Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning corporate spying, forest regulations, and immigration.

Have you heard of Sensorvault? Sensorvault is Google's database of location data culled from folks who use Android phones and folks who use iPhones with Google apps installed -- meaning Google has known where you've been at pretty much any time over the last decade. And Sensorvault holds that information indefinitely, meaning that law enforcement can access it at will -- and our legal system has been issuing warrants allowing law enforcement search geographic areas where crimes occurred rather than suspects, which instantly turns those investigations into fishing expeditions. And if you're at a protest just as a crime is occuring a mile away, you could get swept up in that fishing expedition, which would infringe upon your right to free speech. And, ah, you can easily imagine our government concocting "crimes" just to harass a lot of protestors, right? Yes, you can. We need much better laws governing the use of this location data, but for now, CREDO helps you tell Google to shut down Sensorvault, since the Big Stick of Bad PR still works.

Meanwhile, our U.S. Forest Service has proposed rule changes that would allow it to fast-track certain logging projects, and though its supporters cite "analysis paralysis" and "frivolous lawsuits" as obstacles to projects that otherwise wouldn't actually hurt our national forests, I don't think a lawsuit is "frivolous" merely because it might prevent some corporation from making a few million extra dollars, and I also don't think that scientific analysis is really "paralysis." I'm sure some folks can name actual projects that wouldn't cause any damage so-why-make-them-wait, but I would hope we would make such decisions based on the science and not on anecdotes, and in any case we really should be asking the question "what's the rush, then?" There's also the matter of public commenting, which the new rules would curtail and which I consider sacred in a democracy. Hence the Wilderness Society helps you tell our Forest Service to reject its proposal to shield certain projects from public oversight and scientific data.

Finally, in the wake of this Administration's constant hysteria over BS-13 and "caravans" and "people coming to take your jobs" (like the people our President imports to do seasonal workers at his wineries?), Win Without War helps you tell our Department of Defense Inspector General to investigate our Administration's use of soldiers at our Southern border. Just as we shouldn't fear gun violence research, we shouldn't fear an Inspector General investigation into why we need our military when we already have a Border Patrol. And if our Inspector General concludes that we have a military down there in order to spy on activists and journalists and to terrorize people running from another country's catastrophe, well, I hope our Administration is big enough to handle the backlash! (And yes, I made that crack about our President using foreign workers at his own corporations for a reason. If we stop enabling bosses who import workers in order to drive everyone's wages down, we'll be able to help out refugees running from real horrors much better than we do now.)

Action: concerning data security, Arctic drilling, gun research, and cryptocurrency.

Lately our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) has fined Equifax $650-$700 million for failing to secure the private data of almost 150 million Americans, but that's not as big as it sounds -- if you don't believe me, divide the fine by the number of people it hurt! -- and good Americans need more protection than that. Hence H.R. 2545/S. 1336, the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act, would establish an Office of Cybersecurity within our FTC which would regulate data security at credit reporting corporations, would set strict notification requirements for data breaches, and would make penalties for losing consumer personal data a lot steeper. If you're one of those who reflexively respond oh great another bureaucracy, I would remind you that "just letting the corporations who know their stuff do it" clearly ain't working, and that's the world we're already in. Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect consumer data by passing the Data Breach Prevention and Compensation Act.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell the CEOs of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips to back out of their apparent plans to drill in the Arctic. Drilling in the Arctic has been a fever dream of big oil since time immemorial, but we all know the reasons we shouldn't drill there -- for one, it's much harder to clean up an oil spill which will happen in the Arctic than it is even in the temperate Gulf of Mexico (and you recall how well BP cleaned up that spill, which is to say "not particularly well"). Here are some more reasons: it'll threaten the famous Alaskan sockeye salmon industry, wreck the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, endanger the Native populations of the region, and it won't even give us very much oil. If I, an hourly-paid schmuck, can recite these reasons off the top of my head, then I bet a lot of other people can, too -- and surely these not-very-popular big oil CEOs are acutely aware that There Is-So Such a Thing as Bad PR. If we need to remind them of that with (wait for it!) the Big Stick of Bad PR, hey, we're here to help.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Senate to fund gun violence research by our Centers for Disease Control and our National Institute of Health, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Congress last year passed a spending bill that explicitly authorized gun violence research by these agencies, but naturally they didn't actually give them a dime to do that research; what are they afraid of? I'm no great fan of keeping people from having handguns and rifles -- though I think it should be just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as automatic weapons -- but there's no harm in researching gun violence scientifically, and our CDC and NIH have sterling reputations, though I imagine our President's trying to change that as we speak. Even the author of the Dickey Amendment that restricted gun violence research in the first place said before he died that he regretted his amendment's effects. I wish that remorse was more contagious in Congress these days, but hey, that's why we're here.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to block Facebook's efforts to create its own damn currency. Yeah, you read that right, and I'm sure Libra will be even more annoying than bitcoin has been over the years. They're selling cryptocurrency as, get this, a way of reaching the "unbanked" citizens of the world. Setting aside that we should never privatize currency, and setting aside, also, that Libra won't help the "unbanked" if they're also "uncomputered," there's a better way to help the "unbanked": stop treating the world as your personal fuckjar. Seriously, when we keep the world's biggest actors from exploiting good folks from other lands, those good folks will have more power to do the things they want to do with their lives, and they won't need Libra or whatever to do it. And an important step toward restraining the world's biggest actors would be to stop "freeing" obnoxious tech CEOs from "burdensome" regulations because they're such great "innovators." Mostly what they innovate is new ways to separate you from your money.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, robocalls, copyrights, and immigration.

It's Monday again, so let's call our Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. And this week we add to that list H.R. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections (or SAFE) Act, which would (among other good works) mandate paper ballots for federal elections. The House has passed all these bills, but Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell still refuses to hold a vote on any of them. Still, we have a voice, and we believe that secure elections, voting rights, civil rights for gay and transgender folk, paycheck fairness for women, higher wages for working families, and internet freedom for all Americans are all good things that our Senators should support, particularly if they want to remain Senators. You can find tools for finding your Senators' phone numbers in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone).

Meanwhile, both House and Senate have passed anti-robocall bills, but they didn't pass the same bill, so now House and Senate must conference out a bill that can go to our President, and you know how that can go -- for example, a lot of the worst parts in that 2017 tax "reform" bill somehow found their way into that bill during the House/Senate conference! -- so Consumer Reports helps you tell your Reps and Senators to agree upon the most vigorous anti-robocall bill possible. A conference bill should, for example, ensure that big telecom corporations give you free tools to end all those "spoofed" calls that pretend to be from your bank or our IRS or even your own damn number, and it should also crack down on international scam call rings. Remember: our Reps and Senators would be nothing without us, so they had better do our will here, not some big donor's will. I mean, nobody likes robocalls except scam artists and other people nobody wants to talk to on the phone. Surely Congress can hit a bank-shot layup?

In other news, H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the CASE Act, purports to streamline the process by which folks can redress copyright violations, but that ain't as good as it sounds -- by taking copyright-related claims out of our courts and creating a separate office within the U.S. Copyright Office to evaluate them, the CASE Act will open the floodgates for copyright trolls to slap copyrights on everything they can find so they can harvest settlements from the unsuspecting. If you think you won't be affected because you don't violate copyrights, ask yourself: have you ever shared a meme on Facebook or Twitter? If the answer is "yes," then it will affect you, once folks slap copyrights on everything in sight, knowing they'll get a quick hearing from the U.S. Copyright Office rather than letting the wheels of justice in our courts grind slow. Hence the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect us from copyright trolls by rejecting the SAFE Act.

Finally, we've been trying to get Greyhound to stop letting Border Patrol agents on their buses willy-nilly, but they don't care what you think, so the ACLU helps you tell Greyhound's owner, FirstGroup plc, to stop Greyhound from letting Border Patrol agents on their buses unless they have a warrant or are at an actual CBP checkpoint. Of course if CBP or ICE agents have a warrant, or the bus is passing through a CBP checkpoint, agents can get on board and search, but the CBP has been searching buses without warrants and declaring that pretty much anywhere is now a "checkpoint," and they've also taken plenty of folks of color off buses without having any real suspicion that they're undocumented immigrants. Again, Greyhound has demonstrated that it doesn't care about any of that, so we have to alert their owners to what they're doing. In a sane, decent, and moral society I wouldn't ever have to say this, but in this sick, immoral, and decadent society I often have to, so I will: law and order don't exist just to give us whatever results we want.

Around the table: the dark side of mindfulness, explained! Plus the usual "liberal" media foolery.

Zachary Siegel at The Nation interviews Ron Purser, whose new book McMindfulness examines "examines how spiritual practices and self-care became tools for corporate compliance." Well, when corporations place all the emphasis on "how you can deal with stress at your job," they not only erase their own responsibility for the stress they cause at your job through their terrible management, they condition you to "be content with injustice and inequalities that pervade society." Really, you're a lot less stressed when you have sick days, money in your savings account, and access to health care. That's not to say you shouldn't do deep breathing every once in a while -- indeed, I give this advice to my trolls often! -- but all this emphasis on coping keeps us from remaking our world into one that doesn't demand so damn much coping.

You know all those polls that just ask people if they consider themselves conservative, moderate, or liberal? Well, Jim Naureckas at FAIR, in making a larger point about what certain classes of voters want, links to a Pew Research Center poll that actually evaluates whether you're conservative, moderate, or liberal by your actual stands on actual issues. And what do we learn? That "56 percent of self-identified 'moderates' picked mostly liberal policies, as did 30 percent of 'conservatives' and 21 percent of those who said they were 'very conservative.'" I'd have framed Pew's issues differently -- they include no allusion to taxes on the rich, for example, and the liberal position on clean air/clean water regulations is less that the "costs are worth it" and more that they save money in health care costs -- but I think Pew's findings better correlate with our lived experience than the let's-all-get-along-with-evil-corporatists pablum our media generally serves up.

Mike Ludwig at TruthOut reminds us that making folks with felony convictions pay fines before getting their voting rights back is a "modern-day poll tax.". No, saying so does not amount to "letting people off the hook before they've paid their debt to society," because a) your voting rights should never be taken away in the first place and b) the quality of mercy demands that we take ability to pay into account when giving a sentence. Prisoners make absurdly little money while incarcerated, and while they're in prison they get gouged by medical appointments, phone calls, and high-priced goods in commissaries. Lawmakers would understand all of that, if they weren't so preoccupied with swinging their balls in our faces.

Ho hum, MSNBC (or, as Jeffery St. Clair calls it, "MSDNC") makes blatant errors in its apparent zeal to tamp down excitement about the Bernie Sanders campaign. Putting him third in a chart when he ranks second (or fourth when he ranks third) is Fox News-level BS, of course, but when Chuck Todd tells us Mr. Sanders lost five points in a poll when he actually gained five, or another program simply tacks on three points to Mr. Biden's showing in a poll just so it can put him in first, well, that's the kind of thing George Orwell warned us about. So, to sum: the same people who constantly tell us TEH BERNIEZ CAN'TZ TEH WINZ!!!!! have to fudge the data or lie about the data to make it seem like he "can't win," which should raise anyone's suspicions.

Finally, another day, another flatugasm from our President about how Barack Obama should be the one getting investigated, not him, for his "book deal" or something. Here's the thing, though: "(f)rom day one, they've looked into everything we've done" is exactly how democracy is supposed to work! They work for us, and they're supposed to check the power of the Executive branch! Is there no one in his Administration who can tell him how he sounds? Or are they all telling him that since he sounds like his most self-pitying votaries, it's OK? It's certainly enough to make you miss the crude artistry of Mr. Nixon, who famously said that he was OK with the media putting him under a microscope, but not a proctoscope.

Action: concerning banksters, energy efficiency, and marijuana policy.

S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, would restrain the noxious behavior of the private equity firms and hedge funds that buy up corporations, suck the wealth out of them, and leave their workers jobless. You have seen a lot of this in recent years, with the closures of thousands of ToysRUs, Kmart, Sears, and Payless stores, among others -- and in Philadelphia, with the recent closure of Hahnemann Hospital. Over a decade after the banksters almost destroyed this economy for good, they somehow have so much power that they can even dictate whether a corporation can continue! Dare I mention that these banksters are also invested in the private prison industry that's currently making big bucks separating families at the border? Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect working families from vampire banksters by passing the Stop Wall Street Looting Act.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn Environment helps you tell your state legislators to improve energy efficiency standards for almost two dozen appliances sold in the Keystone State. There's really no downside to appliances that use energy more efficiently -- they use less power, cause fewer carbon emissions, emit fewer pollutants, and (this is the one most folks will hear) cost less money on your energy bills. OK, there's one "downside" -- appliance corporation CEOs won't be able to make things as cheaply as possible, and thus make enough money to gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. They won't put it like that, of course -- they'll say your appliances will cost more money. But our post-apocalypse descendants won't be sitting around the campfire saying sure, our planet's almost unlivable now, but at least ovens cost a little less for a few years!

Finally, H.R. 3884/S. 2227, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, would at long last essentially legalize marijuana at the federal level by removing it from Schedule I, where it's never belonged -- really, pot is as dangerous as heroin? As if! -- and would allow folks who have pot convictions in their past to apply for resentencing and expungment of their record. The MORE Act would also tax pot products and use that money to help communities most ravaged by the "war on drugs," i.e., communities of color. Hence the Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support saner drug policy by passing the MORE Act. Folks may wonder why I advocate for stronger laws protecting good folks from predatory corporations and more relaxed laws about marijuana. The reason is simple: corporations do a lot more damage than pot does, and our laws ought to recognize that.

Around the table: in which we lay the Mueller investigation to rest.

I touched on Charlie Sykes's piece on Politico last week, which argued that Democrats hopeful of recapturing the Presidency should remember 1972 and be cautious, but Josh Marshall does Mr. Sykes's piece more justice than I did. Mr. Sykes's "history is off," Mr. Marshall says, since President Nixon was rather more popular at a similar juncture in his first term than our President is, but one thing that's the same is that both Presidents aimed to divide the country, mainly through endless hammering of hot-button social issues. The one thing that's different? Mr. Nixon indeed had the "larger half" (in Pat Buchanan's words) of our divided country back in 1972, but our President has the smaller half now -- though, of course, we all saw how well that worked out for us in 2016.

You'll get a few paragraphs into this ProPublica story about how Chicago Mayor will (among other reforms) end suspension of licenses for unpaid parking tickets in that city, and you'll likely have the same reaction I did: Jesus Mary and Joseph people actually go into bankruptcy over unpaid tickets? I mean, no, it's not surprising per se, but it is no less appalling. Naturally most of the folks who face this problem are black, and if you're in the mood to say some variation of if you can't do the time don't do the crime, please do three things: 1) slap yourself, 2) note well that Chicago ain't even making very much money off their Draconian ticketing rules, and 3) ask yourself if getting your license suspended or your car repossessed by the city is really a fair punishment for unpaid parking tickets.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media has lost at least some of its "enthusiasm" for the coup in Venezuela that never succeeded, because if there's anything our media hate more than an actual liberal populist, it's a loser. Still, they've moved on to the next possible puppet of power, the former Venezuelan intelligence chief, described by one of our papers of record as "muscular," now there's some journalistic objectivity! I guess it could be worse, in that we could get a whole lot of "soul searching" from our media about "how we got it wrong," because it's tedious to watch people who don't have souls make a show of soul-searching in public.

Hard to believe, Harry, but CBP and ICE just held a Dallas-born brown-skinned person in custody for three weeks and I'll bet the only thing that prevented our government from actually deporting him was the Dallas News reporting on his plight. And CBP wouldn't let him use the phone while he was detained, though ICE did, and I bet that fact goes right into ICE's PR kit. Be prepared for your right-wing uncle to opine that if you're going to make an omelette, you're going to have to break a few eggs. Or deport a few American citizens!

Elizabeth Warren warns that "the odds of another economic downturn are high" "either this year or next year," and though I couldn't tell you whether the New York Fed's recession probability index is particularly edifying or whether our President's grandstanding on trade will actually do our economy any palpable harm, I do agree with Sen. Warren that debt makes every structure less sturdy, and a lot more debt (not just credit card debt and mortgage debt but student loan debt and corporate debt) makes it a lot less sturdy. I also notice that this recovery, such as it's been, has been going on for over 10 years, making it the longest in our history -- and that should prompt us to wonder when the other shoe's going to drop.

Finally, I did not pay attention to former Special Prosecutor Mueller's testimony before the House yesterday, and thus have no comment on it per se. I am surprised, however, that I've only just seriously considered that this whole investigation might have been a drama created by our President! Who better for our President's Deputy Attorney General to appoint to conduct such an investigation, after all, than the lifelong Republican with the by-the-book reputation who would take seriously the Office of Legal Counsel opinion that sitting Presidents can't be indicted? And if a few of the President's friends have to go to jail, well, we all know how he feels about his friends by now. Yeah, I know, our President supposedly said he was "fucked" after Mr. Mueller's appointment, but he says a lot of things, and he doesn't mean a lot of the things he says. Robert Mueller was never going to save us, and if this realization helps us get back to the very serious business of being thorns in our politicians' sides, then I guess the whole thing will have been worth it.

Action: concerning taxes, immigration, government spying, and pollution.

S. 309, the For the 99.8 Percent Act, would make our Estate Tax a lot more progressive, by lowering the threshold at which we start taxing estates, from $10 million to $3.5 million, and by creating 39, 45, 50, 55, and 77% tax brackets, such that if you died with an estate of $5.5 million, your first $3.5 million would face no taxation, the next $750,000 would get taxed at 39 percent, and the last $1.25 million would get taxed at 45%. The Reagan Revolution purported to release constraints on individual accomplishment, but what have we gotten with all these tax cuts for the rich we've enacted since the mid-'60s? A class of elites who have divorced wealth from work and who believe they have a right to insulate themselves from their communities, that's what. With the For the 99.8 Percent Act, we could begin to take our world back from them, and so CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to strengthen the Estate Tax by passing the For the 99.8 Percent Act.

Meanwhile, our Administration might soon deport a lot of Syrians with Temporary Protected Status back to the war zone from which they originally ran. Our Administration would like you to believe that folks with TPS are all terrorists-waiting-to-happen, but even more reasonable folks might well ask why some people get Temporary Protected Status that lasts for years or even decades. After all, it's temporary, right? But folks who get TPS come from countries that haven't resolved the problems that forced them to flee in the first place, which, in this case, include the decade-long military attacks within Syria from the Syrian government, Iran, ISIS, Russia, and the United States. So if none of that's gone away, our Administration sending Syrians with TPS back just to "prove" they're "doing something" would be cruel. We could forestall this cruelty by telling our Congressfolk to protect these good folks with legislation, as Win Without War helps you do.

In other news, ICE personnel have been collecting your driver's license photo without your consent! Do they need your consent, you ask? Well, are you the target of an ICE investigation? If no, then no -- they would need a warrant to get that photo, but you know our government thinks warrants are quaint, and anyway TEH CARAVANZ WILLZ KILLZ USZ ALLZ!!!!!! Have any legislatures authorized ICE to collect driver's license photos willy-nilly? No, they have not -- but too many DMVs have proven too cooperative when ICE "asks" to get these photos. But why do they need photos of your grandmother who's been here 96 years? For their facial recognition technology, of course -- you know, the technology that thinks all black folks look alike. Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to head off this clusterfrack of lawlessness and incompetence by banning ICE from accessing DMV databases.

Finally, the biggest oil leak in American history continues unabated, with the Taylor Energy Corporation still leaking 4,500 gallons daily into the Gulf of Mexico, as it's done for the past 14 years. I don't need to tell you how awful 4,500 gallons of oil a day is for the creatures who live in the Gulf, but I have to say I'm also appalled by the waste. This leak has spewed almost 23 million gallons of oil into the Gulf over the years; maybe that's the proverbial drop in a bucket to a big corporation, but the average American drives 12,000 miles a year, and at 25 miles per gallon, would use around 480 gallons of gas, deriving from about 1,000 gallons of crude, meaning you and about 1,640 of your friends could have been driving around on that oil all these years, instead of it just leaking away and polluting the Gulf. So Environmental Action tell our EPA to stop Taylor Energy from leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Action: concerning working families, immigration, discrimination, and climate change.

H.R. 3590, the Building Our Opportunities to Survive and Thrive (or BOOST) Act, would enact a new tax credit of $3,000 annually for folks making less than $50,000 -- said credit would be higher for heads of household making less than $80,000 and married couples making less than $100,000 -- and the worst thing I can say about the BOOST Act is that it suggests we pay for it by repealing most of the 2017 Republican tax "reform" and enacting a fee on banksters with more than $50 billion in capital, when it should just be doing these things. Naturally the right is hysterical about it -- they're crying WHOZE WILL TEH PAYZ FOR TEH ITZ!!!! (psst: I just told you) and TEH PEEPULZ WILL WORKZ TEH LESSEZ!!!!, to which I have two responses: 1) you say that like it's an unqualified evil and 2) some folks clearly overestimate what folks would do with $3,000. Quit their jobs? C'mon, we all pay bills. CREDO helps you tell your House Reps to support working families by passing the BOOST Act.

Meanwhile, the tech corporation Palantir has become notorious lately for its huge contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE), and though corporate spokeshacks have long said Palantir software doesn't contribute to our Administration's deportations, internal emails beg to differ. And while I wouldn't be upset at the mere possibility that Palantir helps our government deports undocumented immigrants, fact is they lied about it, instead of making the case that they were helping our government do necessary work. But then again, perhaps they lied about it because they're also helping our Administration tear children from their families, which civilized people generally agree is inhumane. Palantir has already suffered a bit from the Big Stick of Bad PR, but that only means more of us need to wield it! Hence Free Press (among other good government groups) helps you tell Palantir to break off its ties to ICE.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell big corporations like AT&T and Amazon to stop donating big wads of cash to politicians who are pro-discrimination against gay and transgender folks, then CREDO still helps you do that. A lot of big corporations position themselves as gay- and transgender-friendly these days, but they still support candidates who aren't, and we're all tired of excuses like "we support them for the economic issues, not the bigotry." And in and of itself, corporate pro-gay and pro-transgender positioning is of limited utility, and if corporations align with Democrats on social issues, that's all the more incentive for Democrats not to pressure corporations on economic issues. Indeed, it's almost like that's the whole idea! But if corporations cut off monetary support for pro-discrimination politicians, just so happens they'll also starve right-wing economic ideas of oxygen, too.

Finally, our United States Geological Survey (or USGS), upon whose research the National Climate Assessment draws in part, will now use scientific models that can forecast climate change's effects only up until 2040, even though most models forecast through the end of the century, and even though basically everyone knows that the worst effects of climate change will come after 2040. That'll teach the National Climate Assessment to embarrass our President! Clearly this Administration -- currently dueling with Tha Bush Mobb for the dubious honor of "most anti-science government of modern times" -- would rather you didn't know how bad climate change is going to get, lest it affect their plans to help fossil fuel CEOs redistribute ever more income upward to themselves. So Penn Environment helps you tell our USGS to abandon its plans to fudge climate change science for the benefit of big polluting corporations.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, net neutrality, humane immigration policy, and voting rights.

If you've missed previous opportunities to call your Senators to tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, well, it's not too late, because Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell still refuses to hold a vote on any of these House-passed bills, since "I get to decide what we vote on," like the voters made him Sultan-with-Absolute-Power or something. And now you can add H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, which our House passed late last week. So, we've got bills that promote voting rights, civil rights for gay and transgender folk, paycheck fairness for women who don't get paid the same way men do, internet freedom for all Americans, and a $15/hour minimum wage by 2025; these are all good things, and our Senators should support them. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Senators' phone numbers. You may have to call local numbers; I've found the D.C. numbers hardly work anymore, for whatever reason.

While you've got your Senators on the phone: the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals may rule this week on our FCC's so-called "Restoring Internet Freedom" rule from 2017 -- the rule that repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order that made net neutrality the law of the land -- and if it strikes the 2017 net neutrality repeal down, the big telecom corporations will be in your Reps' and Senators' ears with a quickness, trying to get bogus "net neutrality" legislation passed so that big telecoms will still be able to block and slow down the websites you want to see. So tell your Senators that, if the D.C. Circuit rules against the 2017 net neutrality repeal, you want them to leave the 2015 Open Internet order as-is and reject any bill the big telecoms push. Big telecoms are among the least popular corporations in America because of their monopolist practices and lousy service -- but our politicians love them, because they give lots of money to political campaigns, so politicians would prefer to do their will, rather than ours. That just means we have to make our will unmistakeable. (Be sure to call your House Reps afterward.)

In other news, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight our Administration's monstrous behavior in re immigrants by passing H.R. 2203, the Homeland Security Improvement Act, and H.R. 3239, the Humanitarian Standards for Individuals in Customs and Border Protection Custody Act. H.R. 2203 would (among other good works) create a National Commission to investigate the inhumane practices conducted by our Administration and would prohibit family separation of would-be immigrants except under extreme circumstances (i.e., if the parents are abusing the children). H.R. 3239 would (among other good works) spell out food/water/shelter requirements for detainees -- you recall that this Administration told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that no law actually compels them to provide soap to detainee children! -- and would establish procedures for our Homeland Security Inspector General and our Government Accounting Office to oversee our Administration's detainment practices. Our House could vote on both these bills any day now (they both passed out of committee last week), so let's make sure we communicate our will to our Reps.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you demand that state governments restore all voting rights to formerly-incarcerated citizens without making them pay fines or fees. Let's not get stuck in the weeds over whether you should pay all your debts to society in addition to serving your sentence before you get your right to vote back, because you should never lose your right to vote in the first place. I don't care if you're a murderer, a child molester, or a corporate criminal -- you should never lose your right to vote. I put "corporate criminal" in there, of course, just to remind everyone why certain state politicians pressed to force felons to lose their voting rights in the first place -- because of racism! Politicians know that our justice system mainly puts folks of color in prison, at much higher numbers than white folks and usually for much smaller crimes than the kind big corporate executives get away with, hence taking away their voting rights is a way of keeping them down even when they're out of prison. So let's not let racism rule our lives.

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 copyright trolls and corporate tax loopholes.

H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act, should set off your alarm bells first with the tortured acronym of its title and then with the word "alternative," because guess what "alternative" they're talking about? That's right, an "alternative" to settling small copyright-related claims in a court of law! Why our courts and our laws never seem to be good enough for our politicians I'll never know, but the CASE Act would let "claims officers" in our Copyright Office to hear copyright complaints and assess fines -- which would essentially enable copyright trolls to stamp copyrights on everything that ain't nailed down and then get an expedited hearing about the matter which will almost certainly go in their favor. There's a reason they might not try that in an actual court of law, you know. Thus the Electronic Frontier Foundation helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect law and order by rejecting the CASE Act.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to close corporate tax loopholes that benefit for-profit private prison corporations, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. S. 1827, the Ending Tax Breaks for Private Prisons Act, would prevent corporations that operate prisons from being able to call themselves a real estate investment trust (or REIT) subsidiary, which sure sounds like a loophole even if you've never heard of a REIT before. A REIT is, per section 856 of our Internal Revenue Code, "any corporation, trust or association that acts as an investment agent specializing in real estate and real estate mortgages"; mainly that means office complexes, shopping centers, and apartment buildings, but private prison corporations? That sure does seem to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the law, and we could put "following the spirit of the law" another way: doing the right thing.

Around the table: dancing on the edge of "peak decadence."

Our President's racism is "Not Blundering," announces William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut, but is "Tactically Deliberate." "An instance of horrifying racism becomes merely 'expected' from the president," Mr. Pitt writes, "and then he moves on to another one, and then another, and another after that. He and his administration are laboring to normalize the grotesque." Of course, Tha Bush Mobb also "set() the bar so low it is barely visible," even though Mr. Bush took great pains to avoid saying something actually racist. And Democrats won't win by straining to be "the party of civility"; they need to be the party of changing the damn subject from this awful President's latest flatugasm to what we-the-people want our America to be. At last count, only two Democrats running for President (Sens. Sanders and Warren, in case you hadn't guessed) might be able to do that.

Philadelphia, PA District Attorney Larry Krasner argues that the death penalty violates the state constitution. But though the flesh is willing, the heart asks whether the death penalty "cannot survive the state Constitution’s ban on cruel punishments" merely because his office has found that the state overturned almost three out of every four death sentences between 1978 and 2015; you'd have to at least compare that data to what's gone on in other states over the same time period. Still, to decide that it's constitutional, I would think you'd also have to prove that it could work if the legislature could fix it, and I'm less certain any legislature can do that, and not just because executing the wrong person ain't something you can take back.

Study finds correlation between broadband availability and higher housing values in rural areas, and why not? People like their internet, and people get a lot out of it, too. Interestingly, the higher broadband speeds (250 Mbps and up) seem to have no effect on housing prices; possibly (the authors theorize) because speeds like that are relatively new to rural areas, or because rural folks don't care exactly how fast their broadband is. I incline more to the explanation that once folks get the opportunity to "becom(e) civically-engaged, reduc(e) isolation, and even (improving) income generation," they don't really care about exactly how few nanoseconds it takes to reap these boons.

Sam Pizzigati at the Our Future blog asks: "Have We Hit Peak Decadence?" I'll admit I was tempted to answer in terms of our President's ongoing dramas and what evils we seem willing to tolerate from politicians as long as they're on our "team," but I was pleased to see Mr. Pizzigati pivot immediately to the burgeoning "super-penthouse" phenomenon. As long as I've been alive, the penthouse apartment has been synonymous with decadence, but now you've got super-penthouses with 10,000 square feet, a 360-degree view of the city below, and (oftentimes) more than one floor. And the folks who own them don't own just one of them, either! Sadly, every time you think we've "peaked," there are more peaks to climb. Are billion-dollar, building-sized penthouses that far off? And how many more overworked, underpaid people will they create?

Finally, another day, another Republican warning that if Democrats move too far left, then 2020 could be 1972 all over again. I'd agree with Mr. Sykes that national Democrats shouldn't simply be the mirror opposite of our President on immigration, and I also agree that our President's racist "go back to wherever you came from" flatugasma resonated with a lot of Americans. But here's a major difference between 1972 and 2020: Richard Nixon knew better than to say the proverbial quiet parts out loud. And, as I've suggested above, the best way to counter all these hypothetical attack ads on cherry-picked positions is to run ads about how your actual agenda will help us make a more perfect union. Of course, we have a more compelling reason not to make 2020 a "referendum" on our President: he loves being the center of attention, and people who love being the center of attention like that need to be ignored. (Not a lot of Democratic 2018 campaign ads even mentioned our President, you know. In fact, the only Democrat who did mention him in my media market lost.)

Action: concerning immigration and the minimum wage.

Tiana Smalls has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell the Greyhound bus corporation to stop letting immigration agents on their buses without a warrant. "Without a warrant" is the key phrase here -- with a warrant, Greyhound would have to let them on, but Greyhound lets these agents on warrant or not, surely knowing that they transport a lot of immigrants all across our great nation, and thus Greyhound enables border agents in violating folks' rights. If you're tempted to say YOU JUST WANTZ TEH OPEN BORDURZ!!!!!, please attend the phrase "without a warrant" again. And generally I would advise you to look into your own past and see where your ancestors might were mistreated for being "strangers," because almost all of us have some of that in our history, and whatever privilege you now enjoy only came to you on the backs of the generations of good Americans who suffered hardship and ostracization.

Along those lines, CREDO helps you tell big online retail corporation Amazon to stop helping this Administration oppress immigrants. What's that, you say? Our President is always attacking Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos? Well, that's all drama, because Amazon has been gobbling up government contracts related to our Administration's animus against immigrants -- Palantir's Investigative Case Management system, which has helped our Administration ramp up surveillance and targeting of immigrant populations, now uses Amazon Web Services as a cloud computing host, and AWS also hosts a big chunk of our Department of Homeland Security's databases, too. Amazon is also trying to sell its notorious "facial recognition" software, the pretentiously-titled Rekognition, even though Rekognition is notorious in the first place because, like your Tea Party uncle, it can hardly tell black people apart. And being a part of the New Concentration Camps is surely Bad PR if anything is.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. Your House Reps could be voting on this bill any day now, and even though minimum wage hikes get routinely passed by states and localities all over America, and even though the $15/hour minimum wages adopted in some cities have not resulted in the hysterical forecasts promulgated by doomsayers, they're still at it, so they need to hear from you. But don't believe the hype that a higher minimum wage "kills jobs." Our CBO has indeed reported that a $15/hour minimum wage would displace somewhere between zero and 3.7 million jobs by 2025 (the median figure was 1.3 million), but consider that even this highly-unequal economy typically creates close to 2.5 million new jobs every year, and consider, also, that the CBO reported that 17 million workers would make more money. Surely that's a consideration, amirite?

Action: concerning Senate obstruction, our President's tax returns, and protections for working families.

Today's another good day to call your Senators and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. (You can find your Senators' phone numbers using the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page -- or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page.) Why is Mob Boss Mitch blocking them from a Senate vote? Because he doesn't want his members to go on record opposing voting rights, internet freedom, tools for workers to rectify pay gaps, and civil rights for gay and transgender folk. He also doesn't want our President to go on record as opposing these things, once he vetoes the bills. If this all sounds like the opposite of courage to you, well, you're not alone. And if House Democrats don't run thousands of ads in 2020 touting their votes in favor of these bills, that'll be the opposite of courage, too.

Meanwhile, now that the state of New York has passed a bill mandating that the state comply with Congressional requests to turn over tax returns on state residents, CREDO helps you tell House Democrats to actually request our President's tax returns. House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) has been strangely slow in making that request, but that's why we're here: to remind our Congressfolk of our will. And though our President's apologists call this "Presidential harassment" -- a phrase that sure does sound like whining! -- fact is we have plenty of probable cause to start an investigation into his tax returns, beginning with his own refusal to release them and continuing on through New York Times reporting on our President's massive alleged tax fraud. And if we nail him for tax fraud, what will his apologists say? That it's OK for our President to cheat on his taxes? Well, perhaps I shouldn't tempt fate with these fools.

Finally, H.R. 2474/S. 1306, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (or PRO Act), would, as its title suggests, give workers tools with which to organize and collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions. Specifically, the PRO Act would stiffen penalties for employers who interfere with employee organizing efforts (including votes!), and close a lot of current loopholes in our labor laws, which corporations have been driving Mack trucks through lately. You remember how our Supreme Court ruled that Kentucky nurses could be classified as "supervisors" on hysterically flimsy pretexts? Well, the PRO Act would fix that. You remember how FedEx classified all its drivers as "independent contractors" just so they could avoid paying health insurance and also so they could make their drivers pay for their own trucks? The PRO Act would fix that, too. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the PRO Act.

Action: concerning humane treatment of prisoners and unconstitutional war.

Two years ago, when Hurricane Harvey slammed into Louisiana and Texas, did our state and federal governments move prisoners who couldn't get out of the hurricane's way? No, they did not. And are they planning to do so now that another storm is about to hit the Gulf Coast? Not unless we tell them to, in numbers they can't ignore, so Roots Action helps you tell federal, state, and local officials to move their prisoners out of the storm's path. If you're saying if they didn't want to be left in the path of a major storm they shouldn't have done the crime, just navigate away from this page right now -- if you won't treat your prisoners humanely, you have no business calling yourself a civilization. And if you're saying WHEREZ IZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!!, don't be the fool who advocated for more tax cuts for the rich and more corporate tax cuts. As anyone acquainted with arithmetic would tell you, actions have consequences.

Meanwhile, the House did pass an amendment to its defense authorization bill that would prevent our President from waging war on Iran without Congressional approval, but as you know, that's exactly the kind of amendment that dies in conference, hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 1039, the Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act. You may have heard that the British Ambassador to the United States claimed that our President abandoned the Iran nuclear deal in order to "spite" President Obama. I don't know whether that's true or not -- it fits our President's penchant for drama! -- but he certainly didn't abandon it because it wasn't working, and now he has a Secretary of State and a National Security Advisor (both of whom he picked after firing their predecessors) who are constantly agitating for war with Iran. So let's remind our President that his job is to listen to us.

Around the table: tabulating yet more Presidential drama and Democrat weakness.

Factcheck.org reviews our President's recent speech trumpeting his alleged environmental accomplishments, and finds it wanting. I'd almost hoped to report that our President was as clever a liar as George W. Bush, but some of what Factcheck tabulates are just flat-out lies easily refuted, and naturally our President regurgitates the $100 trillion Green New Deal number when even its originator has admitted he doesn't really know how to measure the cost (like, by, you know, tabulating how much we'd save in health care costs, disaster relief costs, and the like). Also, too, we still have clean air and clean water to a large degree because our federal courts have slapped down almost every Administration attempt to gut clean air and clean water regulations.

Our President twitters that certain liberal Congresswomen who emigrated here should stop "loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run" and instead "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." If you heard the ghost of go back to Africa!, I wouldn't blame you, and I doubt he really hears them as "loud" and "vicious" merely because they fight his evil -- rather, he hopes you do, so you'll live vicariously through him. Of course, people come here from "totally broken" places all the time -- often to avoid being murdered themselves! -- and then our First Amendment protects them when they opine, as we all do, about how we'd like to make a more perfect union. That's America, folks. And those who agree with our President really ought to consider, as always, whether constant enragement is really good for their health.

From Kaiser Health News we learn that despite federal laws that are supposed to prevent this sort of thing, rape victims still get billed for forensic exams they undergo afterward. Think of how you'd feel if you kept getting slammed with bills after you got raped! We need better, more precise laws -- the yet-to-be-reauthorized Violence Against Women Act cuts off certain federal grants to states that don't cover these costs, and maybe that was all that would pass in 1994, but a better idea would be to simply make it illegal to charge rape victims for rape kits. Sadly, that's the kind of thing politicians tend not to push on their own, but as part of larger legislative efforts. The next politician who does that might find it better to prioritize good works above "not stepping on other legislators' toes."

Please please please do not attend the "conservative" "reaction" to our President's apparent "cave" on his Census citizenship question, because like everything else with this President it's drama, and bad drama at that. His "conservative allies" can whine all they want about "whether they should support this guy if he's not going to fight," but rest assured they will all turn out for him in 2020, and they'll probably cite some unrelated, whipped-up drama about the Democratic nominee as being more important than whatever betrayal they've lately experienced.

Finally, dig this bit of moderate, centrist pandering emanating from Young Fresh Fellow Pete Buttigieg, who says (in re Medicare-for-All and student loan debt) that "we should be realistic about what’s going to work" and that "just flipping a switch and saying we’re instantly going to have everybody on Medicare just like that — isn’t realistic." If he'd read the Medicare-for-All bill, he'd already know that the bill won't get everyone on Medicare for four years, so discussing how we're "instantly going to have everybody on Medicare" is typical straw-man arguing. And of course saying Medicare-for-All is "pretty far out...from where Americans are" isn't borne out by polling consistently showing majority or supermajority support. The good news? The No-We-Can't caucus -- of which Mr. Buttigieg aspires to be leader, though his big-donor fundraising hasn't yet translated into better polling numbers -- ain't that big in America. The bad news? It sure does seem concentrated among Our Glorious Elites.

Around the table: here, have some more of the red pill!

Federal immigration officials are using "gang databases" to conduct their nefarious family-separation-at-the-border activities. You remember "gang databases," right? The databases you might find yourself in for no reason, particularly if you're a person of color? The ones you can't challenge if you somehow discover your inclusion therein, in violation of your habeus corpus rights? So, to sum, our government is using bad information to conduct bad policies. Of course, we as Americans deserve better, and I'll brook no rubbish about ZOMG TEH MS-13 GANGZ ARE COMINZ FORZ TEH YOUZ!!!!! Being afraid of MS-13 is a lot like being afraid of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in 2002. And if Democrats don't run a Presidential candidate who actually tells the truth, our current President will use the BS-13 to fearmonger his way to victory.

Speaking of fearmongering, our Department of Defense does not actually have any evidence that Iran killed over 600 American troops during the Iraq war. As of late June of 2016, we've lost 4,424 troops in that nefarious war, so 600 sure does sound like a lot, doesn't it? And dig how they said "608," because an exact number is always true! Read the whole thing, because the pro-war arguments don't get any better -- they're easily refutable with mainstream media reporting, in fact, and this from a media that loves war. All of this does beg the question: if you're worried about Shiite Muslims having too much power in the Middle East, why topple Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, in the first place? And why should we as Americans allow the past to hold is hostage in the present and the future? Yeah, waging war on Iran sure does look like piling shit on top of shit and hoping it magically turns into a house.

And speaking of the forked tongue of certain Democratic Presidential candidates, Marjorie Cohn at TruthOut reminds us that "Kamala Harris Has a Distinguished Career of Serving Injustice." As soon as you realized that her position on federally-mandated busing is the same as the former Vice President whom she attacked in that debate, you probably already suspected that, but it's nice to have the full story of how she ran interference for jail trusties who illegally elicited confessions, how she wouldn't allow DNA testing on a death row inmate who was probably innocent, and how she opposed a bill requiring her office to investigate police shootings while she was California's Attorney General. And she didn't investigate the "foreclosure king," now-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, when she had the chance! Also, too, where's she been on cash bail reform? Far behind Philadelphia's Larry Krasner, that's where.

Dave Zirin at The Nation explains "Why No One Watches Baseball Anymore," and I'd say the problem may be even worse than Mr. Zirin describes: the sheer length of the game turns people off, but even that is a symptom of the real problem -- that the game's gotten so damn thinky-think that players and managers hardly play anymore. Now they grow every pitcher to throw hard and strike people out, and every team carries 12 or 13 of them for every conceivable situation, so pitchers don't know what to do anymore when they get tattooed, as happens to all of them in time. And these days they grow every hitter to "be patient" and hit home runs, so now hitters can't execute a simple hit-and-run or a sacrifice bunt, which speeds up the game as much as it spices it up. You'll recognize baseball's other problems from, well, everything else in our civilization -- the Commissioner tinkers with "limiting mound visits" and "shortening time between innings" with all the imagination of an accountant, and cable TV deals and public stadium-financing make baseball owners rich without having to do very much actual work. Thus, between baseball's boredom and football's head trauma, basketball stands poised to become our national pastime.

Finally, former Air Force Colonel/failed House candidate Amy McGrath raised a boatload of cash on her first day challenging Mob Boss Mitch in Kentucky's 2020 Senate race, but then she took two distinct and opposite positions on the 2018 nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to our Supreme Court in a matter of hours. Folks, this is why Democrats lose elections -- not because they don't relate to racists enough, not because they're not pro-life enough, and certainly not because they're not "pro-business" enough, but because everyone can tell they don't mean what they say. Calling Matt Jones!

Action: concerning unconstitutional war, Senate obstruction, and working families.

The House plans to vote on amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act today, so now's the time to call your House Reps (using the tools in the upper left-hand corner of this page, if you're viewing it on a computer, or the bottom of this page if you're on a cellphone) and tell them to vote in favor of a) the Khanna amendment that would prevent our President from participating in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen, and b) the Khanna-Gaetz amendment that would prevent our President from waging war on Iran without Congressional authorization. Just Foreign Policy also advises us not only to tell our Congressfolk to vote in favor of these amendments, but also to tell them to push for a recorded vote. Congressfolk would prefer to pass these amendments "en bloc" via voice vote -- which tells everyone how many folks voted in favor of an amendment but not which way individual Congressfolk voted. But how can we hold our representatives accountable for what they do if we don't know how they vote?

Once you're off the phone with your House Reps, you can call your Senators and tell them to pass the following bills: H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. We've discussed these bills at some length; they would, respectively, protect voting rights more vigorously, extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folks, give working folks more tools to fight pay discrimination, and reinstate the FCC's 2015 pro-net neutrality order as the law of the land. Of course Senate Majority Leader "Mob Boss Mitch" McConnell won't bring these House-passed bills up for a vote, because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on." By his actions, we know that Mr. McConnell believes the American people should not challenge the "right" of Our Glorious Elites to run (and ruin!) everything. If that belief sounds singularly un-American to you, then you would want to reassert your power as an American by communicating your will to your Senators.

Finally, H.R. 2474/S. 1306, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, would (as its title suggests!) enhance workers' ability to protect themselves via collective bargaining on wages and working conditions. Specifically, the bill would make it harder for corporations to reclassify employees as "independent contractors," would clarify the National Labor Relations Act's definition of "supervisor" to prevent corporations from pretending their employees are "supervisors" when they're really not, and would stiffen penalties for many offenses corporations perpetrate against working folk. Right-wingers would complain that working folks don't have a "right" to organize, but these are the same folks who argue that bosses have the right to do whatever they like regardless of whom it hurts, so how much credibility do they have? People for the American Way (among other groups) helps you tell your Congressfolk to support working families by passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act.

Action: concerning monopolies, ubiquitous advertising, and the minimum wage.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to break up big tech corporations. The House Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on this matter as we speak, so now's as good a time as any to communicate your will. I'm sure some folks out there think this world would be a whole lot bleaker without same-day shipping from Amazon and instant answers to almost any question from Google and the ability to connect with almost anyone on Facebook, but fact is Amazon's crushing of small businesses, Google's on-again, off-again collaboration with the totalitarian government of China, and Facebook's apparent inability to protect your private data (to name just three problems with big tech corporations!) all make this a bleaker world. Besides which, do you really believe the boons big tech have given us simply wouldn't exist without big tech monopolies? Small businesses invented virtually everything of consequence on the internet, then big corporations gobbled them up and acted like we could never live without them. But we can certainly dream better than that.

Meanwhile, a Russian corporation wants to put giant billboards in space. No, really: it wants to launch a bunch of satellites that'll display logos of prominent products three miles above the Earth. Thing is, you can't just "change the channel" if you don't like it (an argument I've long found wanting anyway) -- you look up, and it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it. What, are proponents of this plan really going to say just don't look up at the sky? But then, people say all kinds of stupid crap these days without any apparent self-editing. Let's head off such embarrassment by allowing Penn Environment to help us tell our Congressfolk to outlaw "space billboards." No use retorting that if some other country is going to do it, then why shouldn't we? That's not what being a civilized person is all about -- sometimes, it's about being civilized even when you know you're going to lose, because future generations might learn from you. So let's have them learn the right things, OK?

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to give working families a raise by passing H.R. 582/S. 150, the Raise the Wage Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The Raise the Wage Act would raise the minimum wage in America from $7.25/hour to $15/hour over the next five years, and it would eventually bring minimum wages for tipped and disabled workers into parity with the minimum wage for the rest of us. You won't be surprised to learn that Republicans oppose the bill, given that so few of them know (or remember) what it's like to work three jobs because you have to, but you might be surprised to learn -- oh, forget it, you won't actually be surprised to learn that some corporatist Democrats also oppose the minimum wage. But states and municipalities have been hiking the minimum wage -- without ill effects -- at the behest of their voters for many years now, so it seems, as it too often does, like a lot of politicians are behind the times. But that's why we're here: to bring our representatives up to speed.

Action: concerning banksters, immigration, and privacy.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would impose a small financial transaction tax on big Wall Street banksters, then Americans for Tax Fairness would still help you do that. The bills in question are H.R. 1516/S. 647, the Wall Street Tax Act, which would impose a 0.1% tax on financial transactions including stock and derivative trades, and H.R. 2923/S. 1587, the Inclusive Prosperity Act, which would impose a range of taxes (from 0.005% to 0.5%) on same; the highest tax imposed here would be $5 per $1,000 in trades. Folks on the right are calling this a "tax on my 401(k)," as if all financial speculation winds up in pension funds, and as if $5 per $1,000 is onerous -- and as if reducing the number of trades banksters make, which these bills would do, wouldn't actually stabilize markets. Most people understand all of this intuitively -- unless, of course, their salary depends on them not understanding it. But if we get it, we must act.

Meanwhile, I have two private prison-related action alerts for you: in one, Color of Change (among others) helps you tell your Congressfolk to close a loophole that allows private prison corporations to avoid taxes, and in the other, Moms Rising helps you tell two big banking corporations to pull their investments from private prison corporations. Both of these are also concentration camp-related, of course, since this Administration thinks detaining immigrants in inhumane conditions and funneling taxpayer money to corporate cronies is a two-fer. Even the Obama Administration had started getting private prisons out of the immigrant detainment business; the least we can do is hold the folks who work for us (i.e., our government) accountable to us. And certainly private prison corporations deserve no special treatment from our tax code; at least S. 1827, the Ending Tax Breaks for Private Prisons Act, would stop private prison corporations from calling themselves "Real Estate Investment Trusts."

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell three big airline corporations (JetBlue, Delta, and American) to stop using facial scanning technology on their customers. Why? Well, we'll begin with the airlines' explanation: it makes things faster! After all, presenting your boarding pass or your passport (which biometric screening would replace) takes several seconds, and Delta claims that using biometric screening saves a whole nine minutes per flight. Would you want to take "I saved nine minutes per flight" to the Pearly Gates? I didn't think so -- it would display a distinct lack of imagination. The downside, meanwhile, is that we don't have a whole lot of law covering facial scanning, so who knows how long the airlines hold on to the information or which government agency they give it to without a warrant? Yeah, I know the airlines say they don't store the info, but you don't trust corporations more than you trust your government, do you? Of course you don't. So let's not trade liberty for convenience.

Action: concerning unconstitutional war-making and big telecom gouging of prisoners and their families.

Reps. Khanna (D-CA) and Gaetz (R-FL) have proposed an amendment to the defense authorization bill that would prevent our President from taking military action against Iran without Congressional authorization. Don't believe the hype that this President "doesn't want war," because no President is stupid enough to tell you they want war anymore -- they all act like "they have no choice," even when they themselves bring about the conditions that would "force" them into war, in this case by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal that absolutely positively kept Iran from getting nukes. Also remember that this is the President who justified staying friends with Saudi Arabia by saying Iran was worse. Also remember that nine-year economic expansions don't last forever. The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to support an end to constant unconstitutional war-making by supporting the Khanna-Gaetz amendment.

Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to stop big telecom corporations from gouging prisoners by passing S. 1764, the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, then CREDO still helps you do that. The late Mrs. Wright-Reed started campaigning for affordable calls from families to loved ones in prison after realizing that she had enough money to get the medicine she needed to survive or talk to her grandson in prison, but not both, and the sad thing is I know some right-winger out there would respond to that story with some combination of she just should have found a way or get a job! or learn a new employable skill. I got a better idea: why don't we stop big corporations from stealing money from us? Why should anyone have to pay $25 for a 15-minute phone call? Is it civilized to heap punishment after punishment upon prisoners (and their families!) just to prove what big balls we have? Or is that just drama?

Around the table: describing the continuing follies of Our Glorious Elites.

Our President is still trying to think of a way to ask your citizenship status on the 2020 census. Whatever he tries (executive order, addendum to the form) will no doubt die a brutal death in court, and the sooner the better, but with this guy you always have to consider whether success is really his goal, and not just because he's made so much money off his own failures. He may aim to show his votaries that he's "trying," or put the scare back into immigrants filling out census forms. He already has Republicans thinking he's actually cut regulations, when courts have mostly stymied his efforts.

From Fox 5 in San Francisco we learn that housing prices have gotten so high in some places (like, ah, San Francisco) that some folks are willing to pay $1200 a month just to have a bunk. Just in case you didn't get enough of dorm living in college! Meanwhile, the absurdly rich still own dozens of homes they leave empty and don't even rent out to people because, really, they're just places to park money so it doesn't get taxed by The Man. I'm starting to think J.G. Ballard may not have known the half of it.

And now Joe Biden complains, after that rough first debate, that "(w)e're supposed to be talking about and competing about what we’re going to do about the future," not "go(ing) back and pick(ing) something about somebody’s past, out of context," which of course you'd say if you've established a nearly-50-year record of capitulation to power. Remember, "most qualified Presidential candidate ever" wound up being a liability for Hillary Clinton in 2016. All that being said, he's right about Sen. Harris essentially having the same position as him on busing. Get used to that from her.

From the "Things We Shouldn't Waste Our Time With But (Sigh) Have To" file: no, that meme about Democratic Presidential candidates saying bad words three bazillion times and not saying "America" enough times during the debates is ridiculously wrong. What a shame Factcheck.org even had to go through it! If I may misquote a proverb, stupid seems to get halfway around the world before smart can get its pants on. Are we lucky that stupid never even wears pants and constantly swings its balls in your face? I'm not sure.

Finally, one more time, no one has any business praising our President for making his much-feared July 4th speech relatively drama-free. Yet again he becomes President! But if a man spreads feces all over your walls 23 hours a day, you don't heap praise upon him for taking it easy that other hour. Also, my fellow liberals should really stop making fun of that part of his speech where our President appeared to suppose that George Washington's army defended airports. We should all know by now that our President acts stupid not only to distract liberals from his more nefarious doings, but to provoke liberals to act in such a way that it in turn inflames his votaries against our "arrogance." That's how it worked with Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, so we really ought to be wise to it by now.

Action: concerning overtime pay, student loan debt, and abortion.

H.R. 3197/S. 1786, the Restoring Overtime Pay Act, would essentially restore the overtime pay threshold the Obama Administration's Department of Labor set at around $47,400 -- meaning anyone who makes less than that annually must get time-and-a-half if they work overtime. A federal district court struck the Obama standard down in 2017, ruling (persuasively, I think) that the standard didn't follow the Fair Labor Standards Act, which exempts "any employee employed in a bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity" from getting overtime pay. But the Restoring Overtime Pay Act would mandate that employees would have to make around $47,400 annually to be exempted, which is not only a clever workaround, but one that'll get eight million more Americans the overtime pay they deserve! Hence the Economic Policy Institute helps you tell your Congressfolk to help working families by passing the Restoring Overtime Pay Act.

Meanwhile, Education Secretary DeVos -- who has somehow survived over two years in her position -- is actually considering selling federal student loans to banksters! Naturally our Education Department's position is ZOMG TEH DEBTZ IZ OVER $1.5 TRILLYUNZ WE HAVEZ TO DO TEH SOMETHINZ!!!! But using a crisis to justify just any old action is what despots do, and our Administration doesn't want to be looked upon as despots, right? I mean, in America, that's a bad look. Now, they might not actually be able to do this, because the law says they can't sell off federal student loans if that would cost taxpayers money -- and federal student loans generally already make money. But that doesn't mean they won't try, and then dare the courts to stop them. Indeed, that's what they've done so far, and they can't always fail. In any event, CREDO helps you tell our Department of Education not to sell student loans to banksters.

Finally, H.R. 2975/S. 1645, the Women's Health Protection Act, would stop states from outlawing abortion, or otherwise preventing women from getting abortions. This should be a no-brainer, since our Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade explicitly says states can't outlaw abortion, and even the Roberts Court has found it rather difficult to chip away at abortion rights. The Women's Health Protection Act would also stop states from enacting or enforcing those noxious "ultrasound" bills or making absurd demands of hospitals, to name just two roadblocks states have thrown up in recent years. No one, and I mean no one, likes the idea of abortion. But the idea of compelling women to be breeders no matter their circumstances is worse. If men could give birth, we'd be having a different conversation. Until then, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect women's health by passing the Women's Health Protection Act.

Around the table: concerning health care, bad arguments, bad technology, and patriotism.

Already tired of our "liberal" media calling Medicare-for-All "government-run healthcare"? Well, we've got a response when they say that: "we are the government." They're trying to make you think of spineless bureaucrats making big health care decisions -- you know, like spineless bureaucrats at private health insurance corporations do right now! -- but we need to keep practicing thinking of ourselves when we think of our government. And anyway, that silly polling about folks preferring to keep their private health insurance? Turns out that support collapses when you tell folks they can keep their doctors and hospitals under Medicare-for-All, which is true, since the Medicare-for-All bill would mandate that doctors and hospitals accept Medicare.

Dean Baker at TruthOut says we should "Replace Patent Monopolies With Direct Public Funding for Drug Research." You know, versus the system we have now, where the public funds a significant amount of drug research (some $40 billion annually!) but asserts no power over the results, which is just about a perfect way of socializing the cost while privatizing the profits. And patents bloat these profits, of course, because when you can't get a drug from more than one manufacturer, what are you gonna do about it? Big pharma says they need the patent monopolies because they do a lot of drug research that goes nowhere, but if they're spending $70 billion and we're spending $40 billion, well, let's just say our government could probably get the whole job done for less than $110 billion. And then we-the-people could keep the patents.

Been thinking lately (or for decades!) that maybe the punditry is behind the American people a bit? Jonathan Chait will prove that point for you with all his pearl-clutching about "unpopular stances" Democratic Presidential candidates supposedly take. Not "unpopular stances" like supporting Medicare-for-All, of course, but the "unpopular stance" of "replac(ing) all employer-provided private insurance with a government plan," see how long it took to get all that out? I wonder when I'll ever hear punditoids talk about Republicans taking "unpopular" stances, though they do that all the time. (No, they didn't criticize our President for taking "unpopular" stances during his campaign, but for being generally uncouth.)

FAIR describes "liberal" media efforts to sell "Mayor Pete" Buttigieg as the guy who can unite the big donors and the small donors. The New York Times, naturally, resorts to very fuzzy numbers to make this point, and though you don't need to do differential calculus to expose their flimsy argument, you can also think of Mr. Buttigieg as the Jon Ossoff of 2020. And Mr. Ossoff not only lost that 2017 special election during which he raised all that money, he proved that the district could be won by a different Democrat, since a different Democrat -- someone who actually gave a voters a compelling reason to turn out to vote, since "but I can win" clearly ain't cutting it anymore -- won that district just this past November.

Ho hum, those "aggression-detecting" microphones some schools are using, purportedly to head off the next school shooting, are doing a very bad job, since a girl with a bad cough can set them off (and a girl screaming at the top of her lungs for a drama class apparently can't). Get a cold, become a "misfit" targeted by overzealous school administrators! I hate to sound old-fashioned, but maybe, you know, we should get our heads out of our cellphones and pay more attention to each other, rather than letting "technology" do it for us? And as for heading off the next school shooting, we should a) make it just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons and b) stop giving school shooters so damn much media attention.

Finally, Gallup finds a mere 45% of Americans are "extremely proud" of being American, the lowest number ever recorded, and though that number's been falling at least since George W. Bush won a second term, the poll theorizes that it won't go back up until our current President's out of office, whenever that is. Well, as a member of the "extremely proud" camp, I'll happily tell you that our President has nothing to do with my love of my country -- and that's how the Founders wanted it! We invest our love and our patriotism in each other, not in some diaper-loaded brat who got 46% of the vote, struts around like he got 66%, and whines like he got 26%.

Action: concerning immigration, Honduras, and equal pay.

You've all heard the stories coming out of the border concentration camps -- kids sleeping on cement floors, babies left largely unattended, and inadequate soap, food, and water. You may also have heard that our Administration has argued before the 9th Circuit that the law doesn't compel them to provide soap per se. Hence the ACLU helps you tell Congress to investigate the conditions at these concentration camps and hold Customs and Border Patrol accountable for their actions -- which include the deaths of six children in custody -- and Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to address this ongoing humanitarian crisis of our Administration's making. You know how I hate to pile on (i.e., that I don't)? Well, family separation at the border is actually fiscally irresponsible! $775 a day in taxpayer funding to care for one child at a concentration camp! This policy doesn't work on any level!

Meanwhile, the military coup in Honduras -- one enabled by the Obama Administration's hair-splitting over the precise meaning of the word "coup" -- is now 10 years old, and things ain't getting any better for the good people of Honduras, as poverty has grown and the government mocks law and order by imprisoning human rights activists and killing and injuring protestors in the street. But we have leverage: our Congress can pass H.R. 1945, the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, which would suspend "security" aid to the lawless government of Honduras, and our government could actually enforce the labor standards enshrined in one of those notorious "free" trade deals, the Central America Free Trade Agreement. Hence the International Labor Rights Forum helps you tell our government to stand up for the good people of Honduras. I mean, if this were Venezuela, President Bolton would already have sent 5,000 troops, amirite?

Finally, CREDO helps you tell the U.S. Soccer Federation that the U.S. Women's National Team deserves the same pay and the same standard of medical care as the Men's Team. You may know that one of these two teams has won three World Cup titles and four Olympic gold medals since 1991, and guess what? It's the team that faces more discrimination! The Women's Team got a pay hike in their 2017 collective bargaining agreement with the Soccer Federation, but they still don't get equal pay with the Men's Team that, frankly, isn't nearly as accomplished, and yet the U.S. Soccer Federation still makes the Women's Team play more on injury-causing Astroturf and doesn't promote their matches nearly as much as they do the Men's Team. And no it doesn't matter that "women's soccer doesn't make as much money" -- what matters, in America, is the law, which requires that we pay men and women the same if skill level and responsibilities are the same. That is only fair, after all.

Action: concerning arbitration fairness, pollution, and high drug prices.

H.R. 1423/S. 610, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal (or FAIR) Act, would (as its title suggests) invalidate any arbitration agreement a corporation forces upon an employee or customer if the dispute concerns employment, product safety, antitrust law, or discrimination. These little "agreements," as you know, force you into an arbitration proceeding generally of your opponent's choosing, which denies you your rightful day in court and also very likely denies you a positive outcome. If this bill passes, we'll never have to hear, again, of folks who get raped in nursing homes but whose families can't sue, or folks whose lenders illegally renew thousand-percent loans but can't sue, or folks whose banks use their names to open fake accounts but can't sue. Really, these are not "frivolous" lawsuits. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our right to a day in court by passing the FAIR Act.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to reject the Pebble Mine project in Alaska's Bristol Bay. You probably know the drill by now: mining for copper in Bristol Bay will not only pollute good Alaskans' water and disrupt the unique and fragile ecosystem, but it'll also be the death knell for the Bristol Bay's sockeye salmon industry, one of the world's most famous salmon fisheries and one that supports 14,000 jobs. You probably also know that not even that most inveterate corporate defender, former EPA head Scott Pruitt, could see his way clear to approving the Pebble Mine project, and you probably also know that a lot of Pebble Mine's potential investors have gotten cold feet. But none of that is any reason to be complacent, since we are currently ruled by a President who thinks it's honest work to buy low, suck the wealth out of the resulting failure, and foist the burdens of that failure on the taxpayer. So let's make sure we do our duty.

Finally, a Change.org petition helps you tell Pennsylvania state legislators to cap insulin prices in that state. In days of old (and, who knows, maybe tomorrow, too), right-wingers would have decried such things as TEH PRICE CONTROLZ!!!!! But arguing against "price controls," here, would be the same as arguing in favor of big pharma corporations setting insulin prices so high that diabetics start rationing their insulin and then die. Is it naive to suggest that right-wingers will perhaps exercise some shame at the prospect of being called objectively pro-diabetic death? I kid, of course -- right-wingers tend to recast any shame they deserve as liberal oppression, at which point I say: c'mon, we're either the people who want to give everyone participation trophies or we're the people who are waiting for you in the parking lot with baseball bats, but we can't be both.

Action: concerning law and order, immigration, and various good bills Mob Boss Mitch won't even bring up for a Senate vote.

First things first. Late last year, five-months-pregnant Marshae Jones started a fight with another woman, who then shot Ms. Jones in the stomach, killing her unborn baby -- but now the state has indicted Mr. Jones for manslaughter and let the actual shooter go free! Their reasoning: the would-be mother "initiated and continued the fight" with the shooter. Hopefully you'll recognize that as utter horsedoodle, since, hopefully, you never got away with anything as a kid by saying "he started it!" Call me old-fashioned, but I would charge the shooter for the shooting, in part because I accept our responsibility, as civilized people, not to respond to every provocation we get -- let alone with force! Hence Change.org helps you tell the Pleasant Grove police department to dismiss the charges on Ms. Jones and charger her shooter instead.

Meanwhile, hundreds of workers at the Boston furniture corporation Wayfair walked out last week in protest of their employer's furnishing of our Administration's border concentration camps for immigrant children, so Sum of Us helps you tell Wayfair's CEO to stop selling furniture to these camps. Now, you might be saying, I hate what our Administration's doing as much as the next guy, but don't these kids need beds to sleep in? But you should recognize that as a rhetorical hostage situation! You're not cramming these kids into squalid rooms, and you're not going before federal courts arguing that you don't have to give these kids soap because the law doesn't spell that out; our Administration is doing all that, and corporations like Wayfair are helping them. So if you bring the Big Stick of Bad PR upon corporations like Wayfair, you might help end our Administration's family separation policy, which will only help these kids.

Finally, your Senators are home this week, so go ahead and call them and tell them to pass H.R. 1, the For the People Act; H.R. 5, the Equality Act; H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act; and H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act. Long story short, since I've been telling the long story on these bills for months now: H.R. 1 would better protect our voting rights and make gerrymandering harder; the Equality Act would extend civil rights protections to gay and transgender folks, the Paycheck Fairness Act would help folks get equal pay for equal work, and the Save the Internet Act would restore internet freedom for people, not for corporations. I know, I know, Mob Boss Mitch says the Senate won't vote on these bills because (and I quote) "I get to decide what we vote on," but pressuring our Senators to pass these good bills is still our duty as Americans. And, you know, all Mitch McConnell has been doing for a dozen years is blocking good legislation. I shudder to think that's what he's taking to the Pearly Gates.