Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning stock buybacks, corporate welfare, wind power, and tax cuts for the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, and the NOW Act, and tell your Congressfolk to let the worst parts of the 2017 Trump tax “reform” expire. 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.

Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would raise the 1% stock buyback tax (enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022) with a 4% tax, which would, I would think, be at least four times as effective in discouraging stock buybacks, which used to be illegal, because they concentrated shareholder power in fewer and fewer hands, but now are as big a blot on our economy as the hedge fund or the monthly stock report. You know it’s always the folks who already have too much money (i.e., executives) who buy back the most stock, but the Stock Buyback Accountability Act would help make shareholders relevant again.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, which would restore the 35% corporate tax rate, close loopholes that allow corporations to move money overseas and outsource our jobs, and end, once and for all, the practice of using a Cayman Islands P.O. Box as a “headquarters.” Every year, too many big corporations pay literally nothing in taxes – or, worse, suck tax money out of our very pockets. That’s money that could pay for cops, libraries, and bridges! But the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act would help us get that money for the public investment we deserve, so we should do it.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Nonrestrictive Offshore Wind (or NOW) Act, which would repeal the law (passed, sadly, in the Inflation Reduction Act) mandating that wind power leases can only occur after our government has handed out an offshore oil drilling lease. Hey, it was what Joe Manchin would let happen in 2022! And I’m sure more than a few Americans are still so timid about these “new” renewable energy sources that they don’t mind their development being so closely tied to the further development of “established” energies. But renewables have been around for decades, and really, we don’t need training wheels to use them anymore.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires also helps you tell your Congressfolk to let the worst parts of the 2017 Trump tax “reform” law expire. That would, sadly, not include the corporate tax rate cut from 35% to 21% (which is why we need the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act described above) but it would include the big tax cuts for the top income tax brackets and the pass-through deductions that somehow only benefit the already-too-rich. Don’t expect a second Trump term to do anything but give bosses more unearned goodies; best that we take action now, and at least reveal to our Congressfolk a will they will have to work to ignore.

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban facial recognition software at performance venues, invest more in our care economy, and ensure that any effort at permitting reform benefit renewable energy exclusively. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell Congress to prohibit performance venues from using facial recognition software on event-goers. You don’t even have to know that facial recognition can’t tell Black people apart any better than your January 6-addled uncle can to tell Congress to ban its use; you only need know that facial recognition enables law enforcement fishing expeditions, and opposing those, I would think, would be something conservatives could get behind as well as liberals. If your right-wing neighbor retorts BUTZ I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!, just remind him that could be him getting profiled and wrongly-arrested the next time Bruce Springsteen rolls into town.

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

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

Around the table: the evil, it burns!

Ho hum, January 6 rioters who express remorse for their actions change their tune after sentencing. Why, it’s like they were never sorry in the first place! It’s true that “there’s not much the legal system can do for an adjudicated defendant” (unless their “remorse” got them shorter sentences!), but there’s something we can do: stop inviting these people to our dinners, our cookouts, and our parties no matter how much “fun” they are. Because if we don’t go this far, they’ll never learn shame or accountability. Plus we’ll probably have to fight them in the streets later.

FactCheck.org, being cautious as usual, tells us it’s too soon to attribute last month’s storms in California exclusively to climate change, this after talking to actual climate scientists who, how about that, talk cautiously like scientists tend to do. Despite the headline (and the findings), some right-wingers will still say but why didn’t they ask the guy with no expertise and no credentials in climate science I saw on YouTube who just so happens to agree with me? I mean, they won’t put it quite like that. Or maybe they will, since they do seem to have even less shame than they did before.

Confronted with the question of why both state and national Republicans are “doubling down on abortion bans” even after Roe’s overturning clearly contributed to the absence of a “red wave” last November, I’m tempted to say it’s because Republicans are so used to their actions having no consequences at the ballot box. But yeah, Amanda Marcotte is right that it’s mainly right-wing sexism. Too many right-wingers need to divide the world into people they want to fuck and people they don’t, but that’s no reason to give them all the say about everything.

When I hear that Vladimir Putin has invoked the Battle of Stalingrad – and the battle against Nazism – to justify his invasion of Ukraine, I’m tempted to say really? But then I remember that America has no shortage of folks who wish they’d fought World War II, and who thus make every stupid war they want to fight another World War II, like they did with Afghanistan and Iraq; it’s all drama, bad drama at that, and we deserve better than drama. So do good Russians, and not just because they gave the world Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Nabokov.

Big oil corporations induce right-wing media bubbleheads to blame recent whale deaths on, you guessed it, offshore wind power. Amazing how often “populists” like Tucker Carlson do big corporations’ bidding. Even more amazing that Jesse Watters can say New Jersey’s hardly-even-begun wind power project is “probably” killing whales while the Fox News chyrons say things like (caps in original) “WIND SURVEYING IS KILLING OUR WHALES.” Note well that these whale deaths have been going on for at least six years, and New York and New Jersey ports have been unusually congested lately for reasons you can easily imagine, but as Ronald Reagan once said, facts are stupid things.

Finally, how about our “liberal” media reporting our economy adding over half a million jobs in a single month as bad news? You and I can think of half a million people who don’t give a rat’s ass about stock prices going down, and anyway why did they go down? Because of the fiction Our Glorious Elites have forced down our throats for the last 40 years, the fiction that cutting jobs leads to “efficiency” and thus "more wealth." More wealth for them, certainly! But you know what creates real wealth? When our economy gives everyone, including actual entrepreneurs, a chance to wow the world. Why would Our Glorious Elites fear such a thing?

Around the table: from smaller wind turbines to an affirmation about the midterm elections.

A corporation called Aeromine has developed a 10 foot-tall wind turbine that can apparently produce the power of 15 solar panels – though Aeromine recommends pairing its technology with solar panels to achieve self-sufficiency. The turbines only fit on flat roofs, and thus Aeromine pitches them toward warehouses and apartment buildings (though plenty of city rowhomes also have flat roofs). I demand progress, not perfection, from new technologies, so I’m interested to see if these turbines become a game-changer. I wish Aeromine the best in their efforts.

Daniel Byman at the Lawfare blog asks “What is a Terrorist Movement?” If you’re disappointed with the difficulty in finding good answers to that question – and it is difficult, given how many terrorist groups influence mass murderers who don't belong to any groups – you can at least be consoled that Mr. Byman concentrates more effort on white supremacy than Islamic extremism, the latter of which was never the “existential threat” right-wingers said it was. I mean, if that was an "existential threat," what happened to the administration of President bin Laden? And remember how right-wingers all threw tantrums on TV when the Department of Homeland Security talked a tiny bit about white supremacist terrorism in 2009 and 2010? Sure seems like they doth protested too much now, doesn’t it?

Fifth Circuit panel rules that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism is “unconstitutional,” despite the fact that our government funds plenty of agencies similarly. Our CFPB will likely appeal to the full Fifth Circuit, which may yield a different result, or our Supreme Court, which may not. But our CFPB is actually doing the best job of discouraging monopolies right now, which I’m sure has nothing to do with the fact that right-wing judges (all three members of the Fifth Circuit panel were Trump appointees) do their damnedest to destroy it. Recall, also, that Justice Kavanaugh declared the CFPB’s hierarchical structure unconstitutional while he served on the D.C. Circuit.

Supreme Court Justice Barrett denies the Brown County (WI) Taxpayers Association’s “emergency” suit against the Biden student debt relief plan, leaving in place a lower court’s ruling that the Association doesn’t have standing to sue against it. Which makes sense, since, like, what harm has the student debt relief plan actually done to this "taxpayers association"? One hopes Judge Barrett's denial is good news for the whole notion of standing, a notion threatened by (among other laws!) Texas’s anti-abortion law which empowers virtually anyone to sue abortion providers and/or abortion recipients. But I often get the sense that our Supreme Court uses the standing issue just to avoid taking on controversial decisions. Which means that, yes, their last term could have been even worse than it was.

Akela Lacy at The Intercept calls the Pennsylvania Senate race “The Biggest, Dumbest Race for the Senate,” and while she certainly doesn't excuse Mehmet Oz’s role in that, she mostly concentrates her ire on John Fetterman, who has run a social media-savvy campaign that’s also avoided topics like Medicare-for-All and climate change, not to mention Pennsylvania state legislators’ absurd attempts to impeach Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, which they clearly hope will be the October Surprise to buoy Republicans up and down the ballot. I haven’t been upset with all of Mr. Fetterman’s low blows – Republicans only deliver low blows, and Mr. Oz makes himself an inviting target fairly often! But I see her point as well; we’re missing yet another opportunity to demonstrate to the world that rural folks only vote Republican because Democrats don’t stand up for them nearly enough.

Finally, our “liberal” media has spent the last week or so swearing that the midterms are now “breaking” in Republicans’ favor – but you have to ask: what’s changed? As far as I can tell, all that’s changed is that Republicans have sworn to create another debt limit drama so they can cut Social Security and Medicare, and why should voters flock to that? Republicans are still the party of book banning, whining about masks and vaccines, and overturning the results of elections they don’t like, and now I can't escape the feeling that our “liberal” media are putting their thumb on the scale, either out of a shallow attempt to create horserace drama or out of an actual hope that voters who care about our civilization will get discouraged and stay home. How do we get around that? We don’t get discouraged, and get out and vote and get in our Congressfolk’s grills in numbers they can’t deny! Funny how the antidote to depression about democracy is, well, more democracy.

Around the table: tabulating various kinds of corruption for the 814th time.

Thinking maybe sports isn’t a healthy outlet for our stress after all? Rick Eckstein at The Conversation discusses “how abuse is baked into American sports.” As you read about how many young athletes don’t speak out about verbal and physical abuse out of fear of getting “benched,” you may recall those Little League Dads who yelled at their kids all the way from the batter’s box after they struck out. You may also recall how news coverage has bled into “liberal” media news coverage in more ways than one, not just in sports news executives moving into straight news divisions, but also in all the horserace coverage. You may also decide that “winning at all costs” is just as toxic an attitude in politics as it is in sports.

Uh oh: Rep. Ted Budd, the Trump-endorsed North Carolina Republican Senate nominee, helped a pair of big banks merge in 2019, and the resulting behemoth not only laid off over a thousand workers and closed a few hundred branches, but it’s also resulted in at least one low-interest loan and tens of thousands of bucks in campaign donations for Mr. Budd!. I guess Donald Trump would call all that “smart”! Seriously, if Democratic nominee Cheri Beasley doesn’t make a whole lot of hay about this, she deserves to lose this race. There’s no “let’s not be too strident about corruption” vote out there to be had.

Ho hum, six of the seven biggest health insurance corporations get more than half their revenues from our government – i.e., the taxpayer, i.e., us – but still jack up prices much faster than inflation just like they were doing before the Affordable Care Act became law. Oh, but expanding Medicare to everyone would be TEH SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! The only people who think of “socialism” as a scare word are far right-wingers who let everything anger them. And even fewer folks get their hackles up at the words “price controls.” A lot of good Americans would like some more price control in their lives! (They’d also like to not be moved from their Medicare plans to Medicare Advantage plans – which deny a lot of claims! – without their consent.)

Wondering why rent prices are going up so quickly? Brace yourself: one corporation’s algorithm might be responsible for most of it. Algorithms ruining things where people might manage them more deftly – gosh, where have I heard that story before? But at least the algorithm isn’t an irredeemable asshole, like the people who promote the algorithm, who are the sorriest bunch of tone-deaf losers I’ve ever heard. They actually celebrate when prices go up beyond what good Americans can afford! They actually encourage landlords to leave units open because the jacked-up prices of their occupied units more than compensate! They actually say that landlords have “too much empathy” compared to the algorithm! If I were the Deity, they would abide in fire for all eternity.

The Center for American Progress describes, at some length, how “Offshore Wind Can Lower Energy Prices and Beat Out Oil and Gas.” Wind power has competed, expense-wise, with fossil fuels for the better part of a decade now, and “spills and cleanup costs are negligible with offshore wind,” (n.b. “negligible,” not “non-existent,” right-wing trolls!). This is all true regardless of the histrionics right-wingers employ about the “noise” (obviously none of them have ever lived in New Jersey!) or the “piles of dead birds” (as a friend of mine said once, it sure is a good thing oil spills have never killed any birds!). Time to kick climate change’s ass!

Finally, dig this simple-minded horseshit poll from Fox News alleging that more Americans want help from our government than they used to. I don’t mind the result, I guess (more Americans want help than don’t), but I do mind the question: whether you want your government to “lend me a hand” or “leave me alone.” Gosh, binary much? Good Americans want more help from their government where they need it and less interference where they don’t; most of us favor expanding Medicare to include everyone, for example, but I bet none of us favor expanded warrantless spying. Those are just the first examples that leaped to my mind! Did anything leap to Fox News’s mind when they formulated their poll, besides goading Americans into being the stupidest version of themselves?

Around the table: right-wingers pretending to be moderates and iconoclasts, part 763.

Politico’s new "contrarian" owner sent out an email to his fellow executives asking them to “pray” for Donald Trump’s re-election in late 2020 – then not only denied he sent it, but once confronted with evidence of the email’s existence said that yeah, he might have meant it “as an ironic, provocative statement.” Because if there’s one thing people love having explained to them, it’s irony! And are his politics “hard to pin down,” really? He loves the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich “reform” of 2017, he worries about “cancel culture” and “identity politics,” his response to anti-Semitic attacks is to fly an Israeli flag like there’s literally no other way to show solidarity with Jews – c’mon, I’m not a schmuck.

When I hear that folks experience “crisis fatigue” because of all the news they consume, I feel compelled to ask if we’re experiencing “crisis fatigue” as much as we’re experiencing sensationalism fatigue. I’m sure crisis fatigue is a real thing that real people suffer, but I don’t think the sheer volume of tragedy we read about is the only problem we face when trying to make sense of the world – right-wing news sources, in particular, love ramping up the drama. I’d also like to know if folks who read news experience less crisis fatigue than folks who watch the news.

President Biden endorses a bill in the California state legislature that would help farmworkers organize more easily for better pay and working conditions – a bill California Governor Newsom apparently intends to veto. You’d hate to think Joe Biden endorsed this bill (fairly persuasively, too) merely because he knows Gavin Newsom will veto it, but you can’t rule it out. The good news? It doesn’t matter: when the President endorses a good idea – and letting farmworkers unionize is a good idea, regardless of the cowards who’ll say it’ll “cause inflation” – it makes a difference.

Tamara Pearson at TruthOut charges the corporations building wind farms in Mexico with stealing, dividing, and destroying Indigenous land – in addition to using carbon credits to keep polluting and giving the clean energy they produce to Americans, rather than locals – and, yeah, I’d have to say this is the wrong way to fight climate change. I would also remind everyone (especially certain think tank morons who provide sound bites to the Wall Street Journal) that respecting the rights of Indigenous folks does not mean no one can fight climate change, ever. We need to stop listening to folks who hold such rigid dichotomies, not least because they’re not even being honest about it.

When I hear that Republicans are trying to soften their stances on abortion in the wake of our Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization being unpopular, all I can say is they are too fucking late. Does anyone think that the Democratic Party’s two-year effort to create hard-hat jobs will erase the common stereotype of them as out-of-touch latte-swilling liberals? No, they do not, so Republicans ain’t gonna reinvent themselves as abortion “moderates” in just two months. When you spend four decades screaming at the top of your lungs, you should expect folks’ opinions of you to harden.

Finally, ads about guns featuring Mehmet Oz skeet-shooting sure are funny – go skeet-shooting, and get ready for revolution against the liberal elites! – but Mr. Oz’s apparent endorsement of second-cousin marriage from 2014 should put a couple more nails in the coffin of his Senate campaign. I sure hope John Fetterman – eager to bash Mr. Oz for living in New Jersey or pretending to shop for groceries – bashes him hard for this, because no sane person thinks it’s OK to marry your second or third cousin, even if your resulting children will be much less likely to have hemophilia.

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

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass legislation raising taxes on the rich and lowering prescription drug prices, tell your PA state legislators to stop investing in gas infrastructure, and tell your Congressfolk to pass a big oil corporation windfall profits tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: featuring stories about the power of organizing.

When I hear that far-right Christians aim to redeploy the "Astroturf" stratagem that worked so well for them in Virginia in 2021, I feel compelled to remind everyone that once we reveal such a stratagem (and I'll continue to reveal it as often as I can!) it becomes less effective, and also that as even E.J. Jackson knows, running against Terry McAuliffe isn't the hardest thing a candidate can do. Their stratagem might succeed, though, if Democrats don't point out all the Astroturfing going on in these races. People are too quick to accept that someone they know personally couldn't possibly be part of an Astroturf group! But too many of them are, and borrowing a hedge-trimmer from one of them doesn't make them more "real."

Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone not only digs up evidence that our FBI did, in fact, know a lot about the January 6 attempted coup before it happened, but also reminds us that our FBI professes that it simply doesn't have the legal tools to detect right-wing agitation before it happens but can detect and disrupt more peaceful liberal agitation with laughable ease. Which further reminds us that law enforcement agencies always use events like the January 6 attempted coup to justify even more surveillance power over the American people, when they hardly need it! They just don't focus very much on right-wing protestors, for some reason. Also, they don't seem to need to get warrants very often; there's a reason we get warrants.

On March 29, wind power produced more electricity than either coal or nuclear power for the first time; though not as much as natural gas. I can already hear the right-wingers squeal that TEH BIG GUMMINTZ GIVEZ TEH WELFAREZ TO TEH WINDZ POWERZ!!!!!, as if either coal or nuclear power would be able to provide any power at all without massive federal taxpayer support. Think how much power wind could supply if big corporations had done the smart thing and embraced it long ago! Versus the dumb thing of clinging like grim death to fossil fuel technology that's going to make our planet unlivable. (No, they're not "smart" merely because they've made a lot of money. Try taking money with you to the Pearly Gates.)

Luis Feliz Leon at New York Focus reminds us that the Amazon Labor Union organizing effort in the Staten Island warehouse "broke many of the traditional rules of labor organizing, while making history." The ALU had virtually no funding, no prior experience organizing, and no support from other unions; they also made "amateur missteps" like filing for an NLRB election before having majority card-signing support and refraining from home visits and door-knocking. So how did they win? They organized by talking to workers in break areas and in the cafeteria rather than at home -- since, as one organizer suggests, most folks look at their home as a safe space from work -- and used social media apps to specifically to reach workers whose command of the English language wasn't that great face-to-face. Besides, they're not the first independent union to win! In the '30s, those unions won all the time -- and after ALU won, more established unions supported them.

Mark and Paul Engler at Waging Nonviolence interview Rebecca Tarlau about "What U.S. Organizers Can Learn From Brazil's Landless Workers Movement." "(W)e need to contest power in all spaces of social life" (i.e., not just in the political sphere), "whether that’s in the media or the schools or with the land," and Brazil's Landless Workers Movement has been doing that for decades, whether through gaining permanent settlements or through establishing and maintaining health care clinics, educational curricula, and food processing plants. So they've essentially seized power without very much compromise by providing for their own needs as much as possible and through that service "prefiguring an alternative way of being" -- though when the Black Panthers (among others!) tried something similar in the United States in the '70s, our governments demonized them and our law enforcement took them down.

Finally, Indonesia's Parliament passes a bill criminalizing many forms of sexual violence, the first of its kind in that nation. Many observers think it doesn't go far enough -- it tackles domestic abuse, child marriage, forced marriage, and sexual exploitation but not rape -- while the religious right there complains that it doesn't include proscriptions against extramarital sex (like those guys really want that!) and "deviant" sexual orientations. My father would say if all the extremists are upset, it must be a good bill; I won't go that far, but I will call it progress, even if, as I suspect, getting it passed was (in Ronald Reagan's famous phrase) like crapping out a pineapple.

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, tax the windfall profits of oil and gas corporations, prohibit themselves from trading on the stock market, pass legislation promoting renewable energy, pass legislation protecting public lands and rivers, and confirm two USPS Board of Governors nominees so they can fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: Republicans have an agenda! (Spoiler alert: it sucks.)

When I hear that women fight reactionary forces in Kuwait who call the mere presence of yoga classes an affront to Islam, I can't be too proud that at least American women can go to yoga classes largely unmolested, not least because American women still had to get their husbands' permission to get credit cards during my lifetime. These right-wing drama hounds may say they're "defending the daughters" of Kuwait, but American right-wingers sound no different, and I'm pretty sure they look at how much further Kuwaiti women have to go and wish they could start America from there! I wish the women of Kuwaiti luck, and how about the rest of us stop appeasing assholes?

Sanitation workers in San Diego County win a fairly substantial raise after going on strike for seven weeks with enthusiastic community support. Yes, even though they weren't getting their trash picked up, to the point where the city of Chula Vista actually declared a public health emergency. The new contract did not resolve many of the workers' grievances -- like poorly-maintained garbage trucks, that's a big one -- and I think it'll take many, many more strikes to get those issues resolved, because they don't actually work for the county government, but for Republic, a corporation that collects trash in 40 states and pays its CEO $12 million annually. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's yet another argument against privatization.

Jim Hightower describes "Corporate Profiteers' Pandemic Strategy" thusly: "Gouge Consumers and Blame Joe Biden." "What the GOP bemoans as America’s inflation problem," he writes, "is actually a corporate greed problem" (italics in original, I swear!) because "our economy doesn’t remotely resemble a competitive marketplace." You'll be familiar with the record-profits-but-still-raising-prices-story, but you may be less familiar with corporate monopoly's effects on small businesses, such as the cattle ranchers who get less money for their beef as meat processors charge consumers more. Read to the end so you can do something about all of this, versus just staying angry.

John F. Tooker at The Conversation warns us that we are overusing seeds coated with insecticides. Coating a seed with insecticide? What will they think of next? With neonicotinoid-coated seeds now being planted in just about all corn and cotton fields and about half of soybean fields, the answer to that question is, as always, "whatever allows big ag to hire fewer workers." Pretty soon nobody's going to have the money to buy food! Mr. Tooker isn't anti-neonic per se, but would prefer that farmers use integrated pest management, which I sure hope wouldn't involve introducing any more invasive species (after all, the spotted lanternfly is one of those species that makes neonics useful).

From the "Who Greenlighted This?" file: a bitcoin "mining" corporation rescues a Montana "zombie" coal plant which had operated on only 46 days in 2020, and perhaps not unexpectedly, the climate change emissions skyrocket. "This isn’t helping old ladies from freezing to death," one observer notes, "it’s to enrich a few people while destroying our climate for all of us." So how did Marathon get its gnarled hand around the Hardin plant? Oh, the usual way -- by promising JOBZ!!!! Though we read yesterday about how fossil fuel corporations' job promises typically fall well short. And while wind isn't the zero-sum game coal is, I'd prefer wind turbines power homes and businesses rather than speculative investments. No, I will not call it "currency," because it's not currency. Words mean things, after all.

Finally, Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) releases an 11-point agenda for Republicans if they take back Congress in 2022, and most of it makes you realize that Mitch McConnell's refusal to issue any agenda makes him the brains of that outfit. I've already got the ad written: "Sir, what would Republicans do about inflation?" "We'll finish the border wall and name it after Trump!" "I see. So what would Republicans do about high prescription drug prices?" "We will make a law saying there are only two genders!" "Don't see how those relate; so what would Republicans do about paid family leave?" "We're going to take critical race theory out of the schools!" "OK, so family, schools, I guess -- what would Republicans do about corporate monopolies?" "We will make private corporations do everything government does!" "Uh huh. Oh, and what's this I hear about Republicans wanting to raise taxes on half of all Americans?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, the Postal Service Reform Act, the Future Generations Protection Act, the Algorithmic Accountability Act, and the Supreme Court Ethics Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to reject a fake gerrymandering reform bill, tell our EPA to enact the most vigorous methane emissions regulations possible and start monitoring factory farm pollution, tell President Biden to keep his promise to outlaw certain landmines and close Guantánamo Bay, and tell our USDA to stop oil trains from rumbling through Utah. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your PA state Assemblyfolk to reject pro-pollution bills, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Farm System Reform Act, the Martha Wright Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, the Baby Food Safety Act, and the GI Bill Restoration Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to let Medicare negotiate drug prices, fight climate change, plug gaps in Medicaid coverage, end the Senate filibuster, and protect Inspectors General as they expose government corruption. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your legislators' phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning our Post Office, offshore drilling, "Instagram for kids," fossil fuel drilling, and right-wing news.

Long story short: tell President Biden to reform our Postal Service and end offshore drilling, tell Facebook to abandon its plans to let children use Instagram, tell AXA's CEO to stop insuring fossil fuel projects, and tell AT&T to abandon One America News Network. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to fire USPS Board of Governors member Ron Bloom and USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy already. He should have already fired Mr. DeJoy merely for slowing down the mail and charging more for it, because why should we tolerate paying more to get our medicine and ballots and Social Security checks slower? I'm old enough to remember when merely proposing such a thing would get you laughed out of the room. But apparently Mr. Bloom stands in the way of our USPS Board of Governors firing Mr. DeJoy, and even better, Mr. DeJoy has invested with a fund Mr. Bloom runs, which sure smells of corruption even if we never put either man in jail for it. If Mr. Biden replaces Mr. Bloom, we're all one step closer to replacing Mr. DeJoy, at which point hallelujah!

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell President Biden to end offshore drilling. You don't need to stop with the recent spill of the Southern California coast -- you need only remember the Exxon Valdez spill and the BP Spillageddon in the Gulf of Mexico, both of which were avoidable and took forever to clean up because corporations don't like paying to clean up their messes. President Biden wouldn't just be fulfilling a campaign promise by ending offshore drilling -- he'd also open up space for the wind farms he wants to line America's coasts, as I imagine it would be difficult to do both things in the same spot. And if I had to pick, I'd rather have the turbines out there -- no, they won't kill all the birds, and no, they won't make you sick, and no, they won't be so noisy you can't function. And we might get to keep our planet.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell Facebook to abandon its ill-conceived (and ill-concealed!) plans to hook children on Instagram. You no doubt know from multitudinous news reports that Facebook knew that young girls who used Instagram had much worse body images than girls who didn't, and it was still like pulling teeth to get them to "suspend" their plans for an Instagram for Kids app. And don't let anyone justify Instagram-for-Kids by saying "they're just going to find a way to get it anyway," not just because defeatism is unworthy of a civilized people, but because our job, as adults, isn't necessarily to play catch-up with social media so much as to give our kids spiritual nourishment so they don't run to social media for it. Old-fashioned of me, I know.

Sum of Us helps you tell AXA CEO Thomas Buberl to stop insuring new gas and oil projects. He's supposedly going to decide on that matter this week, and AXA (which operates mainly in Europe and the Middle East) was the first big insurance corporation to refuse to insure new coal projects, but we still need to let AXA know we're watching, not least because we also know big oil and gas drilling corporations are also watching, and preparing to drown out our voices with the power of big money. Oh, and also their "expertise," which is mainly expertise in BSing and gaslighting. When that's all they got, we need to oppose them, in numbers they cannot mistake. The only way to beat big money is to fight big money, after all -- and our victories today guarantee more victories in the future, as long as we keep working.

Finally, Color of Change helps you tell AT&T to end financial support for the One America News Network. Just because AT&T might have wanted "its own conservative (sic) news network" years ago doesn't mean we have to put up with all the rage-inducing crap on TV news today -- and since AT&T is apparently OAN's sole funder, the first blow we strike might be the decisive one. OAN are the people who tell you lies about the 2020 election, lies about COVID vaccines, lies about the January 6 attempted coup, lies about Black civil rights activists, and lies about how "oppressed" white folks are. They're also the folks who think that people who "believe" Joe Biden won the 2020 election should be executed for treason. I want the assholes who say such things to get the oblivion they deserve. They sure don't deserve more corporate money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning the Build Back Better Act.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the rich and corporations pay more taxes, expand Medicare, increase funding for home- and community-based care, fund weatherizing for low-income homes, end funding for the notorious F-35 plane, and pass the IG Independence and Empowerment Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: all jobs, all day.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk you want renewable energy, lead-free water pipes, paid family/medical leave, and Medicare drug price negotiation in the American Jobs Plan -- and no military spending! And then tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the wealthy and on corporations to pay for it. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Iraq war AUMF, create zero-emission public trans, release COINTELPRO files to the public, and pass the IG Independence and Empowerment Act, the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the End Polluter Welfare Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's and/or state legislators' phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

Daily Kos, the Sierra Club, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Meanwhile, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and the Daily Kos Liberation League all help you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And Public Citizen helps you tell them to do both. I know, I know, One True Real and Great American President Joe Manchin has expressed a preference, but he ain't the boss of us. And, toward that end, Daily Kos helps you sign up and call West Virginians and urge them to urge their Senator to vote for the For the People Act. 79% of them support the For the People Act, after all! And if he's going to write 299 stupid paragraphs about why he won't, at least we can get his constituents to embarrass him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk not to be cowardly about raising taxes on the rich, tell your Senators to pass the For the People Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Baby Food Safety Act, the End Polluter Welfare Act, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, and the Medicare for All Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links (where applicable) in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk what you want from the Biden infrastructure/jobs bill; tell your Congressfolk to support the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, the Medicare for All Act, and the End Polluter Welfare Act; and tell your Congressfolk to support encryption and stop Arctic drilling. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to contact your Senators -- or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: in which we take the whole "Republicans are leaving the party" narrative with the appropriate amount of salt.

Sick of hearing how "frozen windmills" (which even Gov. Abbott said only comprised 10% of Texas's power grid) supposedly left good Texans out in the cold? Greg Palast, America's Last Journalist, reminds us that deregulation left the Texas power grid vulnerable to winter storms, and that's not just about Texas refusing to join the federal power grid that could have enabled them to get free excess power from California this month -- it's about letting power utilities do whatever made them the most money, rather than whatever made the power grid the most reliable, as federal regulation mandated before the early '90s. Trigger alert: the woman with the $450 electric bill for one day's power who paid only $33 for the entire month of February last year.

It's tempting to watch the Arizona Republican Party's machinations in the wake of Mr. Trump's election loss and conclude that the party is dead, but remember that if Democrats do nothing over the next two years, a bet no one's ever lost their shirt taking, then even a rabid raccoon can become Arizona's Governor or beat Sen. Kelly in 2022. How would that work? The same way it always does: the crazy people get behind their nominee, and then the party regulars, sensing victory, "hold their noses" and tell themselves they can control the crazy people, a stratagem that has historically led to very little soul-searching among its practitioners.

In a related note, we can also make too much of reports like these, describing the thousands who've left the Republican Party after the January 6 attempted coup, and not just because "5,000 voters leaving the party" happens in the context of over 480,000 registered Republicans (and about twice as many independents, at least some of whom lean right) in Connecticut as of late October. You could argue that January 6 was probably the last straw for a lot of these folks -- or you could argue that folks may formally abandon a party and still not abandon it in their hearts, and that the next big election is almost two years away, and that's plenty of time for easily-imaginable circumstances (like, again, a do-nothing Democratic government) to bring them back.

How the mighty fall: Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D?-NY), lionized with such titles as "America's Boyfriend" for his performance as the anti-Trump during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, now finds himself more of a pariah after getting caught covering up COVID-related deaths at nursing homes. Our "liberal" media may have trouble understanding how this could have happened, but I suspect most real liberals don't; should we pretend to care about Mr. Cuomo's fall as a sort of rope-a-dope game for the American right? I kid, of course -- I'm a terrible liar, and why not just primary him out in 2022? No actors need apply.

Finally, you've heard that Ted Cruz is the Senator other Senators love to hate? Well, you have to wonder if his wife's friends view her similarly, after one of them in a group chat leaked her texts concerning their now-infamous Cancún trip to the New York Times. Yikes, Mrs. Cruz actually said their house was "FREEZING" (caps in original), and I bet millions of good Texans would have used more than all-caps to tell you how they felt! Of course, most good Texans also can't simply slip off in the middle of a pandemic to some $300-a-night hotel room south of the border when things get tough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning campaign finance, animal safety, and paid family leave.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment that would allow our government to regulate campaign finances again, then Public Citizen still helps you do that. H.J.Res. 48, the "Democracy for All" amendment, would end the fiction of corporate "personhood," explicitly stating that "(t)he rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only. Artificial entities, such as corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities, established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law." The amendment also authorizes state, federal, and local governments to regulate campaign finance, so that "all citizens, regardless of their economic status, have access to the political process, and that no person gains, as a result of that person’s money, substantially more access or ability to influence in any way the election of any candidate for public office or any ballot measure." So there we are.

Meanwhile, you've heard our President's bloviating about "piles of dead birds" at the foot of windmills? Then you will be interested to hear that our Administration has basically decided not to prosecute violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, by allowing oil, electric, and fishing corporations to simply claim they didn't "intend" to kill any of the birds they routinely kill! Law and order! Remember how Antonin Scalia would get heated about attempts to discern the "intent" of a law? I'd like to think he'd be just as hoppin' about this Administration's attempts to simply assign a benign intent to violations of the law. And anyway, if an oil corporation doesn't cover its waste pit though its executives know birds will drown in it, then what do they intend? They intend to harm, and they intend to break the law -- no finger-shaking about how they "only intend to save money," lest that become the "religious conscience" of the new decade. If we wanna be all law and order, we actually have to be all law and order. Hence Environmental Action helps you tell our Administration to scuttle its plan to let bird-killers off the hook.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Brook no silliness from anyone about HOW WILL WE PAYZ FOR TEH THINGZ!!!!, because the cost to the worker making $50,000 annually for this program would be $8.33/month -- about the price of four Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers at Wendy's, or about a buck and a half less than the price of Boz Scaggs's Silk Degrees album on iTunes. Seriously, it's not a lot of money for a lot of peace of mind. And everyone won't be using family leave at once! Because that's not how insurance works! Insurance is when people pool together their resources to help any one of them, or any few of them, through a tough time. We've forgotten this because our culture drills this everyone-for-themselves ethos into us, to the point where fools call things like the Affordable Care Act "socialism" and never face the scorn and ridicule they deserve. But we need to get back to what works in America, and what works in America is Americans helping each other out.

Action: concerning Social Security and PFAS chemicals.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 860/S. 269, the Social Security 2100 Act, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would increase benefits, shield more Social Security income from taxation, and start taxing income above $400,000 into the system. If you want, though, you could tell your Congressfolk to improve the bill -- there's no reason income above $137,700 and below $400,000 should be untaxed, and there's no reason we should tax anyone's Social Security income at all. You might also mention (there's a "comments" section for this at the above link) that you oppose bills like the so-called TRUST Act, which would let Congressfolk fast-track Social Security cuts "behind closed doors" (in Sen. Ernst's words, which I sincerely hope she regrets after Election Day). We might as well demand the most, or else we'll have to live with the least.

Meanwhile, H.R. 535/S. 618, the PFAS Action Act, would require our EPA to designate all PFAS substances as hazardous; this shouldn't be a tough lift for our EPA, not just because a) PFAS chemicals hardly degrade over time and b) scientists have linked them to cancer, immunity disorders, birth defects, and liver problems, but because our EPA has long acknowledged the need for action on PFAS chemicals -- in fact, they announced a plan to deal with PFAS chemicals just last year, a plan widely derided as too-little-too-late, but it's not like they're going around calling PFAS chemicals "safe." You know, like our President goes around calling climate change a "Chinese hoax" and wind power "dirty"! So Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our health by passing the PFAS Action Act. If it's in everything (and it is), and it doesn't break down naturally, then it's in our water, too -- at least, it is in 43 states, that's 43 of 50 -- and if we don't have clean water, we don't have health care, period.

Around the table: featuring the horrible truth about "free" trade.

Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the state of Colorado violated the U.S. Constitution when it replaced three electors who planned not to vote for Hillary Clinton, though she won the state's popular vote. I think they ruled correctly -- and that's why we need to get rid of the Electoral College! I'm a little surprised and ashamed that it hadn't occurred to me until today that our President could win re-election regardless of his share of the popular vote, if enough electors simply buck the will of their state's electorate. If Democrats were more street-smart, they'd make the Electoral College a big campaign issue. They're not, of course, so they won't.

The incomparable Dean Baker reminds us that, contra what our President says, "China Did Not Trick the U.S. -- Trade Negotiators Served Corporate Interests." "Both Republican and Democratic administrations signed trade deals that made it easy to manufacture goods in China and other countries, and then export them back to the United States," he writes, meaning corporations could take advantage of "low-cost labor there" and "low-cost supply chains" so they could destroy their competitors and make a mint. Thus "the trade deficit was the result of their efforts to increase their profits," and American working families "lost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007." In other words, the trade deficit with China is a feature of American policy, not a bug. The fact that it gives our President opportunity to grandstand about foreigners "taking advantage" of America is just icing on the cake, and our corporate overlords are nowhere near as upset about such grandstanding as they'd like you to think.

Department of Energy study finds the price of building wind farms lower than the price of building a natural gas plant. And natural gas was the "cheap" fossil fuel! Some caveats apply -- renewable energy tax credits might disappear, for one -- but note well that if our President calls all of this TEH FAKE NEWZ!!!! that his own Department of Energy said it. He does appoint "the best people" to his government, right? (But as much as he rants about "piles of dead birds," I'm sure he'll also tout the fact that three states that now get 30% of their power from wind -- Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma -- all voted for him in 2016. Why? Because while you're trying to make sense of his chaos, he just makes more chaos. And yes, I could have written that sentence about George W. Bush in 2004, too.)

Rutgers University study finds that roughly one out of every thousand black men will die during an encounter with police. Sadly, right-wingers will twist this around to SEE YOU ARE TOO TEH SAFEZ 99.9% DON'T DIEZ!!!!!, without telling you that black men and boys are 2.5 times more likely to die during police contacts than white men and boys. They'll also probably twist this around to say black men and boys are five times more likely to kill themselves than get killed by police, without mentioning, that, hello, nobody should worry about whether the next time they talk to a cop will be their last.

Finally, our President claims that Jews who vote Democrat exhibit "either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty." Presumably he means "disloyalty" to Israel, but suggesting you're disloyal to a foreign country if you oppose our President or his party is no less offensive than suggesting you're disloyal to this one. And, ah, could it be that Jewish voters went harder for Democratic Congressional candidates in 2018 than they did for Hillary Clinton in 2016 at least in part because more of them fear they'll be killed by the very same white supremacists our President has emboldened? Anyway, no President should conflate himself with our country and call his opponents "disloyal." This is a grown man acting like this.

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

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

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

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

Around the table: concerning some of the difficulties we face in pushing the Overton Window leftward.

I sympathize with Alan MacLeod's frustration that "To Media, No Democrat Can Possibly Be Right-Wing" -- after all, it wasn't that long ago that Georgia Democratic Sen. Richard Russell helped found the Conservative Coalition, and that the American Conservative Union ranked the late Georgia Democratic Rep. Larry McDonald behind only Ron Paul as the most conservative House Rep. But I will say it's nice to finally hear our media call folks like Nancy Pelosi "center-left" instead of pretend (as they did for almost two decades!) that no one in America could possibly be further left than she. This is yet another reason I'm glad Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib are in Congress -- and in America.

In a peripherally-related note, the incomparable Duncan Black, a.k.a. Atrios, answers the vexing question "Why Don't Democratic Senate Candidates in Purple States Support Popular Things" (like a higher minimum wage), and he answers it better than anyone else I've heard. Races in purple states, he says, "are generally going to be tough/close races, but the calculation is not 'boy if I support a higher minimum wage then the voters will get mad.' The calculation is 'boy if I support a higher minimum wage then the voters will like that, BUT the Chamber of Commerce types will dump a bunch of money into the race to oppose me and run ads calling me a child molester (or highlighting something else that might be unpopular about me).'" All of that is true, but it also demands a counterpunch from the candidate like "how about that -- I support a minimum wage hike and suddenly my opponents are lying about me! Don't let them take you hostage!"

Dino Grandoni at the Washington Post explains, with the help of a perhaps too-understated headline, how our "EPA's New 'No Surprises' Inspection Policy Has Some Critics Worried." You remember from school how all your surprise quizzes didn't really count if you didn't do well on them? You don't? Of course you don't! It boggles the mind how Republicans can claim to be the "party of personal responsibility" but also ensure that polluters won't have to put up with surprise inspections which is often the only way to catch polluters. Of course, for our President's votaries, "personal responsibility" is only for black people -- "belonging to the club" is what matters to them, and that's what no-surprise-inspections signifies to them. If Democrats had any courage, they'd run attack ads on this basis, and make the moral argument I've described, but you already know what the chances of that are.

In a peripherally-related note, our President opines that wind power "doesn't work" without taxpayer help. Given the price parity wind has achieved with fossil fuels in many parts of our nation, I rather suspect it would work without subsidies, but gauging whether wind power would work without subsidies now really isn't the point -- we're supposed to subsidize good technologies that need more research and more time to develop. Also, too, oil and gas get about the same amount of subsidies annually as wind power, so if our President "(doesn't) want to be subsidizing things that don't need to be subsidized," where's his enthusiasm for ending that slab of corporate welfare? And if he's so hot to stop handing out taxpayer money to energy sources that "don't work," where's his enthusiasm for ending handouts for nuclear power, which has lost money for a much longer period of time? (I notice he didn't tell other heads of state about the "piles and piles of dead birds" no one finds at the base of windmills. Clearly he saves those stories for us rubes.)

Defense contractor apparently leaves voice mail message threatening Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) over her introduction of a bill that would force public schools to ensure all their students are properly-vaccinated. Read the transcript of this phone call in its entirety, and you'll marvel at the continued existence of folks who have clearly never contemplated the benefits of deep breathing. And remember, folks: "I’m gonna kill your ass if you do that bill, I swear" is a terroristic threat, and therefore not protected by our First Amendment! I hope Rep. Wilson responds to this threat by fighting harder for this bill.

Finally, the New York Times reminds us that "Using Race for Gain" is an "Old Tactic" for our President. Yes, his settlement of that 1970s investigation into his apparent refusal to rent to black folks and his emptiest-wagon trumpeting of the "guilt" of the Central Park Five leapt to mind even before I got to paragraph nine. If you accept that race-baiting is a pattern with our President, as I do, then of course you regard reports that he "didn't...fully underst(and) what he was doing when he unleashed last week's racist tweetstorm as utter bullshit. And worse, as drama.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the table: what's even worse than pretending not to understand how tax brackets work, and other lessons.

You know what's even worse than Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) explaining how tax brackets work pretty thoroughly and our "liberal" media refusing to understand it? Right-wing fools calling the "Green New Deal" a "leftist fantasy program." Folks actually do want less pollution and more renewable energy in their lives, so calling their sincere hopes and dreams a "fantasy" is pretty insulting. Oh, but it's even worse than that: in an era where solar and wind production costs have almost achieved parity with coal and oil costs, calling renewable energy a "fantasy program" is also pretty insulting.

Ari Paul catches a New York Times op-ed asserting that pot is actually extraordinarily harmful. The Times probably thinks it's doing its due diligence in presenting "opposing views," but I only want opposing views that actually make good arguments, not "arguments" that present anecdotes as evidence and cherry-pick the data so obviously it'd make the Cato Institute wince. And people have been known to do evil after drinking a lot of booze, and that hasn't lately spurred a whole lot of righteous anger against legal alcohol.

If you're wondering why it's taken so long for Rep. Steve King (R-IA) to finally suffer for the racist claptrap he's been saying on the national stage for 15 years, well, I can't really tell you, and not just because "tipping points" like these really seem to come and go without very much changing. It's not like Republicans have never condemned his remarks before, but it's also not like they've done very much about his mouth before now, either. And I don't think Republicans were trying to get ahead of Democratic-sponsored censure resolutions, because don't they normally just ignore Democrats when they talk about racism? (As an aside, I bet Mob Boss Mitch is hopping mad about having had to say something about this.)

Researchers develop a font (which they've called "Sans Forgetica") that supposedly helps you retain more of what you read. It probably does put more markers in your mind than you'd get from Georgia or Trajan Pro III (my two favorite fonts, if you haven't noticed), but the size and smell of a good book put those markers in your mind, too, and anyway you can't read a whole book in Sans Forgetica because it'd hurt your head. The best way to remember what you've read is to read it more than once, and don't task yourself reading things you don't enjoy. And better it be a real book than an e-book (see "size," "smell").

Finally, because you deserve some good news, two federal courts effectively block our Administration's attempt to allow just any old corporation to cite just any old "religious" belief to deny birth control to its employees. You'll recall that our Supreme Court's infamous Hobby Lobby decision wouldn't expand such "religious conscience" exceptions beyond closely-held corporations, and while I suppose it's possible the two relatively new far right-wingers on our Court might be looking to widen these exceptions, this could wind up being the second time our Administration has failed to roll back the mandate. Don't think our Administration is trying to do everything badly, though, not just because that's 13-dimensional chess and you should avoid it, but because incompetence might really just be the better explanation.

Around the table: how Tammy Baldwin won re-election, and other lessons.

David Rosen at TruthOut reminds us that "Regulations Protect Us All." He not only lists the various crises brought about or helped along by lax regulatory oversight (the bankster meltdown of 2008, the Spillageddon in the Gulf of 2010, the Flint lead poisoning crisis of 2014) but he reminds us that our "liberal" media too often buy what anti-regulatory groups are selling without being too critical of it. Regulations actually save money, after all -- they just don't deposit that money directly into CEO bank accounts, as anti-regulatory efforts tend to do. Also, too, "(i)t’s pretty rich for corporations to demand longer, more nuanced, more detailed rules full of loopholes and exceptions to boost their bottom lines, and then turn around and whine about how complicated the rules are."

Mary Bottari at the Center for Media and Democracy describes how Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin fought off $14 million in outside spending attacking her and defeated her far-right opponent by 11 points. How did she do it? She punched back hard against an early attack ad, she defined her opponent as a corporate shill, defended popular causes like fair trade and expanding access to health care, and made those causes personal for her (she lost her mother at an early age to opioid addiction and got seriously ill as a child) and for Wisconsin voters (explaining how "free" trade hurts Wisconsin's massive paper industry). It didn't hurt that her opponent ran truly awful attack ads unbecoming a civilized person, let alone a nurse, or a candidate for U.S. Senate.

Investment bank study finds that building a new utility-scale wind or solar farm costs about as much as running an existing coal power plant. And, you know, eventually we'll run out of coal, but the sun rises every day and the wind always returns (and, ah, there is such a thing as battery storage for relatively lean times). But please, right-wingers, let's hear more bogus stories about "wind turbine syndrome" and "piles of dead birds," and let's pretend that coal miners couldn't possibly adapt to a more renewable future.

And on cue: our "liberal" media stops covering the caravan coming up from Honduras, and now our President is pulling troops from our southwest border. Remember how much ebola was in the news before the 2014 elections and then wasn't in the news at all after that? Good times! But seriously, you can't pull out before an "invasion," can you? Our brave and bold President can. And of course his votaries will tell the story that their Personal Lord and Savior put troops on the border and scared the caravan away. I can't even dismiss the possibility that they'll say he did it with dust from his magic horn.

Finally, it's bad when my veteran co-workers are bringing up our President's statement that the retired Navy Admiral who got Mr. bin Laden -- and who's been very critical of our President lately -- maybe should have gotten to Mr. bin Laden sooner. I have three things to say about that. One, if you can't ever concede even a relatively unimportant point in an argument, you're not being tough so much as you're being weak. Two, a big reason we "didn't get bin Laden sooner" was that George W. Bush didn't "lose a lot of sleep" over it -- or, you know, preferred him alive so he could be a villain in future election campaigns. And three, our President isn't popular with our military so much as he's popular with folks who need everyone to watch them worship our military, and you remember what Jesus said about people who pray in public.