Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning voting rights, clean water, and paycheck fairness.

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk and state legislators stop denying prisoners the right to vote. Why? Because denying prisoners the right to vote gives governments the power to deny the vote to whomever they can throw in jail. Could it be a coincidence that America not only incarcerates more people than any other nation on Earth, but incarcerates a disproportionate number of Americans of color? Even if it is actually coincidence, there's no denying that the result is racist. And there's another problem: the census counts prisoners for the purpose of apportioning Congressional districts, which means the unscrupulous can pack prisoners into rural districts and deny them a voice in those districts! If you're inclined to retort that we've always denied prisoners the right to vote, please re-read the previous four sentences, in which I explain why that's a bad idea. And maybe slap yourself.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to reject the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska's Bristol Bay area, then the Alaska Wilderness League still helps you do that. You probably thought this was all over when Scott Pruitt's EPA announced its own lack of support for the mine, didn't you? But that only meant Pebble Mine supporters would try to get their foot in another door, hence the Army Corps of Engineers' public commenting period. You already know that Pebble Mine would not only pollute Bristol Bay waters, but kill the world-renowned sockeye salmon industry that thrives there -- which means, not incidentally, that Pebble Mine would also be a job-killer. But you probably also know that Pebble Mine is also the kind of project that might not ever get built, but will enable someone to bilk someone else out of a lot of money. Your comment could help stop all of that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7/S. 270, the Paycheck Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The House passed its version last month, with only seven Republican votes -- to think that only seven Republican House Reps can use this vote to tout themselves as moderates! In the Senate, of course, it's worse -- Republicans hold 53 of 100 seats, and of those, I can see two who would vote for the bill. That doesn't mean we give up, though -- it means we inform them of our will, again and again and again. And the Paycheck Fairness Act would make it easier for women to find out their bosses are paying them less than their male counterparts for no good reason. You'd think that'd be a conservative solution -- you know, to give good Americans tools to help themselves. Of course, today's Republicans are reactionaries, not conservatives. But that's just another reason to keep fighting.

Action: concerning discrimination, government spying, and internet privacy.

Sadly, pro-discrimination bills are advancing in the Tennessee state legislature -- HB 1274/SB 1499 would force the state to help localities defend their bathroom bills, SB 1297 would call the mere presence of a transgender person in a locker room an "indecent exposure" incident, and SB 1304 would let adoption agencies discriminate against particular parents as an act of "religious" "conscience." You'd think state legislators would have something better to do than make it harder for gay and transgender folks to live their lives! But this is now the hill far-right religious bigots will die on. The good news, I guess, is that they've already died on so many other hills, but that's only because we fought them, and kept fighting them after it seemed we lost. Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee state legislators to oppose HB 1274 and oppose SB 1297, SB 1304, and SB 1499. And if you're in Tennessee, you can join protests at the capitol; you can get more information here and here. The legislature will start deliberating on all these bills today, so the quicker you act, the better we'll do. Good hunting!

Meanwhile, H.R. 1942/S. 936, the Ending Mass Collection of Americans' Phone Records Act, would, as its title suggests, stop our National Security Agency from collecting American phone records without a warrant. Proponents of government spying always gloss over those last three words, "without a warrant," in their never-ending efforts to smear those of us who respect our Constitution as "weak on terror," but no one opposes law enforcement carrying out its duties in a lawful manner. And considering how quickly our government can get warrants to investigate terror activities, you have to wonder why our government has needed more power -- and if you concluded that they "need" that power so as to silence its opponents and smear protestors as "terrorists" (or "socialists"!), I wouldn't blame you. So the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ending Mass Collection of Americans' Phone Records Act.

Finally, word on the street is that Congress is trying to draft online privacy legislation -- but that Congressfolk are already giving in to big telecom corporations. Not that this is a tremendous surprise, if you recall that the Republican-dominated Congress nullified FCC internet privacy regulations in 2017 using a "resolution of disapproval." Given our Congressfolk's propensity to wilt before the prospect of campaign contributions (or campaign contributions for potential opponents), we will no doubt have to lend some steel to their spines, hence Fight for the Future helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass internet privacy legislation that puts us, and not big corporations, in charge of our private information. That link has a lot of good information, such as Mr. Snowden's statement that "(a)rguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." Indeed.

Around the table: how quickly Wall Street bonuses outpace the minimum wage, and other horrible truths.

Sen. Sanders says folks in prison should be able to vote, and gets an earful from center and right. Opponents center and right whine WHAT ABOUT TEH MURDURURZ ANDZ TEH TERRORIZTZ!!!!!, but they say that only to provoke rage in people. If folks in prison can vote, our government won't be able to throw people into prison to keep them from voting them out. Note well that the "war on drugs" mainly throws black and brown folks into prison, and you'll begin to see what that means.

Aimee Picchi at CBS News notes that if the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as Wall Street bonuses have grown since 1985, it'd be $33.51/hour today. And minimum wage workers do so much more for America than banksters do! No use whining that the minimum wage has gone up 116% since 1985, not just because it ignores Wall Street bonuses going up about 1,000 percent over the same time, but because inflation has gone up over 136% during that time. Something's tricking down, but it sure ain't wealth.

Fox News's Andrew Napolitano says that not only did our President obstruct justice numerous times during the Mueller investigation, his obstruction is also "immoral," because his obstruction didn't even "save a human life or to preserve human freedom" but merely "to save him from the consequences of his own behavior." Naturally Fox News relegated these insights to the internet, like all cable news corporations do when they don't want to rock the boat, but Mr. Napolitano's condemnation is still worth hearing -- and repeating.

You recall that deal that prohibits the IRS from offering free filing services to good Americans as long as private corporations like TurboTax offer the service? Well, it seems that Intuit (TurboTax's parent corporation) has inserted code on TurboTax's website that keeps Google from helping you find that free service!. So, in short: TurboTax has an agreement to keep the IRS from offering free filing services to taxpayers, says it'll offer the service instead, and then keeps you from seeing it in search engines. Nice work if you can get it! (Sadly for those who insist the "free" market must be allowed to solve every problem, H&R Block is doing the same thing.)

We learn from Motherboard that Twitter doesn't ban white supremacists from its platform the way it bans ISIS from its platform because the algorithms it uses to ban ISIS only catch a few peaceful Arabic-language sites, while a white supremacist ban would catch more than a few Republican politicians. And? You have a First Amendment right not to be put in jail by your government, but you do not have a First Amendment right to use Twitter, and if you think Twitter's banning you for no good reason, you have to prove it. I think right-wingers get so angry about the prospect of Twitter banning them because they can't prove it. I just wish their anger didn't scare Twitter into weakness. (And, ah, one more time: Twitter should hire people to moderate their boards instead of counting on computer software to do that. Hiring people is job creation, after all, and if Twitter can't pay people to do that very important work, then maybe Twitter shouldn't survive. Why is it always left to the liberal to be the hardass these days?)

Finally, George Goehl at The Guardian says something that should be fairly obvious in America: that if Democrats would fight big ag factory farms and all the pollution they cause, they'd win back rural voters. Of course, Democrats are counting on all that factory farm donation money, so they won't do something that might actually win back rural voters -- they'll go on pretending to be Republicans-lite about crime and drugs and immigration and "right-sizing regulations," which hasn't ever fooled anyone, really.

Action: concerning health care, food inspection, and cable fees.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, then Peoples Action still helps you do that. What would we gain by expanding Medicare to include all Americans -- you know, besides better and cheaper health care that leaves no good Americans out in the cold? We would get more power over our lives! How much power do you have over your health insurer when they slam you with a surprise bill? Can you go get yourself a better health insurance corporation? Not when you get health insurance through your job, and not when a mere five health insurance corporations cover over half of all insured, and not when buying insurance by yourself would cost you a lot more than what you're paying now. Now what would happen if your government slammed you with a surprise bill? You can fight that -- you can embarrass them in the media, and you might be able to get people fired, or even get people voted out. All we need, as Americans, is a fighting chance. The Medicare for All Act would help give us one.

Meanwhile, our Administration, ever sensitive to big ag bosses and their need for gilded plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, has proposed slashing federal pork inspectors by 40%, so that big ag corporations don't "suffer" from the PR headaches of poisoned food, never mind how much the rest of us actually suffer from poisoned food. Food poisoning is one of the few things that can get substantial coverage from our drama-addicted media, so naturally this Administration wants to relieve them of their responsibility not to make their customers sick. Also, our Administration would let big ag corporations use their own employees instead of federal inspectors -- think their employees might have some incentive not to anger their bosses with news of pus and bile and feces in their meat? -- and would speed up slaughter inspection lines because of course they would. Hence CREDO helps you tell our Department of Agriculture to abandon its plans to cut inspection workers and let more big ag corporations to inspect their own meat.

Finally, you love getting surprise fees on your cable bill, right? Well, H.R. 1220, the TRUE Fees Act, would make that a less ubiquitous occurence by forcing big telecom corporations to include most of their fees in their advertised price and to break down their electronic bills so that the consumer can see all the fees and taxes in their bill. The bill would also make big telecom corporations give consumers at least 21 days' notice before jacking up any fees, and if any consumers don't like it, they can end their contract with those big telecoms without any penalties. (Admittedly that latter part would mean more if big telecoms didn't have monopolies in most areas.) And the bill would also void forced arbitration clauses in customer contracts; we should get rid of forced arbitration clauses (which, as you likely know, deny you your day in court and put you in a "court" more to the corporation's liking) every chance we get. So Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to support price transparency by passing the TRUE Fees Act.

Around the table: stories about public banking, taxes, news deserts, retail worker activism, and "stability."

"I've Seen Goldman Sachs From the Inside," writes Nomi Prins at Truthout. "We Need Public Banks." There's a Mack truck-sized opening for the "fiscally responsible" "moderate" to point out that relying on banksters for infrastructure funding is far more expensive than relying on public banks. And it's no use complaining that public banks would be corrupt too, because as a citizen you can do more about public bank corruption. When they say don't let the perfect murder the good, this is kinda what they mean.

Misha Hill and Lorena Roque at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy ask the right question about the "opportunity zones" created by the 2017 tax "reform": "Opportunity for Whom?". The answer: "opportunity" for big developers to get even more corporate welfare from the taxpayer, as they push folks of color out of historically black and brown neighborhoods. And I'll bet more than a few of them are keeping buildings empty to get even more corporate welfare from the taxpayer, too. (Stick around for the last five paragraphs, though, to learn that there really are solutions to urban poverty, and that they even go beyond "stop handing out corporate welfare.")

Daily Yonder publisher Dee Davis explains how her area of East Kentucky became a "news desert." If you're thinking "but now you can get any viewpoint on social media at the click of a button," think again -- the Clinton/Bush the Lesser era saw the mushrooming of religious broadcast stations at the low end of the FM dial, stations now "weaponized by conservative think tanks and by Evangelical church networks," and if you've watched Fox News for any length of time you'll recognize how "the emotional button-pushing remains constant" on these stations. Wishing for a time when you could read two real local newspapers in almost any area of the country may sound like a conservative dream, and maybe it is, but it's also a democratic one.

Bryce Covert at The Nation describes the works of Rise Up Retail, a group of retail workers who have agitated for better treatment under the law, many of them after losing their jobs at retail chains owned by hedge-fund managers. You know hedge-fund managers are vampires, redistributing the wealth of their workers upward to themselves and hollowing out the corporations they run, but you may not know that Rise Up Retail is getting good bills a hearing, like S. 3170 in New Jersey, the so-called "Toys 'R' Us" bill that would mandate more severance and notice for workers at corporations about to go under. What hedge fund managers did to Sears and Toys 'R' Us (and Ms. Covert goes into great detail about that) ain't illegal, but it should be.

Finally, I know you all had a good laugh when former Clinton impeacher Kenneth Starr said that impeaching our current President would be "so bad for the country," but let's not let pass his explanation, such as it is, of why impeaching our current President would be "so bad": "(t)he American people want stability." "Stability"? What about this Administration has ever evinced stability? Someone tell Mr. Starr that a rhetorical hostage situation only works in America if we're not already spitting laughter.

Action: concerning Social Security and economic policy.

Social Security Trustees released their annual report on Monday, and you've seen all the crappy headlines: ZOMG TEH SOSHUL SECURITEEZ CANTZ PAYZ TEH FULL BENEFITZ BY TEH 2035!!!! and ZOMG TEH COSTS WILLZ EXCEEDZ TEH INCOMEZ NEXT YEARZ!!!!! If you're old enough to remember the ZOMG TEH SOSHUL SECURITEEZ WILL GOEZ BROKEZ BY 2016!!!!, then you won't be impressed. But if you're acquainted with simple arithmetic, you can see that raising the ceiling on payroll taxes so that income over $132,900 can be taxed into the system will not only help keep Social Security solvent, but also allow us to expand its benefits so our seniors can have a more dignified retirement. And ideally we're all going to be seniors one day, so what we do for them we do for us, too -- particularly since we're all paying into the system now! Social Security Works helps you tell Congress to protect and improve Social Security by passing H.R. 860/S. 269, the Social Security 2100 Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 2176, the Return to Prudent Banking Act, would (among other things) bring back the famed Glass-Steagall "wall" separating your bank account from a bank's risky investment activities. You still remember the big bankster meltdown of 2008, I trust? And you remember how politicians all went on the TV to blame anyone but the banksters? And you remember how banksters barely suffered for their evil, but the taxpayer had to bail them out? And you remember how well banksters have done in the succeeding years under a weak Democratic President and then an evil Republican one? Well, forcing banks to keep their speculative investments from crapping all over your savings and your investments would be a good way to start bringing the banksters to heel, as it is the duty of all civilized people to do. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back some sanity to banking by passing the Return to Prudent Banking Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to keep Stephen Moore off our Federal Reserve Board of Governors, then a group of good-government organizations still helps you do that. You know we should keep Mr. Moore off our Federal Reserve because he's long advocated the kind of economic flimflam that has destroyed state and local governments and served only to redistribute worker income upward to bosses. You may also have heard that he owes our government some $75,000 in unpaid taxes and that he owes his ex-wife four times that amount in alimony. His defenders will say these are the kinds of mistakes "big people" make all the time when they have a lot of money -- which only argues for not letting people get that "big" in the first place, as well for rejecting the me-first-and-only economic theories that cause all these "big people" "mistakes."

Action: concerning pollution and paycheck fairness.

The Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell big money-managing corporations BlackRock and Vanguard to pressure ExxonMobil and Chevron to move toward renewable energy at their next shareholder meetings. BlackRock and Vanguard are two of the biggest retirement-fund managers in the world, after all, and their agitation can get even ExxonMobil and Chevron moving in the right direction. Of course, these pension funds might have your money in them, so the enterprising corporatist might retort DON'T MAKEZ UZ DO TEH SOLARZ AND TEH WINDZ OR YOUR RETIREMENTZ WILLZ BE TEH GONEZ!!!!! Maybe you don't want your pension fund dependent on a future where coal-oil-and-gas belch pollution into our air and water with impunity, but consider, also, that a) energy is not the only sector of the economy BlackRock and Vanguard invest in and b) coal is doing badly and renewable energy is doing rather well, so any supposed impact on your pension might just be a bit overstated.

Meanwhile, the Adani Group is still trying to put a coal mine on the edge of Australia's Great Barrier Reef -- which has suffered enough over the years, frankly -- but they're going to need a big corporation to insure their mine. A few big insurance corporations, to their credit, have said no -- but Liberty Mutual hasn't, yet, so Sum of Us helps you tell Liberty Mutual not to do business with the corporation that would destroy the Great Barrier Reef. It's not enough to describe the unique ecosystem the Reef supports -- plenty of bad people act like that's all stupid, and too many good people believe them. Fact is, the fuel they make goes away, and the money they make goes away, but the Great Barrier Reef can last forever, if we simply avoid destroying it -- particularly for a source of fuel that contributes less and less to our economy and more and more to the pollution that's destroying this planet. I hope that all doesn't sound too conservative.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. Women still make 80 cents for every dollar men make, on average, and when you adjust for factors like experience and similar qualifications, women still don't make a dollar for every dollar men make. The Paycheck Fairness Act would, among other things, keep employers from retaliating against workers who discuss their pay with each other, since that's generally the only way women find out they're getting shafted. Of course, Mob Boss Mitch, who "get(s) to decide what we vote on" in the Senate, won't want to hold a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act. Maybe he'll grace us with another op-ed (which no mob boss likes writing!) intoning seriously about "trial lawyers," which they always talk about when they've got nothing. Still, let's do our duty; at least it'll make them look bad, again, and that'll add up.

Action: concerning war with Iran, the For the People Act, and the Save the Internet Act.

Our Administration isn't just saber-rattling with Venezuela these days -- they've also set their sights on Iran, by designating part of the Iranian military as a "terrorist organization" and refusing to rule out attacking Iran under that 2001 AUMF that Congress should have repealed long ago. Hence S. 1039, the aptly-named Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act, would defund any Administration effort to attack Iran without explicit Congressional approval. There are plenty of reasons to dislike the Iranian government (they're fundamentalists, they're a police state, they held 52 good Americans hostage for over a year from 1979-81, etc.), but those are not necessarily reasons to wage war on Iran. And we all saw how the occupation of Iraq went; now try that in a country with three times the population. Win Without War helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 1039 and thus slow our Administration's bloodlust for war with Iran.

Meanwhile, Sign for Good helps you tell the Senate to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act, and thus protect our right to vote. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (E-KY), as you know, has said he won't bring H.R. 1 up for a vote in the Senate despite its passage by the House because, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on." Ah, no: the American people decide what you vote on, and if the American people want voting rights reform, campaign finance reform, redistricting reform, and ethics reform, there is no "I get to decide." We have become such a cynical people that we just shrug when a guy like Mob Boss Mitch says "I get to decide what we vote on." But if we act in numbers they can't ignore, we can change that. Toward that end, you might want to call Sen. McConnell's office, either in D.C. or at one of his Kentucky contacts; you can find that information at his website. Don't worry if you're not a Kentucky resident; no one put a gun to his head and made him leader of the entire Senate, after all.

Finally, speaking of things Mob Boss Mitch doesn't want to do, the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 1644/S. 682, the Save the Internet Act, and thus restore net neutrality protections for good Americans. The FCC repealed its Open Internet Order in 2017, as you know, and thus allowed big telecom corporations to block websites, make them load more slowly, and otherwise herd you into junk news ghettoes. You may not have seen very much of that lately, but that means nothing -- any unearned power gets abused eventually, and no freedom disappears so completely as one that disappears slowly. Yes, your right to go where you want to go on the internet is a freedom, and some corporation's "right" to make you go where they want you to go so they can make more money is not a freedom. At least, it ain't freedom for us -- and protecting our freedom is our government's job.

Around the table: a Presidential veto over Yemen, and other revolting developments.

Ho hum, our President vetoes resolution aiming to end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, calling it a "dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities." Ugh, one more time: Congress authorizes war, not the President. Also, too, he suggests the resolution will "endanger() the lives of American citizens and brave service members," which is, also, exactly the opposite of how it works -- no one kills us out of jealousy; they kill us because our government can't stop interfering in their affairs. And the safest way to protect our soldiers? Stop sending them off to stupid wars.

It's about time someone noted that our "liberal" media constantly insist that our agitation for better and more liberal policies constitutes a "purity test," but never use that term to describe the centrist insistence that liberals toe the centrist line. Of course the policies we advocate, like Medicare-for-All, just so happen to be popular across the ideological spectrum -- Medicare-for-All even gains support from a considerable number of conservatives. So "purity tests" means "elites being pressured in ways they don’t like." Well, waaaaaaah.

In a related note, Peter Bloom at Common Dreams says that Sen. Sanders's Fox News town hall "revealed a different way of bringing the country together" -- namely, a "new type of political unity -- one based on a shared desire to transform a corrupt system rather than tribal party allegiances." Centrists would no doubt agree that we can only create "national unity" by appealing to a broad cross-section of the populace, but they somehow think a broad cross-section of the populace wants Social Security and Medicare cuts and constant appeasement of the farthest right Republicans. I think we've spent a long time tabulating exactly what Americans do want, and it sure ain't whatever keeps Our Glorious Elites in power.

Proving once again that a little alliteration can be a dangerous thing, our Administration announces a new round of sanctions against the "troika of tyranny," Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Gosh, no one sits on their laurels like a right-winger does -- Venezuela is the only nation on that list that hasn't been a right-wing bête noire for decades. I also presume the inclusion of Nicaragua might be in advance of a few gazillion ads showing Bernie Sanders in Nicaragua in the early '80s, which they may be overestimating as a crippling blow.

Finally, Sen. Mitch McConnell (E-KY) launches his re-election effort with a jab at Democrats over that Obama Supreme Court nomination Mr. McConnell's Senate refused to take up. I'm not going to lie and say it's not funny, but whom, exactly, does this convert? This does nothing but anger up the already-angry, and at some point angering up the already-angry simply doesn't work anymore -- particularly if (not that this is likely!) Mr. McConnell gets a decent opponent in 2020.

Action: concerning civil rights, recycling, and tax reform.

S. 1082, the BE HEARD in the Workplace Act, would help good Americans better battle sexual and racial harassment in the workplace. Among other things, it would extend Title VII civil rights protections to all workers, including interns, volunteers, independent contractors and small business workers; it would allow workers to prove harm in sexual harassment cases by proving that the harassment altered the "terms and conditions" of employment; and it would prohibit employers from forcing binding arbitration and non-disclosure agreements upon workers. It would also bring the minimum wage for tipped workers up to the minimum wage level for non-tipped workers, which we ought to do, but the reforms I've listed in the previous sentence would bring a lot of vulnerable workers (yes, interns are profoundly vulnerable at the workplace!) out of the shadows and would get them the tools they need to fight harassment at the workplace. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working folks by passing the BE HEARD Act.

Meanwhile, in the wake of news reports that the city of Philadelphia sends over half of its curbside recycling off to be incinerated, Penn Environment helps you tell Philadelphia's Mayor and City Council to fix Philadelphia's recycling program. One can't blame Philadelphia's good residents for feeling betrayed at having done their part while the city fails to do theirs -- and to think that the city has the gall to blame its residents for "contamination" (i.e., putting non-recyclables out with recyclables), when Philadelphia's contamination rate is in line with or lower than the national average. The city also suggests that it can't get contracts that are cheap enough or long-term enough, which requires us to believe that a) there just aren't hungry people willing to make their mark in this field and b) contractors have somehow stopped preferring the certainty of a long-term contract. We should say to the city: enough with the excuses already; just do your damn job.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to actually reform our tax system, so that it makes corporations and the rich pay their fair share, then Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you do that. And if your Tea Party uncle tells you that TEH TOP THREE PURCENTZ ALREADY PAYZ MORE THAN HALFZ OFZ ALLZ TEH TAXUZZ!!!!!!, remind him that in the country he grew up in (it's not a stretch to imagine that your Tea Party uncle is fairly old, right?) taxed corporations and the rich a lot harder, and then spent that money building a middle class which could expect a better life for their children and their children's children. Of course, in the country we have now, Our Glorious Elites constantly tell us we can't have nice things like Social Security and Medicare anymore. They're wrong -- good Americans can have these things, as long as billionaires break off some of that money they're currently using to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes.

Action: concerning Muslim bans, birth control, product safety, and taxes.

H.R. 2214/S. 1123, the NO BAN Act, would reverse our President's various Muslim bans and prevent future Presidents from issuing similar travel bans, mainly by amending the Immigration and Nationality Act so that it explicitly prevents discrimination against foreigners based solely on religion. What's that, you say? Our Supreme Court said the Muslim ban wasn't an attack on religious freedom because it also happened to include a few nations our Administration obviously put there to provoke such a ruling? Well, our Supreme Court was wrong, and not just because they simply refused to consider our President's stated intent (to enact a "Muslim ban, but legally") when they've bent over backwards to amplify supposed "intent" in other rulings. They're wrong because a billion Muslims live on Earth and if Islam was really so "violent," ISIS would be as big as pre-World War II Germany. Hence People for the American Way helps you tell our Congressfolk to truly honor our actual religious beliefs by passing the NO BAN Act.

The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a pair of bills that would increase our lawful access to birth control. H.R. 2182/S. 1086, the Access to Birth Control Act, would require pharmacies to supply birth control medication to anyone who can lawfully get it, regardless of any pharmacist's "religious" "beliefs," since "conscience" doesn't give you the right to discriminate against others. Folks who profess worry that the bill will force pharmacies to dispense birth control medication to folks who can't pay for it or who don't have a prescription in states where the law requires they get one, etc., can go ahead and read previous versions of the bill at Congress.gov to find out they're wrong. Or they can just admit they're trolls. H.R. 2091/S. 1049, the Access to Contraception for Servicemembers and Dependents Act, would expand access to birth control for our soldiers and their dependents, without the cost-sharing schemes that can limit that access.

Did you know our FDA can't get cosmetics off the shelves that have asbestos in them? Even makeup marketed to children? I wouldn't market makeup to children, personally, but if I were so inclined I certainly wouldn't market makeup to children with a chemical scientists have strongly linked to lethal lung diseases. If your Tea Party uncle tells you that of course the FDA can't get cosmetics off our shelves because it's called the Food and Drug Administration, remind him that the law that expanded the FDA's power in 1938 is called the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and it came about because of (among other things) the mascara "Lash Lure" that purported to give women a permanent eyeliner look but instead blinded them. I'd hate to one day find folks dying of mesothelioma because they used makeup as kids. Anyway, PennPIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to give our FDA the power to remove cosmetics from our store shelves.

S. 1138, the Working Families Tax Relief Act, would expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (or CTC), by expanding the size of the benefit taxpayers who qualify for the credit would receive. You should distinguish that from right-wing efforts to "expand" the EITC and the CTC so that higher-income folks can get the credit; the effort described in S. 1138 actually helps working families, while the right-wing "expansions" only pretend to. You should also distinguish the Working Families Tax Relief Act from the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the law that promised tax cuts to the middle class but instead delivered massive tax cuts to rich folks and corporations -- and slammed a lot of middle-class taxpayers with a tax bill this year instead of the tax refund they'd come to expect. The National Women's Law Center helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the struggle of working families by passing the Working Families Tax Relief Act, because it's a bill that actually lives up to its name.

Action: concerning human rights, war in Venezuela, and our Federal Reserve.

Iranian lawyer/activist Nasrin Sotoudeh faces almost 150 lashes and almost 40 years in prison from the government of Iran, and for what? Well, by the looks of it, it's for a life of fighting for human rights! The charges against her included "being a member of a human rights organization" -- didn't know that was a crime, did you? -- and "encouraging corruption and prostitution," which you know is BS because they lumped them both together! You may also know it's BS because Ms. Sotoudeh has advocated against Iran's law mandating that women wear a head covering (or the hijab). You may recall the Shah of Iran outlawing the hijab (and the chandor, or the flowing robes many Muslim women also wear) in 1936, an act that surely added up when the Islamic revolution threw him out in 1979, but putting women in jail now for advocating against the hijab surely doesn't represent an improvement. Hence Avaaz helps you tell world leaders to put pressure on the Iranian government to release Ms. Sotoudeh.

Our President has been itching for war in Venezuela for some time now, perhaps because a floundering President always needs a war to take good Americans' minds off his incompetence, and possibly because he thinks it'll be as easy as President Reagan's invasion of Grenada in 1983! Of course, if you've been attending the history of American intervention in foreign lands, you'll no doubt think differently about them, and you don't even need to go back very far -- you need only remember how we were to be "greeted as liberators" in Iraq, or how badly Libya's been doing in the wake of our 2011 invasion. Venezuela has nearly 32 million people, at least five million more than Iraq did at the time of our 2003 invasion, and they actually like President Maduro a lot more than our "liberal" media would have you believe. Hence Demand Progress, among others, helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1004, the aptly-named Prohibiting Unauthorized Military Action in Venezuela Act.

CPD Action (among other groups) helps you tell your Senators to reject the potential nomination of right-wing economic blowhard Stephen Moore to our Federal Reserve Board, whenever our President gets around to nominating him. In opposing this nomination, you need not be the kind of fellow who'd lament the fact that no President would ever nominate a really good economist like Moshe Adler or Michael Hudson or Paul Craig Roberts to the Fed. You only need know that Mr. Moore has spent his entire career peddling the kind of economic hogwash with which other politicians have achieved total disaster -- most recently former Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, whose supply-side "experiment" ended in vital state functions (like, you know, education) being chronically-underfunded. We've got enough untalented people making far too many important decisions in our lives; we certainly don't need one more.

Around the table: concerning health care and that one Senate seat the Republicans are counting on picking up in 2020.

I appreciate hearing that other countries with private health insurance do a lot better than we do at it simply because they regulate what insurance corporations have to cover and how much doctors can charge for care a lot more aggressively than we do. But I guarantee you that if we pressed for similarly strong regulation instead of Medicare-for-All, right-wingers would call that "socialism," too. After all, they called the Heritage Foundation's health care plan "socialism" once a Democratic President embraced it, and they call everything else they don't like "socialism," so beginning negotiations with what you'll settle for is impossible with these people.

In a related note, we learn from Sarah Lueck at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that if our Supreme Court does eventually strike down the Affordable Care Act, the Republican plan to replace it -- the so-called Protect Act -- wouldn't live up to its name. Which I'm sure is very surprising! Here's the main wrinkle: the bill would literally ban insurance corporations from throwing people off their rolls for having pre-existing conditions -- but it would also let insurance corporations simply not cover those pre-existing conditions in the first place! It gets worse from there, and is exactly the kind of thing that's going to drive even more good Americans into demanding Medicare-for-All.

Well, this isn't a good look: Fox News's Bret Baier, in a town hall featuring Sen. Bernie Sanders, asks his audience if they really want a "government-run" health care system, and his audience responds with cheers. It's easy to pick on Fox News for running into that wall, but the rest of our "liberal" media would be similarly dumbfounded to discover people who would rather have our government administer health insurance than the private corporation that's likely screwed them over repeatedly, and that's because media people talk to each other far, far more than they talk to regular Americans.

From the "It's Early, But..." file: Mason/Dixon poll finds Roy Moore leading other Republicans in the 2020 Alabama U.S. Senate race. National Republicans think this seat will be an easy pick-up, but I wouldn't be so sure: while Sen. Doug Jones has the same kind of center-right profile that delivered Jon Ossoff to oblivion, he's also the guy who put two of the Birmingham bombers in jail, and perhaps not coincidentally, black voters did turn out in tremendous numbers for him in 2017. Admittedly the other, non-girl-dating Republican candidates in the race would probably have a better shot at beating Mr. Jones than Mr. Moore would.

Finally, scientists at Tel Aviv University create the world's first 3D-printed heart made from "human cells and patient-specific biological materials." 3D printers haven't previously been able to make tissues with blood vessels, and creating an organ from the patient's own tissues reduces the chance that a host will reject a transplanted organ. We've got a long way to go here -- the heart they made is about the size of a cherry and would need unspecified "training" to function like a human heart -- but this is still a big step.

Action: concerning health care, internet freedom, financial predation, and racism.

H.R. 1384/S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act, would expand Medicare to include all Americans; thus the number of Americans who don't have health insurance would go down from 34 million to zero. You've no doubt heard that close to 70% of Americans support Medicare-for-All -- and that this number gets much closer to 50 once some of its putative supporters have trouble explaining how we're going to fund it. Here's all you need to know: Medicare projections have us spending $49 trillion on health care over the next decade, while even the right-wing Mercatus Center says Medicare-for-All will cost less than $33 trillion over that time, which means Medicare-for-All will be less expensive than our current system. Then we capture the lion's share of that $49 trillion, and fight through the inevitable right-wing propaganda campaign against it; I know, I make it sound easy, but we can make it a lot easier by continuing to step up, as both CREDO and Public Citizen both help you do.

Meanwhile, the House has passed H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, which would roll back the FCC's 2017 net neutrality repeal and reinstate the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order that established net neutrality as the law of the land. Net neutrality, as you know, is the principle that forces internet service-providing corporations to treat all network traffic neutrally -- without, for example, making websites load more quickly or slowly, or preventing websites from loading at all. The latter example basically describes censorship -- you don't like censorship, right? -- and the former example suggests the kind of internet we'd have if we let big money buy faster access for its junk news and junk culture. So net neutrality might make the big telecom corporations less "free," but it makes citizens more free -- to find alternate viewpoints, or be alternate viewpoints, on our internet. Hence Stop the FCC, Consumer Reports, and People for the American Way all help you tell your Senators to fight for real internet freedom by passing the Save the Internet Act.

In other news, our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- which, under this Administration, seems like an evil alternate universe version of its former self -- plans to roll back the payday lender rules it instituted a few years ago. And not because those rules didn't go far enough, though that was a common complaint among many observers -- our Administration, as you know, considers any regulation evil if it might keep a corporation from acting badly; why, it's almost like they think bosses, and not good Americans, are their real constituents! Hence the Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell our CFPB to scuttle its own plans to roll back rules that help stop payday lenders from preying on customers. The rules they're trying to roll back would force payday lending corporations to establish if potential customers can pay back loans without being likely to descend into a spiral of debt; is that really so much to ask?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our FBI to stop targeting black protestors as "black identity extremists," then a consortium of good-government groups (including the ACLU, Demand Progress, and Defending Rights and Dissent) still helps you do that. If "black identity extremist" seems to you an awfully cumbersome phrase -- perhaps, even, so cumbersome as to preclude the possibility that it describes reality -- then, well, you're not alone. But smearing black protestors as part of some insidious larger evil is, sadly, a long-standing tradition in America, particularly in our FBI, whose original director, J. Edgar Hoover, once said that the Black Panthers "represent() the greatest threat to internal security of the country." He said that some 50 years ago, at the height of the Cold War -- and, not incidentally, after black protestors had helped spur our government to pass historic civil rights laws, how sad, that only racism seems to outduel anti-Communist hysteria in America.

Action: concerning taxes, Yemen, and pollution.

You may have heard that the Taxpayer First Act (which passed the House and now awaits consideration in the Senate) would forever prevent our IRS from offering good Americans free tax filing online, like many other nations do; the IRS could do that now but doesn't, in apparent deference to private tax prep corporations like H&R Block and Intuit. But there's really no good reason to prevent the IRS from providing this service to good Americans; if you're waiting to scream SOSHULIZM!!!!! at the idea, well, that ship kinda sailed the day you decided not to be a tax evader. To be sure, the Taxpayer First Act has some pretty good things about it, too -- it would shield low-income working families from private collection actions, for example -- but there's no reason we must swallow poison pills in order to get nice things in America, so Demand Progress helps you tell your Senators to ensure that our IRS can offer free tax filing services to all Americans.

Meanwhile, both our House and our Senate have passed S.J.Res. 7, the resolution mandating that our government end unconstitutional participation in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen -- and word on the street is that our President might actually sign it. It's of no consequence that he might have said he'd "look at" the resolution just so one of his votaries can yell HE ENDEDZ TEH WARZ!!!!! at us a year or so from now, because our duty remains the same: to communicate our will to our President. Hence Just Foreign Policy has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell our President to sign S.J.Res. 7 and get us out of the moral quagmire that is the war on Yemen. We may want to remind him (since his advisors probably won't!) that helping make war on the Houthis in Yemen also just so happens to injure our fight against al-Qaeda, since the Houthis are some of al-Qaeda's bitterest and most effective enemies.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its plan to undermine the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule, then the Sierra Club still helps you do that -- but be quick about it, because the EPA's comment period ends on Wednesday. If our EPA rolls back these protections, we'll have more pollution in our air, which means we'll also have more asthma, more heart attacks, and more premature deaths. Of course, if mammon is all that matters to them, we could also point out that with all these extra asthma attacks, hearts attacks, and premature deaths we'll have more hospital and ER visits and more missed days of work and school -- and all of that costs money. Of course, it doesn't cost some coal CEO money, so maybe our EPA doesn't care. But duty is duty, and if we talk to our government about the monetary costs of pollution, we can at least corner them.

Finally, the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Senators to extend the electric vehicle tax credit, so that good Americans can continue to get a deduction of up to $7,500 for every electric car they buy. I wouldn't blame you for worrying that this might be corporate welfare, but here's why it isn't: one, electric cars aren't the predominant form of automobile in America; two, electric cars are better for our air and water than cars running on oil; and three, it's perfectly alright for our government to spur production of technologies if they work better than what we've got. I'd take far less seriously the NO MOREZ WELFAREZ FOR TEH TESLAZ!!!!! objection, because any big automobile corporation, not just Tesla, can make an electric car, and thus also benefit from the increased sales that a tax credit would spur. And anyway, what about the actual corporate welfare fossil fuel corporations still get after all these years?

Around the table: from actual frivolous lawsuits to frivolous charges of "domestic terrorism."

Seems like all I do when I talk about the Tennessee legislature is complain, and not without reason, but let's give them kudos for passing an anti-SLAPP bill with teeth. SLAPPs, as you may know, are "strategic lawsuits against public participation," or lawsuits designed only to silence otherwise First Amendment-protected speech, and Tennessee's bill (which only requires the Governor's signature at this point) would require the courts to consider motions to dismiss before allowing lawsuits to proceed any further. Hence, a blow to actual frivolous lawsuits; now if they'd just stop obsessing about gay and transgender folks.

Rod Dreher at The American Conservative does the dying cause of conservatism a solid by locating tyranny in corporate behavior for once. He locates that tyranny largely in corporate abridgment of your privacy and not in, say, laws and regulations that enrich banksters and corporate executives at everyone else's expense -- which latter item would upset conservatives as much as liberals, since conservatives profess an abhorrence for concentrated power -- but baby steps, folks. And I'm glad to hear someone else say that social media has as much power to serve bad governmental actors as it does to liberate us from them. I still think dissent is better off expressed than hidden myself, but I guess that's just one of the things that makes me a liberal.

Ho hum, twice as many Fortune 500 corporations paid zero dollars or less in corporate taxes this year, the first under the Republican tax "reform," than in previous years. Nobody could have predicted that slashing the corporate tax rate without closing very many corporate tax loopholes would have resulted in this! One day we'll get it through our "liberal" media's thick heads that tax breaks for corporations are completely unnecessary and illogical, since corporations already get to deduct expenses before paying taxes. I mean, gosh, how much more of this BS must we take?

Also from the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: our Administration lets private child adoption agencies take federal or state money and turn away Catholic and Jewish parents. Take federal money, follow federal rules, I've always said, and if our laws forbid discrimination, then you can't take federal money and discriminate, period, end of. But maybe in a year or two they can get a Supreme Court decision that explicitly says NO WE ONLY MEANT TEH GAYZ!!!!!

Our Administration apparently considered dropping off all asylum-seeking immigrants in so-called "sanctuary cities," as a sort of punishment to Democratic-leaning urban areas, I suppose, but although I abhor politicians treating people like they exist to be used, I almost sorta wish he'd gone through with it, just so the good folks in those cities could assimilate the new immigrants with no problems. Then again, if there'd been even one problem with an asylee in any city, you can bet Fox News would talk about it 24-7 for a week, so maybe this is for the best after all. (What a surprise to learn that this was all Stephen Miller's idea! Stephen Miller has a face even a mother could punch.)

Finally, few-if-any politicians handle abuse better than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), but I wish she'd handled this incident a little differently. Upon being called a "domestic terrorist" by the Ohio College Republican Federation, she responded by saying "this puts me in danger every time" and "we get a spike in death threats" whenever some right-winger says something that awful. I'm absolutely certain she's not lying, but no one wants to hear a politician talk about how hard they have it. A better response would have been "I eagerly await hearing that you've actually called law enforcement about this very serious accusation and that you're not just making an ass of yourself in public," or "every time you call me a terrorist, you're admitting you can't win an argument with me."

Action: concerning climate change, pollution, and the Electoral College.

Our government can pretend all it wants that climate change isn't happening and pollution isn't making it worse, but we've got other ways to fight it -- like telling big asset managing corporation like BlackRock to divest from fossil fuels, which Sum of Us helps you do. It's a shame we even have to tell folks with money to help us make the world a better place -- hell, we all remember when right-wingers used to say that folks with money need to be "free" from the horrible tethers of taxes and regulations just so they could be "free" to make the world a better place! -- but duty is duty. And BlackRock pumps more money than any other entity into new coal-producing plants (which sure ain't very forward-looking of them!) and BlackRock's fancypants "green" investment funds only comprise some three percent of the corporation's total assets. So, yeah, BlackRock could be doing more, and doing a lot more good.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its own plan to scuttle the 2011 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, then Environmental Action still helps you do that. How many times must I tell these pimps! Pollution actually kills people! And over 900,000 good Americans wrote public comments supporting these standards back in the day, which represents the vast majority of comments received about the matter; does the EPA mean to assert that public opinion simply doesn't matter as much as a dying industry's ability to redistribute income to its executives? I kid, of course -- the EPA absolutely means to assert that! The only thing this Administration cares about is other bosses! Maybe this regulatory rollback effort will die in court, like almost all the others have, but we still need to speak up, because even if our voices don't get heard by this Administration, the courts will still need to hear us.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to abolish the Electoral College, then CREDO still helps you do that. My, how trolls come out in force when you advocate for electing our President with the popular vote -- you know, the way we elect Reps and Senators and Mayors and Governors and state legislators and city councilfolk and the local PTA. Mostly the trolls just ignore what you actually say, even when you've preemptively dealt with their objections, but sometimes they also "remind" you that "America isn't a democracy but a constitutional republic," or they might even say "democracy equals mob rule." The latter statement, of course, is code for "most people aren't as good as I am," which is un-American, while the former is merely pedantic -- we call America a democracy because that's what we aspire to be, and stomping all over our aspirations for America really isn't the hill you want everyone to see you dying on.

Action: concerning clean water, Social Security, and the minimum wage.

H.R. 1417/S. 611, the WATER Act, would pay for water and sewer infrastructure restoration in America by hiking the corporate tax rate from 21% to 24.5%, and 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 this bill. And what, exactly, will right-wingers' arguments against this bill sound like? Will they pretend that a hike in the corporate tax rate is a personal tax hike, despite the mountain of recent evidence that a corporate tax cut sure ain't a personal tax cut? Will they demand that "the market" fix our water infrastructure ills, despite the mountain of evidence that whenever "the market" takes over an essential function of our civilization it charges out the wazoo for bad service? No matter; opposing cheap, public, clean water is not the hill any sane person wants to be seen dying on. And the insane people don't get all the say around here.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Administration to stop sabotaging Social Security. Our President has pledged not to cut Social Security benefits, which he presents as some great gift to us ("thank you oh thank you sir for not setting this particular house on fire tonight!"), but if he's going to sign onto continued Social Security Administration budget cuts and office closures, then he will, in fact, cut benefits, because the word "benefits" doesn't extend solely to the amount of money in your Social Security check, but also describes the help Social Security can give you when you try to navigate the system, and it gives you a lot less help when the closest offices close (not everyone lives in a city or a suburb, after all!) or have fewer staff. And now they want to start charging fees to replace Social Security cards! I wouldn't blame you for thinking that maybe your taxes already paid for stuff like that.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to help out working families by passing H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then Progress America (among other good-government organizations) still helps you do that. You know the deal: average wages don't rise much more quickly than inflation, if they do at all, and "average" wage increases, just like "average" tax cuts, don't necessarily put more money in your pocket -- most of the wage increases over the last decade have gone to people at the top, and if that ain't income redistribution, then what is? The Raise the Wage Act would hike our federal minimum wage to $15/hour over the next five years, and ultimately raise the minimum wage for tipped and disabled employees so that they get the same minimum wage as everyone else in six years. Just don't call it a "job killer," because the folks at the top are the real job killers.

Action: concerning corporate behavior, law and order, and paycheck fairness.

S. 915, the Reward Work Act, would make corporations ensure that employees comprise at least a third of the seats on their boards of directors, and would also prevent corporations from indulging in stock buybacks, as they've been doing since the 2017 tax "reform" cut their tax rate from 35% to 21%. How many times must I tell these pimps! Corporations don't invest windfalls in their workers, but in executive pay and executive power; if you want a corporation to invest in workers, you have to tax them harder, so that they're faced with the choice of spending money on workers or giving it to our government in taxes. That's how it worked during the New Deal era, after all. And putting more workers on decision-making boards will induce those boards to make better decisions, maybe even decisions reflecting realities in the workplace! So Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: the Senate is mulling SB 149, popularly known as Marsy's Law, which purports to create "victims' rights" in our state Constitution. Maybe that sounds like a good idea, but SB 149 would allow alleged victims to withhold information sought by the accused, which violates our constitutional habeus corpus rights, and would further mandate a "prompt conclusion" of their case and an end to "unreasonable delay," both of which could also violate your due process rights. And you have to remember that, as a person accused of a crime, you wouldn't just face your accuser -- you'd also face your government and all the power it can marshal against you. That's why defendants get what seem to be "extra" rights -- they actually level the playing field. And just remember: you could be a defendant at any time. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your state legislators to reject the wrongheaded Marsy's Law.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Senators to pass H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. The House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act a few weeks back, but Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) has famously said -- about that other big House-passed bill, the For the People Act -- that, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on." That should strike you as profoundly undemocratic. And it should also strike you that if we want a democratic nation, we should all get in our Senators' grills until they can't avoid our will any longer. It's not like the Paycheck Fairness Act is some stupid piece of crap like the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act or the Affordable Care Act "skinny repeal" bill -- the Paycheck Fairness Act would give women more tools with which they can fight pay inequity, and what's wrong with that? Not a damn thing, that's what. So let's make sure the Senate hears us.

Around the table: thoughts about war, health care, clean water, and the absurd notions Our Glorious Elites entertain.

Saudi-led coalition bombs residential area in Sanaa, the capitol of Yemen, killing upwards of 11 people -- most of them children running away from a bombed-out school. But please, Administration spokeshacks, please keep telling us about your "serious constitutional concerns" about Congress for once asserting its constitutional war-making powers to keep us from slaughtering civilians in deference to an unreliable ally.

Dig this pile of horsedoodle from Forbes, entitled "Britain's Version of 'Medicare for All' is Struggling With Long Waits for Care." Tried to get an appointment with a specialist lately? Then you won't be impressed to hear that less than four-tenths of one percent of the British population have been waiting more than six months for some kind of indeterminate health care. Been to the ER lately? Then you won't be impressed to hear that 15% of good British folks have to wait more than four hours at the ER. Also, has it occurred to the author of this piece that if wait times are up or post-cancer longevity's down since some date in the past, that might just be due to a government running the program badly? In England, if your government's running the health care system into the ground, you can elect a new government. In America, we can't just elect new big health insurance corporations -- and the result is that Hep C patients face annual six-figure medical bills, diabetics ration insulin until they die, and folks at risk of anaphylactic shock go to the park without the $600 EpiPen that'll save them from death-by-bee-sting.

George Goehl at The Guardian asks if our "unsafe water crisis" can "unite Americans." Long story short: everyone drinks water, so yes. Long story somewhat longer: about one in 15 Americans drink unhealthy water now, and it's not just "those people" in Flint but also poor whites in the shadow of factory farms in Iowa, so hell yes. If Democrats are lucky enough to hold the House and win the Senate and the Presidency in 2020, they could help matters immensely by doing something good with their power for fucking once. We'll stay on them the whole way, but they have to do their jobs, too.

Alice Speri at The Intercept writes about, get this, American law enforcement officials supposing that (in her words) "the mostly black activists demanding an end to police violence in the U.S. might join with Islamic fundamentalist groups promoting violence abroad." How do law enforcement personnel (and media personnel!) draw a line from creating an oppressive "Islamic state" in the Levant to ensuring police don't beat the crap out of black folks in America? I kid, of course -- if you're an American ragehead, everything you don't like is equal to everything else you don't like, and all these everythings are part of a massive conspiracy specifically targeting you.

Finally, you knew this was coming: our Administration actually plans to run on its record "protecting" our clean air and clean water. Kudos to Bloomberg for calling our Administration's case "cherry-picking"! Of course, not only has our President benefited from laws and regulations put in place before he ever graced us with his presence, but he's also benefited from his own incompetence, as most of his attempts to roll back clean air and clean water regulations have died in court. And if you're impressed that WE HAVE TEH CLEANESTEST AIRZ EVAHZ!!!!!, remember that Tha Bush Mobb used to do victory laps every year about record homeownership.

Action: concerning internet freedom, corporate welfare, and sexism.

H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week, and could get a full floor vote on the House this week, 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 your smartphone) to find your House Reps' phone numbers, and then call them to tell them to pass the Save the Internet Act. The Save the Internet Act would reinstate the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order, which protected your right to go where you want to go on the internet, rather than have big corporations make you go where they want you to go. Big corporations haven't been doing much blocking, throttling, or censoring since the FCC destroyed net neutrality in 2017, true, but of course big corporations don't take all your freedoms at once -- they take them a little at a time until one day you can't go to your favorite websites because they didn't pay the necessary tribute. If we get Congress to pass the Save the Internet Act, we'll stop that.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to ensure that the new U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade agreement doesn't lock in absurdly high drug prices, then Replace NAFTA still helps you do that. The new USMCA trade agreement -- or "NAFTA 2.0," as they call it -- does curtail the use of the hated "investor-state dispute settlement" system that threatens to nullify our clean air and clean water laws, and that's no small thing. But it also extends monopoly protections for big pharmaceutical corporations (under the rubric of "protecting intellectual property," like a drug patent is a novel or something!) so that they can prevent other corporations from developing generic versions, and thus keep drug prices absurdly high. Big pharma corporations don't need any more corporate welfare -- especially when they also get massive infusions of taxpayer money to develop their drugs. Why, it's like Our Glorious Elites want to keep "socialism" all for themselves! But they don't get all the say around here.

H.R. 1882, the Menstrual Equity Act, would ensure that all women have access to menstrual hygiene products, since students, prisoners, and homeless folks also need tampons, pads, and panty liners and can't always get them. The Menstrual Equity Act would also require Medicaid to cover menstrual hygiene products and would mandate that all large employers and federal public buildings provide these products without charge. Some folks would read the above and have all sorts of strange reactions, like giggling uncontrollably and wondering WHAT MORE DO TEH HOMELESSEZ WANTZ!!!!! To such folks I would say three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) grow up, and 3) consider how you'd feel if your body started bleeding uncontrollably at any moment and you couldn't do anything to stop it. I know, I know, empathy is so quaint, but all civilized people practice it. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Menstrual Equity Act.

Around the table: mostly about taxes, antitrust, and real compromise.

We learn from Jesse Eisinger and Paul Kiel at ProPublica that the IRS has had a tough time going after ultrawealthy tax-dodgers. Congress deserves some of the blame, for repeatedly slashing IRS funding and thus helping drive experts out of the agency, but of course the bad actors who design these labyrinthine tax-avoidance schemes deserve most of the blame. And dig the chutzpah of at least one IRS target proclaiming (successfully, it seems!) that the IRS's detailed questions about his dealings were themselves a "burden." As if their schemes aren't a burden for the rest of us!

In a peripherally-related note, another ProPublica report wonders why a particular impoverished Mississippi county has the highest IRS audit rate in America. You won't like the answer: because more than half the county uses the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC), and the IRS audits EITC recipients more than anyone but the very richest taxpayers. The article doesn't say it, but I would guess that EITC audits are pretty easy pickings for the IRS -- you don't exactly have an army of folks getting the EITC who know how to game the system as well as a billionaire does.

Sen. Wyden (D-OR) proposes taxing capital gains more like income, since it is, in fact, income. Details are scant at present, but the Wyden plan would go after the "appreciation of assets owned by the very wealthy as income each year" as income; if that strikes you as "taxing folks for the sin of holding onto their property," consider that letting the wealthy build up tens of billions of dollars this way essentially taxes folks for the sin of working, since we don't generally get the opportunity to buy property and sit on it. Also consider that wealthy folks frequently set up deals so that it doesn't look like they're selling their property when they actually are. (Mr. Wyden's plan would also eliminate capital gains tax cuts for the very wealthy, which would make that tax more progressive.)

Ho hum, our President promised that corporate tax amnesty repatriation would bring back as much as $4 trillion, but corporations have brought back less than $700 billion, and they're bringing the money back a lot more slowly now. Promise made, promise kept! Still, if his eventual Democratic opponent is just another Democrat who doesn't mean what they say, then this moron of a President will still get re-elected no matter how many promises he breaks.

Speaking of which, noted pre-emptive compromiser Barack Obama worries about a "circular firing squad" that could torpedo the next Democratic nominee. Uh, no: liberals demanding what they want and demanding that their elected officials actually fight for it will get us far better policy in America, and Mr. Obama certainly shouldn't act as if liberals being liberal "weakens the movement." The man piddled away his 2008 mandate from the voters by "reaching out" to an opposition party that did nothing but stamp its feet and yell no, so he has no standing to lecture us on the importance of compromise. You compromise from strength, not weakness.

Finally, if you're wondering how right-wingers and their enablers will attack Sen. Warren's proposal to break up big tech corporations, the incomparable David Dayen provides us with a primer on all their bad arguments. Go and study the whole thing, from the multitudinous conflicts of interest antitrust critics have to the irrelevant worst-case scenarios they concoct, and also note that breaking up big corporations is an honorable American tradition, over a century old, no matter how many corporatists call it "radical." Of course you already know that calling something "radical," like calling something "socialist," is a signal that the person doing the name-calling already knows they can't win the argument on the merits.

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning human rights, clean water, and education funding.

H.R. 1945, the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, would cut off federal funding of Honduran military and police operations, at least until Honduras's government investigates and prosecutes human rights violations by their security forces against activists there -- activists like Berta Cáceres herself, murdered in 2016, with two of the eight suspects arrested in her murder linked to the notorious School of the Americas (now WHINSEC). But Honduras has long been hostile to those who speak out for indigenous rights, be they protestors, farmers, or journalists; 2014 saw a dozen such activists get killed. But don't confuse this with our President's cutting off of humanitarian aid to Honduras -- humanitarian aid contributes rather more to security in Honduras than arming their security forces does. Hence Roots Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to support human rights by passing the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act.

Meanwhile, Environmental Action helps you tell our Administration to comply with a federal court order to strengthen coal ash storage regulations in order to protect good Americans' clean water. Our Administration has a dismal record trying to defend its regulations in federal courts, but it has also shown, shall we say, a reticence to obey the will of the people as expressed in our laws and the courts that interpret them. Coal ash contains arsenic, mercury, and plenty of other goodies that make people and wildlife sick, and you can now find groundwater pollution near coal ash sites in nearly half of all American states. Of course, this Administration cares little for the world we pass on to our descendents -- it cares only about the now, and more specifically about the riches that can be plundered by bosses now. In a way, they're like the right-wing caricature of liberals. But they ain't the boss of us.

Finally, Education Secretary DeVos got a lot of negative publicity last week for announcing her intention to cut federal funding for the Special Olympics, but you can't discount the possibility that she took the hit on that so she could slip even more nefarious cuts past us -- like cutting billions of dollars from public education funding and crafting billions more in unearned tax credits for private schools. I wish I could put this some other way, but our Administration hates any part of our government that actually works on the people's behalf, and acts like our government's sole purpose is to funnel taxpayer money to Administration cronies. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the priorities of our Education Secretary and properly fund our public schools. And if you're the fool who says states fund public schools you libtard ha ha I said libtard snort, don't also be the fool who constantly whines about how high your property taxes are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning drone strikes, transparency, and federal budgeting.

Win Without War helps you tell Congress to ban secret CIA drone strikes. You no doubt know that our last two Presidents have conducted multitudinous drone strikes in foreign lands upon which Congress has not declared war, killing American citizens and foreign civilians; you may also remember that President Obama authorized the CIA to conduct the strikes in order to avoid violating the letter of the Geneva Convention. Then, just last month, our current President reversed Mr. Obama's 2016 executive order requiring the public disclosure of drone strikes, so now we now have to work a lot harder to figure out what our government's doing, which is kind of the opposite of transparency, so we might as well stop the drone strikes entirely It's no use telling me that disclosure "hamstrings" our President, because hamstringing our President from conducting war without Congressional authorization is a feature of our Constitution, not a bug.

Meanwhile, in a related note, our Defense Department lately exempted some 5,000 pages of documentation describing Google's work on a government drone project (known as Project Maven) from the Freedom of Information Act, on the rather suspicious grounds that their work comprises "critical infrastructure security information." Civilized people know that it's too easy to go around justifying any proposal by screaming that we're all going to die if we don't adopt it; thus civilized people set boundaries that respect both a project's requirement for secrecy and the people's right to transparency. And Project Maven uses AI to pilot and target drones, so we have every right to know whether Google's AI is any less sucky than anyone else's or how many false positives it's had in testing, at the very least. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell our Department of Defense to stop blocking FOIA requests about Project Maven.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject our President's hateful, hurtful, stupid budget, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. You know the basic gist of this budget: slash spending that actually helps good Americans (including Medicare spending, no matter how much our President denies it), but ratchet up fraud-and-waste-drenched defense spending, in a nation that already spends more on defense than the next eight nations on that list combined. Now, you also know that even Republican-dominated budgets haven't hewed to this line, not even during those two recent years of total Republican control of our federal government. But surely you know why that is: because we the people have demanded it, and a truly draconian budget existing only to please the politicians' big donors would result in mass defeats of Congressfolk all over America. So you know we need to keep the pressure on them to do our will.

Action: concerning H.R. 1, discrimination, and transparency.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would enact a suite of necessary reforms in the areas of voting rights, campaign finance, ethics, and redistricting. The bill passed the House, but Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell (E-KY) said he wouldn't bring it up for a vote, because, and I quote, "I get to decide what we vote on." Well, he also called it a "Democrat power grab" -- which I guess he'd know all about, having orchestrated so many Republican power grabs! -- and he also said it was "radical" and "socialist," which is what they all say when they can't win the argument anymore. But regardless of what he says, he doesn't get all the say around here -- we do. Hence People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to reform our democratic processes by passing the For the People Act. You can also find phone numbers for Mr. McConnell at his website. His D.C. number is (202) 224-2541, but you'll likely have to call one of his local Kentucky numbers to speak with someone.

Meanwhile, pro-discrimination bills are still moving in Tennessee's state legislature, as the full House plans a vote tonight (Monday night) on HB 836, which would not only let private adoption agencies reject gay couples because of their "religious" "beliefs" but force the state to fund such agencies, and the state's Civil Justice Subcommittee is mulling HB 1274, which would force the state to defend any locality that enacts one of them-there "bathroom bills" folks use to humiliate transgender folks. In other words, these bills act like the folks who are used to getting all the say about everything all the time ever are "oppressed," while actually oppressing folks who deviate in some way from what the majority calls "normal." Hence the Tennessee Equality Project helps you tell Tennessee state legislators to reject both HB 836 and HB 1274. One more time: no one in America has any "right" to use "religious" "beliefs" as an excuse to deny other folks their rights.

Finally, the House passed H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would, as you know, give women more tools to fight the wage inequality they face (and yes, they still face wage inequality even when you adjust the data for similar experience and skill). I bet Mob Boss Mitch, being TEH DECIDURZ!!!!!, won't want to hold a vote on that, either, and I bet he'll call it "radical" and "socialist," too, even though neither word aptly describes what the bill would actually do. Is it "radical" or "socialist" to keep employers from retaliating against employees when they discuss wages at their job? Is it "radical or "socialist" to keep employers from refusing to hire people merely because of their past wage history? Of course not. You might better describe these things, and the Paycheck Fairness Act, as "sensible" or "responsible." Hence Moms Rising helps you tell your Senators to support fair wages for women by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act.