we ain't fighting media consolidation or expanding broadband into rural and urban areas or assisting working families with broadband costs or ensuring everyone can go to school during a pandemic with 2-2 votes, either. And "internet freedom champion" is an important part of this formula, too -- we don't need yet another big telecom lobbyist on the FCC. Yeah, former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler was a big telecom lobbyist once upon a time, and he worked out better than expected, but that's only because we held his feet to the fire every single day of his tenure. We did the same to Ajit Pai, and he spent four years mostly ignoring us. So we need someone in there who understands how communications policy affects ordinary Americans like us. It ain't so damn much to ask, frankly. But we won't get it unless we all speak out, and make our will unmistakably plain.

Around the table: in which we invoke yet more '70s TV sci-fi to describe current events.

Good news, everyone! The Delaware River Basin Commission (or DRBC) has permanently banned fracking in the Delaware River watershed. This is a major victory, and you deserve congratulations if you contacted the DRBC. However, the DRBC also voted to start rulemaking processes for both selling water to frackers elsewhere and importing fracking wastewater from elsewhere, neither of which is a particularly good idea. When I get action alerts, you'll get action alerts.

Surprise, surprise, a Wall Street Journal analysis finds that energy deregulation in the state of Texas has cost good Texans an extra $28 billion since 2004. Here's the thing about "more competition leading to lower prices": if people simply can't be without electricity, which is where we are as a civilization, then people don't have the bargaining power that more competition would help them use -- especially if governments don't enforce antitrust or collusion laws. At present, Texas has only two electricity providers; that's some "competition," there.

FAIR reminds us that, amid all the coverage of the Perseverance rover giving us brand new pictures of the surface of Mars, our "liberal" media ignored "the Plutonium Bullet We Dodged." Previous Mars probes did fine powering themselves with solar panels, but for some reason we powered Perseverance with Plutonium-238, which would have caused a lot of mayhem if it'd blown up on takeoff, and don't retort that there was only a one-in-100 chance it'd do that, because if it happens, and people die, and you can't drink the water anymore, you won't be telling future generations how unlikely all that was. Wasn't there a Space: 1999 episode about this kind of thing? I kid -- of course there was.

Teaneck, NJ, population 39,776 as of the 2010 Census, has banned its police from using facial recognition technology. Thankfully we only wait until paragraph 2 before hearing that facial recognition technology can't tell black folks apart any better than your Trumphole uncle can. We also learn that Teaneck is just getting around to making its police officers use body cameras, which, no, is not the same thing, not least because we don't use body cameras to identify people so much as we use them to determine if police officers are executing citizens without charge, which should be a much easier matter to determine with a camera.

Upon hearing that "Georgia Dems Take Gambling Hostage Over GOP Voting Bills," all I can say is you go, Georgia Democrats! "Passing a sports gambling bill" is about one-millionth as important as "ensuring everyone can vote," after all. It's a shame this sort of thing will only work on matters like sports betting where state Republicans are divided, but Democrats say they've already identified two more priorities where this might work. Rip the system, that's what I say. And send Chuck Schumer a bottle of whatever you're drinking.

Finally, in a peripherally-related note, Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), not running for re-election in 2022, advances the novel theory that Joe Biden will violate an alleged "promise" of "working together" if he doesn't magically produce a COVID relief bill that a single Republican will vote for! Surely he knows that Republicans can continue to manufacture fake outrage over "not being consulted" simply by never voting for anything that might do anyone some good, as they've been doing for the entire McConnell Era. And again: the COVID-19 bill garners supermajority support among regular Americans in polls, meaning it must also garner bipartisan support among Americans. I know liberals are beyond tired of right-wing gaslighting; I can only hope that most other Americans are starting to get tired of that, too.

Around the table: how to deal with domestic terrorism, part 298.

"Fears Grow," says this Guardian article, "That Efforts to Combat U.S. Domestic Terrorism Can Hurt Minorities." Yeah, it "can," in a nation that prioritizes going after folks of color even though white supremacists commit most of the domestic terrorism. Rep. Tlaib is right to say the January 6 coup attempt had nothing to do with "not having enough tools," and in any case "use the tools you got" shouldn't just be about laws and law enforcement -- when right-wingers look around and find everyone's stopped talking to them, then they'll start to think twice.

The International Energy Agency (or IEA) says that the best solar power set-ups now offer the "cheapest...electricity in history." So that's the good news. The bad news is we're going to have to work a lot harder to head off the worst effects of climate change than the good news would have us think, since we're still not abandoning coal and oil fast enough. I guess we'll just leave it to our best and brightest entrepreneurs, then? I kid, of course -- if they were really our best and brightest we'd have solar-powered utilities now.

Surprise, surprise, our "liberal" media are starting to cover the whining of deficit peacocks again, now that voters have moved heaven and earth to take control of both Houses of Congress and the Presidency back from Republicans. Now, when one puts it like that, it sure makes all these folks wringing their hands over the deficit and their media enablers sound more like the assholes they actually are. Do they not remember how George W. Bush's bankster bailout ran up the deficit right before Barack Obama took office? Gosh, it's almost like it's a plan with these people.

Well, that sure didn't take long: QAnon votaries who were starting to feel a little used-like-a-wet-dishrag after Inauguration Day have glommed on to a new hope: that Donald Trump will be inaugurated President on March 4 as the "19th President" of the original American republic. I'm afraid I can't illuminate the labyrinthine reasoning that links the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871 with this latest Oncoming Storm because no reasonable person can, but I do know that the "sovereign citizens" who've historically banged this saucepan have never had a healthy relationship with Jews or folks of color.

Finally, Sen. McConnell described why he likes the filibuster this week, and I'll discuss this a little more in today's action post, but I thought I'd illuminate this line of reasoning: "If your legislation can't pass the Senate, you don't scrap the rules or lower the standards. You improve your idea, take your case to the people, or both." Sounds reasonable, right? Trouble is, all this "just make your argument better" stuff doesn't apply when the side that does all the filibustering doesn't have to make an argument at all -- they just say "no" to whatever argument you're making and then go home. Now, if they had to say no and then keep talking, Mr. McConnell would have a leg to stand on here, but they don't, so he doesn't. He knows all that, of course -- he just hopes you don't.

Action: concerning violence against protestors, renewable energy, and public water.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: good Nigerian citizens raise their voices in protest of their government's violence against them, only to be met with more violence. While our President must be saying if only that could be me!, sane, moral, and decent people say there ain't nothing a protestor can do that warrants being shot to death on the street or disappeared into a labyrinthine court system. (And when your right-wing friends and neighbors whine BUT TEH LOOTERZ!!!!, you can remind them that a lot of these looters are agents provocateurs like the gas-masked Nazi wannabe who hammered away at the Minneapolis AutoZone.) Naturally the Nigerian government, having studied how bigger countries do it, calls their gang of thugs the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, because who supports robbery? Typical of tyrants, to pretend they're doing it for you when they're doing it to you. Thus CAPPA helps you tell international criminal courts to investigate the violence Nigeria commits against its people.

Meanwhile, the fifth anniversary of the biggest gas blowout in American history, at SoCalGas's Aliso Canyon storage facility in Los Angeles, just passed -- well, the fifth anniversary of its beginning, at least, since SoCal didn't finally plug the leak until almost four months later, meaning good Californians were breathing in all those toxins all that time. California suffers worse droughts and wildfires every year, while still producing two-thirds of our country's fruits and nuts and another third of our country's vegetables, so why does California push more gas production? "Cheap fuel," I guess, but it ain't cheap if you'll have no food, water, or earth in the foreseeable future. Hence Food and Water Action helps you tell California to phase out of fossil fuels and shift toward renewables. And don't tolerate the retorts that "you see more solar panels in Cali than anywhere else" -- the big utility corporations, which make most of Cali's power, won't shift to renewable energy unless we make them.

Finally, notorious public water-mongering corporation Nestlé plans to sell all its North American bottled water operations, which means the Big Stick of Bad PR has worked! But it also means we need to make the Big Stick of Bad PR work against whichever corporation (or corporations!) buy up Nestlé's water operations -- which may include Coke and/or Pepsi -- so Sum of Us helps you tell Nestlé and/or whichever corporations buy up its water operations to give back the public water that really belongs to good folks in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, California, and Ontario. I've said it before and I'll say it again: bottled water is a scam, and in those rare places bottled water is cleaner than public water -- like, say, Flint -- then local governments need to improve their public water delivery systems, not sell them to private corporations that'll jack up the price of water so good folks can't afford it. Clean water is the cornerstone of health care on this planet -- but only if we can keep it.

Action: concerning pollution, government spying, police foundations, and bad media.

On the occasion of yet more wildfires in California, MoveOn helps you tell California Gov. Newsom to stop approving new drilling and fracking leases in the Golden State. A lot of folks say there ain't a dime's worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans, and while that's not exactly true, it doesn't exactly help that California's Democratic Governor, nominally an environmentalist, lets all this oil and gas drilling happen, when making climate change worse is an obvious side effect. Having no clean water is another obvious side effect, since hydrofracturing uses a lot of water -- in a state that frequently experiences drought, no less! In a state already appropriating a lot of water for agricultural uses, no less! So, to sum: the solution to burning lungs, brown sky, ashes falling like rain, and so little water they tell you not to flush the toilet is what? More oil and gas drilling? How about more solar and wind, eh? Last I looked, California got plenty of sun, and you might as well use the resources at hand, rather than dig for more just so a few fossil fuel executives can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes.

Meanwhile, as good Americans continue to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha, WI police -- and as said police seemed strangely uninterested in the militia member who shot several protestors in the middle of the week -- M Power Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect protestors from FBI surveillance, intimidation, and criminalization. We've told our FBI not to do these things many times, but obviously they think admitting that right-wingers commit terrorist acts is a good enough reason to let them continue to harass black protestors, like they've been doing since time immemorial. But admitting that right-wingers commit terrorism -- you know, like the thing I described in the first sentence of this paragraph! -- is not some great gift to us (it's rather like saying water is wet), and I'm old enough to remember when right-wingers threw a hissy fit over our DHS saying the same thing during the first Obama term. And if you'll refer to the first sentence of this paragraph again, you'll wonder why law enforcement spies on black protestors but seems so helpless when some kid kills a few of them. People have rights even if you don't like them, after all.

And while we're on this subject: if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big corporations to stop funding police foundations, then Police Piggy Bank still helps you do that. It's well past time that police foundations came under some scrutiny -- and it's also well past time the corporations that fund them came under some scrutiny, since these corporations are now falling all over themselves to say how much they love black folks. We-the-people have little-to-no oversight over police foundations, since they're private; certainly we don't have the oversight we have over public police budgets! And police foundations don't typically use this money to have barbecues with the good folks in their neighborhoods -- they more typically use it to buy military weapons they then use on the good folks protesting their atrocities. At least big corporations can be swayed by the Big Stick of Bad PR. Yes, even if they've said "black lives matter" out loud! Anyone can say black lives matter, but it takes hard work to make black lives matter -- or, for a start, to make corporations stop funding police who act like black lives don't matter.

And finally: Free Press helps you tell the Fox News Channel to fire Tucker Carlson. His presentation of Kyle Rittenhouse as a victim after he shot three Kenosha protestors (killing two) may be the last straw, but really, he's been leaving a trail of slime for a long time, most vividly in his almost pornographic reuse of looting and rioting footage over the last few months. He employed this tactic again in his Wednesday night "report," one late night TV show writer Brian Parise describes at length in a public post on his Facebook page. Go find it; it's quite illuminating. Mr. Carlson didn't mention Jacob Blake (i.e., the black man whose shooting by police stoked the protests!) in his report, though you'd think that would provide much-needed context -- but he did show the same clip of a man kicking a fence three times, as well as a black woman hitting a white woman in a church 800 miles away, whenever that happened. Sadly, what he does isn't uncommon -- watch a lengthy news report about anything and you'll see the same clips being used over and over. The difference? Generally they don't push a pro-murder perspective.

Well, this has been a busy week. I remain optimistic, however, that our efforts will, one day, deliver a lot less drama and a lot more peace and quiet.

Action: concerning our Post Office, another coal mine, and another proposed tax cut for the rich.

You've heard our media say that Postmaster General DeJoy is "suspending" all those "operational changes" that slowed the mail and threatened our Election? Not so fast! He said he'd "suspend" plans to move equipment around but said nothing about equipment already moved, and "suspending" the changes isn't rolling back the changes. As they say, when someone shows you who they are, you ought to believe them, and the man who is still financially invested in a corporation that alternately competes with our Post Office and does contract work for our Post Office shouldn't be leading our Post Office. I'm old enough to remember when folks actually tried to avoid even the appearance of evil, but too many of us are too cynical anymore to demand even that much from our leaders. For those of us who believe cynicism is evil, Progress America helps you tell Postmaster General DeJoy to restore the 600-plus mail sorting machines already removed, and then resign. It'd be nice, for once to be able to say someone resigned in shame.

Meanwhile, most big insurance corporations (including Liberty Mutual and AIG) have shunned the proposed Carmichael mine that would further befoul Australia's Great Barrier Reef -- but British insurance corporation Aon has not. Nearly 30 million tons of coal already go through the Reef, and one accident could destroy one of the world's oldest wonders, so why do our leaders continue to reject wind and solar? Apparently because, as Ralph Nader used to say, you can't own the sun, though you can own the infrastructure that collects wind and solar power and converts it to electricity, and you'd think that'd be enough for big corporations. They tell us they're our best and boldest visionaries, but their only apparent "vision" is obliterating our history and our heritage so they can redistribute more of your money upwards to themselves. Anyway, the Big Stick of Bad PR still operates, if we wield it, so Sum of Us helps you tell Aon to protect our world's treasures and scuttle its plans to insure the notorious Carmichael mine.

Finally, with over 30 million good Americans either unemployed or underemployed thanks to our government's absolutely miserable response to this pandemic, what's our President's new great idea? Cutting the capital gains tax rate from 20% to 15%, of course, though this would deliver yet another massive tax cut mostly to rich folks. Capital gains ain't just about real estate, of course, but also about stocks and bonds, meaning rich folks already pay a lower tax rate on their stock sales than working Americans do on income above $53,325. And there's no good reason for that: stocks and real estate aren't "better" than the work the rest of us do. Hence Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to not only reject the capital gains tax cut proposal, but raise the rate to ensure that folks pay the same tax rate on their investments as the rest of us pay on our wages. The stock market doesn't make the economy go, after all: our work does.

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 Social Security, fascism on our streets, polluting pipelines, and public water.

Word on the street is that the Republican COVID-19 "relief" proposal will, in fact, include the payroll tax cut our President has obsessed about since the pandemic started. Because 140,000 dead Americans and destroying Social Security go hand-in-hand! We always suspected that reports of Republican resistance to the payroll tax proposal were exaggerated, and now we know. So it's time to get on the horn with your Reps and Senators (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page) and tell them to reject the Republican COVID-19 relief proposal. Their proposal, by the way, would also include liability "relief" for big corporations that have already profited enough from this pandemic, and would tie any school funding to schools fully reopening, health of students and teachers be damned. Call it trash; tell them you're angry this is the best they can do -- they deserve our counsel, after all, and they deserve all of it, even if it hurts their fee-fees. Quite frankly I'm tired of protecting the feelings of bad people.

While you're on the phone with your Reps and Senators, you can also tell them to fight our President's efforts to deploy troops in American cities to control "rioting." We said the creation of a Department of "Homeland" "Security" would result in law "enforcement" running rampant against the innocent, and we were right! And our "leaders" in Congress have shown their usual amount of cowardice about the matter, letting only Rand Paul speak out against it, probably so our media can reduce this all to Republican-on-Republican crime when it's actually government-on-American crime. And, boy, be prepared for your fellow-Americans to spout utterly disgusting trash. What will you do when protestors to tear down the Liberty Bell? was one I actually heard yesterday. Yes, benighted souls, when the jackboots come for you, you may console yourself that at least the Liberty Bell still stands! And, please, enough with the either-we-accept-fascism-or-we-all-die. That's a hostage situation, and for the 297th time Americans deserve better.

Meanwhile, Sum of Us helps you tell insurance corporation Liberty Mutual to stop insuring the Trans Mountain pipeline in Canada. The hook? That pipeline spewed out over 50,000 gallons of tar sands oil in British Columbia last month. The other hook? Liberty Mutual's contract to provide insurance on Trans Mountain expires next month! Naturally, the Canadian government just greenlit an expansion for the pipeline, though 85 spills in 10 years doesn't bode well. Maybe you think 85 spills in 10 years ain't a whole lot! Less than one per month, maybe you're saying! Just remember that if that one oil spill hits a water table, there goes your clean drinking water, and there goes any chance of having decent health care, and you won't be sitting in your kitchen saying "well, it was only one spill! That's a pretty good record, really!" Well, some corporate troll will, but you won't. And you know how much water gets polluted via the transportation of wind and solar power? Yes, you do. And it's well past time we realigned our priorities to reflect that truth.

Finally, speaking of clean public water, private water corporation Aqua Pennsylvania (a subsidiary of Aqua America) is trying to snap up public water systems in the Commonwealth, figuring that a lot of them don't have a whole lot of money in the middle of this pandemic. But HB 2597 would require any proposed sale of a municipal, public water system to a private corporation go before the voters of that municipality first! Imagine that! People deciding not to sell their public water systems to the highest bidder for easy money today! I say "easy money today" because it'll be much harder money tomorrow, when the private water concern jacks up your water prices just because it can, and then when they shut it off because you can't pay it, what will you do? Hence Food and Water Watch helps you tell your PA state legislator to support the people's control over public water by passing HB 2597. If you're the one who says people won't bother to vote to keep their public water, just go ahead and show yourself out. And don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.

Action: concerning government spying, WHO funding, and fracking.

Fight for the Future helps you tell your Congressfolk to block reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act. Because increased, intrusive surveillance of good Americans has done what over the last two decades? Besides chill free speech and prompt law enforcement fishing expeditions? I know some folks will respond to "what has the PATRIOT Act ever done" with the answer "you'll never know how many terrorist attacks it's foiled, because telling you that would jeopardize national security." But think about that answer -- you not only can't prove or disprove it, but you would have to accept life in an untenably fragile world, where no quest for truth can be undertaken lest it lead, however indirectly, to a terrorist attack somewhere. I'm old enough to remember when we accepted that freedom doesn't guarantee good things all the time. Today, we don't -- and, as a result, we're less free. So bollocks to the PATRIOT Act, and all the politicians who fearmonger with it.

Meanwhile, our Administration has actually submitted formal notice to the World Health Organization (or WHO) of its intent to withdraw from the organization. You know, because the WHO's relative competence has embarrassed this Administration, whose incompetence has reached the point where its advisors now say their message is that Americans should "live with" 50,000 new cases a day! I will admit I am a little surprised that they actually had the stones to go through with it, but, you know, our system of government doesn't actually leave a whole lot up to our President -- even though we've left far too much up to our President for far too many years now, and that's sure blowing up in our faces now, isn't it? Anyway, this would be a good occasion to call your House Reps (using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page) and remind them who holds the power of the purse in our government -- and then call your Senators and remind them whom they're supposed to serve.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: late last month, our Attorney General released results of a two-year, grand jury investigation into gas drilling operations and regulations -- and guess what it found? "Systemic failure" on the part of our state government in preventing fracking from polluting our air and water! Preventing pollution is more our government's job, after all, than ensuring gas drilling CEOs make a crapton of money. The report makes eight recommendations, mostly concerning safe transport of gas, better tabulation of air pollution, and more thorough disclosure of fracking chemicals, and enacting these recommendations would certainly reduce pollution in the Keystone state -- but I'm feeling ornery today, so Food and Water Action helps you tell your PA Governor and state legislators to ban fracking entirely. How much air and water pollution comes from solar, wind, and geothermal? Maybe those are the industries we ought to be promoting!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C., energy investment, and child care.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to grant statehood to Puerto Rico, and Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to grant statehood to Washington, D.C.. Not because they'll then elect Democrats to Congress! You know how I feel about a lot of the Democrats who serve in Congress, and besides, Republicans might well one day convince enough Puerto Rico and D.C. residents to elect them to represent them. Hey, stranger things have happened -- Hawaii sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate for three terms at the beginning of its tenure as an American state! No, Puerto Rico and D.C. should be states because their citizens have no representation in the Senate and only token representation in the House even though Puerto Rico has over 3.5 million residents and D.C. has over 700,000 residents, that latter figure being about the size of the average House district. Congress also typically strong-arms both Puerto Rico and D.C. -- Puerto Rico far more egregiously in recent years! -- and no Americans have to tolerate that.

Meanwhile, Mitsubishi wants to build a coal plant in the middle of the Ha Tinh province of Vietnam, a community still recovering from the pollution of its coastline by the Formosa Ha Tin Steel plant, which virtually wiped out the local fishing industry. If George W. Bush still ran the world, we'd be hearing about what a wonderful opportunity this disaster would be for another corporation to swoop in, poison a little more of the local air and water, and enrich some executives! But even if Orange George Bush runs the world now, we shouldn't tolerate that state of affairs, hence Sum of Us helps you tell Mitsubishi to abandon its plans to put another coal plant in Ha Tinh province. Mitsubishi might be vulnerable to the Big Stick of Bad PR, not just because several of its financial partners have pulled out of the project, but because the good folks of Ha Tin have fought back other proposed projects, too. Gosh, if they'd just embrace solar and wind, maybe they'd be more amenable to big corporations coming into their backyard. Anyway, let's help them out, and let Mitsubishi know we're watching.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1364/S. 568, the Child Care for Working Families Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Child care costs are one of those costs -- like college, health care, and car loans -- where corporations can pretty much charge whatever they like because, hey, we can't just "choose" not to have these things, not anymore! It'd be nice to live in a world where only one parent in each family has to work, but we don't live in that world anymore, and child care corporations take advantage of that fact by charging out the wazoo. If your Tea Party uncle wonders whether we're going to make government pay for everything in the future, just remind him that a) "government paying for everything" is actually we the people paying for everything and b) we should not measure the effectiveness of a "free market" by how much unnecessary pain it causes working families. You may also remind him that child care almost certainly wasn't an issue for him, either as a child or as a parent, largely because of aggressive government taxation. Hey, truth doesn't have to tickle.

Action: concerning Social Security, renewable energy, and Presidential bad behavior.

2020 is coming, which means more fearmongering from the Koch brothers and their like-minded ilk about "runaway" "entitlements," and which likely also means that our President will go back on his promise not to touch Social Security because of TEH DEFICITZ!!!! he made worse with his tax cuts for the rich (probably not until after re-election, though). And it also means that the "liberal" media outlets that supposedly hate our President will be considerably more blunt then he about the "need" to cut "entitlements." So let's head them off, by telling our Congressfolk that we must expand Social Security, not cut it, as Social Security Works helps you do. The haters keep trying to sound "reasonable" and "serious" about cutting Social Security, and they keep failing -- but only because we stand up to them. We worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and when we retire, we deserve to enjoy it. So don't let the haters and their scare numbers take it from us.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend funding for clean energy programs. Would it be crass to mention to them that they take big campaign donations from the fossil fuel corporations they still subsidize even though they don't really need it? No, it would not be crass. Would it be crass to mention that we just had the hottest June in recorded history and massive heat waves devastating the country in July, and that using more renewable energy and less fossil fuel energy would help us suffer less of that? Would it be crass to mention the increased health care costs from dirty air and dirty water caused by pollution from fossil fuels (and, ah, not from renewables)? The answers are, in order, "no" and "no." And though renewable energy has grown tremendously across America over the years, it still only provides about 10% of our electricity, and it still needs support from our government -- which really means support from us, the taxpayers. We should get the livable future we pay for, right?

Elyse Marin has begun a petition on Color of Change which helps you tell the Anschutz Entertainment Group (or AEG) to stop hosting our President's rallies. That's right, it's time for the Big Stick of Bad PR again -- if you're a corporate sponsor giving stadium space to our President so he can have his little Nuremberg rallies where his votaries all squeal "lock her up" and "send her back" and other noxious crap, then you deserve to be pointed out and shamed until you change your behavior. I know there are still folks who are so proud of their cynicism that they'll say well how do you say no to the President, huh? Gosh, 54% of the electorate said no to him on Election Day 2016 (though, as you know, he's not a man who takes "no" very easily!), and anyway, saying no to our President is part of our birthright as Americans, a lesson I bet meant a lot more to the cynics when Barack Obama was President. Is it too much to ask that no big arena in America enable our President's obnoxious behavior?

Action: concerning corporate transparency, nuclear power, racist enabling, and big tech monopolies.

H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, would (as its title suggests) force corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners" -- the folks who create the corporations and, presumably, benefit financially from their existence. Believe it or not, we don't do this in America, so skewed toward corporate power have our laws always been. And forcing corporations to disclose their owners will have real benefits: we'll better be able to stop the banksters, terrorists, tax-evaders, sex traffickers, drug money launderers, and big campaign donors who use shell corporations to hide their wrongdoing. Don't believe any don't-tread-on-me tantrums from the right -- corporations aren't people, and don't have the same rights as people, and corporation owners don't have a "right" to hide criminal behavior, either. Hence CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to crack down on corporate misbehavior by passing the Corporate Transparency Act.

Meanwhile, Environmental Action helps you tell the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems to scuttle its plan to build new and inadequately-tested nuclear reactors near the Grand Teton National Park and invest in renewable energy instead. I know, nuclear power plants, every one a potential Chernobyl or Fukushima, near public lands -- terrible idea, right? And you don't even need to see every nuclear power plant as a potential terrorist target, either, or as an almost-certain money-loser that the taxpayer will need to bail out, though both of these are true as well. Really, all you need know is that the price of solar and wind production has come down so far in the last 20 years that now homeowners can reasonably expect to be able to pay to solarize their houses with home equity loans. That has come about with very little corporate or utility help; think of what their help could do to push renewables across the finish line in America.

In other news, with the rise of white supremacist groups selling their disgusting wares online, Sum of Us helps you tell big payment-processing corporations like MasterCard, VISA, and PayPal to stop letting white supremacist groups use their services. What's that, you say? Isn't that denying white supremacists their right to have their views heard, as well as their right to make money as they see fit? Well, no, because neither of these rights actually exist -- white supremacists do have the right to believe whatever obnoxious and emotionally-cripped shit they want in the privacy of their heart, and they have the right not to be put in jail by our government for those beliefs, but they do not have a "right" to sell those beliefs on bumper stickers and T-shirts, nor do they have a "right" to make money however they like -- I mean, if that were true, we could never put a burglar or a bankster in jail. So trouble not your heart, if racists have to get real jobs. Work builds character, after all.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell investment management corporation Vanguard to support a shareholder resolution aimed at breaking up Google. You don't need to know about Google's inability to protect your privacy or their illegal tracking of your location or their complicity in Chinese government censorship or accusations of wage theft and sexual harassment against them to want Google broken up. All you need to know is that when we look for information online, we say we're going to "google" it, for Google has so much power over our lives that its name has become a verb. And any corporation that has that much power deserves to be broken up -- even if we can credibly say that Google has done a lot of good. You know what other corporation did a lot of good? Netscape. Seriously, they had the best browser/email application in the world in the late 1990s. But I don't mourn their oblivion -- and I would mourn if they'd wound up monopolizing the internet.

Around the table: starring weak Democrats, malicious Republicans, and actual hard-working Americans.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, now seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination for President, seems to aim for a "middle ground" on climate change policy. Never mind that this "middle ground" looks suspiciously like we'd just be clawing our way back to the Obama-era status quo, or that a "middle ground" is less likely to save our planet than an agenda corporatists will label "radical" and "extreme" -- dig this flatugasm from a Biden spokeshack: "What we learned from the Obama administration is unless we find middle ground on these issues, we risk not having any policies." Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph: "what we learned from the Obama Administration" is that once you signal to right-wingers that you won't fight, they'll just move further right, and you won't "hav(e) any policies" worth a damn.

In a related note, Mr. Biden thinks that, once our current President is out office, Republicans will have an "epiphany" and work with Democrats again. The evidence, of course, points to the opposite conclusion, especially when you remember that Republicans stonewalled the center-right Mr. Obama in 2009 and 2010 and were rewarded with 63 more House seats and six more Senate seats. The only thing that'll shake Republicans out of their stupor? Shame and humiliation in unmistakeable proportions in 2020. And Democrats will surely prevent that, by running out as many "electable" "non-ideological" "problem-solvers" as possible.

Rachel M. Cohen at In These Times visits Kentucky -- where high-paying coal miner jobs have left an indelible mark in residents' minds -- to describe some of the issues we'd have in shifting to renewable energy. A coal miner who has transitioned to renewable energy work warns that the transition costs money (he had to intern for six months) and might not persuade coal miners used to making high five figures who honestly believe that the coal jobs really are coming back. And a liberal activist also reminds us that even though Kentucky has moved right (especially in recent years), "FDR was just a peg or two under Jesus Christ here," which again suggests that maybe we need more actual liberals, and fewer "electable" centrists, running for office.

Greg Stohr at Bloomberg notices that "Mystery Delays Push Divisive Supreme Court Issues Into Election Year." Some analysts cite the contentiousness of the Kavanaugh hearings as a possible reason, but they may be misapprehending the lesson of those hearings a bit, i.e., that if those hearings had gone on into November, we'd probably have a larger Republican caucus in the Senate, and we might not even have a Democratic House! Delaying decisions on abortion, immigration, transgender issues, etc., into 2020 turns Republican voters out -- and regardless of the outcomes! If they rule the way Republicans would prefer, then "the President delivered," but if they don't, then "the President must be re-elected so he can get better judges on the Supreme Court." In the long run, though, this ain't gonna help John Roberts convince everyone that federal courts aren't political.

Finally, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) is the lone Republican to vote against one of our President's judicial nominees, specifically citing, as his reason, said nominee's 2011 characterization of former President Obama as an "un-American impostor." And Politico treats us to five paragraphs about how this is Mr. Romney's "latest break with the President," citing precisely two other "breaks." And note that the judicial nominee still got confirmed, because, like all the rest of them, Mitt Romney only stands on principle when it makes no difference.

Around the table: featuring yet another reason we need *a la carte* cable packaging.

The incomparable Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs reads South Bend Mayor/Democratic Presidential aspirant Pete Buttigieg's autobiography, finds it wanting. There are literally dozens of insights here, but let's just say that Mr. Buttigieg is just another guy who wants you to think he's a liberal -- since liberal policy prescriptions are actually quite popular! -- but is actually just another center-right technocrat who values "bipartisan cooperation" with the political party that thinks cooperation equals capitulation. Also, too, when folks complain about "out-of-touch" elites, the Harvard- and Oxford-educated, consultant firm-groomed Mr. Buttigieg is really what they mean, no matter how nice he seems or how many languages he speaks. Every time he mentions "smart sewers" in the first debate, take a drink.

Study finds that employment in the solar power industry fell by a little over 3 percent last year, largely due to tariffs on Asian imports. I'd prefer we made the solar panels here, too, but I'm sure some fossil fuel CEO or other told our President that this would happen if he slapped tariffs on the nations that produce these panels (or the materials the panels need), and our President laughed with glee at the thought. But not only do these tariffs come down gradually and then disappear after 2022, federal tax credits will also come down gradually and then disappear after 2022, which means solar job creation will likely go back up in the short term, so I guess our President gets to take credit for that, too. Seriously, none of this is beyond his ability to calculate -- the man only wins political battles by manufacturing crises like these. Just like Mr. Bush.

Almost-bankrupt corporation Sears hands out $25 million in bonuses to executives, then cancels life insurance for its retirees. Bonuses for what? For finding a hedge fund to grind the corporation into the ground for good while sucking the marrow out of it for the executives? Always they demand loyalty, but never do they show it to us "little people." When a man realizes he needs to live in a gated community for his own safety, does he start to think that maybe the problem is him?

Our President, less than a week after saying he wanted to completely destroy the Affordable Care Act and make Republicans the "party of health care," has announced that Republicans won't vote on their new plan, whatever it is, until after the 2020 election, which sure isn't the textbook definition of courage. Also, why does he imagine that "private health insurance" is "beloved"? The only people who really like their health insurance are the people who haven't had to use it lately, and it's a long walk from "like it, I guess" to "TEH BELOVEDZ!!!!!"

Finally, Fox News's Jeannie Pirro returns to the air after a short hiatus, and declares that folks who accused our President of colluding with Russia are "traitorous" and "treasonous." I sure am glad she said both words, or I wouldn't have understood what she meant! Seriously, two things: one, Article III, Section 3 of our Constitution doesn't call accusations, or attempts to prove accusations, "treasonous." Two, don't people hate TV pundits who yell all the time? I'm old enough to remember when on-air meltdowns ended careers. This is yet another reason we need a la carte cable packaging -- we're paying for all these tantrum-throwers on our TV, even if we're not watching them, and if we could stop paying for them, they'd clean up their act right quick.

Action: concerning clean water, paycheck fairness, renewable energy, and social media monopolies.

The WATER Act is back, this time as H.R. 1417, and it would pay for restoring our water- and sewer-related infrastructure in America by raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 24.5%. I'd raise the corporate tax rate all the way to 55%, which is where it was in the America all those Tea Party folks grew up in, but financing water infrastructure with a smaller hike in the corporate tax rate is certainly worth doing. And what can Republicans say in response? That the corporate tax cut has created craploads of jobs which is to laugh? Seriously, the more folks get their taxes done this year, the more unpopular the 2017 tax "reform" will be -- and the more popular the idea of raising taxes on corporations so that folks can drink unleaded water will be. If we act, that is! Hence a group of good-government organizations helps you tell your Congressfolk to support clean water by passing the WATER Act.

Meanwhile, our House of Representatives plans to vote on H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, today (Thursday), so you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find your House Reps' phone numbers and call them to tell them to support the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act, as you know, would protect workers from retaliation if they discuss their pay at their job -- since that is, after all, the only way most folks find out they're victims of discrimination! -- and would also ensure that employers can't make hiring decisions solely on the basis of past salaries, since that'd be like penalizing people for the discrimination they've already suffered. Women's pay still hasn't achieved parity with men's pay, even after you adjust for factors like experience, so we need the Paycheck Fairness Act with a quickness.

In other news, our President's budget proposal (among its many, many other insults) zeroes out our Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (or ARPA-E), which operates within our Department of Energy and happens to be the agency that conducts R&D for clean energy. Because, apparently, the will of coal corporation executives means everything in America, and the will of the people means nothing! And also, apparently, coal simply can't survive unless this Administration strangles all other forms of energy in their crib. But solar and wind farms now cost less to start up than coal plants do, and solar and wind production have almost achieved parity in cost with fossil fuel production, so zeroing out ARPA-E (and trying to zero out virtually all other renewable energy funding in our budget) smacks of desperation. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to preserve our government's investment in renewable energy.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to break up Facebook, then Freedom from Big Tech still helps you do that. You know that Facebook has seemed awfully susceptible to actual "fake news" purveyors, and that Facebook had allowed Cambridge Analytica to misuse the data of 87 million users, and you also know that both of these problems are made much, much worse by the fact that you can't just punish Facebook for its mistakes by moving your entire social media life to another network these days. But add yet another scandal to your list: Facebook has apparently stored hundreds of millions of passwords, maybe including your password, as plain text on its servers. Too often it seems we need to rewrite the old saw "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" into "the bigger they are, the more damage they do" -- and we need to force our government to work a lot harder at making sure corporations don't get that big.

UPDATE. The House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act this morning, so Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to pass the bill.