Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning corporate evil, anti-immigrant cruelty, and Project 2025.

Long story short: tell our government to prosecute Boeing, support immigrant care workers, and tell big corporations to reject the notorious Project 2025. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Justice Department to prosecute Boeing for violating the “deferred prosecution agreement” it signed with the Trump Administration. “Deferred prosecution agreements” give our government a way to let big corporations off for the harm they do (in this case, building planes that crashed and killed 346 people) as long as they don’t do further harm (in this case, partly by making sure planes conformed to plans submitted to our government). So how did that work out? With plane doors blowing out and whistleblowers mysteriously dying, for a start! Maybe the Biden Administration is thinking second term with this, but they may not get a second term, and the time for justice is always now.

Moms Rising helps you tell our government to support immigrants who comprise over a quarter of family care workers. Even folks – regular folks, that is, not professional anti-immigrant haters – who want to deport all immigrants who commit crimes would hesitate, I would think, before deporting law-abiders who might take care of them one day. Professional immigrant-haters, of course, use “deport the criminals” as a first step to deporting the rest of them! Would I prefer American citizens to do these jobs? Yes, and I sure wouldn’t be above making them citizens to meet that criterion, and I’d pay them more. But it’d be cruel to deport caregivers before we bring our ideal world into existence.

Finally, the National Campaign for Justice helps you tell big corporations to stop supporting the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Project 2025, if enacted, would defund our Securities and Exchange Commission, defang our Federal Trade Commission, and abolish our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, all of which have, under Joe Biden, fought corporate monopolies and junk fees for the first time in 40 years. So remember that Project 2025 votaries aren’t just against anyone who’s different from them – they’re also against our government agencies whenever they do anything good on our behalf. And these days, big corporations don’t want either PR stink on them.

Around the table: today with one-quarter good news!

Biden Administration reverses a lot of changes former President Trump made to short-term health insurance plans, requiring more transparency about what they don’t cover (because that’s a lot!) and shortening the maximum period folks can have short-term health insurance from 36 months to four. That’s good news, but it’s also another argument for putting all Americans into Medicare, because short-term health insurance is, frankly, a shit product, and no, good Americans shouldn’t have the “option” of shit products, nor should our government even tout shit products as an “option.”

Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in the big house for fraud over his cryptocurrency shenanigans, so it’s starting to look like law and order has actually come to the cryptocurrency field, despite its votaries claiming it’s just too complex for us regular folks to understand (but don’t pass any new laws, because that would “crush innovation”!). Can our “liberal” media stop calling him a “cryptocurrency guru,” though? We don’t need to mystify cryptocurrency any more than its votaries already do. I’d also be happy if we stopped calling him by his initials, like he’s FDR or JFK or LBJ. He’s not even OBJ.

I missed this, because I watch very little TV news, but apparently some TikTok attention hound has been telling everyone how to “legally” squat in buildings and homes, and our “liberal” media covered it rather credulously. Because crime and immigration! It’s a two-fer! I imagine TikTok is no better or worse than other social media, but between this and birth control, one day soon we’re going to ruefully speak about folks with degrees from TikTok University, just as, not that long ago, we rued folks with degrees from the University of Google. In the meantime, our “liberal” media might remember that covering TikTok videos breathlessly as if they mean a damn thing doesn’t make anyone any cooler, let alone smarter.

Surprise, surprise! Our government recently sanctioned the corporation that chartered the cargo ship that took down the Francis Scott Key bridge, and for what? For violating the rights of whistleblowers alleging safety violations. You wish that had done more to prevent the bridge’s destruction, but it still represents a welcome change from the War on Whistleblowers waged by the Obama Administration. Of all the wars (coal, jobs, etc.) right-wingers accused the Obama Administration of fighting, they were strangely silent about the war they were actually fighting. What is the moral of this story? Right-wingers are useless, except maybe to teach us how not to be. I said “maybe.”

The good folks at The Conversation inform us that ”For-profit nursing homes are cutting corners on safety and draining resources with financial shenanigans − especially at midsize chains that dodge public scrutiny.” If, like me, you think banksters ruin everything and corporations shouldn’t own other corporations, you must also accept that nursing home chains shouldn’t exist. (That doesn’t mean nursing homes shouldn’t exist; it means they shouldn’t be part of big chains.) And while some folks would balk at our government taking over Boeing, I bet many, many fewer would balk at our government taking over some of these midsize nursing home chains. People find tales of abuse at nursing homes persuasive, after all. They also hate middlemen. And banksters.

We just talked about how squatting wasn’t really a thing, but it’s still always a good time to be reminded that even though Donald Trump says “violent crime has skyrocketed in virtually every American city,” actual FBI statistics tell us that crime is down, and violent crime is down 11% in cities with more than a million people. And what does the Trump campaign spokeshack say in response? “Joe Biden is trying to convince Americans not to believe their own eyes.” Yes, people do watch a lot of crime on TV, but anecdotes aren’t facts, no matter how many anecdotes pile up. And on the count of Donald Trump trying to convince Americans not to believe the facts she is strangely silent. I will not read her inevitable tell-all about how she came to be disillusioned with the Big Man, either. Seriously, anyone still working for him after January 6 is just a fool.

Ho hum, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s running mate has called intravenous fertilization (or IVF) “one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today,” and I wonder how the millions of Americans born via IVF feel about that, let alone their mothers. Naturally there’s a personal angle – because what good is our personal experience if we don’t get to smother everyone else with it? – as IVF practitioners apparently turned her away many years ago. This is why Donald Trump has been working overtime to call Robert Kennedy, Jr., a liberal – so his votaries would know they shouldn’t vote for Kennedy/Shanahan no matter how much their, ah, unorthodox medical opinions might appeal to their false pride.

Finally, Georgia Republican party official gets hit with a $5,000 fine for illegally voting nine times. Now, I could gloat (and have gloated) about how only Republicans ever seem to get caught voting illegally despite how much they whine about Democrats doing it all the time – and Mr. Pritchard sure has whined about that latter item, despite never proving it! – but I think it’s far more important to note that the state should never have taken his voting rights away in the first place. No, not even for forging checks! Even though I imagine that’s one of those crimes murderers beat people up for in jail.

Action: concerning voting rights, government funding, and whistleblower protections.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to restore voting rights to ex-felons, pass a clean funding bill, and expand whistleblower protections for federal workers. 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.

Stand Up America helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Democracy Restoration Act, which would restore the right to vote in federal elections to released prisoners. Because they never should have lost their right to vote in the first place! Because continuing to punish someone for a crime for which they’ve already served their sentence is cruel! And, not incidentally, because folks who try to deny voting rights to ex-felons mean to deny rights to Black and Brown folks, not because “they commit all the crime,” but because our justice system tends to target them. So, like, enough already.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk you expect them to pass a clean government funding bill, with no poison pills and no manufactured hostage crises. And no means no! Just because politicians want to do something doesn’t mean anyone else wants to do it! Rep. Greene (E-GA) says she won’t vote for any spending bill if our House doesn’t vote on impeaching President Biden over a whole lot of nothing, and we have to stop coddling people who do that. No means no! And no whining means no whining!

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Expanding Whistleblower Protections for Contractors Act, which would, as its title suggests, strengthen protections for whistleblowers and expand those protections to include federal contractors as well as federal employees. Because contractors can dime out some serious corruption, too! And they don’t do it for the money, because no amount of money can make up for lost jobs, livelihoods, families, or friends, so don’t believe big corporate lobbyists who tell you they do.

Action: concerning treating prisoners like human beings, corporate spying, and chemical disasters.

Long story short: tell the Alabama Department of Corrections to treat prisoners more humanely, tell our government to investigate TikTok’s parent company for illegal spying on Americans, and tell our EPA to protect good Americans from chemical plant disasters. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell the Alabama Department of Corrections to start treating prisoners like human beings again. You need not indulge in any if you can’t do the crime don’t do the time horsedoodle or you sound like you want all prisoners to eat caviar horsedoodle or how is it different from any other prison horsedoodle; all ye need do is consider that our Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Alabama in 2020, saying they violated prisoners’ Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. That's right, the Trump DOJ did this! So go ahead and assume it must be pretty awful, and act accordingly.

Public Citizen helps you tell our government to investigate potential criminal behavior by TikTok or its parent corporation. ByteDance, the corporation that owns TikTok, stands accused of either tracking locations of particular American citizens or planning to do so – no, not even tracking locations so they could sell more ads, and certainly not tracking them as part of an internal workplace investigation. No, they just wanted to spy on Americans! If we’re not going to tolerate that from our own government, and we shouldn’t, then why would we tolerate it from a corporation? Why would we tolerate it from a foreign corporation? We would not, so let’s not.

Finally, Public Citizen also helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to do everything it can to protect good Americans from chemical disasters. While our EPA’s revised Risk Management Program for chemical plants improves on our existing one, it could still do more, like make chemical plants submit their own risk management plans more quickly than within four years, or requiring backup power on all equipment, or create a third-party anonymous reporting hotline to supplement in-house reporting and whistleblowing. When it’s your neighborhood on fire from a chemical plant, you’ll think these are all good ideas, too, so let’s help ensure we’ll never have to contemplate such things.

Action: concerning the war on Yemen, whistleblowers, and campaign finance disclosure.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end our involvement in the war on Yemen, pass strong protections for financial sector whistleblowers, and pass the DISCLOSE 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.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Yemen War Powers Resolution, which would enable our Congress to claw back some of the war-declaring power they’ve historically delegated (unconstitutionally!) to our President, at least as far as Yemen is concerned. President Biden talked a good game about winding down our involvement there, but hasn’t done very much of consequence, since we’re still providing weapons and logistical support to the war, and lately our President’s tried to “reset” our relations with Saudi Arabia, the nation leading the coalition against Yemen. All that means is, once again, it’s up to us to make our Congressfolk do their job.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the most vigorous reforms possible for good Americans who blow the whistle on money laundering schemes. Such reforms would include a mandatory minimum award for these whistleblowers – who have basically risked their livelihoods to do the right thing! – and an established fund to pay out such awards. And not for nothing, but money laundering drives wars all over the world, including the one Russia’s waging on Ukraine, so strong protections for whistleblowers who expose financial sector wrongdoing would result in (dare I say) a peace dividend. A real one, though!

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 443, the DISCLOSE Act, which would (among other necessary reforms) force disclosure of all big campaign finance donors who give more than $10,000 to campaigns or committees. As for those who worry about big campaign finance donors getting death threats once they’re exposed: that kind of lawlessness is a separate problem. Death threats are always wrong and illegal and our laws exact punishment for them, but it’s our job to protect our democracy from big money, which is why we demand that big players at least show themselves.

Action: concerning banksters, privacy, corruption, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, tell the Biden Administration to remove the DHS Inspector General, and tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation restricting the use of PFAS chemicals. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5648/S. 3022, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. This bill would treat several forms of bankster income as ordinary income, i.e., so that it gets taxed at normal-person rates, rather than the lower rates our government has foolishly set for too much speculative income. The bill would also force bankruptcy proceedings to give higher priority to taking care of a corporation’s employees, so that executives can’t steal all the money from a corporation’s dead husk. Folks who object to the word “looting” don’t understand what looters are. I think even Ayn Rand would call today’s banksters looters.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. You’ve heard that if you’re using a period-tracking app that you should totally stop doing that, now that abortion could soon be illegal in your state (if it’s not already)? Well, that’s just one reason we need the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, because currently third-party data collectors can sell all your data to law enforcement whether you want them to or not, and this bill would put a dead stop to that. The bill would also force our government to follow the 1978 FISA Act in conducting surveillance. And call me old-fashioned, but law enforcement shouldn’t get any data without a damn warrant.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell President Biden to remove our Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General and replace him with someone who’ll do the job right. Because the accusations against him are mounting – ignoring sexual harassment complaints, wrongfully firing his deputy, and retaliating against whistleblowers, which amounts to a very bad look, especially, you know, for an office that’s supposed to be rooting out corruption in our government! Mr. Cuffari is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but I’m old enough to remember when the appearance of corruption prompted folks to step aside. We’ve got to get back to that in America.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation restricting PFAS chemicals and holding the corporations that make them accountable. They call PFAS chemicals “forever chemicals” because they’re everywhere and your body can’t break them down, and even worse, at least one corporation that manufactures PFAS chemicals (3M) knew decades ago how bad those chemicals are! If they knew something would hurt us, and they not only kept doing it but lied to us about it, we’ve got to fix that. We can’t just wait for them to get to the Pearly Gates, not when PFAS chemicals make us sick now.

Action: concerning whistleblowers, renewables, monopolies, and worker safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act and pass the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2022, and tell our federal government to rein in big ag monopolies and protect American workers from heatstroke. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act so that our government doesn’t use it to bludgeon journalists. Specifically, you’d ask your Congressfolk to pass Amendment 617 to the defense authorization bill, authored by Rep. Tlaib (D-MI), and I’m glad someone did the extra reading for Sausage Making 101 by attaching necessary legislation to must-pass bills! Currently our government has too easy a time prosecuting and silencing heroic whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, John Kiriakou, and Daniel Hale; we should make it harder for them to do that. I mean, that could be any of us witnessing evil and having a conscience!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7439/S. 4013, the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2022. This bill would amend the Defense Production Act so that it specifically authorizes our President to invoke it to build renewable energy infrastructure; I don’t think Russia’s war on Ukraine is the biggest reason gas prices went up (that would be “corporate greed”), but it’s really not a far walk from foreign policy disasters to energy supply chains, and instead of staying vulnerable to world events so that big oil executives can keep getting richer, why don’t we ensure we can make more of our own energy here instead?

Food and Water Action helps you tell our U.S. Department of Agriculture (or USDA) to stop big ag corporations from running roughshod over small farmers and ranchers. The Packers and Stockyards Act nominally protects small farmers and ranchers from the ill effects of consolidation and monopolization, but our government hasn’t enforced it for at least the last 40 years, which means small farmers and ranchers now exist at the mercy of meat-packing middlemen. The Reagan Revolution didn’t “set our economy free,” not even from bureaucracy, but it gave middlemen and speculators all the control over our economy; it sure would be nice if our USDA would help a brother out here.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) to pass emergency heat standards for American workers. After all, it’s only going to get hotter from here on in, and we’re already almost halfway into July. I am a little surprised to learn that heat kills more folks than tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods, but should I be? Those weather events get all the ink, but most folks who die of heatstroke hardly know it’s happening to them while it’s happening, and too many of our workplaces think only of the bottom line, and not of their workers’ safety. That’s why we have our government: so it can step in on our behalf when big corporations won’t do the right thing.

Action: concerning the Espionage Act, marriage equality, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act, protect marriage equality, and lower prescription drug prices. 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.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act so that our government can’t use it to silence journalists and whistleblowers. You know, like they’re trying to do to Julian Assange for the crime of exposing American wrongdoing during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That embarrassed a lot of American elites, but embarrassing American elites ain’t no reason to use anti-spying legislation to silence journalists. And silencing whistleblowers? Who expose corruption at great personal cost? Anyone who says they love America should be ashamed of doing such a thing. Allow me to believe that shaming still works in America.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to codify marriage equality in our laws before our Supreme Court uses its dastardly “deeply-rooted rights” notion to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges. Because you know they’re just itching to do it – why, Justice Thomas said they should do it in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization which overturned Roe v. Wade. Hence we need our Congressfolk to act. It’ll take a while for a case to reach our Court that could outlaw gay marriage, but don’t let that make you complacent. Whenever our Court takes our rights away, it always seems like it’s too soon.

Finally, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower drug prices already. Feel free to tell them exactly how in the space for comments – like, by letting Medicare negotiate drug prices, or capping insulin prices, or fining big pharma corporations when they raise prices faster than inflation. People like all of these ideas, and would it kill our Congressfolk to do some things that people actually like, and actually want them to do? As Drug Prices Are Too High suggests, it might even help them in the midterms this November.

Action: concerning clean water, forced arbitration, scientific integrity, corruption, and plastic pollution.

Long story short: tell your Philadelphia City Council to replace lead-contaminated drinking fountains, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act and the Scientific Integrity Act, ban members of Congress from trading in defense stocks, investigate corruption allegations against Postmaster General DeJoy, and pass the Reducing Waste in National Parks 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.

Philadelphia residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your City Councilmember to pass Bill # 220221, which would force the city school district to replace all drinking fountains in schools with lead-filtering ones by 2025. That's because a recent study found 98% of Philly school drinking fountains had lead in them, and recall that no amount of lead in drinking water is safe, and that any amount of lead a child ingests can cause brain damage. So doing something about this shouldn't be this difficult, particularly since the American Rescue Plan Act delivered an extra $1.1 billion to Philly public schools and the district would only have to spend (per Penn Environment) around $6 million of that to fix the problem. But politicians won't do the right thing unless we demand it.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. I don't want to downplay the importance of the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act; it is a major piece of legislation, and I don't think I ever described the Affordable Care Act with that phrase. But why not press your advantage? Forced arbitration is unjust in every contract, for every reason -- and if arbitration is so great, why do corporations force you to use it? If you want to band together in a class action suit with other similarly-wronged folks, why should corporations get to stop you? Because they "deserve" more say than you? They don't -- but they'll get it, if we don't speak out.

Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 849, the Scientific Integrity Act. The Scientific Integrity Act would force Executive3 branch agencies to create (and enforce!) a scientific integrity plan that keeps politics out of scientific decisions. After all, we just had President Troll pack EPA scientific boards with corporate polluter hacks, and that's not the kind of thing that free people should have to put up with. The bill would also keep political employees from muddying up scientific data and give whistleblowers more power to expose wrongdoing. Oh, and it ain't just about the EPA: our Food and Drug Administration sure hasn't earned a reputation for sobriety as of late, what with their greasing the skids for the Alzheimer's drug that may not even work. So, yeah, let's put a stop to that kind of thing.

Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban members of Congress from trading in defense stocks. Why can't we cut the defense budget, even though we spend more money than the next 8 nations combined and still never feel secure? It couldn't be because nearly 50 members of Congress have almost $7 million in investments in defense contracting corporations, could it? I'm still appalled how cheaply people can be bought -- yes, $7 million is a lot of money even when divided among 50 individuals, but you know that's a drop in the budget next to our annual defense budget, meaning that defense contracting corporations can purchase a lot of legislative power for their buck. We need to make a world where our leaders avoid even the appearance of evil.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy for yet another potential conflict-of-interest, this one concerning the free COVID tests our Postal Service delivered to our houses. Turns out Mr. DeJoy owned stock in one of the corporations that supplied COVID testing kits to the public, and didn't divest himself of said stock; some folks no doubt think this is no big deal, but owning stock in a corporation that might get work from our Postal Service while you're running said Postal Service is an invitation to corruption, the kind of thing our laws proscribe precisely because we don't want such corruption to happen. America may be the get-ahead country, but we don't want it to be the get-over country, and that's why we fight corruption.

Finally, Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5533/S. 2960, the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act, which would ban single-use plastics in our national parks. Not just because you don't want to see that while you're hiking or climbing, but because our national parks protect a lot of our clean air and clean water, not to mention ecosystems you don't see anywhere else. And seriously, how many cheap plastic bags do you need at the Sequoia National Park? There are plenty of alternatives to plastic bottles, coffee cups with plastic lids, and take-out containers, and the internet is anxious to tell you all about them. I suppose some folks must oppose a bill like this, but I suspect they're the same folks who think freedom is mainly all about being as obnoxious as possible and preventing others from shunning you for it.

Action: concerning COVID, gas prices, scientific integrity, no-knock warrants, abortion, and pot.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to approve emergency COVID funding and pass the Stop Gas Price Gouging Tax and Rebate Act, the Scientific Integrity Act, the Amir Locke End Deadly No-Knock Warrants Act, the EACH Act, and the MORE 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 approve additional funding for fighting COVID. Another omicron variant is on its way, and our government has run out of money for testing and vaccines; Congress didn't include more COVID funding as part of its last appropriations bill, apparently because they feared Republicans would object to it and scuttle everything. To which I respond: make them! And though I know the Lancet predicted, a few months ago, that the pandemic would be over soon, that's still a prediction, not a certainty, even if pretty good science buttresses it, so one should be prudent and prepare for the possibility that things could go wrong. Apparently it takes a liberal to preach prudence these days.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7099, the Stop Gas Price Gouging Tax and Rebate Act. Similar to the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, the Stop Gas Price Gouging Tax and Rebate Act would impose a 50% excise tax on crude oil-producing corporations on profits that exceed 10% over their average profits from 2015-19. The bill would then deliver the proceeds back to working families as monthly rebates. House Democrats should pass this bill posthaste and then put Senate Republicans on the spot. Let them say they can big oil corporations may not be price-gouging; people will love that! And let them be the ones to snatch monthly checks out of good Americans' hands; people will love that, too!

Breast Cancer Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 849, the Scientific Integrity Act. You remember how the Trump Administration EPA stacked its scientific boards with pollution industry hacks? Well, the Scientific Integrity Act would fight that, by making all executive branch agencies develop and enforce a scientific integrity plan that keeps politics out of scientific decisions. In practice, that means polluting corporations won't be able to dominate decisions about stopping pollution, a sentence that probably seems self-evident to you, but a lot of politicians seem to have trouble understanding the whole concept! Plus the bill would keep political employees' grubby mitts off scientific findings and give whistleblowers more power to expose wrongdoing. These are good works, and we should make Congress do them.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6877, the Amir Locke End Deadly No-Knock Warrants Act, which would, as its title indicates, vastly reduce no-knock warrants (and therefore deadly ones). It wouldn't outlaw them -- the court issuing the warrant would have to establish "clear and convincing evidence, supported by particularized facts, that...notice prior to entry would substantially endanger the life or safety of the law enforcement officer or other persons," which is the exception for which any reasonable person would ask -- and which most right-wingers will pretend doesn't exist in the bill, though it's in Sec. 3(a)(2). The bill would also outlaw no-knock warrants for drug cases, which would curtail (though not end) unannounced entry.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2234/S. 1021, the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (or EACH) Act, which would make federal health care programs cover abortion services, and make federal health care facilities provide access to abortion. Because abortion is a legal medical procedure, that's why! And if we don't provide abortion, we will make women breeders, and we're not much of a civilization if we do that. Pro-lifers would say we're not much of a civilization if we tolerate abortion, but all civilizations have to choose between greater and lesser evils. When men can give birth, and science can progress beyond using abortions to save would-be mothers' lives, we can think about all of this again.

Finally, Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment, and Expungement (or MORE) Act. Yes, Democrats will bring it up for a vote, thanks to our pressure; now we have to convince our Reps to pass it. They'll quake in fear of Republicans saying they're "soft on crime," but consider that Republicans say we should have fewer laws preventing polluters from befouling our air and water; why don't we call that "soft on crime"? After all, dumping poison in a lake or river hurts far more people than a burglary does; it doesn't feel that way to the burglary victim, obviously, but pollution still hurts more people. We should think of punishing polluters (or banksters, or tax cheats, or Medicare fraudsters) as being "tough on crime." I'll keep saying it until we do.

Around the table: featuring evil government officials and Russian heroes.

Ho hum, Donald Trump's Homeland Security agency expected violence on January 6, but didn't tell anyone who could do anything about it. Oh, they told each other to be careful, but otherwise lol-ed each other in texts. This unconscionable failure came not too many months after HHS's Intelligence and Analysis head, Brian Murphy, quit and filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that his superiors at DHS were pressuring him to downplay reports of right-wing terror and play up fantasies about left-wing terror. Now would be a good time to note that if Donald Trump becomes President again in 2024, he has said he will push to have absolute authority to fire people like Brian Murphy merely for blowing the whistle on wrongdoing.

Josh Boak at the Associated Press asks "Two years into COVID, was $800B payroll aid plan worth it?" And answers that "just 23% to 34% of PPP dollars went to workers who would have lost jobs, at a cost of as much as $258,000 per job retained," and that "most of the benefits accrued to the affluent," which I'm sure was a complete accident! Seriously, the AP report does its best to be even-handed, but as a famous philosopher used to say, there's just no there there -- reports that the Biden Administration made it a little nicer to Black and Brown folks shouldn't convince you otherwise. Having banksters run the program was a stupid idea; how many small businesses do banksters know anymore? The original legislation contended that Ruth's Chris Steak House was a "small business," after all!

You might hate Spotify for its absurdly low musician royalties and its enabling of Joe Rogan, but here's another reason to hate it: it invests in artificial intelligence tools on the battlefield, and regardless of how you feel about war, I hope you don't imagine that AI "saves lives," for Philip K. Dick exploded that supposition in "Second Variety" almost 70 years ago. Also, Spotify hosts plenty of podcasts that generally make war seem like a fun video game and specifically advance the cause of drones and robotics on the battlefield, which see previous sentence.

Hard to believe, Harry, but today's battles over book banning are a lot like the 1980s battles over book banning, and I guess when Jerry Falwell didn't actually spew racial epithets, he probably caught a lot of folks off-guard. Today's "critical race theory" may be yesterday's "secular humanism," which I guess suggests how far we've come if our enemies are more willing to spell out what they hate. It also suggests the utter emptiness of right-wing arguments, which I wish meant more; desperate people fight ugly, true, but they only beat civilized folks when civilized folks aren't sure of themselves, which illustrates, if it needed it, that post-modernism has its limits.

Cal Winslow at Counterpunch profiles Will Smith, a prodigious offensive line talent who played only two years of professional football in the early '60s because racism. Yeah, when the Raiders' legendary/notorious owner, Al Davis, won't pay you what he pays the other starting guard who happens to be white, you can say "because racism." Will Smith had a tough time even getting as far as he did, surviving Southern segregation and its only slightly-less oppressive Northern flavor -- his Michigan coaches benched him because he was serious with a white woman, whom he eventually married and started a family with, and crowds everywhere shouted racial epithets at him, until he silenced them with his play. No teams contacted him after the Raiders let him go; he made a pretty good career in education after that. Thus endeth a lesson you now cannot receive in many public schools across America because waaaaaaaaaah!

Finally, journalist Marina Ovsyannikova goes on Russian TV to protest the war against Ukraine, not long after releasing a video detailing her shame at having propagandized on Russia's behalf for so many years. "Only we have the power to stop all this madness," she said in that video. "Go to the protests. Don’t be afraid of anything. They can’t imprison us all." Indeed, they cannot! And even if they decide to shoot them all, it'll take more than 10 generations to wash out that stain. She's a hero, and so are all the Russians who have already taken to the streets to protest this war; we would welcome them into our hearts and communities even as we would ostracize Vlad the Bad forever.

Action: concerning Yemen, algorithms, labor, small businesses, antibiotics, and Presidential misbehavior.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to end our involvement in the war on Yemen, hold corporations accountable for their algorithms, pass strong labor legislation, protect small online businesses, make antibiotics strong again, and investigate former President Trump's removal of official documents to his private residence. 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.

Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end all American support for the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Specifically you'll ask that your Reps support a War Powers resolution aiming to end our involvement there; it'd be nice if our government would only go to war when Congress specifically authorizes it, as used to happen in the old days, but in the meantime, I'd take a War Powers resolution. 16 million good Yemeni sit on the edge of famine, and for what? Because the Saudis don't like the Houthis? The Houthis are some of the world's best at fighting al-Qaeda, but then so were the Kurds, and we sure sold them out to an even more odious dictator. How about if we stop making foreign policy decisions that constantly put us on the wrong side of decency? Our Founders didn't think that was too much to ask.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 6580/S. 3572, the Algorithmic Accountability Act. A CEO's only job is, literally, to make decisions, but now lazy CEOs farm out their decision-making to algorithms, and it ain't just about Facebook algorithms automatically creating groups that let racists find each other much more easily than if they had to put some work into it -- it's also about algorithms charging some people higher prices, hence the recent controversy over Tinder, which was apparently charging older daters more money -- on the precept they'll swipe left more frequently than younger folks more mesmerized by appearances? It's a question worth asking! "Personalized pricing," Tinder called it, but "personalized price gouging" might be a better name, and we should fight that.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act passed our House almost a year ago, and given all the good things it would do -- it would stop corporations from trying to make all their employees into "contractors," it would stop employers from forcing their workers to sit through anti-union propaganda, it would outlaw forced arbitration in union contracts, it would prohibit corporate retaliation against whistleblowers, and it would give workers more choice in how they would vote for unionization -- it's hard to see how a sane, moral, and decent Senate would oppose it. We must conclude, therefore, that our Senate is not sane, moral, or decent. So we must make them so, by communicating our will until they can't deny it anymore.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the inclusion of the SHOP SAFE Act in larger trade legislation. What would the SHOP SAFE Act do? In the name of "protecting intellectual property," it would force online small businesses to jump through additional hoops about the products they sell, to make sure they're not "counterfeit" -- and then subject those small businesses to abuse anyway, since the internet marketplaces that host them will use, you guessed it, algorithms to detect "counterfeit" items, and they'll be just as good at that as facial recognition software is at telling Black folks apart. Politicians constantly talk about "protecting small businesses," and then they go and pull shit like this. Unless we stop them.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3932/S. 2076, the PASTEUR Act. The PASTEUR Act would fund development of new antibiotics, which we need mainly because we've abused the ones we've got so badly that superbugs rise up all over the world. Yes, "abuse" is the right word there -- we give seven out of every 10 antibiotics to nominally healthy farm animals so they can endure squalid conditions in family farms, instead of, you know, sick people or sick animals. The result? The world is full of superbugs! Also, too, exposure to COVID leaves folks vulnerable to another, bacterial infection -- which means hospitals treat all of their COVID patients with antibiotics out of an abundance of caution, thus antibiotics become less effective. Creating new antibiotics will give us a little more breathing space, at least.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate former President Trump's removal of some 15 boxes of Presidential records from our White House to his Mar-a-Lago residence. It's almost comic how often this man implicates himself law-breaking, but our failure to hold him to account for his many sins is no laughing matter at all. Anyway, the Presidential Records Act of 1978 doesn't let you just take any old document home, and not just because some of them might be classified "Top Secret," as they were with Mr. Trump. Why, you might be hiding something the American people deserve to know! It's almost comic how little respect Donald Trump shows to the people, but the fact that so many Americans think he's their Personal Lord and Savior is no laughing matter at all.

Action: concerning whistleblowers, drugs, privacy, police, and our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act and pass the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act, the Protecting Data at the Border Act, the People's Response Act, and the Postal Service Reform 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.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act, so our government can't use it to oppress reporters and whistleblowers. Like him or not, that's what our government is doing to Julian Assange right now, who has hid out in the British Embassy in London for the last dozen years after publishing a slew of government documents that made our government look idiotic, which admittedly isn't very difficult. (The British High Court ruled that our government could extradite him, but he's appealing.) And Mr. Assange ain't the only one: our government convicted drone whistleblower Daniel Hale under the Espionage Act. More than 20 years after the "war on terror" began, we continue to let our government oppress those good citizens who expose governmental wrongdoing. And we must stop that.

Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 445, the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act. Currently the FDA-approved drug buprenorphine can cut opioid-related deaths in half, but folks who need it face obstacles they can't do anything about, because our laws limit how many patients a doctor can treat and force them to jump through unnecessary bureaucratic hoops; the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act would remove these barriers. Buprenorphine is itself a narcotic, which is why our government put these obstacles up in the first place, and folks do get high with it, but the bill doesn't hand the drug out on the corner, but allows doctors to dispense it more easily. Seems to me I'd put up with the small potential for abuse if I knew I could keep more good Americans from dying, and give them a chance at a better life.

Restore the Fourth helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5524/S. 2957, the Protecting Our Data at the Border Act, which would, as its title suggests, limit our government's ability to access your personal data at the border. The bill would require that our government get a warrant for that info -- warrants, how quaint! -- and it would also prevent our government from simply denying you entry (or delaying your entry for more than four hours) simply because you've refused to hand over your personal data without a warrant. Plus our government would have to destroy any data seized in violation of the bill (and your rights). The bill provides other protections as well, and we deserve them. It's simple: if they want to investigate us, they have to get a warrant. That's only worked for hundreds of years.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4194, the People's Response Act. If you've heard this is a "defund the police" bill, tell folks it's not -- it's a bill that stops using police like Swiss Army knives, demanding anything and everything of them rather than sending people to deal with problems (like mental health and drug addiction issues) that they're actually trained to deal with. The bill would establish grants so that local governments can create better approaches to these issues, and it would give the folks most impacted by these issues a bigger voice in the creation of these approaches. Police shootings went down 13% in 2021, and cities like Orlando that stopped sending police to deal with mental health issues helped drive that change. It's the kind of change we could make happen all over America, if we but have the will.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act. You may have heard that our USPS Board of Governors held an "emergency meeting" to install a pro-DeJoy Chair, not long after postal workers demanded Mr. DeJoy's removal as Postmaster General. Frankly I suspect a lawsuit will discover that the Board can't produce the "emergent" situation that "required" the meeting, but in the meantime, how about we pass a bill that'll actually solve the service issues Mr. DeJoy is making worse? All of our Postal Service's financial problems stem from being forced to prepay retirement benefits 80 years in advance; the Postal Service Reform Act would repeal that mandate. And then, to quote a famous philosopher, problem solved! If we have the will, that is.

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."

Around the table: exploding lies about inflation, law and order, and COVID.

Matt Stoller says about 60% of the inflation hike comes from rising corporate profits. How does he know? Long story short: inflation is five percentage points higher than it was in 2019, and the sharp spike in corporate profits probably accounts for three of those five percentage points -- and n.b. we have investment managers on the record saying that they want to find corporations with "pricing power," a power you don't have unless you also have monopoly power. Thus inflation isn't just a thing that happens, but a thing people with unearned power make happen. You'll also understand "why economists tend to dislike rules against profiteering" -- because "(p)rice gouging, they believe, transmits important information." Well, as long as we have "important information," it must be OK that people get hurt! (And seriously, why do we listen to Larry Summers? Like the proverbial fool who thinks everything's a nail because all he's got is a hammer, Mr. Summers's one solution to every problem is STOP ALLZ TEH GUBMINT SPENDINGZ!!!!)

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson says his administration will prosecute anyone who might have helped the St. Louis Post-Dispatch expose a massive security issue in a state website. Well, waaaaaaaaaah -- I mean, if you don't want to be embarrassed, don't earn embarrassment, and blowing the whistle on a state security issue ain't the same as "attempt(ing) to steal personal information and harm Missourians." Hate to beat a dead horse, but this is what happens when Democrats don't run economic populist candidates -- know-nothing, do-nothing right-wingers like Mike Parson coast to re-election.

Robyn Pennachia at Wonkette describes the mercurial rise of an anti-abortion Missouri state legislator who, our "liberal" media tell us, listens to Lizzo and Beyoncé and watches The West Wing, and I must admit that I, too, have long found it tiresome that our "liberal" media outlets go mining for the "unexpected" personal traits of right-wingers. It has the effect of "normalizing extreme viewpoints," as Ms. Pennachia says, and I wouldn't expect any right-winger to be impressed that "Okie from Muskogee" and "The Fighting Side of Me" are two of my favorite Merle Haggard songs (though neither one is "Branded Man" or "Uncle Lem."

Now an Oklahoma legislator, with obviously no intimate knowledge of Texas's notorious anti-abortion law, not only wants to give parents the "right" to demand that school libraries remove a book, but give them the "right" to "earn" a $10,000 bounty for every day the school doesn't comply. None of these efforts should survive even cursory legal scrutiny -- seriously, have none of them have ever heard of standing to sue? -- but perhaps a few authors will get a boost in their book sales if they get banned in Oklahoma. Why, authors could even try to get their Oklahoma buddies to demand that a book gets banned and then split the bounty! These right-wingers never think anything through.

J. Alexander Navarro at The Conversation reminds us that when folks got tired of wearing masks and social distancing in the 1918 flu pandemic, they paid and paid and paid. Today's lazy, entitled right-wingers won't listen to that, so maybe they'll listen to this: people don't actually want to fuck you as much as you think, so maybe you're not losing out all that much if you cover up that mug of yours.

Finally, Matt Novak at Gizmodo runs down "Fox News' Worst Lies About Covid-19 From 2021." I was actually disappointed to hear that Fox had peddled the BIG GUMMINTZ LYINGZ ABOUTZ TEH DEATHZ!!!! lie (which lie depends on a misunderstanding about the difference between reported deaths and confirmed deaths, not to mention the difference between correlation and causation), because when a relative parroted it to me for the first time I thought maybe it came from some YouTube "celebrity," not plain old rubbish-peddling Fox News. This is why we demand that our cable corporations stop carrying Fox News.

Action: concerning press freedom, voting rights, weapons sales, "Grinch bots," and pregnant workers.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act so our Executive branch can't keep abusing it, tell your Senators to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act, the Stopping Grinch Bots Act, and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to reform the Espionage Act, so that our government can't use it to put journalists in jail. Yes, that's what Julian Assange is, regardless of whether or not you agree with him! And that's what releasing the Wikileaks papers was, too, and if we're going to put him in jail for that, then we should have put Daniel Ellsberg in jail for releasing the Pentagon Papers, and nobody's in favor of that, are they? I must say I find it disheartening to find President Biden continuing the unfortunate trend under President Obama of using the Espionage Act to punish truth-tellers, be they journalists or whistleblowers from within the Executive branch. American democracy demands more of President Biden, just as it demands more of us.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to vote on S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act, this month. Especially now that Democrats have actually snuffed out the shutdown and debt limit dramas! And easy as it is to make fun of Joe Manchin's objections to the For the People Act, his Freedom to Vote Act is about as good -- it gets rid of ethics provisions I wonder why! but it adds provisions that would keep states from hijacking the people's will during elections, as many states have moved to do this year. And early voting for 15 days in all states, same-day voter registration, making Election Day a national holiday, clamping down on partisan gerrymandering, restoring ex-felons' voting rights, and restricting dark money campaign contributions are all good works. So let's make our Senators do them.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4718, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act. In the wake of our government selling over $100 billion in weapons to nations we know abuse the rights of their citizens, like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Philippines, the Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act would allow our President to impose sanctions against any nation that breaks international human rights law, and that sure seems prudent -- I mean, you wouldn't want to be an accessory to someone else's genocide, would you? The bill would also establish a Commission on Atrocity Accountability and Human Rights, which would be able to supply Presidents with the information they'd need to determine human rights violations and impose sanctions. How would this bill's opponents object? Probably by yammering on about "socialism."

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5263/S. 3276, the Stopping Grinch Bots Act. What are "Grinch bots"? They're pieces of software that roam the internet and buy up all the most popular items, so they can resell them at a high markup. Nice work if you can get it! Actually, since you're not a Grinch-bot -- and, very likely, you're not someone who writes Grinch-bots -- you can't get it, and more to the point, you can't get something nice for your nephew for Christmas this year because some bot has already bought it up and now wants twice as much as it paid for it. In a time of supply-chain bottlenecks caused by COVID, this ain't exactly what you need this holiday season. But Congress has done this kind of thing before, with 2016's Better Online Ticket Sales Act, so they can do it again.

Finally, the ACLU helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. We've been trying to get this passed for years, since too many bosses fire pregnant workers, won't hire pregnant workers, or make their pregnant workers' lives miserable; the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would prevent bosses from doing any of these things, by forcing them to make, and I quote, "reasonable accommodations" to their pregnant workers. Note well the word "reasonable," for when some right-wing prick rants about Big Gummint letting workers spend their entire shift in the bathroom, which the bill does not allow, because it is not a "reasonable" accommodation. Our House passed this bill in May by a wide margin, but the bill still needs a vote before the whole Senate, so let's prompt them to do that.

Around the table: from prayer apps to justice served.

"Prayer apps are flooding the market," announces Dorian Llywelyn at The Conversation, "but how well do they work?" If you think of praying as something you do on your own anyway, with only you and God around, you might be tempted to answer "not too well," although admittedly that's not all of us and folks have been spending more time alone than they'd like these days. Fr. Llywelyn sees both utilities and limits to prayer apps, but comes down more on the "limits" side, and I agree, skeptical as I am of attempts to achieve community through social media that don't necessarily involve achieving community in real space-time, and I rather suspect that if you just need reminding to pray -- hey, life gets busy! -- you've already got an alarm app on your smartphone that can help you with that.

Catalina Jamarillo at FactCheck.org patiently negotiates how "Viral Posts Misuse VAERS Data to Make False Claims About COVID-19 Vaccines." VAERS stands for "Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System," where folks have reported side effects after receiving vaccines for 30 years, but here's the thing: some haters use raw, unverified data to claim that vaccines cause much more harm than they actually do, when literally anyone can submit a claim, and frankly, haters don't even read these claims very closely -- LOOKZ ATZ ALLZ TEH DEATHZ!!!! meaning even less when, for all we know, the one who "passed away in their sleep" after getting the vaccine was ancient. Whenever you hear some guy bellowing "do your own research!" you can be pretty sure he has no idea how to do actual research.

Melvin Goodman at Counterpunch tells us "Why There Are So Few Whistleblowers." Because you'll ruin your life would, I suspect, be your first answer, but it's good to stare at the wreckage a little longer, and list the reasons your life will be ruined: because our "liberal" media will attack you, because you can count on military and intelligence agencies to actively conspire against you, because the last two Presidents (not just Trump!) have waged war on the Inspectors General who would receive your whistleblower complaints, and because today's Senators care little about protecting whistleblowers from retaliation. And I'm beyond tired of media knuckleheads charge a whistleblower with "narcissism," while permitting all manner of actual narcissism to spew forth from the mouths of politicians.

When I read that some House Republicans think "(p)eople need to get a thicker skin" is a proper response to Rep. Gosar's censure over posting a "satirical" snuff faux-anime in which his avatar kills two other avatars belonging to President Biden and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, I can only respond "well, you're one to talk!" Republicans who want us to "move on" from January 6 and "learn to take a joke" when threatened with decapitation have spent the last year whining so much about having to wear a mask, having to get a vaccine, and not being allowed on the House floor packing heat that they need their own diaper-changing stations. Which they wouldn't complain about, I'm sure, until an actual mother with an actual toddler needed to use it to change an actual diaper, at which point it would become TEH NANNYZ STATEZ!!!!!

Finally, we achieved a measure of justice in the Ahmaud Arbery verdict, as a jury found all three of his killers guilty of multiple felony murder counts, and by now you've probably heard 50 times that this verdict would never have come about without that video getting shared, and while that's true, we should also contemplate how many Ahmaud Arberys died 50 years ago when citizens were not able to carry high-quality video cameras in their pockets; the era where "everyone's a filmmaker" isn't entirely a bad thing. Moreover, we need to stop qualifying victories by saying "but it never would have happened if not for the activism," because we should be activists all the time.

Action: concerning government spying, war on Yemen, voting rights, whistleblowers, Social Security, and our FCC.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the USA PATRIOT Act, end our military support for the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Whistleblower Program Improvement Act, and the Social Security 2100 Act, and tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's two FCC nominees. 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 repeal the USA PATRIOT Act. 20 damn years old, the PATRIOT Act is, and what has it done? Nothing, except make us less free. How do I know? Because we already had tools to prevent 9.11; Tha Bush Mobb just failed to do it, and when someone fails to use the tools they've got, you don't just give them more tools. Particularly tools that let our government spy on us without a warrant and without probable cause, in defiance of our Constitution! And those who say the PATRIOT Act has stopped terrorist attacks won't name them, because of "national security." You can say you did anything but can't prove it because of "national security"! It's stupid, and we need to stop it.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to end our military involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. President Biden's taken a few steps in this direction, but not enough, and previous bills didn't get a vote, hence we resort to the "attach amendment to defense authorization bill" method, since Congress has to pass a defense authorization bill. And this bill relates to defense, so brook no IRRELEVANTZ AMENDMENTZ!!!! arguments from haters. That amendment Rep. Russell (E-OK) tried to attach to the 2016 defense bill, which would have established a "religious" "conscience" exception so any employer can discriminate against anyone who might give them gay cooties? That's an irrelevant amendment, right there. Make sure you spell out the difference. Haters don't care, but other, more reasonable folks will.

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. Also, Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to dump the filibuster in order to get them passed, since a Republican filibuster is literally all that stands between these bills and their passage. I'm old enough to remember when Voting Rights Act reauthorization sailed through Congress with almost no opposition -- actually, so are you, since it was 2006! Now, no Republicans will support the fight against gerrymandering, dark money, and other forms of vote suppression, while only one (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) will support the fight to put some teeth back into the Voting Rights Act. Luckily, America has us to fight these battles, so let's fight them.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4107/S. 2055, the IRS Whistleblower Program Improvement Act. Currently the dysfunction of the whole IRS whistleblower process is so bad that it takes our IRS a decade to process individual cases, and on quite a few occasions whistleblowers have died before that could happen. The IRS Whistleblower Program Improvement Act would give whistleblowers more protections under the law and make sure they get paid more quickly -- there's nothing wrong with getting paid for the corruption you dime out, particularly since you stand a good chance of being unemployable after you blow the whistle. And you want the IRS Whistleblower program to work, because you want to bring tax cheats to justice. Tax cheats hurt everyone, after all.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act. The Social Security 2100 Act would increase benefits for seniors and better fund Social Security's trust fund. It would increase benefits by, well, paying out more, but also by calculating inflation in a way that reflects seniors' real lives (i.e., by conceding that seniors face enough fixed costs that they can't just switch to a cheaper option whenever they feel like it). And it would better fund the trust fund by imposing the payroll tax to income over $400,000. Don't brook all the hand-wringing of "moderates" who want a "grand bargain" that increases revenue but cuts benefits. We deserve better than that, and the Social Security 2100 Act would do better.

Finally, Battle for the Net helps you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's two FCC nominees. It's about time he nominated them, because our FCC has a lot of important work to do, especially since the internet has been more essential to our civilization during this pandemic than ever before (and more than we'd like, I would think). I hate to have to say it, but we're actually lucky that Democrats hold the Senate, because a McConnell Senate wouldn't even hold hearings on these nominees right now. That leads me to my next worry: that a Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema would try to burnish their "independent" credentials by stymying a critical Biden nominee! Paranoid? Perhaps. But that's why we communicate our will, though -- to forestall at least some of the ridiculous dramas that hurt good Americans and injure our civilization.

Action: concerning securities fraud, worker rights, social media, data privacy, Presidential appointees, and corporate news.

Long story short: tell our SEC to investigate Donald Trump's latest media organization, tell Starbucks to stop interfering with its workers' unionization efforts, tell our government to investigate Facebook for law-breaking, tell our FTC to protect Americans' data privacy, tell our Senators to confirm two Biden nominees to our FCC, and tell AT&T to stop funding the One America News (sic) Network. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Sum of Us helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to investigate the creation of the "Trump Media and Technology Group." Not because of "politics" or "irrational hatred," but because, frankly, the whole exercise looks like a scam designed to defraud investors. And it's no use shrugging and saying ho ho ho these people deserve to lose their money, because the law should protect all of us, otherwise it's not much of a law, is it? This "Trump Media and Technology Group" merged with a shell corporation, claimed it'd make a gazillion dollars, and then told Trump votaries to invest their life savings -- and voila! The stock price went through the roof, and now they don't have to do any work. Kinda like all his other doings, now that I think about it. So it at least merits an investigation.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Starbucks to stop trying to stamp out its workers' efforts to organize for better pay and working conditions. Buffalo Starbucks workers are trying to unionize as we speak, and Starbucks has responded in exactly the manner you thought they would -- with intimidation, mandatory propaganda meetings, and store closings. I've been in plenty of Starbucks with not enough workers to handle the volume, sp why shouldn't they unionize for better pay and working conditions? Do they not deserve our respect? It wasn't that long ago that Americans looked down on factory workers and their "unearned" prosperity (which was mainly their children's prosperity); now that they're almost all gone we idealize them. Let's not one day tell that sad story about today's workers!

MoveOn and the American Economic Liberties Project help you tell our government to investigate Facebook executives for their potential law-breaking. Which might not be confined to inflating advertising stats and then lying about them to investors, but may also include private discussions to deceive investors, clients, and regulators, as two investor lawsuits allege and which Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's documents also support. I guess Mr. Zuckerman, who's not even 40 yet, will one day say that he didn't know he was breaking the law because this was the first time he was a billionaire. The Buddhists may smile upon that explanation, but I won't, and our laws shouldn't, either. I mean, fraud is fraud, and if you commit fraud, you should pay the price.

Access Now helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to enact privacy rules that would protect Americans from the greed and venality of social media corporations (among others). You'll recall that our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) enacted pretty good data privacy rules in 2016 -- and that the Republican Congress, apparently unable to tolerate any attempt to tell a corporation not to hurt people, repealed those rules in a "resolution of disapproval," which also forbade our FCC from ever revisiting the issue. But that resolution doesn't apply to our FTC -- different letters! And even the Trump FTC fined Facebook $5 billion for privacy violations, so it has not merely a role in justice but some practice in extracting it. And President Biden's FTC is a vast improvement on Mr. Trump's.

Both Free Press and Fight for the Future help you tell your Senators to confirm President Biden's two new FCC nominees. Now our FCC can do its work; previously it had only four Commissioners, guaranteeing 2-2 deadlocks on every conceivable issue; President Biden has essentially appointed Jessica Rosenworcel (whose term would otherwise expire in January) to a full term as FCC Commissioner -- a position she has filled on an acting basis this year -- and former Media Access Project executive director Gigi Sohn to the position left vacant by former FCC Chair Ajit Pai's resignation this past January 20. Without five Commissioners, our FCC can't do very much business, and much business awaits it, chiefly the possibility of net neutrality's reinstatement and the resulting increased ability to stop big telecom corporations from harming consumers. So let's get that done.

Finally, both the Juggernaut Project and Common Cause help you tell AT&T to stop its financial enabling of the right-wing "news" network OAN. As you no doubt know, AT&T actually wanted a new right-wing news network that could compete with Fox News; why on Earth anyone would actually want such a thing is a mystery that will forever befuddle me, but that's why we have the "news" network that constantly yammers on about how Democrats "stole" the 2020 election from Donald Trump by getting seven million more votes. They're no better on any other issue facing Americans today, and even their founder and CEO will tell you, if you put enough liquor in him, that OAN wouldn't survive without AT&T funding. Seems to me there's a starve-the-best mandate waiting to be enacted here. But only if we get in their grills about it.

Action: concerning voting rights, social media, prison phone rates, plastic pollution, and worker safety.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, and the Protecting America's Workers Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Left Action and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act. By now you may know that the Freedom to Vote Act would authorize early voting for 15 days in all states, enact same-day voter registration, make Election Day a national holiday, clamp down on partisan gerrymandering, restore ex-felons' voting rights, and restrict dark money campaign contributions; you may not know that it would prevent states from interfering in elections so that a particularly party can "win" elections when their candidates get fewer votes. So ignore the right-wing rubbish about how "states should be allowed to run their own elections." If they're going to run them badly, then our federal government needs to step in.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. I know, Republicans blocked the bill yesterday, but that's one reason we pressure them -- so they know there will be consequences to their actions. Unless they think "voting against me" is a "terrorist act" or something. I wish I were kidding about that! I think we will be there soon! Anyway, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore our Justice Department's ability to stop states and localities with an established record of vote suppression from suppressing the right to vote any further. That's any state and locality with such a record -- you know, for when right-wingers try to tell you "the South has changed." When no one's brought up the South!

Public Citizen also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. Normally I blanche when I see bills with the words "innovation" and "choice" in their title, but this one's pretty good -- it would prevent big online platform corporations from preferencing their own products, or discriminating against others' products, if the result "would materially harm competition on the covered platform." All monopolistic practices, you may notice! I believe Amazon is in court for this stuff as we speak, but I can think of other big tech corporations that should be shaking in their boots, like Facebook and Google. Or how about Apple? You can only use the "uniqueness" of your operating system as an excuse for so long! At least, that's how it should be. So let's make it be.

Color of Change helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1541, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act. S. 1541 would make our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) cap what big telecom corporations can charge prisoners and/or their families for staying in touch over the phone. So that prisoners and their families can afford them! Currently these big telecoms can charge an arm and a leg for these calls, which is not only cruel, but also reduces the possibility that prisoners will stay out of jail once they get out of jail, and I believe every civilized person works toward prisoner rehabilitation. The only ones who don't, I presume, are the private prison corporation lackeys who love "repeat customers." But they're not civilized. But they don't get all the say around here.

Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2238/S. 984, the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act. It's not just about us breaking free from plastic pollution, it's also about the world's marine wildlife, who cannot afford well-heeled lobbyists arguing for their protection. The plastic corporations have big lobbies, but the hermit crab has us, and that's going to have to be enough. Besides which, a lot of animals harmed by plastic pollution can find their way to your dinner plate sooner or later, and if you didn't feel the harm before, you will then. And anyway, you probably did feel it before then -- a World Wildlife Fund/University of Australia-Newcastle study famously told us we ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic weekly -- but you just may not have known it. Now you know, and you can act.

Finally, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2876, the Protecting America’s Workers Act. The bill would strengthen reporting requirements for workplace injuries and stiffen penalties for workplace safety violations, but it would also expand whistleblower protections, particularly for workers who won't undertake obviously dangerous tasks and those who help inspectors find workplace violations. Maybe this bill doesn't excite people, and big corporations will call it a "job-killer," but this is exactly the kind of bill that could help you out a lot if you get hurt at your workplace because of some boss's negligence. And if this bill passes, employers also won't be able to get away with hurting you just because you're a "consultant" or a "contractor" or a "temp," either. So let's get this done.

Action: concerning war, whistleblowers, police, and "fraudits."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs), protect utility grid whistleblowers, demilitarize our police, and end qualified immunity, and tell Pennsylvania state legislators to stop whining about the 2020 election and reject any proposed "fraudit" thereof. 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.

Defending Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 2391, the National Security Powers Act. As you know, the last four U.S. Presidents have used the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations to Use Military Force (or AUMFs) as excuses to launch unconstitutional military adventures at will -- but S. 2391 would repeal both those AUMFs, and about damn time, too. S. 2391 would also put more constraints on future AUMFs -- among other things, it would cut off funding for new military adventures after 20 days unless Congress approves them, and it would sunset all future AUMFs after two years. And then, with some diligence and oversight, we can get back to ensuring Congress declares the wars, not the President. Remember: "hamstringing the President's ability to act" is a feature of our Constitution, not a bug!

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to extend whistleblower protections to workers who maintain our electric grid. That grid, as you might imagine, is suffering under the weight of climate change weather, and it's also like a big ice cream cone to folks who would want to terrorize good Americans -- and I want you to imagine other Americans, not foreigners, as the folks who would want to terrorize you, since that's likely how it'll be. And yet electric grid workers face retaliation if they report trouble on the grid -- even if they report, say, wildfire-related trouble. You imagine that you go through life doing the right thing, and standing up when the situation calls for it, right? In reality, most of us decide that losing our job and our family suffering isn't worth it. And that's why we need to better protect the people who do stand up.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell our government to demilitarize our police. As I've said before, those right-wingers who think of Nazism whenever they confront a vaccine mandate or a sign telling them to wear a mask inside a store should more closely contemplate the spectre of police officers routinely using grenade launchers on protestors. Of course, many right-wingers have already contemplated this, and have decided that militarizing our police is necessary to the degree they use tear gas and rubber bullets on Those People. But it is entirely possible that, in the near future, our government will start going after the folks who bomb abortion clinics and try to overthrow our government, and it may take time, but I think many right-wingers will then see the utility of maybe not making every cop into a walking time bomb.

The Daily Kos Liberation League also helps you tell your Congressfolk to end "qualified immunity" for police officers. It's very, very hard to bring a bad cop to justice these days, not so much because of unions (even though other liberals say so!), but because our courts make it almost prohibitively difficult via the entirely court-created doctrine of "qualified immunity," whereby you can't bring a bad cop to justice unless your case almost exactly resembles a previous case which brought a bad cop to justice. And how many cases are almost exactly like others? This places the burden of proof rather far above "beyond a reasonable doubt" and into the rarefied air of "ain't never happening." And the good folks who've had their brother or sister or mother or father or son or daughter shot for brandishing a cellphone or a water gun deserve more than that.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to reject any attempt at a 2020 election "fraudit" like the one they had in Arizona. When they're not whining about the utter absence of evidence pointing to widespread voter fraud that would have, say, wiped out President Biden's eight-million vote lead across the nation, they're saying things like if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear! Actually, that's not even true: you have the loss of taxpayer money, for one thing; you have the shame of throwing away that money for bellyaching, for another; and you also have voting machines that have to be decertified and replaced (also at taxpayer cost!) because the people conducting the audit have no fucking clue what they're doing, like the Cyber Ninjas in Maricopa County, Arizona. When will Republicans feel shame over what they've done? When they look around and find no one supports their works. So let's help bring that about. It'll be better for all of us.

Around the table: in which corporations come up with totally non-novel objections to whistleblower law reform.

When I read that some big banksters are simply "opting out" of a process to forgive Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) loans, leaving some of those borrowers with no recourse for relief, I asked myself who the hell greenlighted that? And I was not surprised to learn that, though the Trump Administration's PPP was a pile of dung that delivered half a trillion dollars of your money mostly to big corporations, the Biden Small Business Administration created a program for smaller borrowers to get relief directly from the agency -- but allowed the big banksters to opt in to participating in that program, which means if said bankster facilitated your loan, they can still block you from getting relief from our SBA! Still, let's remember that banksters are evil -- Chase's hack response to The Intercept made sure to mention that their loan-relief application process takes less than 10 minutes, which will mean nothing when they say no.

Ana Popovich at Whistleblower Network News details how actual false claims by big corporations derailed the inclusion of amendments to the False Claims Act in the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" earlier this month. Even though, as I mentioned yesterday, the amendments would actually have raised revenue, and the amendments have actual bipartisan support in the Senate! What were those false claims? Oh, you know -- targeting corruption would "raise health care costs," the kind of excuse they pull out whenever we contemplate doing the right thing, and that "the burden of proof would shift to the defendant," which I can assure you is nowhere in the False Claims Amendments Act, where those amendments now sit, awaiting Congressional action. Greed, like rage, is a hell of a drug.

I'm just not that impressed anymore when conservatives notice that banning mask mandates isn't a conservative thing to do. Even Charlie Sykes's most salient point -- that states aren't being "conservative" when they prevent smaller governmental bodies and private corporations from mandating mask-wearing -- is essentially the same argument I've made for damn near 20 years now. I guess it's possible I'm being too hard on him, though I would also ask Mr. Sykes how he squares his conservatism with his support for former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whose own notorious addiction to corporate welfare is also quite anti-conservative.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is probably right to declare (before a meeting of evangelists, how dramatic) that his fate will be one of three things: "being arrested, killed or victory," although I'd caution against the notion that it only has to be one of the three -- he could get arrested and get back into politics a few years down the line, as Silvio Berlusconi could tell him, amirite? I'd be miserable with the third option, perfectly happy with the first, and though of course I endeavor never to wish death on another human being -- even a 66-year-old billionaire asshole can redeem himself through good works! -- folks like Mr. Bolsonaro sure do test my patience on this matter.

Speaking of redemption and the difficulty thereof, Proud Boys leader Henry "Enrique" Tarrio, who proudly burned a Black Lives Matter flag in late December and cheered on the January 6 attempted coup from afar, now says he's sorry he did the things for which he's going to jail for five months. But even if you're not cursed with a close attention to diction -- you can apologize "profusely," but you can't be "profusely" sorry! That's not how words work! -- you'll still wonder if Mr. Tarrio's "remorse" is more because he got caught and he knows now there'll be consequences. He shouldn't fret, though -- he'll meet a lot of like-minded people in jail, and not all of them will be prisoners.

Finally, as Republicans loudly shriek about the "border crisis," and happily hand you a pile of "facts" that really require context -- if you think 2021 is bad, check out almost every year between 1983 and 2001! -- we should really let this whole concept of a "border crisis" rest in a deep, deep grave. Any "gang" of immigrants take over Laredo, Sierra Blanca, Tombstone, or San Clemente? Have we had to dispatch soldiers to retake these or any other towns so we can reinstall duly-elected local governments? No? Then people need to STFU about a "border crisis," just as they need to remember that 9.11 didn't lead to the installation of President bin Laden and thus also didn't represent an "existential threat." Contrary to what you've heard, Americans generally aren't soft -- but the folks who whine about immigration sure are!

Action: concerning evictions, Democrats, Medicare, taxes, whistleblowers, and prisons.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to enact an eviction moratorium, tell "Wall Street Democrats" to stop trying to kill the reconciliation bill, tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate its own drug prices, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, pass the False Claims Amendments Act, and end slavery in American prisons. 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.

Now that our Supreme Court (by the expected 6-3 margin) has ruled the most recent Biden eviction ban unconstitutional, the Center for Popular Democracy helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact an eviction ban at least through December. Right-wingers will continue to shriek about TEH LANDLORDZ!!!!!, but landlords can weather bad times better than renters, and anyway that's beside the point -- the point is that our government enacted renter relief in the American Rescue Plan Act that hasn't gotten to renters yet, so it would be evil of us to let people get thrown out in the streets before we've made sure they got all the help they could get. That won't convince right-wingers, but nothing does anymore, except DIDDLEZ MY RAGEZ GLANDZ!!!!!

Now that our House has passed the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint, the National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell the notorious "Wall Street Democrats" to stop trying to sabotage it. Remember: when they say "the price tag's too high," what they really mean is "we don't want rich people and corporations to pay more taxes," even though wanting rich people and corporations to pay more taxes is the majority position in poll after poll after poll and it ain't even close. We could have better Medicare, lower drug prices, paid family/medical leave, better jobs for care workers, and real tax relief for real American working families, except that for some Democrats, big donors are more important than anything. They need us to remind them whom they actually work for.

Speaking of lower drug prices, the aptly-named Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to give Medicare the power to negotiate its own drug prices. It isn't just a good idea, it's a funding mechanism! Seriously, even the right-wing Mercatus Institute told us a few years ago that letting Medicare negotiate its own drug prices would save the taxpayer over $80 billion annually; times that by ten and you've got $800 billion, which all by itself is more than one-fifth of the aforementioned reconciliation bill's $3.5 trillion price tag. Also, it is a really good idea, since Medicare is the biggest buyer of prescription drugs in America and can use its leverage to reduce drug prices for everyone. We deserve good things from our government, but we won't get them unless we speak out.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. The American Rescue Plan Act helped deliver $250 or $300 monthly checks to mailboxes and bank accounts all over America, so of course some right-wing Democrats want to end it; I guess they're just more comfortable going hat-in-hand to some big donor who didn't earn his millions or billions than they are running on, you know, actual accomplishments. If they really want to choose the guy who gilds the plumbing in his 19th vacation home over the kid who got lifted out of poverty, they can go right ahead. But we have to speak out so that if they choose unwisely, they'll get hurt at the polls. And anyone who puts big donors over poor children deserves that hurt.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2428, the False Claims Amendments Act. The original False Claims Act helps our government go after federal contractors (among others) who defraud the taxpayer; and the qui tam provision (literally hundreds of years old, don't let anyone tell you any differently!) has helped numerous whistleblowers get a part of what our government is able to recover; S. 2428 would strengthen anti-retaliation provisions and prevent judges from setting an arbitrarily higher standard for proof in fraud cases. Despite this bill's bipartisan sponsor list, the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" didn't include it, even though it would raise revenue. But that suggests that we need to be more vocal about it.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end slavery in American prisons. Specifically, you'd ask Congress to amend the 13th Amendment -- which allows slavery "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" -- and then apply our minimum wage laws to prisoners. We'll see how lucrative private prisons are after that! If you're thinking if they didn't want to be slaves they shouldn't have committed crimes, you're making a number of errors in your thinking: one, that any slavery is tolerable, anywhere, at any time; two, that anyone who commits a crime thinks like that; and three (and perhaps most important), that we're only supposed to punish prisoners, not rehabilitate them. So let's not hold ourselves hostage to cruelty.

Action: concerning war, privacy, women's health, whistleblowers, and corporate spying.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the National Security Powers Act, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act, the Whistleblower Protection Improvements Act, and the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale 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.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2391, the National Security Powers Act. S. 2391 would repeal all the authorizations to use military force (or AUMFs) relating to war in the Middle East, give Congress more authority over arms sales to other countries, and reform the National Emergencies Act, presumably so the next dunderhead who wants to build a border wall can't abuse it like the last one did. And if anyone tells you this would hamstring the President's ability to act, tell them that's a feature, not a bug. The President is only supposed to lead armies into battle after Congress declares war, not whenever the President feels like it.

Restore the Fourth helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1628, the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act. S. 1628 would ban targeted advertising to children, require that internet corporations get consent before collecting data from children, allow parents and children to more easily delete personal data from private data brokers, and mandate a whole lot more transparency about this issue than we have now. We have the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, but that became law over 20 years ago, and a lot's happened since then -- it's a lot easier to get targeted ads now, for example. S. 1628 would help update COPPA for modern times. Our kids deserve that, after all.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act. The bill would essentially legalize abortion all across the land, in anticipation of our Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, which action would allow the states to regulate abortion again, and would make it illegal for states to restrict access to abortion in the ways they've done it over the last decade. The most recent egregious example? The Texas law that lets literally anyone sue an abortion provider for performing an abortion! Never mind proving standing to sue, or even that harm was done to you! A court will strike that part of the Texas law down for those reasons fairly soon, but why make good Americans wait?

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1065/S. 1486, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would require bosses to make reasonable accommodations for workers who get pregnant -- that means more sit-down assignments wherever possible, more bathroom breaks, no firing of workers just for getting pregnant or refusing to hire workers who are just because they're pregnant. I shudder to think of the "objections" Republicans will throw up against this bill. I suspect they'll mostly be TEH TRIAL LAWYERZ!!!!! and TEH BOSSEZ CAN'TZ DOEZ TEH BOSSINGZ ANYMOREZ!!!!!, both of which will be revealed to be utter horsedoodle to anyone who reads the bill, or to anyone who's ever been fired because their boss wouldn't get them a chair.

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2988, the Whistleblower Protection Improvement Act. Folks who blow the whistle on our government's corruption deserve our admiration, because they risk their careers and their personal lives when they do so; people who think they just live off the fat of a huge reward have obviously never blown the whistle on a damn thing in their lives. H.R. 2988 would better protect whistleblowers from retaliation at their jobs -- even if their boss is our President! -- and would give them more access to jury trials and speed up the process of rewarding them (if their whistleblowing merits it), so they can get on with their lives with minimal placing of sharp objects to their wrists after three years of being completely unable to work, just as a for-example. We need their good works, so we need to protect them.

Finally, 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. H.R. 2378/S. 1265 would prevent third-party data broker corporations from selling your personal information to law enforcement personnel, because selling that personal data willy-nilly like that may be lucrative for people who really should go get a real job, but it contravenes our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. If law enforcement wants to get you, they should get a warrant first, but buying up big chunks of data from brokers lets police work around that. And they shouldn't get to work around it! If you're tempted to get all thin-blue-line about this, just imagine police harassing you because some web search you did in 2009 raised their antennae.

Around the table: stupid *is* evil, part 342.

I'd been wondering how jobs legislation would end badly, and now I know: Joe Manchin says he'll basically kill the reconciliation bill by himself if the "bipartisan" "infrastructure" "deal" "falls apart." "When one falls apart, how do you move the other one?" he asks, perhaps hoping we won't answer take everything Republicans said "no" to in one and put it in the other one. Surprise, our leaders have been playing us again; Democrats will do nothing with the power they have -- they'll even squander that massive political victory, the monthly CTC expansion check -- and in a year and a half Republicans will take back Congress, this time with candidates who come right out and say they're fascists. All because Democrats are more afraid of losing big corporate campaign donations than losing elections. (I guess you can call Joe Manchin, especially if you're a constituent. And say I know your secret, perhaps.)

Hoo boy, Ohio Republican Senate candidate/bankster/"flip-flop-flipper" J.D. Vance says maybe parents should get more votes than childless adults. And, of course, they would actually get to vote on their children's behalf! I'm actually not convinced that right-wingers are popping out more children than liberals -- everyone ain't the Duggars, after all, and naming several famous Democrats who don't have children doesn't exactly make a strong argument -- but this is the kind of thing desperate people come up with when they know they can't win arguments on the merits, or, perhaps more precisely, when they can't win vote tallies on the merits. I'm old enough to remember hearing "maybe we should only let property owners vote just like in the old days," so I don't want to hear about this bullshit again. One person, one vote, period, end of, done talking.

Wondering how Israeli corporation NSO managed to create such a nefarious slab of spyware like Pegasus? Look first to Israel's occupation of Palestine, as Yousef Munayyer at Jewish Currents does: "(w)ith an occupied and stateless population of Palestinians under its rule, to which it has granted no citizenship rights or civil liberties, Israel is free to develop, test, and perfect its surveillance technology on millions of unwilling subjects." American corporations would have different constraints, obviously -- though, ironically enough, one probable reason NSO's done so well is not only the nearly $4 billion in American taxpayer money Israel gets from our military, but the fact that Israel gets to spend more of that money on its own manufacturers than any other nation receiving American taxpayer assistance.

As Daniel Hale is about to be sentenced to up to 11 years in prison for blowing the whistle on the drone assassination program, I find myself shaking my head at our government's case against him -- he did it out of "vanity"? Seriously? Knowing his government would hunt him down and that more Americans would hate him than admire him? And hilariously, our government claims the leaks "helped ISIS" even though a former CIA official who reviewed the leaked documents said that, actually, they didn't. Mr. Hale's own words chronicle his shame at having participated in drone strikes, and all I can say is thank the Lord someone in America can still feel shame, and would repent of his sins and attempt to repair the harm they caused and continue to cause.

When I heard that Sen. Tommy Tuberville (S-AL) totally broke the law by failing to report over $1 million in stock trades, some involving corporations with business before the committees he serves on, within 45 days, I actually thought for a moment that the answer to the "stupid or evil?" question might actually have been stupid here, since this is Tommy Tuberville, after all. But then I remembered that stupid is how evil people cover themselves. Besides, even if it was stupid, it's also evil -- evil deeds don't require evil intent. Also, too, stupid is evil.

Finally, Tucker Carlson got an earful from a local resident in a Montana fishing shop, but I was most intrigued by Fox News's reaction: "Ambushing Tucker Carlson while he is in a store with his family is totally inexcusable — no public figure should be accosted regardless of their political persuasion or beliefs simply due to the intolerance of another point of view." We'll set aside the idea that we should "tolerate" lies and drama and hatred, let alone consider them just "another point of view" -- Fox News used to send Jesse Watters out to accost public figures repeatedly back in the day, and it never bothered them then. They don't like being held accountable now? What a surprise! Hey, kids: don't be like Fox News.

Action: concerning gerrymandering, whistleblowing, drug costs, abortion, and discrimination.

Long story short: tell your PA state legislators to pass anti-gerrymandering legislation, and tell your Congressfolk to add strong whistleblower protections to the Climate Risk Disclosure Act, and pass the For the People Act, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act, the Women's Health Protection Act, and the Equality Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Fair Districts PA helps you tell your state legislators to pass SB 222, which would establish a redistricting commission with some teeth in Pennsylvania so that legislators can't gerrymander themselves into unearned power. Two-thirds of good Pennsylvanians support a redistricting commission taking the power to gerrymander away from state legislators, and their number also includes a majority of Republican voters, so I say the voters have spoken here and the legislators should do our will, period, end of. And, while I'm thinking about it, 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 -- which would force every state to use a redistricting commission to redraw districts, rather than let legislators carve out their own personal fiefdoms with Rorschach-shaped districts that exclude single houses from districts. Might as well fight on every front, that's what I say.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to add strong whistleblower protections to H.R. 2570/S. 1217, the Climate Risk Disclosure Act. Big corporations love bragging about how green they are, but the Climate Risk Disclosure Act would actually force those corporations to disclose their investments in fossil fuels to their shareholders -- but without whistleblower protections, corporations will more easily hide such investments, because those who would expose them could be intimidated, fired, or otherwise abused. Whistleblowing is not for the faint of heart; folks who do it resign themselves to years of being unemployed and unemployable until they finally win their case and get some reward for their good works. So we ought to protect them wherever we can.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act. Republicans will whine that it's not "bipartisan," nor does it represent an effort to "compromise," but, as usual with Democratic bills, it is a compromise -- the bill would phase in Medicare drug price negotiation, as a sop to big pharma corporations, I'm sure, and would only require negotiation on 50 such drugs by 2024, and the "negotiated maximum price" might not be that much lower than it is now, at least in the short term. So, if you want H.R. 3 to be better, there's space in the comment block of the petition tool for that. But certainly don't let your loved ones think this is some radical, unrealistic bill. It's certainly much kinder to big pharma than I would be.

The ACLU helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3755, the Women's Health Protection Act. Republicans legislators all over America are passing anti-abortion laws as quickly as they can -- because dealing with the real problems facing their constituents isn't as easy as strutting before the cameras! -- but the WHPA would stop states from outlawing abortion or enacting restrictions on abortion that wind up making abortions nearly impossible to get. Why? Because allowing the continued assaults on abortion rights in America will force women back into being valued as breeders, and nothing else. Anyway, don't want an abortion? Then don't get one. Strange that I have to explain that.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League, People for the American Way, and Ultraviolet all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 5, the Equality Act. One more time: the Equality Act would prevent landlords, banks, and employers from discriminating against gay and transgender folk merely on the basis of being gay or transgender. It would do so by adding gay and transgender folks to the protected classes in the Civil Rights Act, and the Civil Rights Act already has a broad exemption for religious freedom, so don't believe right-wingers when they tell you it's an "unprecedented assault on religious freedom," because it's not. Don't believe right-wingers when they say "well, we should do something about discrimination against gay and transgender folks," either, because they never tell you what that is, and because what we should do about discrimination is already in the Equality Act. If I sound like I have no patience with stupidity, that's because I have no patience with stupidity. So I won't get started about fever dreams of boys becoming girls just so they can dominate in field hockey.

Action: concerning jobs, health care, corporate welfare, D.C. statehood, our Supreme Court, and whistleblowers.

Long story short: tell our President and your Congressfolk to raise the corporate tax rate much higher than some Senators would like; tell your Congressfolk to pass the Medicare for All Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the D.C. Admission Act, and a bill that would add four Justices to our Supreme Court; also tell your Congressfolk to strengthen whistleblower protections for folks who expose money laundering. 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 Congressfolks' phone numbers, or use the email/petition links in the paragraphs below. Good hunting!

Word on the street is Democrats are about to settle for a 25% corporate tax rate, when 28% was already settling, and all I can say is: congratulations, Democrats! You are about to lose the 2022 midterms! Seriously, making corporations pay more is popular, you know, with people, even if it's not popular with big corporate donors. So go ahead and call your Senators and demand a 55% corporate tax rate, just like the one we had in the '50s when we had damn near full employment almost every year. (Daily Kos also helps you demand higher taxes on corporations and the rich.) If you've got an extra minute, call President Biden at 202.456.1111 (or contact him at this web address) and tell him to give up on "negotiating with Republicans." We've watched Republicans "negotiate" for 20 years -- they block everything, they call their opponents "traitors," and they try to overturn elections when the results don't go their way. The only people our President should negotiate with is us.

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. Hopefully, spending the most on health insurance and getting less for it than most other rich nations on Earth is not the kind of thing that makes you you want to yell WE'RE NUMBER ONE! Now's a good time for two reminders: 1) we can fund it by converting the money big corporations already spend on health insurance into an employer-side payroll tax and fund Medicare for All without raising taxes on workers even one penny, and 2) the Democrats who ran in Republican-leaning districts but supported Medicare for All tended to win, and the ones who didn't tended to lose. So brook no ten-dollar-word cowardice from your Congressfolk about this.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2102/S. 1167, the End Polluter Welfare Act. As its name suggests, the End Polluter Welfare Act would repeal handouts to fossil fuel corporations to the tune of $15 billion annually. I suppose the same right-wingers who pretend to hate subsidies "except for these" will turn it around at some point and argue that fossil fuel corporations need subsidies precisely because renewables are catching up to them! Of course, renewables barely pollute, whereas oil and gas drilling befouls our air and water and threatens to make our planet unlivable, so right-wingers still lose. Unless we fail to speak out, that is.

Both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and the League of Conservation Voters help you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 51/S. 51, the D.C. Admission Act, and thus make Washington, D.C. a state. You'd think Republicans would leap at the chance to give D.C. some autonomy, but alas, no -- they'd prefer to dictate to D.C., and they don't want one more Democratic House Rep and two more Democratic Senators in Congress, though, you know, if you were worried about that, you'd figure out how to win there! Also, too, if D.C. were a state, they'd have been able to protect themselves better from the seditionists of January 6. It's all about giving good D.C. residents the same amount of self-determination all our states have; why is that so much to ask?

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support legislation that would add four Associate Justices to our Supreme Court. Meaning our Court would have 13 Justices, not nine, and just so happens America has 13 appellate courts, so now our current Justices won't have to double up. And Congress can-so do this! The number of Supreme Court Justices has fluctuated throughout American history; law sets the current number at nine, not our Constitution, not our Founders. Don't brook any silliness from Republicans about this matter -- they were perfectly happy to have only eight Justices while it suited them.

Finally, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen whistleblower protections for folks who expose money laundering. It's only been a few months that we've had protections for those whistleblowers, but they're not as good as they need to be -- when such folks can face retaliation without recourse to legal avenues, and when our Treasury Department can award whistleblowers as little as one dollar without being challenged, these are not good things. Many whistleblowers will have been out of work for several years and destitute by the time they get that piddling award, so it's important we reward people properly when they put themselves on the line like that. They're helping us be a law-and-order nation, after all.

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 taxing the rich, clean water, demilitarizing our police, paycheck fairness, corporate taxes, and whistleblower rewards.

Long story short: Tell your House Reps to pass the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, the WATER Act, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act; also tell your Congressfolk to close big corporate tax loopholes and strengthen whistleblower rewards. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to get your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links provided below.

H.R. 1459/S. 510, the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, would assess a tax on wealth over $50 million for the first time in America -- households and trusts worth more than $50 million would pay 2% on all their assets over $50 million (meaning the tax would leave their first $50 million alone -- but you know they'll whine about it nonetheless!) and then 3% on assets over $1 billion. Sen. Warren (D-MA) says it'll raise $300 billion annually, and given that billionaires alone have amassed another $1.3 trillion in wealth over this last pandemic year, really, this wealth tax ain't too much to ask of people who should be paying 91% of their income to Uncle Sam. The Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund provides a petition.

H.R. 1352/S. 916, the WATER Act, would start rebuilding our water infrastructure, which would represent a solid investment in one of our most important natural resources, clean water, without which, it's safe to say, we'd have no decent health care in America at all. You can't wash or bathe or disinfect or sterilize with polluted water, after all! Not to mention getting the lead out of all our water pipes will create a lot of jobs for people! I guess Republicans will retort TEH DEFICITZ!!!!!!, but they didn't give one rat's hind quarter about when they were cutting taxes for the rich and for corporations, and whiners always have excuses to avoid doing the right thing. Food and Water Watch provides an email contact tool.

H.R. 1694, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, would limit transfer of military equipment from our Department of Defense to local police departments. I've said this many times: you don't need a drone or a grenade launcher to find murderers and drug dealers -- but you do "need" these things, apparently, to put down protests about your own brutality. Particularly if you're Donald Trump and you want to do a photo-op in front of a church with a Bible in your hand! Seriously, the fact that that moment didn't make 75 million Americans turn against him is our shame as Americans, although admittedly it's more their shame as Trump votaries. And just as we shouldn't try to turn police officers into social workers, we shouldn't turn them into soldiers, either. Restore the Fourth provides the email tool.

H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, now awaits a full House vote; the bill would, like its previous iterations, give women more tools to fight paycheck discrimination, which (despite the Equal Pay Act of 1965) still runs rampant in America, such that women make about 81 cents for every dollar a man makes, when it really should be a dollar for a dollar. The Paycheck Fairness Act would, among other things, prevent employers from disciplining workers for discussing their pay, since that's usually the only way employees find out they're getting shafted. I bet Republicans defend the "free speech" right of bosses to tell their employees what they can't talk about, but do we really want employers to be able to make their employees accomplices in their wage theft? Daily Kos provides the petition.

Did you know that big corporations can pay large amounts of money in class action settlements when they hurt people -- and then turn around and deduct those settlements from their taxes? Yes, this really happens, and it sure hampers us from being a law-and-order nation now, doesn't it? We generally regard punishments as more effective if they hurt, and don't think it's OK because the injured parties are still getting their money, because when corporations get to use their wrongdoing as an excuse to skimp on what they owe on their taxes, we all become injured parties, because that's money that ain't paying cops and ain't keeping the libraries running. So that $26 billion big pharmaceuticals are planning to pay for keeping good Americans addicted to opioids will wind up being yet another windfall -- for them. Penn PIRG provides the email tool, if you don't call your Congressfolk.

Finally, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your House Reps to strengthen the whistleblower protections in the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement (or FIRREA) Act. Currently the law caps whistleblower rewards, which means more whistleblowers won't come forward, and the CARES Act just gave away a couple trillion bucks of our hard-earned taxpayer money -- quite a lot of "small business" money went to national restaurant chains! -- so we've got a more immediate incentive to root out corruption. Don't let your Tea Party uncle describe whistleblowing as a "way for scammers to make money," because whistleblowers go through absolute hell for years while the courts evaluate their complaint -- they usually never work in the same field again, and more than a few don't work at all. They deserve our support.

Action: concerning taxes, internet access, whistleblowing, and pollution.

Chye-Ching Huang at the New York Times proposes a way for President Biden to fund his dream infrastructure bill: simply restore our IRS's ability to collect the taxes big money earners avoid paying! This is a wonderful idea, and not just because our IRS didn't collect some $570 billion in unpaid taxes in 2019, and may face a "tax gap" of $7.5 trillion over the next decade: frankly, if you owe money to our government, you owe it to the American people, and you shouldn't short your friends and neighbors. But our government has enabled this noxious behavior by pointedly underfunding our IRS. It should be hard to argue against "making big money earners pay the taxes they already owe," but in these times, we have to get One Real True and Great President Joe Manchin on board; his phone number is 202.224.3954. He wants that infrastructure bill "paid for," but every dollar in IRS funding brings back $6 in unpaid taxes, per our Treasury Department, so, hey, this could help us meet his goal of getting that bill "paid for." And, hey, we're all about helping people reach their goals!

With the departure of Ajit Pai, our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) is short one commissioner, meaning it only has four, and it's hard to break ties with four -- and since two Commissioners are Democrats and two are Republicans, you're going to have a lot of ties. It's not such a great time for that, though, since millions of good Americans don't have reliable internet access and have never needed it more -- how many millions of kids are going to school over the internet again? How many folks are trying to sign up online for a vaccine as we speak? How many big telecom corporations are imposing data caps to squeeze more money out of good Americans, again, during a pandemic? Hence both Battle for the Net and Demand Progress help you tell our President to nominate an FCC Commissioner who will support good internet policy, and tell your Senators to confirm said individual. And let's have one who'll help establish a net neutrality policy like the Open Internet Order of 2015; maybe you haven't noticed the loss of net neutrality, but like the proverbial frog in a boiling pot, you're not supposed to notice it until it's too late. So we need a good 5th Commissioner.

Meanwhile, S. 409, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (or CFTC) Fund Management Act, would increase funding for whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing in the bankster sector of our economy; the Dodd-Frank law of 2010 created the whistleblower program, but Congress hasn't effectively funded the program in years, and it's about to run out of money. And S. 409's lead sponsor, Iowa's Chuck Grassley, is a Republican; one Republican and two Democrats join him as co-sponsors, and you'd hate to think our Senate would smother this bill in its crib merely because it's actually bipartisan. Regardless, whistleblowers deserve compensation for the law-breaking they find, and don't think some of those guys are making stuff up just so they can steal money themselves -- whistleblowers can count on getting blacklisted and threatened if they come forward, so the number of "frivolous" whistleblower complaints is not only quite small, but, ah, handled by circumstances. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to help protect whistleblowers by passing the CFTC Fund Management Act.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: our Department of Environmental Protection (or DEP) has proposed a rule that would cut methane emissions and other pollutants from oil and gas drilling -- a big deal in a big fracking state like Pennsylvania -- but contains a rather important loophole that a lot of frackers will try to drive a Mack truck through: it would excuse "low-producing" wells from the rule. Maybe that seems logical to you: how much can a "low-producing well" pollute, after all? Problem isn't how much one pollutes, but how much they all pollute all together! Turns out more than half of all methane emissions coming from fossil-fuel operations in the Keystone state come from "low-producing" wells, so the proposed rule wouldn't keep as many pollutants out of our air and water as we'd like. And you can just imagine some big drilling operation deciding to evade regulatory scrutiny entirely by drilling only "low-producing" wells! Hey, if I thought of it, you know they have. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell our DEP to close the "low-producing well" loophole in its proposal to cut methane emissions.

Around the table: in which we confront various Useful Idiots.

Remember when Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) insisted that her yea vote for the notorious 2017 tax "reform" only came after winning some important concessions? Yeah, not so much -- she offered an amendment that would have closed that "carried interest" tax loophole, but then quickly withdrew it, voted yea anyway, and now gets buku bucks from banksters in her re-election effort. Hell of a story to drop less than a week before the election, amirite? And typical of her fake devotion to "bipartisanship."

On the 10th anniversary of the release of the Iraq War Logs via Wikileaks, Brett Wilkins at Common Dreams reminds us that while Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning still face abuse for their whistleblowing, the war's planners still escape punishment for their evil deeds. It's funny, except also not funny, how that works. And if Joe Biden gets elected and gets into that "looking forward" mood, we need to get all law-and-order on him.

Next time you hear that it's no use raising taxes on corporations because they know all the ways to dodge them, you can remind them that corporations often take tax breaks they already think are illegal but know they can run the clock out on the statute of limitations because our IRS doesn't have the money to catch them, as ITEP's Matthew Gardiner does here. In other words, instead of throwing up our hands because corruption is so hard to fight, let's fight corruption. That would be law-and-order of us, wouldn't it?

You've heard that our President walked out of his 60 Minutes interview in a huff? Well, wait until you get a load of how tough that interview wasn't, courtesy Julie Hollar at FAIR. Interviews of Messrs. Biden and Harris were, of course, no better, with all their BUT TEH SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! Personal to those who think it's disrepectful to call our President a "toddler": how about he stops acting like one? We do believe in treating people the way they deserve to be treated, right? Or is that too conservative for today's "conservatives"?

Owner of website that spawned the notorious QAnon conspiracy "theory" also controls a corporation that likely hosts actual child porn websites, meaning he's making money from child porn. Q believers no doubt see this as evidence that said owner has infiltrated the child-sex cabal that just so happens to involve every politician who doesn't agree with our President, and is thus using the cabal against them! Please remember that these folks will be the next Useful Idiots who win back the House for Republicans and rubber-stamp the corporate agenda.

Finally, speaking of Useful Idiots, Jared Kushner is also on a Bob Woodward tape saying, out loud, that our President was "getting the country back from the doctors" in mid-April and, further, replacing them with "more thoughtful people who kind of know their place." Which brilliant plan, as you know, has lately resulted in roughly 80,000 new cases and 1,000 deaths daily. There are many kinds of evil in the world, but perhaps none as bad as ignorant people who are arrogant about it. Hey, I think I said this all the time during the Bush years.

Action: concerning masks, whistleblowers, and government lies.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a national mask mandate. Because wearing a damn mask outside helps slow the spread of COVID-19! And no, right-wingers, it's not about your "freedom," unless by "freedom" you mean "freedom to infect others with a deadly disease." And certainly it's not like Nazis forcing Jews to wear the Star of David! (I mean, we're not all Jews, and if we were, making us wear masks to set us off from other people would be pointless. Right-wingers need to work on their damn similes.) We've coddled these don't-tread-on-me tantrum-throwers for too long, and I, for one, am willing to bring the force of law upon them. Everyone who's thought about the matter knows that masks do what the scientists say they do, and everyone who disagrees merely wishes it weren't true, and they'll latch on to whatever snake oil salesman doesn't sound completely off their rocker. Y'all will let me know if my true feelings aren't coming across here, right? I wouldn't want to be accused of holding back.

Meanwhile, H.R. 4816/S. 2529, the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act, would (as its title suggests) expand whistleblower protections, which currently only extend to those who blow the whistle on wrongdoing directly to our SEC or CFTC; the bill would extend those protections to those who assist in whistleblower investigations. I can't imagine what objections folks would have to that, unless they're of the DESTROYZ ALLZ REGULASHUNZ!!!! variety, or the FRIVULUZ LAWSUITZ!!!! variety. And, as you know, our government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in COVID-19 relief lately, which means hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money (i.e., our money) that could be stolen. Some right-wingers use that as an excuse to say all government programs are awful, but I say you need to have the courage to do right, and that includes punishing those who would subvert your efforts. So the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect taxpayers by passing the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act.

Finally, our Department of Homeland Security (or DHS) has lately proposed reclassifying complaint records as "temporary," which would give our National Archives and Records Administration (or NARA) the power to destroy any records of those complaints within four years of their filing! Our government destroying records of complaints against it -- why, who could find that suspicious? It's almost like they've got something to hide, like, you know, family separation, forced hysterectomies, wrongful deportation, or murder or sexual abuse at concentration camps! Seriously, if you want to be the greatest nation on Earth, you'd better be able to admit and overcome your mistakes, and you'd better be able to repent for your evil works; otherwise, you're not the greatest nation on Earth, but just another country doomed to get lost in the sands of time, and we'd all like to be remembered for the good we did on Earth, right? So Open the Government helps you tell our DHS to scuttle its proposal to censor complaints about its nefarious works.

Action: concerning the HEROES Act, cruelty to immigrants, and Social Security.

You've heard that Democrats and Republicans are "negotiating" another COVID-19 stimulus bill? And you've heard Republicans say Democrats are "blocking" their efforts in some way or other? Don't believe the hype! Our House passed H.R. 6800, the HEROES Act, over four months ago already, and that bill's a good enough COVID-19 stimulus bill -- it would fund states and localities, it would fund COVID-19 testing and tracing, it would repeal hedge fund manager tax cuts, it would extend enhanced unemployment benefits, and it would issue another round of stimulus checks, among other things. So why haven't our Senators passed it? Oh, you know, because it doesn't give big corporations blanket immunity from COVID-19-related lawsuits, it doesn't expand three-martini lunch tax breaks, and it doesn't give Congress the power to gut Social Security without debate. I wish it were more complicated than that, but it's not, such is the intellectual vapidity of our opposition these days. So call your Senators and tell them to pass the HEROES Act. After all, why do they negotiate with each other like they're more important than we are?

Meanwhile, you've also no doubt heard by now that at least one OB/GYN at an ICE concentration camp in Georgia did so many hysterectomies there that one whistleblower called him "the uterus collector," but outrage doesn't mean much if it doesn't translate into results, hence Daily Kos helps you tell your House Reps to demand an investigation into alleged mass hysterectomies of immigrant detainees. Surely you won't have to convey the moral reasons for such an investigation -- though if you want to tell your Reps that great nations always treat immigrants with the dignity and compassion they deserve, go ahead! What could it hurt? -- but even the political calculations should not dissuade your House Reps from investigating this matter. Most people oppose cruelty, after all, and the pro-cruelty crowd (not that they'd ever describe themselves as such!) don't win elections without a lot of help from outside factors. Besides, all that hysteria about TEH CARAVANZ!!!! didn't exactly help Republicans keep their House majority in 2018, did it?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass a "resolution of disapproval" that would block our President's Executive Order delaying the collection of the payroll taxes that fund Social Security, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. Make no mistake, this payroll tax "holiday" is no holiday for working families, and not just because so many of their employers aren't taking advantage of the "holiday," nor because working families will owe all that money when the "holiday" expires -- this "holiday" is absolutely a way to cut Social Security's funding to the bone, and our President has said this out loud. Yeah, he's also said he'd like to fund Social Security a different way, but what way will that be? It won't be by taxing his rich cronies, that's for sure! Don't believe any hype from Presidential votaries that blocking the payroll tax "holiday" would be "like a tax hike." It's literally not a tax hike to keep collecting the taxes everyone already knows they have to pay.

Action: concerning whistleblowers, immigration, and our Post Office.

Our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) planned to vote on regulatory changes that would cripple vital whistleblower protections -- but cancelled the vote shortly before it would have taken place, which is what they usually do when they don't have enough pro-evil public comments. The SEC's proposed changes would have arbitrarily capped whistleblower rewards, hampered whistleblower reporting, and prevented our SEC from acting in certain legitimate circumstances; what would comments in favor of these changes look like? Please, SEC, shield banksters from the investors they try to screw over? But the important thing is there have never been enough comments favoring the changes, or else our SEC would have pushed through these changes last year, when they cancelled a vote on them after getting over 100,000 public comments opposing them. So let's keep up the pressure! The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our SEC to reject its own proposed changes to its whistleblower program.

Meanwhile, defense contracting corporation MVM has made several hundred million dollars from our Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) to detain over 100 migrants, with many children reportedly among their number. Apparently the best way to disappear these folks is to put them in a privately-held hotel, since detaining them in one of our notorious concentration camps would create, at least, a paper trail. And MVM says its workers can handle abuse reports, but their contract says they don't actually have to do anything about them! What would you say, if your money paid for all of this? Oh, wait, it did -- we don't fund defense contracts with bake sales, after all. And don't be put off by the notion that it's only a hundred migrants, because they'll do it to a thousand or a million if we don't stop them now. Hence we wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against the weakest link in this particular chain, as Sum of Us helps you tell Best Western to end its participation in this ongoing disgrace.

Finally, upon learning that our U.S. Postal Services Board of Governors Chair Robert M. Duncan also just so happens to direct a $130 million Super PAC aligned with Sen. Mitch McConnell (E-KY), Progress American helps you demand that Mr. Duncan resign his post on the USPS Board of Governors. The rot didn't start with Mr. DeJoy, it turns out! Is it against the law for Mr. Duncan to do both jobs? I'll bet it's not; folks like Mitch McConnell don't break the law so much as change the law so that it turns law-breaking into law-following! And your right-wing neighbor is no doubt already saying and you're surprised? But the fact that something's no surprise doesn't automatically make it tolerable! Time was nobody would serve in our government and run a campaign arm at the same time simply because it made people look corrupt! But our leaders care less and less about that every day -- and, sadly, so do many Americans, only because all the corruption has made them dizzy. Still, duty is duty.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning government spying, defense spending, and worker safety.

First things first. The House will vote today on legislation that would prevent our FBI from using Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to spy on our internet histories without a warrant. No one objects to a search conducted once our government gets a warrant, but for damn near 20 years now, our government has used the "war on terror" to justify spying on good Americans unconstitutionally. This is one of the reasons we revolted against Great Britain in the first place! Our Founders were tired of British soldiers busting doors down and turning their houses over whenever they felt like it, and for good reason: folks deserve to be free from harassment by their government. (No, paying taxes to cover health care isn't "harassment." Like I didn't see that coming!) Anyway, you can either call your House Reps and demand that they pass the Lofgren/Davidson amendment (formerly the Wyden/Daines amendment that failed by one vote in the Senate) that would restrict government spying, or you can let Defending Rights and Dissent help you email them.

Meanwhile, Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to ban any arms sales to Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates for the next five years -- which would emphatically curtail our involvement in their war on Yemen. They'll whine that Congress shouldn't tell them what to do, but that is, in fact, Congress's precise role as our Founders envisioned it -- to tell our President whether or not he can go to war, or even spend money helping other countries go to war. Remember all that "foreign entanglements" talk in history class? Yeah, it was a real thing. Of course, there's a recent news hook -- our President just so happened to fire a State Department Inspector General who just so happened to be looking into Secretary of State Pompeo's $8 billion weapon sale to Saudi Arabia, which bypassed stated Congressional will and may have been illegal to boot. It won't be enough to drain this particular Presidential swamp; we'll also have to make sure future Presidents don't create similar swamps, and one way to do that is to restore Congressional prerogative and power in this instance.

Finally, you've seen those Amazon ads in which they take worker temperatures and such? They're really trying to reassure us that we won't get COVID-19 from our even-more-ubiquitous Amazon packages! But how serious can they be if they're firing workers who blow the whistle on squalid conditions at Amazon warehouses? They should just be able to refute their arguments with facts! Particularly if they're worth $24 billion more than they were at the start of our government's attempts to contain this pandemic, as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos now is. I mean, they say such riches are an achievement, after all, and even if one disagrees (ahem!), a man with $24 billion more than he had just two months ago shouldn't have to resort to firing "troublemakers." So MoveOn helps you tell Mr. Bezos to better protect his workers' (and therefore the public's!) health and reinstate those fired workers right away. He's not insensitive to public pressure, after all -- it's the only reason Amazon hiked worker wages a few years ago! So let's deliver that pressure.

UPDATE. Apparently Democratic leadership has blown so many holes in the Lofgren/Davidson amendment to the PATRIOT Act reauthorization bill that Defending Rights and Dissent has withdrawn its endorsement of the amendment; you can still call your Congressfolk and tell them that you support the Wyden/Daines amendment to the Senate bill, even if the Senate didn't pass it. Remember: it doesn't matter what they want; it matters what we want. I'm going to keep saying that until we all believe it -- and when that happens, the politicians had better watch out.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning debt slavery, election security, and whistleblower protection.

Worried that you won't be able to make ends meet during this pandemic without maxing out your credit cards? Well, H.R. 6370/S. 3508, the Disaster Protection for Workers' Credit Act, will help good Americans out, by preventing lenders from giving negative reports to credit reporting corporations during the pandemic, by prohibiting credit reporting corporations from putting negative information on good folks' credit reports, and by forcing them to remove any such information they do put on credit reports. Everybody knows that if you max out your credit cards while you literally can't find a job for however long this pandemic is going to go on, you're not a loser, and we shouldn't let big corporations treat you like one. Don't believe anyone who tells you this will be a "slippery slope" to never accurately reporting real credit risks again -- all you need do to see they're wrong is read the bill at Congress.gov. It's not even that long! So Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to help out good Americans during this time of distress by passing the Disaster Protection for Workers' Credit Act.

Meanwhile, hot on the heels of a positively ridiculous Wisconsin primary election, where folks literally risked death (and also broke the law) to stand in line to vote, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to safeguard the 2020 elections. Anyone who opposes efforts to secure elections should answer this question: do you believe everyone should vote? You might be surprised at the answers you get to that question! For a long time, right-wingers pretended they were in favor of everyone voting, but now they're more open about their real feelings: that anyone who doesn't vote Republican is "stupid" and if they're stupid, they should not vote. You'd think, being nominal "conservatives" and all, that they would take responsibility for explaining why their ideas are worthy of everyone's votes! And you have to wonder why they don't do that. And by that, I mean "they don't do that because they know they can't win the argument, even if they constantly misdirect away from their own foul-ups by pointing at transgender people in your bathroom or the second-tier corruption of Democrats."

Finally, you probably won't be surprised to learn that hospitals are silencing and even firing workers who expose wrongdoing during this pandemic -- wrongdoing including unsafe working conditions! You probably also know that whistleblowers have actual rights, and that our Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or OSHA) has a mandate to tell workers about their rights. Guess what OSHA ain't hardly doing? That, too, is not a surprise, not just because an ER doctor in Washington state just lost his job after publicly denouncing the lack of personal protective equipment (or PPE) in his hospital, but also because you know this President hardly staffs his government and thinks anyone who doesn't make him money is useless. Hey, you probably worked for a manager or a supervisor like that once! And now we've got one as our President. Hence the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to "wake up OSHA" and get them to remind whistleblowers of their rights, as is their job. It's a shame we have to tell our government to do the job we have given it as their bosses, but duty is duty. And doing this duty will save lives.

Action: concerning various forms of Executive branch corruption.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate how much taxpayer money (i.e., our money) is flowing right into our President's pockets. You'll recall how he planned to hold the next G20 summit at one of his own hotels, until popular outcry forced him to do differently, and you may also recall him saying that he's not "supposed to hate" the Saudi Arabian citizens who drop buku bucks at his hotels; even from these two examples, we can see the necessity of determining exactly how corrupt this President might be. The more cynical among us will no doubt chortle that we shouldn't be "surprised" he would do that, but remember that people who say "and you're surprised?" are advertising their own cynicism, and cynicism is evil. (They're also trying to tell you how much better they are than you, and you certainly don't have to take that.) We take it as gospel that politicians shouldn't profit from public service, because that warps the service they give to the public, and we shouldn't carve out an exception for arrogant billionaires.

In a peripherally-related note, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect the Ukraine whistleblower's identity from our President and his cronies. Our President has repeatedly demanded that the public know the identity of the individual who first reported on that infamous phone call to the Ukraine President, but our first job as civilized people is to protect the whistleblower's identity from folks who might decide to threaten or kill said whistleblower. And no, this has literally nothing to do with our President's habeus corpus rights -- he has the right, as an American citizen, to confront his accuser in a court of law, but he has no right to out his accuser so his votaries can take matters into their own hands. This is exactly the risk every whistleblower takes when they confront the abuse of power, whether in government or the private sector. And as civilized people, we either protect those who confront the abuse of power, or we lose the right to call ourselves civilized. It's that simple.

Our Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or NRC) would loosen regulations governing storage of radioactive waste, because what stimulates an economy more than letting some corporation bury nuclear waste in a shallow pit near an aquifer providing drinking water to good Americans? Sadly, too many Americans agree with big corporations that regulations are for LOOZERZ!!!!!, and when their loved ones get cancer from drinking the local water, they just blame Black Lives Matter or something. But the best part of all this? Our NRC is apparently considering changing the rules just so one waste management corporation in Texas can accept the most radioactive materials even though they don't have a license to handle them! Corruption isn't just about abusing the process to harass your potential opponents, or about redirecting taxpayer money to corporations you own, it's also about deforming the rules so your cronies can benefit. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our NRC to reject its plan to loosen nuclear waste storage regulations.

Action: concerning whistleblowers, corporate transparency, and D.C. statehood.

The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would allow all federal whistleblowers to get jury trials. Before anyone you know responds with any pablum about "frivolous lawsuits," remind them that whistleblowers in the private sector already get this protection under the law, and intelligence community whistleblowers do, too. You could, if you like, also tell them that arguments about "frivolous lawsuits" tend to rely on anecdotal evidence (and bad anecdotal evidence, at that), and that corporations file about four out of every five lawsuits in America. But you might do better telling them that whistleblowing isn't so much about spotting corruption and getting paid as it is about putting yourself and your family through hell just to do the right thing. Most folks wouldn't want to be whistleblowers if they knew how unemployable they'd become -- but they also wouldn't disrespect the folks who do go through it, the way the "frivolous lawsuits" crowd does.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, then Public Citizen still helps you do that -- but word is the House will vote on it this week, so act soon. The Corporate Transparency Act would force corporations to disclose their "beneficial owners," i.e., the folks who create the corporations and, presumably, benefit financially from their existence. And that will force banksters, terrorists, tax-evaders, sex traffickers, drug money launderers, and big campaign donors -- who all use shell corporations to hide their wrongdoing -- out into the light. There's a reason these hoodlums all start corporations in America, and that reason is that America is (per a Global Financial Integrity study from 2014) the second-easiest nation on Earth to start an anonymous corporation, behind Kenya. And don't let right-wingers get it twisted -- you have a right to anonymous speech, but you don't have a right to anonymous money-making. Why? Because money isn't speech -- money is property.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your government that Washington, D.C. deserves statehood. Why? Because they want it, because they deserve it, because not giving them statehood deprives them of the representation in Congress that all other Americans have, and because the arguments against statehood are stupid. Of course said arguments generally boil down to NO MORE DEMOCRATZ IN TEH CONGRESSEZ!!!!!, but Jesus Mary and Joseph Republicans should try winning some damn elections in D.C. before whining about it. Nobody whines about Wyoming returning Republicans to virtually every state and federal office year after year! Funny that we mention Wyoming, because the argument that "Washington, D.C. is too small" falls apart when you realize that Washington, D.C. has more residents than Wyoming. And the argument that "Washington, D.C. is so badly-run that it doesn't deserve statehood" is a pile of dung, too -- particularly when you remember that Congress constantly meddles in its running. Anyway, remember when that U.N. official reported that some parts of rural Alabama had the worst poverty he'd ever seen in the developed world? Did we argue for taking away Alabama statehood then, in the face of obvious governmental failure? No, we did not.

UPDATE. The Corporate Transparency Act has passed the House -- which means we'll be adding it to our list of bills for the Senate next week. Good job, peoples!

Action: concerning banksters, whistleblowers, and abortion.

Another year, another attempt to "reform" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by privatizing them, which would effectively end their efforts to help low-income working families own homes. This idea didn't originate with our President, but he's sure glommed onto it, as he seems to glom on to all bad ideas eventually. Of course, privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would not "modernize" them, unless you have a very low opinion of modernity indeed, and it certainly wouldn't "stop another financial meltdown," because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't cause that meltdown to begin with. Bankster greed and hifalutin financial instruments caused the meltdown, and it'll cause another one -- particularly since hedge fund managers (whom our President supposedly hates, but you don't believe that, because it is to laugh) have grabbed themselves a big chunk of both corporations, and are now hoping to fully add them to their casino economy. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Meanwhile, with whistleblowers all in the news these days, S. 2529, the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act, would (as its title suggests) better protect those whistleblowers who expose corruption in the financial services sector of our economy. The bill would clarify that the protections of our laws extend to whistleblowers in commodities and securities (our Supreme Court apparently being unclear about that), would speed up the processing of whistleblower claims, and would beef up funding to the CFTC Consumer Protection Fund. If we'd had stronger whistleblower protections in 2008, the banksters might not have come so close to completely destroying our economy as they did. It's not beating a dead horse to keep reminding you of the 2008 bankster meltdown, since Congress too often seems to forget it happened. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect good American citizens who expose fraud and corruption by passing the Whistleblower Programs Improvement Act.

Finally, with an overturning (or, at least, a crippling) of Roe v. Wade within our Supreme Court's grasp, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act. States have been putting up hurdles to women getting abortions since the Republican wave of 2010, but this bill would prevent states from putting up these hurdles, which include forced ultrasounds, unnecessary tests, medically-inaccurate information, third-trimester abortion bans, forcing women to explain why they want the abortion and denying them if the state doesn't find their explanation "good enough," and absurd physical plant requirements for hospitals (this final item coming up before our Supreme Court shortly, in June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee). Like I said yesterday, rights are rights regardless of how legislatures "feel" about them, and no one makes a man write an essay on why he wants a vasectomy before letting him have one, do they?

Action: concerning financial predation and the death penalty.

Because our Administration hates all regulations that actually help good Americans, our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) wants to gut its whistleblower protection program. You can understand why governments hate whistleblowers -- because they expose the wrongdoing of politicians and political appointees! -- but the sheer hatred of the last two Administrations is still a bit surprising. Our SEC's proposed rules would automatically disqualify any whistleblowers who take their concerns directly to SEC Commissioners, would disqualify whistleblowers merely because they filled out paperwork wrong, and would put an arbitrary cap on whistleblower rewards; I'm no great defender of filling out paperwork incorrectly, for example, but the SEC's proposal would be like taking a sledgehammer to an ant. Why, it's almost like they're coming up with ways to protect their cronies from scrutiny! The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our SEC to abandon its plans to make whistleblowing on financial firms a lot harder.

Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell Missouri's Governor to grant clemency to Russell "Rusty" Bucklew, because lethal injection would be, in his case, cruel and unusual. Mr. Bucklew suffers from a rare disease that grows tumors full of blood in his head and neck, and if he gets lethal injection, chances are those tumors would rupture and cause Mr. Bucklew to choke to death on his own blood. If you're reading that and saying so what? He's gonna die anyway, then you're doing civilization wrong -- we're supposed to be leaving as good example for future generations to follow, not wallowing in considerations of expediency until we become corrupt and cynical. And if you're familiar with the crime for which Mr. Bucklew got convicted, you might well be tempted to ask he sure didn't treat his victims with very much mercy, so why should we? Answer: the whole point of civilization is to lift ourselves above the murderer's level, not bring ourselves down to it. Maybe setting a good example will come back into vogue one day, but only if we lead.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then Color of Change still helps you do that. S. 2155 would make it a lot less attractive for big private equity corporations to do the thing they've done with impunity the last decade -- buy up large retail corporations, run them into the ground, and suck their wealth out in bonuses and fees on their way out the door. To think they have the gall to say we shouldn't "punish success," and that our richest Americans are merely the ones who have worked the hardest! How does running corporations into the ground and extracting their wealth benefit our civilization? Hell, how does it even qualify as "work"? And these predators have wiped a million jobs from our economy over the last decade; funny how folks who squeal about an increased minimum wage "killing jobs" have nothing to say about that. A lot of these folks are just nihilists, of course, but civilized people don't admire wanton destruction, let alone predators getting rich off it.

Action: concerning debt, social media, climate change, and discrimination.

The Loan Shark Prevention Act (for which Congress.gov has no bill number at this writing) would cap interest on all consumer loans at 15 percent -- which would include credit cards and essentially eliminate the entire payday lending industry. Note well that the Loan Shark Prevention Act would prevent lenders from concocting fees to replace the money they'd lose. Myself, I'd add caps specifically on auto loans, mortgages and personal loans (I'd do 2%, 3%, and 6%, respectively), but a broad 15% cap would certainly save working people money on their credit cards. And banks wouldn't go broke -- they just wouldn't be able to buy Congressfolk as easily as they can now. And the folks who'd call the Loan Shark Prevention Act a "job-killing" bill? We could describe them as objectively pro-usury. You can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to find phone numbers for your Reps and Senators, so you can call them and tell them to pass the Loan Shark Prevention Act.

Meanwhile, you think Facebook's got it bad now, after being exposed as a corporation that's careless with our personal information? Then get a load of reports indicating that Facebook is aiding and abetting wildlife trafficking and looting of Middle Eastern archaeological sites, and has even enabled hate groups to hijack its software to auto-generate more video content. Facebook seems to think it's doing a great job at the last item, while admitting that it "could do better" about the other two, which we've totally never heard before! The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) to fully investigate these allegations and punish Facebook as their investigations demand. Why the National Whistleblower Center, you ask? Because without anonymous whistleblowers -- who risk years of unemployment and abuse whether their identities get exposed or not! -- we'd likely never have known about any of these things going on. And why the SEC? Because Facebook is a publicly-traded corporation which may be injuring its shareholders with its actions.

In other news, Corporate Accountability helps you urge your state Attorney General to investigate allegations that Exxon knew climate change was coming, but lied to shareholders and the American public about it in order to keep making money. You may know the story by now: Exxon knew enough about the relationship between fossil fuel pollution and climate change by the late '70s that it taught scientists about it, but didn't come clean about it with shareholders or customers, instead embarking on a long and very well-funded campaign of obfuscation and disinformation. Change being the only constant, you'd think a corporation that knew about climate change would maybe adapt by gradually switching over to renewables, but, alas, Exxon did not face a 55% corporate tax during the late '80s, nor did its executives face a 91% income tax on millionaire income, so Exxon moved to protect its money rather than the planet on which its employees live. And for that, we should at least investigate Exxon.

Finally, the House Judiciary Committee passed H.R. 5, the Equality Act, out of committee last week, and the full House may vote on it this week, so the National LGBTQ Task Force helps you tell your House Reps to support civil rights for gay and transgender folks by passing the Equality Act. The Equality Act would extend full protections under the Civil Rights Act to gay and transgender folks, which will no doubt prompt some right-wingers to squeal BUT TEH CIVUL RIGHTZ ACTZ WAS FOR TEH BLACKZ!!!!!, which would generally represent more enthusiasm for black civil rights than they had when Congress was debating the Civil Rights Act. What a wondrous thing, when folks suddenly discover their support for past civil rights legislation in their efforts to keep other folks from getting civil rights! But for the gay and transgender folks who get shut out of jobs, apartments, and freaking bathrooms because of other people's bigotry, we need to pass the Equality Act.

Action: concerning wealth taxes, animal trafficking, and paid family leave.

Sen. Warren (D-MA) has proposed an "Ultra-Millionaire Tax" aiming to tax not merely income but wealth, specifically the wealth of folks who have more than $50 million in net worth. The tax would be small -- a 2% tax on wealth between $50 million and $1 billion, and a 3% tax on wealth over $1 billion. That's two percent and three percent, not "20%" and "30%," "liberal" media! Two University of California economists estimate that the tax would raise $210 billion annually even though it's mere percentage points, and $210 billion every year could do a lot of good. The "Ultra-Millionaire Tax" proposal would also increase the IRS's budget (which should have been done, like, years ago) and would impose a sizable "exit tax" on folks who try to renounce their citizenship so they don't have to pay the wealth tax. Ms. Warren hasn't yet introduced a bill codifying these principles, but why wait? The tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) will help you call your Reps and Senators and tell them to support the Warren proposal to tax wealth.

Meanwhile, H.R. 864, the Wildlife Conservation and Anti-Trafficking Act, would turbo-charge wildlife trafficking enforcement in America, by incentivizing whistleblowers worldwide to report animal trafficking crimes, strengthening laws that go after traffickers, and dedicates all financial penalties toward wildlife conservation. Wildlife trafficking actually isn't an easy thing to go after, particularly in poorer areas of the world, so we should absolutely give folks more incentive to report these crimes. So I wonder what the far right in America will have to say about it. Actually, I don't: it'll be MORE TEH FRIVULUZ LAWSUITZ!!!! at one end and GOD GAVEZ UZ TEH ANIMULZ TO DOMINATEZ!!!! on the other, and while I do find Dominionist beliefs noxious, they're certainly not worse than the "frivolous lawsuit" crowd, who might better be described as the "protect unearned corporate CEO salaries" crowd. Anyway, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight animal trafficking by supporting the Wildlife Conservation and Anti-Trafficking Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family leave in America by passing the FAMILY Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. If the FAMILY Act from this Congress is like past iterations from past Congresses, it would fund 12 weeks of paid family leave for all workers (including part-time and self-employed workers) from an 0.4% payroll tax, half borne by the employer and the other half borne by the employee. And again, "liberal" media, that's four-tenths of one percent, not "4%" or "40%." Journalists who get this kind of thing wrong should get fired! It's basic math! And here's some more basic math: if you make $50,000 annually, your contribution to the family medical leave fund, annually, would be $100, or not even two dollars a week. If some right-winger tells you it's too expensive to pay for family medical leave for everyone, just remind them that the cost of one cheap cup of coffee simply isn't a whole lot to ask for everyone to have the same peace of mind that workers in just about every other nation have.

Action: concerning our Estate Tax, antibiotic abuse, and William Barr.

It begins again: Senate Republicans have apparently read the mandate handed down by the voters in November to read "let's repeal the Estate Tax!" You'd be tempted to say "they never learn," but of course learning has nothing to do with it: Mob Boss Mitch knows that if you placate every whiny desire of wealthy donors, you'll get more campaign money from them, and thus you'll keep getting elected. To what end? So you can finally get hemp farming legalized after 34 years in the Senate? Not likely -- the only end Estate Tax repeal really serves is the end of democracy. Seriously, you have a better chance of one day paying the Estate Tax if you actually support a robust Estate Tax on estates over $1 million. You can 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 call your Senators and tell them to reject Estate Tax repeal.

Meanwhile, virtually everyone in America wants to see fewer antibiotics in farming, but of course our Administration knows better than everyone else, as our EPA has recently approved a plan to expand spraying of antibiotics on Floridian citrus trees. Sick trees, healthy trees, how can we tell from up here? One more time: using antibiotics on plants and animals that aren't sick gives bacteria a better shot at adapting to them, and thus renders antibiotics useless a whole lot faster. Who will be sitting around the campfire in a hundred years saying the next cut any of us get could kill us, but at least our government was able to con good Floridians into delivering their electoral votes to the Republican Presidential nominee in 2020? The answer, of course, is "no one." Particularly if we let Penn PIRG help us tell our EPA to help preserve good Americans' health by rejecting its planned expansion of antibiotic spraying.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to reject the nomination of William Barr as Attorney General, then the National Women's Law Center still helps you do that. Why? Let us count the reasons: his work helping George H.W. Bush pardon half a dozen participants in the Iran-Contra scandal before Mr. Bush himself could be hauled into court, his belief that Presidents ought to be able to do pretty much what they like without very much constraint from the legislative or judicial branches, his apparent hostility to our Special Counsel's continuing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election (and Administration culpability therein), his persistence in believing the whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act are unconstitutional years after our Supreme Court unanimously ruled that they are -- did I miss anything? Oh, right: he's a fellow who thinks incarceration solves every problem.

Action: concerning war in Yemen, pollution, and whistleblowing.

Late last week, the Saudi-led coalition bombed a school bus in Yemen, killing upwards of 29 children. And our own Defense Department can't say whether the coalition used U.S.-supplied munitions to do the deed, or if we refueled the planes that dropped the bombs, because CENTCOM doesn't track these planes. I have to say that seems awfully convenient. And for decades Congress has let Presidents do pretty much what they like overseas, and even now is mulling a bill that would abdicate even more of their Constitutional responsibility to declare war. And if you thought this President would "be different" and "put America first" and "be laser-focused on fighting al-Qaeda and ISIS," recall that the Houthi rebels Saudi Arabia keeps fighting are some of the finest fighters against al-Qaeda on Earth. Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end American support for this undeclared and unconstitutional war that has put over two-thirds of Yemen's people in need of immediate humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, you know all about the nefarious "cost-benefit analysis" that right-wingers constantly use to say regulations are "too costly" for businesses? Well, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) is now proposing to make their cost-benefit analyses even worse, by forcing the EPA to consider the "harm" its regulations might do to corporate profits before considering the health benefits of its regulations. Scott Pruitt may be gone, but this particular proposal, somehow entitled "Increasing Consistency and Transparency in Considering Costs and Benefits in Rulemaking Process," surely comes from his gnarled hand. One can only hope that this particular Administration initiative, like so many of their pro-pollution initiatives, will die an ignominious death before a federal judge, but in the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell the EPA to reject its plan to put polluters before people, and mammon before life.

Finally, the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our government to do a considerably better job protecting whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing at the Veterans Administration. We can't reasonably blame this state of affairs on our most recent President, but on his predecessor, Barack Obama, who seemed to have a visceral hatred of whistleblowers across our government, including VA whistleblowers. But hatred of whistleblowers is a bit hard to understand on the face of it when you consider that a whistleblower's complaint will either be proven in a court of law or it won't; you may be tempted, as I am, to consider that our government must hate whistleblowers because our government can't win the argument on the merits. But we the people have an absolute, inviolate right to stop our government from screwing us over, and whistleblowers are often our only way of knowing our government's doing that. So, as civilized people, we protect whistleblowers with laws.

Around the table: the "Pharma Bro" heads to jail! And other stories.

President Trump supports bill that would cut legal immigration in half. So how will those white folks who always work themselves into a red-faced rage about TEH ILLEGULZ!!!!! prove they're not racist now? After all, they deflect charges of racism by saying but of course I support legal immigration, but this bill curtails legal immigration, so if you support this bill, you support less legal immigration. Of course, less legal immigration means more undocumented immigrants for people to get into a red-faced rage about, and thus more souls for the Trump goblins to harvest.

Joshua Holland at The Nation argues that single-payer isn't the solution to the problem of achieving universal health insurance coverage in America. So what is the solution, then? Well, the two solutions offerred by Mr. Hacker at Yale would both improve the system, and might even ultimately lead to single-payer coverage, but mainly we learn that converting to a single-payer system in America would be really hard, that not every "single-payer" system is a single-payer system per se, and that the folks fighting hardest for it should be nicer to their opponents. In other words, it sounds like folks slightly to our right want us to feel ashamed of ourselves for fighting so hard. Good luck with that.

Strangely enough, the title of this Patrick Eddington article at The American Conservative --"Why is Mattis Declaring War on Whistleblowers?" -- kinda buries the real story: that a group of NSA employees created a good system for constitutionally sifting internet traffic for terrorist activity, a system that some observers say could have prevented 9.11, but because the NSA Chief hated it and wanted to develop an entirely different and inferior system, the NSA buried it, and the folks who created it suffered greatly, at least in part because they filed whistleblower claims about it. In any case, it sure does look like the Trump Administration will be no better at protecting whistleblowers than previous ones.

Adam Johnson at FAIR describes the "liberal" media's addiction to "perseverance porn" -- i.e., the news stories about folks walking 10 miles each way to work, going right back to work after a serious accident, etc. The "liberal" media extolls these stories as proof that anyone-can-make-it-if-they-try, instead of asking fairly obvious questions, like "why isn't the walking man's area served by public transportation?" or "why doesn't his job pay him enough so he can buy a second-hand car"? As with the notion that the man who walks the streets of a "dangerous" neighborhood without incident for decades isn't news but the one who gets mugged is, one should wonder why the folks who can't get to work after getting run over don't make the news.

New study suggests that "Obama-Trump" voters may be more likely to simply be Republican voters who voted for Mr. Obama, rather than disaffected Democrats who voted for Mr. Trump. Thus, of course, getting those voters back is a fool's errand. Actual economic populism of the Bernie Sanders kind is, of course, the Gourdian knot that slices this problem -- an actual economic populist might expand the number of Democrats who actually come out to vote, and attract some Republicans whose emotional attachment to their party might only be built on rage. I guess that's why Democratic elites won't ever do it.

Finally, hedge fund manager/HIV drug price gouger Martin Shkreli now faces up to 20 years in prison after his conviction on securities fraud (two counts) and conspiracy (one). And just as Al Capone ultimately went to jail for tax evasion, the original Man with a Face Even a Mother Could Punch didn't get nailed for jacking up the price of Daraprim from $13.50 per tablet to $750 per tablet, which is what he'd go to jail for in a sane and healthy society. (No, he wouldn't go to jail for being a sexist pig -- though, in a sane and healthy society, he would be more thoroughly shamed and ostracized for being one.)

Action: rational budgeting, climate change, and abusing federal workers

The Trump Administration "Hard Power" budget -- no, I'm not calling it the "skinny budget," not just because "skinny" seems unthreatening, but because we should always call Trump Administration initiatives by their supervillain names, especially when the Trump Administration is dumb enough to hand them to us! -- would cut a lot of government spending that actually helps the good Americans who fund our government in the first place, and one of them is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (or CDC). How much does the CDC get annually? In FY 2016, the CDC's budget was a little over $11.5 billion, which ain't chump change (not even to Donald Trump!), but which also represented less than one-third of one percent of all federal spending that year. You'd think with all the CDC actually does for America as far as fighting infectious diseases, antibiotic resistance, and obesity, we'd actually increase their budget, not cut it. So PennPIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to cut the CDC budget.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell Gap, Disney, and Pepsi to end their association with the reactionary climate change deniers at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Sadly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has mutated from your grandparents' pro-business organization to a behemoth that lurches as far right as it can on every conceivable topic. Want banksters to stop stealing your money? Then the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will fight you. Want our politicians to stop giving welfare handouts to oil and gas corporations and start helping develop a renewable energy grid that would be the envy of the world if we but had the will to build it? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce will fight you there, too. Getting corporations to quit the Chamber because of its reactionary economic views isn't so effective, of course -- why, big corporations generally have the same views! But big corporations (Gap, Disney, and Pepsi among them) also like getting on the public's good side in re climate change, and so you hit them there.

Finally, the Department of the Interior has reassigned over four dozen high-level employees to new jobs -- including Joel Clement, formerly the head of Interior's Office of Policy Analysis, who spoke out publicly about climate change's impact upon Alaska's Native communities -- so the Sierra Club helps you tell Interior Secretary Zinke to stop moving Senior Executive Service employees around after they say things that make the Trump Administration uncomfortable. Once Mr. Zinke gets down from that horse he always seems to be riding whenever the cameras are around, he'll tell you that he can move employees as he sees fit -- which is true generally, but not if he's doing it in retaliation for whistleblowing, or to force workers to quit. But behold! Mr. Zinke has already said, out loud, that he would use "reassignments" as one tool to reduce the Department's workforce. Logically speaking, how would that work? By sending people to places that would provoke them into quitting, that's how! And why should we allow him to do that?

Action: government spying, and Congressional corruption.

S. 1297 would permanently reauthorize Section 702 of the nefarious FISA Amendments Act -- the bill Congress passed in 2008, with the support of then-Senator Obama, who cited, of course, "the grave threats we face" as a reason to unconstitutionally spy on Americans. You may recall from Edward Snowden's whistleblowing that Section 702 specifically authorizes our government to collect emails, texts, and phone calls in bulk, without getting a warrant, and therefore without establishing probable cause before a judge. So let's get this straight: lone wolf terrorists and terrorist organizations are not "grave" or "existential threats." You know what an "existential threat" is? Nazi Germany in 1939 -- not al-Qaeda, not ISIS, and not the Orlando shooter, whom ISIS disowned upon learning he might have been in the closet. Terrorists aim to paralyze us in fear so that we make our societies less free, thus the only moral response is to stay free. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect American freedoms by rejecting S. 1297.

Meanwhile, S. 1189, the Close the Revolving Door Act, would ban Congressfolk from ever lobbying Congress on someone else's behalf after they leave office. That'd be a big deal, as too many Reps and Senators from both parties become lobbyists after retiring or getting defeated for re-election. The bill would also extend the ban on Congressional staff becoming lobbyists from one year after leaving their Congressional jobs to six. Does this restrict their free speech rights after they leave office? No, it does not -- the Constitution can't prevent you from redressing grievances with your Congressfolk, but the Constitution doesn't guarantee a "right" to make money doing that, either. Former Congressfolk who become lobbyists aren't "redressing grievances" so much as they're exploiting connections, and while the First Amendment also guarantees a right of free association, it doesn't guarantee a right to make money off your "free associations," either. If Congressfolk don't like any of that, I suppose they can always work for a living. So Rootstrikers helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight corruption by supporting S. 1189.

Around the table: in which we wonder, again, *when's that terrorist attack coming?*

Turkish President's security detail attacks protestors at the Turkish embassy in Washington, D.C. yesterday -- the same day he visited President Trump at the White House. I bet a lot of winking went on between the two Presidents. And I wouldn't put it past our President to wonder out loud, very soon, why he shouldn't be allowed to get away with doing such a thing.

Reed Richardson at FAIR chronicles the "13 Resets in 13 Months" phenomenon, where President Trump seems to get endless chances from the "liberal" media to "start over." It doesn't matter that you have to constantly start over when you constantly screw up -- the "liberal" media has no business speculating on what he "could" do to start "winning" again, and the sooner they get back to the not-titillating-but-still-vital work of giving the American people the information they actually need, rather than the horserace coverage that's only as satisfying as junk food, the sooner we can become a sane and moral society again.

Miss USA says health care is a "privilege" you get because you get a job, then backtracks after the backlash. But I won't pile on her, in either direction; I'm pretty sure she said it was a privilege merely because she thought she was describing the landscape -- in America, we assume that health insurance comes with a job, when in fact our health-insurance-through-your-employer system is actually fairly unique on the planet. What's wrong with saying you pay taxes, you get health insurance?

Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) thinks he's found "the real criminal" behind Mr. Trump's disclosure of classified information to the Russians: the person who leaked that story to the press. Mr. Risch should consider that Mr. Trump may have sent an Israeli intelligence agent to an early grave regardless of whether anyone outside the room heard it or not, and he might also want to consider the difference between a "weasel" and a whistleblower. But then, he sleepwalks his way to re-election every six years, so I doubt he'll ever consider anything very carefully again.

Finally, speaking of the Great Man, Mr. Trump instructs us that "(n)o politician in history has been treated more unfairly" by the media than he. Set aside that the "liberal" media, even if they seem a little chastened about it now, was his biggest enabler on the path to victory: what Mr. Trump is doing here is whining. And here you thought being a conservative was all about, you know, not whining. I'd say that actual conservatives have got to be tired of his whining by now, but, sadly, there aren't very many actual conservatives left in America -- they've been mostly reactionaries for some time now. So when's that terrorist attack coming?