Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning immigration, corporate welfare, financial predators, and corporate "personhood."

CREDO helps you tell Google to fire former Department of Homeland (sic) Security (sic) poobah Miles Taylor. Mr. Taylor used to be Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's Chief of Staff, so it's not like he's some low-level bureaucrat who might have been sabotaging the evil efforts of our President to implement his Muslim ban and family separation policies, and now that Ms. Nielsen has left the Administration, he's found a soft landing at Google as "head of national security policy engagement," which sure sounds cush to me. I can already hear right-wingers squealing ZOMG DOESN'TZ HE HAVEZ TEH RIGHTZ TO WORKZ!!!!! Sure he has the right to go find a job, if anyone will hire him, but he doesn't have a "right" to a highly-paid BS job at Google. (His job title has more than three words, so I feel pretty safe in calling it a BS job.) And we, as a civilization, have a profound duty to shame and shun those who hurt us; giving them cush jobs ain't shaming and shunning. I say this as someone who still thinks anyone who worked for Tha Bush Mobb should be too ashamed to show their face in public.

Meanwhile, our President likes to make a show of caring about infrastructure-building in America, so he's angling to funnel your taxpayer dollars to a complex in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio that would turn fracked natural gas into plastics. Sigh. It's like they can never choose right; this is a world where renewable energies are attaining parity in production costs with fossil fuels generally, where fossil fuel corporations are going belly-up left and right (even Robert Murray's coal corporation filed for bankruptcy the other day!) despite Republicans controlling one House of Congress or the other for the last decade. You know what that makes this project, right? That's right, corporate welfare -- for why should our government invest in established technologies that aren't viable either economically or environmentally? Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop the Great Appalachian Corporate Welfare Handout. Remember, we have to tell them, because politicians basically like corporate welfare, even though the people don't.

In other news, H.R. 4724/S. 2640, the Students Not Profits Act, would limit for-profit colleges' access to federal funding unless they can verify that they actually provide their students with an education; I'd have called the bill the "Students Before Profits Act" myself, since I don't believe in giving right-wingers any reason to squeal about SOSHULIZM!!!!, but this bill will protect more students from predatory for-profit colleges like Corinthian, and the bill won't put trade schools out of business, as I'm sure right-wingers will claim, but merely make sure those schools actually do the thing they exist to do. Our last Administration did far too much hand-wringing over how to deal with these for-profit schools that do nothing but redistribute wealth from students to executives; this Administration, of course, openly enables such schools, even violating the law to do so. So we desperately need to start developing a more healthy skepticism about such schools. CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect our students from financial predators by passing the Students Not Profits Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 48, which would amend our Constitution to nullify the doctrine of corporate "personhood" and thus allow us to regulate campaign finance reform again, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. You know, the best argument I've heard against campaign finance reform (admittedly "best" isn't a high bar to clear here, since the other arguments are such horsedoodle!) is that you need money to run a good campaign. But that statement pointedly does not explain why that money must be unlimited; more money doesn't lead to better arguments, obviously, but you can make lousy arguments seem more "normal" simply because you have the money to repeat them endlessly. Of course, we also know that money is not speech -- money is property, and we have a long legal tradition of keeping property from destroying our civilization, if we would but use it.

Action: concerning voting rights, facial recognition, youth incarceration, and cash bail.

Pennsylvania legislators are mulling SB 421, which would enact a number of necessary voting reforms at the state level: it would fund new state voting machines that would actually leave a paper trail; it would move the state voter registration deadline from 30 days before an election to 15; it would extend the deadline for absentee ballots from 5 pm on the Friday before the election to 8 pm on Election Day; and it would allow any voter to vote by mail for the first time. None of these sound particularly sexy, I suppose, and we've fought for more vigorous reforms in Pennsylvania before (i.e., same-day voter registration), but this bill will improve good Pennsylvanians' access to the voting booth, and nothing prevents us from fighting for more vigorous reforms later. And by "later" I might well mean "the day after the bill passes"! Legislators imagine they can earn reprieves from the voters' will, but they can't, ever, because doing the people's will is their job. So both Common Cause and the ACLU help you tell your PA state legislators to support voting rights by passing SB 421.

Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell big corporations Hilton and Unilever to stop using facial recognition technology in their hiring. This facial recognition technology is actually worse than the Rekogition technology developed by Amazon, which has a tough time telling black folks apart -- the HireVue AI system Hilton and Unilever use purports to analyze diction, facial movement, and speaking voice to tell bosses whom they should hire, but as a science, well, it's about as good as those 300-question "integrity tests" they used to give out in the '80s. Job interviews are highly stressful and artificial situations, after all, so you're not learning much about an applicant if you put the tone of their voice and their eye movements under a microscope -- except that interviews make them nervous, which, like, no shit, Sherlock. Hate to pile on, but the development of this technology represents yet another confession by managerial types that they don't know how to do their job. Seriously, if you need another AI "breakthrough" to help you hire good workers, maybe the problem's you!

In other news, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk and state Governors to stop the practice of putting kids in jail. You hear people say how kids are so much worse than they used to be, but your parents and grandparents said the same thing, and good kids (who comprise the vast, vast majority of children!) don't get a whole lot of ink from our sensationalist media. And all of that's not even the point! Here's the point: civilized people understand that kids can't make adult decisions, so those kids who go so far haywire that they commit rape or murder represent a profound failure of all their adult caretakers (their parents, their teachers, their community leaders), and what they need most from the adults in their lives is help. You know what they don't need? Being thrown in adult jail with prisoners who'll prey on them physically, emotionally, and sexually. That doesn't help them; it only helps tough-on-crime cowards feel better about themselves. And that feeling doesn't last, either, so they keep looking for opportunities to "be tough." It's a damn vicious cycle, and we should break it.

Finally, speaking of tough-on-crime cowardice, Daily Kos helps you tell your local district attorneys to end cash bail. We know why: it hurts the poor, it wastes taxpayer money, people don't flee over nuisance crimes, and cash bail makes the accused pay for alleged crimes when we should only make the convicted pay for actual crimes. Yes, I hear some police officers say they feel hamstrung by the absence of cash bail, but police officers tend to see bad people everywhere because they tend to deal with people at their worst, so maybe we should take their resistance with a grain of salt on that basis. And maybe we should also examine the experience of our own work lives! We all tend to resist any change to our procedures at work, even if they're good changes. And then, once they work, we tend to forget we ever resisted them! Would it be piling on to mention that slashing cash bail offenses in Philadelphia is actually working? No, it would not.

UPDATE. SB 421 is now Pennsylvania law, as Gov. Wolf signed the bill on October 31. Kudos to you if you pressured your state legislators to pass this bill.

Action: concerning internet freedom, drug costs, antibiotic abuse, and family leave.

The D.C. Circuit Court, as you know, upheld the FCC's disastrous net neutrality repeal a few weeks back -- but it also nullified that repeal's block on net neutrality laws at the state level. That means, among other things, that California's 2018 net neutrality law -- which some unscrupulous Assembly Democrats tried, but failed, to gut in mid-2018 -- is now in effect, protecting that state's nearly 40 million residents (nearly one-eighth of America's population) from big telecom greed games like blocking, censoring, and throttling websites, or demanding tribute for the "privilege" of having your web content delivered more quickly. Washington, Oregon, and Colorado have also passed laws protecting net neutrality, and a little more than half of the rest of America's states have legislation pending, but haven't passed bills. Hence Fight for the Future helps you tell your state government to protect internet freedom by passing strong net neutrality legislation. Remember: the more states that pass it, the more likely the big telecoms will give up.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act, is not bad -- it would finally allow Medicare to negotiate prices for some drugs (including insulin products since insulin rationing is all over the news and two dozen other highly-prescribed drugs) and would set a ceiling on their prices that doesn't exceed the average price of drugs in six developed countries that all pay a lot less for drugs than we do, but it could be more vigorous, so Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to "strengthen and pass" the Lower Drug Costs Now Act. You will have room for comments -- which might include your preference that such a bill allow Medicare to negotiate for all its covered drugs, or allow Medicare to manufacture generic versions of drugs for which it can't get a good price. S. 99, the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Act, and S. 377, the Medicare Negotiation and Competitive Licensing Act, would do more than H.R. 3, and though I don't let the perfect murder the good, I don't hold back on communicating my will to my representatives, either.

In other news, our EPA has decided to allow farms to spray antibiotics on certain citrus trees. They imagine that spraying antibiotics will stop "greening" -- which, among other things, literally turns citrus fruits green and renders them inedible -- but if you know that an infected insect causes greening (one of two types of psyllid), you might already be skeptical, and indeed, the solutions most likely to mitigate greening (monitoring, keeping insects away, removing infected trees) all require a lot of workers, whereas spraying antibiotics all over your citrus groves doesn't. But spraying also doesn't do very much good -- so says a study conducted by University of Florida researchers, and though they add that injecting antibiotics into trees works better, again, they would need to pay workers to do that! And of course spraying antibiotics on trees like this could actually do us all a lot of harm, by making superbugs even more resistant, until we're all worried that the next cut could kill us. Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our EPA to listen to the science and stop antibiotic spraying on citrus farms.

Finally, Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 1739/SB 580, the Family Care Act, would establish a paid family leave insurance program in the state of Pennsylvania. Like the FAMILY Act at the federal level, the Family Care Act would pay for the program by instituting a small payroll tax -- 0.588%, which is a little over half of one percent, not "five percent" or "50 percent," "liberal" media! Yes, I really will never let that go; people should lose their jobs over such mistakes (or should I call them "mistakes"?). Benefits seem a bit low to me, but at least it would compensate more of your salary at the lower end -- workers would get 90% of "the portion of a covered individual's average weekly wage that is equal to or less than 50% of the Statewide average weekly wage," and then 50% of the portion above that. It's not "class warfare" to do that, but common sense: folks with lower income literally can't afford to take days off to take care of sick family members, or sick selves. So Moms Rising helps you tell your PA state legislators to support working families by passing the Family Care Act.

Action: concerning voting rights, law and order, immigration, and endangered species.

Happy Monday, good peoples! You can use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can 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; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And today, we add the recent House-passed bill H.R. 2513, the Corporate Transparency Act, which would shine some sunlight on the shell corporations used by banksters, drug kingpins, sex traffickers, tax-evaders, and big campaign donors. With one phone call, you can do something about that, and about voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections. Yes, America is a great country, precisely because of its promise of freedom and justice -- but we must fulfill that promise.

While you've got your phone out, the tools in the upper right corner of this page can also help you find your House Reps' phone numbers, so you can call them and tell them to impeach our President. Why, as I write this, Sen. McConnell (E-KY) is running an ad on Facebook calling the House's impeachment inquiry a "kangaroo court." The House is following rules laid down by Republicans during their impeachment of Mr. Clinton 20 years ago, but attacking the "process" is all you got left when you can't win the argument on the merits. Of course, Mr. McConnell would be one of 100 judges of this impeachment, and it does seem corrupt to attack the "process" of an indictment you'll soon have to try, doesn't it? Let alone raise money for your own re-election over it? It's not quite as offensive as Roger Stone telling us that ZOMG IMPEACHMUNT WILL CAUSEZ TEH CIVIL WARZ!!!!!, but that's not the story you want to take to the Pearly Gates. The story you want to take to the Pearly Gates? How you fought this evil and corrupt President.

In other news, a few big banks still haven't committed to getting out of the whole private-prisons-separating-families business, so Moms Rising helps you tell Citizens Bank, Synovus Bank, First Tennessee Bank, Pinnacle Bank, and Regions, among others, to stop financing private prisons. A large number of well-known banks -- chief among them Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, SunTrust, and PNC -- have pledged to stop financing private prison corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic, which is a big deal, since these banks represent seven out of every eight dollars those two private prison corporations get, and if they can't get financing from big banks, then they'll be hard-pressed to continue operating. Don't be swayed by the right-wing hype that you'd be putting those families in jeopardy by starving the private prison beast of money, because you know what that is, right? A manufactured hostage situation, that's what -- and one our government could rectify simply by doing its own dirty work. And we could fight that more easily.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 4348/S. 2491, the PAW and FIN Act, then WildEarth Guardians still helps you do that. The PAW and FIN Act is a clumsy acronym, but don't hold that against it -- the bill would reverse the regulations issued by our Administration that put more endangered and threatened species at risk of annihilation, regulations that force our government to consider the "economic factors" of regulations, which means the money gas and oil drilling corporations would lose if they couldn't drill somewhere. How many times must I tell these pimps! We're not supposed to base all our decisions on whether or not someone loses money! Why, if we did that, we'd have ratified the Trans-Pacific "Partnership" so that foreign investors could overturn our laws whenever they lost money to some clean air or clean water law! And once they drill a species out of existence, it's gone forever -- just like the money they make doing it will, one day, be gone forever. None of this is conservative.

Around the table: more notes about various kinds of corruption.

Independent media outlet unmasks a senior Twitter editor as a British psyops agent -- but our "liberal" media largely ignore the story. You'd think our media would be more interested that a government spy, whose specialty is influencing how people think, was that deeply embedded in a social media corporation that influences how people think, but no, and I doubt it's because some media organ no one ever heard of (which hopefully will change!) broke the story. More likely it's because our "liberal" media do not take their duties seriously, and are just looking to fill space between adverts and move up the corporate ladder. Hey, I like to think the best of people, but some people make it awfully hard.

Jeff Ernsthausen and Justin Elliot at ProPublica describe how Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert managed to get "opportunity zone" tax breaks for his properties in Detroit even though they're not in particularly distressed areas of the city. You'll be depressed to learn that getting these tax breaks is mostly about who you know, and even if Mr. Gilbert or his cronies didn't actually break any laws, the result -- money intended to spur investment in poorer communities gets diverted to already-wealthy developers -- is unmistakably corrupt and evil. And of course the way the 2017 tax "reform" sets up these "opportunity zones" is remarkably free of oversight and disclosure, and therefore accountability. Don't right-wingers say they're all about accountability? Oh, they mean accountability for you, not for them.

U.S. Magistrate Judge holds Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt of court for "show(ing) only minimal efforts to comply" with a court order preventing it from collecting more Corinthian College loans. Which is worse: the DOE spokeshack who plays the but-we-didn't-mean-any-harm card, or the one who said, probably rolling his eyes, that "(w)e acknowledged that servicers made unacceptable mistakes," never mind the unacceptable mistakes committed by DOE? Your law and order Administration, ladies and gentlemen!

You may have heard that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been having dinner with a lot of right-wing blowhards lately, but The Intercept checks around and finds that, despite a stated desire to "meet() new people and hear() from a wide range of viewpoints" that Mr. Zuckerberg says drives his dinners with the likes of Tucker Carlson and L. Brent Bozell III, , he hasn't actually broken bread with any liberals. Dig the it's called learning! BS at the end of his twittergasm! I gotta say, these days, when I read about someone rich or famous, normally my first response is gosh, what a fucking asshole.

Bobby Lewis at The Guardian watches 44 months of the Fox News Channel so you don't have to. And also so that you can fully understand that Fox News "poisons" people, which, like, I've seen happen. I've long said that Fox and Friends is the worst program on Fox News, not just because it's so baldly stupid, but because the hosts all pretend to be regular folks. You can take comfort in knowing that most of the regular folks you know are better informed than this. No, really. Don't judge by the guy eating 10 eggs at the Wisconsin diner, who'll blame his next heart attack on socialism.

Another day, another Bernie-can't-win-Iowa article in which voters act like they're trying to predict the winner, not be the winner. Seriously, when you say you're "unsure" how Medicare-for-All "plays in small-town Iowa" (set aside that it actually plays pretty well!) and you wonder if the things he proposes are "achievable things," you're doing democracy wrong -- gosh, if you're a small town voter and you like Medicare-for-All, you can actually make Medicare-for-All seem less impossible by supporting candidates who might actually pass it! This horserace mentality too many voters still have is going to get us all killed one day.

Finally, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) tells reporters that "(i)f Turkey was planning on coming into northern Syria and trying to ethnically cleanse the Kurds, and U.S. troops were caught in the middle, I am not completely convinced that it was a bad idea to get them out of harm's way." I guess that sounded better in his head, though seriously, America afraid of a big bad Turkish invasion? He acts like we're up against Suleiman the Magnificent instead of some two-bit dictator/Presidential man-crush. As an aside, maybe Beto O'Rourke could run ads about this in a 2020 Senate race.

Action: concerning immigration, mandatory minimums, and fossil fuels.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Defense's Inspector General to investigate the militarization of our Southern border. When you hear that our Administration has deployed armed soldiers at our Southern border, you might reasonably ask: are we at war with someone? Our President would no doubt answer "yes," being a member of Our Glorious Elites, and therefore someone who uses the word "war" to mean all kinds of things it does not mean. But we are not at war with Mexico, and U.S. law actually forbids our government from using soldiers to enforce domestic laws. We don't use soldiers to enforce domestic laws because we don't want to become a tinpot dictatorship where people are afraid to be free. I suspect our DoD IG (Inspectors General still display a large amount of independence) will come to the same conclusion we have. But only if we speak out. After all, saying nothing and hoping for the best doesn't work.

Meanwhile, even though our Pennsylvania state Supreme Court overturned mandatory minimums many years ago, word on the street is that our state legislature wants to bring them back, in a four-pack of bills, HB 726, HB 1850, HB 1851, and HB 1852, that would target offenses committed with firearms. I understand that people want to "do something" about guns these days, but this is doing the wrong thing -- we should let judges do their job and decide case-by-case whether possession of a firearm really merits a longer sentence. I've been saying for a while now that we should make it just as hard to get semi-automatic weapons as it is to get automatic weapons, and I'd rather support that solution than another set of mandatory minimums that wind up slamming folks of color harder and costing the taxpayer more money -- and feeding into the prison-privatization machine, too. Hence the ACLU helps you tell your PA state legislators to reject more mandatory minimum sentences.

Finally, CREDO helps you tell big media corporations to stop taking advertisements from fossil fuel corporations and their flunkies. Sound harsh? Consider the simple fact that you already know whatever you need to know about fossil fuels -- you know what fuel your car needs and whether your house takes oil heat or gas heat and whether your stove takes electric or gas, for example -- and fossil fuel advertisements typically therefore extol the virtues of particular fossil fuel corporations; is it really too much to ask that ads give us information we can actually use? It's not particularly of issue that such ads tend to lie about fossil fuel corporations' commitment to renewable energy and about the real effects of pollution and climate change, but ads disguised as "news stories" or "opinion pieces"? They're a big deal, and any media outlet worth its salt would reject them out of hand. They don't do it now because they're corrupt, but that's why we're here: to show them a way out of corruption.

Action: concerning pollution, corruption, and conversion "therapy."

Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 790, which purports to "update" the Oil and Gas Act, would actually do a lot of foul things we've already been fighting for years. The bill would pre-empt certain local ordinances regarding land development -- which the state Supreme Court found unconstitutional when Act 13 pre-empted local anti-fracking ordinances -- and it would eliminate requirements to report smaller spills, which sounds like "right-sizing regulations" until you consider that you won't think it's a "small" spill if 200 gallons of oil befouls your drinking water. And if this bill passes, oil and gas corporations will get to befoul your drinking water and then "replace" it with water that doesn't meet the standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act! That's like letting your kid put dirty socks in his clean drawer, and dirty socks ain't anywhere near as bad as polluted drinking water! So the Sierra Club helps you tell your PA state legislators to protect our drinking water for-real for-real by rejecting SB 790.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to reject our President's nomination of Aurelia Skipwith as the new head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. You can probably already guess at Ms. Skipwith's pedigree -- currently a deputy in the department and (sigh) a long-time Monsanto employee, plus she's the one who requested a review of rules preventing hunters from using cruel and heartless methods to kill animals, like using donuts to lure them out, or shooting mother bears in their dens in front of their cubs. Like that needed any damn review! You won't be surprised to learn that her confirmation process is not going so well -- she's provided incomplete answers to Senators' question, plus she appears to have given our President a campaign donation in excess of $5,000 just a few days after her nomination! I'm old enough to remember when elected officials would do their best to avoid the appearance of a quid pro quo. I guess those are "the old days" now.

Finally, H.R. 3570/S. 2008, the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act, would make it illegal to sell "conversion therapy" to LGBTQ folks or to claim that such therapy will convert them from gay folks into straight ones, reduce their attraction to folks of the same gender, or is harmless. Because it's not harmless! Conversion therapy often involves forced re-enactment of past sexual abuses and "exercises" involving nudity and intimate touching; does that sound "harmless" to you? It actually sounds more like some satirist's version of what "converting gays" would be like! I'm sure the right will whine that banning conversion therapy offends their right to act on their "religious" "conscience." And you know what? Our First Amendment does protect folks who merely try to persuade gays not to be gay -- but it doesn't protect any "right" to make money off that act or force "therapy" on them. Hence CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect LGBTQ folks from conversion "therapy" snake oil salesmen by passing the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act.

Around the table: law and order! And other things this Administration only pretends to care about.

Joshua Cho at FAIR finds our "liberal" media more than willing to link California utility shutdowns to wildfires but not to what's driving the increase in wildfires, i.e., climate change. Because newspapers and TV shows wouldn't dare offend the ignoramuses who think climate change is a Chinese hoax! Seriously, there comes a time when you must dare to offend stupid people.

Surprise, surprise, an Environmental Working Group study of EPA data reveals that folks in low-income areas are far more likely to drink polluted water. Don't necessarily think it's just urban areas, either -- a lot of low-income folks live in rural areas, too. If the urban poor and the rural poor ever get together, Our Glorious Elites will have to change their underwear several times a day.

Ho hum, HUD officials admit to Congress that they "knowingly" missed a deadline to release hurricane reconstruction funding to Puerto Rico, and further admit that they had "no statutory authority" to do so. They went on to say, however, that HUD didn't release the funding because of all the "corruption" in Puerto Rico; of course these people know corruption when they see it. Because they all look in the mirror, amirite?

Also ho hum, our Department of Education gave out almost $11 million in student aid to for-profit colleges they knew didn't have the accreditation required to receive federal student aid. A DOE spokeshack apparently didn't feel like trying very hard to respond, citing a supposed lack of "context," just like all right-wingers do when they can't win the argument on the merits. Law and order!

CNN's Jeffrey Toobin regrets "blowing" the Hillary Clinton but-her-emails story "out of proportion." Would it make him feel better to know that she didn't lose because of the email story? She lost because she's another center-right Democrat, and history tells us center-right Democrats only win the Presidency when the economy is in the crapper. Maybe that wouldn't make him feel better, now that I think about it.

Finally, buried in this wide-ranging PRRI poll is the finding (scroll down to Fig. 9) that 26% of Americans approve of our President to the point where nothing he could do could earn their disapproval. The poll finds our President with a 39% approval rating generally, meaning 13% of Americans approve of him but could change their mind. In any case, the 26% figure maps well onto my oft-repeated saw that 25% of our electorate is bat-guano insane.

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

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

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

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

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

Action: concerning social media, school lunch shaming, and Bahamian refugees.

In the wake of reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hobnobbing with notorious right-wing figures like Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro -- ostensibly in order to understand why right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's "bias" against them! -- Free Press helps you tell Mr. Zuckerberg to adopt vigorous rules defending its users from abusive hate speech. So far Mr. Zuckerberg has hidden behind the First Amendment in his effort to avoid adopting such standards, but the First Amendment doesn't protect us from Facebook; it protects us from our government, and Facebook, as a publishing platform, has no obligation to publish every single noxious utterance of every single asshole in order to adhere to a notion of "free speech" -- or, at the very least, no obligation to make these utterances public. And if he wants to know why right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's bias, he doesn't have to ask Ben Shapiro -- he can ask me. Right-wingers constantly whine about Facebook's bias because whining is all you can do when you can't win arguments on the merits. You're welcome.

Meanwhile, you've heard horror stories of schools sending collection notices to families who can't afford school lunches, or putting wristbands on their children so everyone can identify them by their debt? Sounds like something you'd have seen in Nazi Germany, right? Well, H.R. 3366/S. 1907, the No Shame at School Act, would put a stop to school lunch shaming, would prevent school districts from handing over parents' private info to debt collectors, and would streamline the certification process for school kids so that simple misspellings (for example) won't lead to school lunch debt. You'd think civilized people would know better than to make a kid's life miserable just because his parents don't make a whole lot of money -- so I guess that means the people who would do such things aren't particularly civilized. Civilization isn't just something we have to maintain, after all; it's also something we have to earn. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to stop school lunch shaming by passing the No Shame at School Act.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to allow Hurricane Dorian refugees save haven in America, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Hurricane Dorian slammed into the Bahamas last month, leaving over 70,000 good Bahamians without homes, but our President, of course, cited the possibility of allowing "some very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very very bad drug dealers" into the country, as if America has never had a vetting process for refugees, ever. Gosh, nobody ever said you have to be stupid every single time you show mercy; why do you suppose some people would like to link the two in your mind? And why do you suppose our President would want you to think we have always just let people into America willy-nilly? It couldn't be because fear is the only weapon he has left, could it? It's not like he can point to a whole lot of good works as President (or as a human being, really) and persuade people to support him that way. But we're better than him, so let's do better than him.

Action: concerning all kinds of corruption.

I know, this Administration's a total crapshow right now, but before we give the proper amount of attention to their drama, please use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're viewing it on a cellphone) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can 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; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Our House already passed all these bills, and our Senate has no business ignoring our will on voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections, respectively. It's a shame we ever have to remind our Congressfolk that the people actually have concerns other than the miserable dramas Our Glorious Elites force upon us day after day, but nobody said our duty as citizens was easy. And they need us more than we need them.

And now, to the drama: you can also use the aforementioned tools on this page to locate your House Reps' phone numbers, so you can tell them to impeach our President; if you're still not entirely sure why you should do that, David Swanson gives us approximately 25 reasons. And yes, our Administration's Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, did actually say that our President withheld foreign aid to the Ukraine so Ukrainian investigators would get dirt on Democrat servers; as for the fact that he tried to walk it back later, well, you can't unring a bell. But worse than that, he said you are stupid if you think there's a problem with that! I'm not sure how else to interpret "I have news for everybody: get over it. There's going to be political influence in foreign policy." If you are proud of your "worldly" cynicism, you probably find this argument persuasive, but if you find a civilization's moral standards worth upholding, and you demand that our politicians be better people than they are, you won't. Cynicism is evil, and evil demands only one response -- a fight to the death.

Finally, in the wake of the news that the next G7 meeting would be held at a property owned by our President, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate our President's habit of profiting from his office as part of their impeachment effort. Our President has since changed his mind about holding the next G7 summit there, but I'm old enough to remember when politicians would avoid such corruption merely because it looked bad, and violating our Constitution's emoluments clause actually is bad, and you don't need a polisci degree to see why: when our President decides to hold a world meeting at one of his own properties, he's showing us that he doesn't care so much about us as he does his own pocketbook. Again, it's a shame I have to spell any of this out -- and it's a bigger shame that our President has spelled it out himself by saying, out loud, that he's not supposed to "dislike" the Saudis because, after all, they spend a lot of money at his hotels. But corruption doesn't smell better just because folks laugh about it more than they used to.

Around the table: time for another exciting installment of "how much is enough?"

David Brooks is getting far too much credit for saying "the only plausible choice" in a race between our President and Elizabeth Warren "is to support Warren." No one gets to talk about a "wave of insular intolerance coursing through parts of the American left" without noting that there are Nazi wannabes out there right now cracking heads, and I'm long past tired of all his cherry-picking of the data (he says Ms. Warren is "one of the few Democrats who could actually lose" based on one poll showing her losing six points with independent voters after a very narrow set of polling questions). You know what's worse, though? His dreaming about everyone-getting-together-and-getting-things-done when the 2016 election instructed us that voters are beyond tired of that scam. David Brooks: even when he's right, he's wrong.

Steve Wamhoff at ITEP says that "Depreciation Tax Breaks Are a Problem that Deserves More Attention." "Accelerated" depreciation, for example, lets corporations take a larger part of the deduction of a piece of equipment at the beginning, which means less tax revenue to pay for the services you've come to expect from your government. Services like, you know, police, libraries, and firefighters. And a lot of corporate tax breaks are about "reward(ing) companies in return for making investments they would have made anyway," which is, you know, stupid. I mean, they already get to expense these investments; how much is enough?

Gregory Shupak describes how our "liberal" media got "Alarmed" by an "Imaginary U.S. Pullout from Syria." This means that what he did was actually worse than reported: it not only leaves the Kurds to die, but doesn't get us out of the Middle East! Why, this guy's almost as good at getting important stuff completely wrong as Bush the Lesser was! It's clear our President framed his withdrawal the way he did to get some more anti-war votes in 2020, which might work, but at least he won't get them from anyone who's actually paying attention, like us. Sadly, when our "liberal" media gets it wrong, they divert our attention.

I think it's actually a big deal that former Ohio Governor/Presidential aspirant John Kasich thinks our House should impeach our President, regardless of the fact that he's not in office at present, and regardless of the fact that Mr. Mulvaney's press conference was so off the rails. But I feel compelled to note that we would be wrong to describe Mr. Kasich as a "moderate" merely because he demonstrates the presence of a soul with some consistency; we would more accurately describe him as a conservative -- which, of course, means you would better describe the folks who call themselves "conservative" on the TV as "reactionary" (if you value civility above all) or "bat-guano insane" (if you don't).

Finally, Hillary Clinton insinuates that Russia is "grooming" Rep. Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate in 2020 so our President wins re-election. Jesus Mary and Joseph does she really think she lost in 2016 because of Jill Stein? Mrs. Clinton lost that race because she didn't miss an opportunity to tell you she would ignore the people's will in favor of Our Glorious Elites' will -- which didn't stack up well against her opponent's railings against immigration and "free" trade, even -- and if Democratic party poobahs get their way, they'll make the same mistake in 2020 with a Biden or a Buttigieg, and a Tulsi Gabbard 2% showing won't be the reason they lose. Once our current President proved that an unqualified and unhinged asshole could win an election, the palette of the possible widened in America, so in 2020 we certainly don't need to hold ourselves hostage to another center-right can-win let's-work-with-arsonists candidate to win. Besides, you don't win big unless you bet big.

Action: concerning government spying, marketing to children, and clean water.

You may recall that our FISA court revealed that our FBI routinely conducts unauthorized searches of NSA-collected data; we have already told our Congressfolk this week that the NSA shouldn't be collecting that data without a warrant, but we also need to tell Congress to close the "backdoor loophole" that allows our FBI to access the information, as Defending Rights and Dissent helps us do. You know, a lot of good folks labor under the impression that the "grave threats we face" (I just can't help quoting then-Senator Obama explaining why he'd done a 180 on government spying!) are somehow unique to our time, and I could be glib and just say "read a history book," but I'd rather just say that the values that sustain us -- you know, things like courage, doing unto others, speaking truth to power -- are not unique to our time, but have been part of our heritage for uncounted years, and when we abandon those values in the name of "security" or "fighting grave threats," then we die the thousand deaths of the coward. So let's stay on our Congressfolk to help us preserve these values.

Meanwhile, the Children's Online Privacy Act (or COPPA) helps parents protect their children's privacy by restricting the data corporations can harvest from children and limiting how they use it. But naturally the big corporations look at kids as money pots, whose data they can use to empty their parents' pockets faster, and so they're pressuring our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to loosen up COPPA -- and that pressure may be working, as evidenced by our FTC's decision to review the effectiveness of COPPA several years before the law requires it, and one commissioner's statement that the review would "tak(e) care of children and data both," when the law only requires them to help take care of children, data being, as you know, a thing that does not require care. Always they pretend that things are just as (or more) important as people! But they're not, and we don't have to take this lying down: we can let the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood help us tell our FTC to do their legally-mandated job to protect children's privacy from the corporations that would exploit them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our EPA to reject its own proposed rollback of coal ash storage rules, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. "What would be worse than over 100 toxic coal ash storage sites lying in high-risk flood zones?" their latest email missive asks. "Answer: loosening the laws that protect our health and communities from contamination by those sites." Yeah, you knew where that was going, too, didn't you? Coal ash is the byproduct of coal plants -- one might do better calling it coal poop -- and contains carcinogens and other dangerous chemicals. And this coal poop can very easily leech into good Americans' drinking water, as the folks in Roane County, TN and Eden, NC can attest. But then again, clean drinking water is only the bedrock of good health care in America; it's not money or power, which are literally the only things this Administration cares about. Power corrupts, and money only makes you miserable in time, but clean water will always sustain us -- if we will but work to keep it.

Action: concerning shareholder power, adoptee citizenship, copyright trolling, and paid family leave.

Apparently because no regulation that serves the public interest can be allowed to survive under this abomination of an Administration, our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) is mulling whether to roll back rules that would inform shareholders of big business decisions involving pollution, campaign contributions, and offshore tax evasion. I guess their reasoning (such as it is) is that shareholders don't care about anything but money, which is certainly true of our President, but as I keep saying, our President is not America, and I bet you won't even find very many Republican-appointed judges who don't understand that shareholders make decisions on where to invest for a variety of reasons -- a thesis proven by the very existence of shareholder resolutions aiming to get corporations to pay their executives less, or address climate change. Hence Public Citizen helps you tell our SEC to scuttle its own efforts to make corporations less accountable to their shareholders. Protecting shareholders from corporate abuse is, after all, our SEC's very reason for existence. That's not my opinion; that's the law.

Meanwhile, our Administration has been deporting immigrants who were adopted by American citizens but never got citizenship when they were adopted. What, you thought adoption automatically led to citizenship? So did I! Our Administration never tires of looking for these little loopholes in the law, do they? All so they can look "tough" when the truth is they are not tough, they are weak -- only weak people care so much about looking tough, and only strong people possess the quality of mercy, particularly when it concerns folks who have spent almost their entire life in America. Hence H.R. 2731/S. 1554, the Adoptee Citizenship Act, would expand citizenship to immigrants adopted by Americans under certain conditions (i.e., the immigrant got adopted before turning 18, and was present in America at the time of adoption). You'll noted that, at this writing, the House version of this bill actually has more Republican sponsors than Democratic ones, which makes it what? An actual bipartisan bill! 18 Million Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Adoptee Citizenship Act.

In other news, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to reject H.R. 2426/S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act. The CASE Act would push "small claims" into an "alternative" court which of course isn't a real court of law, but a "Copyright Claims Board," not staffed with judges but still empowered to levy up to $30,000 in fines if you (for example) share something copyrighted in a meme on Facebook. And dig Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) claiming that the $30,000 cap limits the scope of this bill to "truly small claims"! You think $30,000 is "small"? I suspect not. I suppose we can't expect much better from the political party whose current standard-bearer once claimed to have gotten his start in real estate with a "very small loan" -- of a million bucks! So now is the time to stand up -- not just for the rule of law, which guarantees us our day in court, but also for the notion that $30,000 isn't a "small claim." It's like our leaders don't understand a thing about regular folks, which is why we teach them.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. Most working Americans can't take time off to take care of themselves or a sick loved one, or a newborn baby, without taking a risk they'll lose their jobs or fall into a debt hole, but the FAMILY Act would create a national paid family medical leave program, and if you make $50,000 annually, you would pay a mere $8.33 monthly to enjoy its benefits. We could debate whether that tax rate (two-tenths of one percent paid by worker, the same amount paid by employer) should be progressive -- that your rate should be higher the more money you make -- but that alone wouldn't be a good reason to withhold support, particularly in one of the few rich nations that doesn't have any paid family leave for workers, unless employers are generous enough to give them or unions are canny enough to negotiate them. So let's get it done.

Around the table: featuring new installments of "why our President didn't make his tax returns public" and "why his supporters will never come around."

ProPublica has seen tax records from four of our President's properties, and says they "show major inconsistencies." How hard they must have bit their tongue! At least one source puts it more directly: "It really feels like there’s two sets of books -- it feels like a set of books for the tax guy and a set for the lender." This isn't that big a surprise, I suppose, if you recall the actions detailed here. I guess our President's votaries would call all that smart, but the rest of us would call it evidence of criminal behavior.

Gregory Shupak points out how our "liberal" media orchestrate a "False Balance Between Fascists and Anti-Fascists." Long story short: fascists are evil, antifascists aren't. Long story somewhat longer: fascists routinely resort to violence, while antifascists resort to violence as a last resort -- which can come more quickly than you might like, since fascists overtly want to create a world that's devoid of non-white people. A lot of things in this world are actually pretty simple -- but "liberal" media "balanced" coverage makes it more complicated. Why, it's almost like that's the whole idea.

Ho hum, L.A. police officers search non-white folks for contraband more often than white folks, but white folks are actually likely to have more of it. Oops, sorry, I forgot: we are never allowed to criticize police officers or else they just won't be able to do their jobs. At least, that's how a lot of punditoids act on TV! I mean, imagining police officers as so weak they can't do their jobs right if you hurt their fee-fees is actually quite insulting to them. Also, too, your First Amendment free speech rights exist pretty much exactly for this purpose.

Remember when our President signed an executive order purporting to keep lobbyists out of his Administration? Well, surprise, surprise, his Administration has employed four times as many lobbyists in three years as the previous Administration did in its first six. Which means he's doing about eight times as badly as his predecessor! You probably already suspected this, having witnessed our EPA and Department of Interior get headed up for lobbyists. What is the right-wing reaction to this news? Oh, probably something along the lines of YOU ARE TEH TRAITURZ!!!!!

Virginia Eubanks at The Guardian discusses the new frontier in debt harassment: "zombie debt collection." Here's how it works: our government decides you collected too much money in food stamps 30 years ago, sends you a notice alleging they told you about this all those years ago and because you didn't respond then you can't get a hearing now, and then garnishes your paycheck or tax refund, or your children's paycheck or tax refund. And are they going after big corporations that haven't paid their taxes? Of course not! They're going after poorer working families, like a boss. (Is it too much to ask that we turn "like a boss" into an insult?) Also, too, you know how well debt collectors tend to keep records, which is to say not well. And you won't be surprised to learn that the Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform of 1996 begat this particular problem.

Finally, a friend pointed me to Julie Goldberg's 2017 article explaining the difference between "Christian" and "Christianist." Long story short: it's the same as the difference between "Muslim" and "Islamist" -- the former is a religious person, and the latter is a person trying to force their religion upon you. Long story somewhat longer: you can't reach any of our President's "Christian" supporters with any of Jesus's actual teachings because their "religion" isn't Christianity, it's tyranny -- and in America, certainly, it's also white racist tyranny. (I hate to pile on, but Christianists tend not to go to church a whole lot, either, and you can see why: if they did, they might meet people who can show them a better way to be.)

Action: concerning detainment, banksters, and wildlife.

Our Administration loves looking "tough" on immigrants, but H.R. 2415/S. 1243, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, would force our government to adopt actual standards for detention that are as good or better than American Bar Association's proposed standards from 2014. The bill would also allow our government to break contracts with private prison corporations that repeatedly violate these standards; I'd prefer never to use private corporations for detainment, but this bill would still improve matters. And the bill would mandate inspections of detainee facilities and investigations of detainee deaths in custody. These are reasonable, even mild, changes -- we should still work to prevent corporations (and "businessmen" like our President cough cough) from importing immigrants solely to drive wages down, and if we should do that, we'll better be able to show mercy to those running from real harm, but this bill will improve lives. So Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to advance the cause of civilization by passing the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo must have thought they'd done enough PR work to make everyone forget that they opened accounts for customers without their permission, because now they're apparently "forgetting" to close accounts their customers have asked them to close for a few months, which results in negative accounts and significant fees. Nice work if you can get it! Hence Penn PIRG helps you tell our Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to investigate Wells Fargo for its alleged wrongdoing. You might be wary of doing so, knowing how thoroughly our current Administration has gutted the CFPB, with the explicit purpose of making it "friendlier" to banksters. Why, that's like a cop saying he wants to be "friendlier" to burglars! And this, from the "law and order" Presidency! But I digress, and anyway, if this wrongdoing is as easy to diagnose as it sounds, our CFPB might want an easy victory to "prove" it's still working on our behalf. That would be cynical of them, but the result would be the same if they weren't so cynical -- money saved for customers, and justice done.

Finally, you know that we designate certain areas of the country as wilderness areas so that we can protect wildlife -- but what about the wildlife that has to migrate in order to survive, but finds highways and buildings in their way? H.R. 2795/S. 1499, the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act, would provide for endangered and threatened species by protecting new and existing wildlife corridors, a matter that'll become far more important for those species as climate change drives them to move to new habitats. And in the wake of the U.N. report saying that a million plant and animal species are in danger of extinction right now, well, that matter's actually pretty important. Folks who worry that WE'LL NEVER BUILDZ ANYZ OFZ TEH THINGZ EVAHZ AGAINZ!!!!! would do well to ask whether what they really want is never to be bothered by anything other than self-interest. Really, man-in-the-mirror moments such as these can be very instructive. Environmental Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect threatened species by passing the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act.

Action: concerning free speech, government spying, and corporate "personhood."

You've no doubt heard by now that hundreds of thousands of good Hong Kong citizens have taken to the streets in protest of their government's attempts to pass a bill that could result in innocent citizens being extradited to China -- boy, that sure smells like corruption, doesn't it? -- and you may also have heard that Hong Kong's government has used violence to try to put down the protests. But you may not have heard (though you probably won't be surprised to hear) that Hong Kong law enforcement has been using American "crowd control" weapons to do it. Hence H.R. 4270, the Placing Restrictions on Teargas Exports and Crowd Control Technology to Hong Kong Act (or PROTECT Hong Kong Act), would prohibit the sales of the sorts of things police use to stifle good people's free speech rights -- and everyone has free speech rights, whether their governments recognize that or not. So Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk to support free speech and peaceful protest in Hong Kong by passing the PROTECT Hong Kong Act.

Meanwhile, Demand Progress helps you tell your House Reps to let Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act expire for good. Section 215, as you know, is the section that permits our government to hoover up financial, medical, and phone records without a warrant or even evidence of wrongdoing; it's the nightmare scenario dystopian writers warned us about for decades, and the fact that we're talking about it doesn't mean "it's not that big a deal," but only means dystopia doesn't arrive all at once or announce itself once it's here. (And, you know, Muslims and folks of color would probably disagree that "it's not that big a deal" in the first place.) But with even our National Security Agency opining that they don't really need all that information to do their work, and with Congress mulling USA PATRIOT Act reauthorization as we speak, now's a pretty good time to make our will known to our Congressfolk. I mean, anytime is a good time to make our will known, but we'd be fools to pass up good opportunities.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment that would help us rein in the campaign finance spending that lets big corporations have more say in our democracy than people do, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. The Constitutional amendment in question is H.J.Res. 48, better known as the "Democracy for All" amendment, and would state explicitly that "(t)he rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only," and that "(a)rtificial entities" like corporations would be "subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law." That ought to help bring corporate power to heel, since corporate power is a problem right-wingers seem loathe to admit even exists. They pretend that since our Founders weren't very much concerned with it, we shouldn't be, either, but we're Americans, which means (among other things!) that we're not slaves to sophistry.

Action: concerning civil rights, impeachment, and law and order.

First things first: use the tools in the upper right corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find phone numbers for your Senators, so you can 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; H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. Yeah, I know, there's an impeachment effort going on, and we'll get to that, but our House has already worked to pass good legislation supporting voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections, and your Senators should work to pass this legislation, too. And if our President vetoes all of it, as I'm sure he would, then let him be accountable for it. It comes with the job, after all. Too often we excuse the inaction, or the bad actions, of our leaders. Let's stop doing that.

Meanwhile, you can use the aforementioned tools on this page to find phone numbers for your House Reps, too, so you can call them and tell them to impeach our President for his wrongdoing. Don't call your Senators, though. They're supposed to try the impeachment. It's annoying to hear some of our Senators currently running for President call for impeachment, because that's rather like a judge demanding an indictment. But other Senators get their role wrong, too: Sen. Alexander said last week that though what our President did was "inappropriate," an impeachment proceeding would "only divide the country further." At least Mr. Alexander wasn't Administration crony Roger Stone, who said that impeachment would bring about "a spasm of violence and insurrection in this country like you’ve never seen" and that "a politician who votes for it will be endangering their own life." I don't know about you, but when evil people try to scare me into doing the wrong thing, that only makes me twice as resolved to do the right thing. Which is to call my Rep and tell them to impeach this arrogant, ignorant, unprincipled, sorry excuse for a President.

In a related note, Daily Kos helps you tell our Congressfolk to hold Administration officials who ignore their subpoenas in contempt. Like me, you probably thought the law-and-order issues were pretty cut-and-dried, but apparently not! Apparently if our 46% President believes he can't be touched while in office, or that the impeachment proceeding against him is somehow "illegitimate," he can direct his underlings to defy legal writs to show up in court and testify! Actually, he can't do that, or else anyone could simply refuse to comply with the law, but Democrats in the House seem to be answering his defiance with a shrug, and though you might argue that we could interpret this collective shrug as a shrug of confidence, well, come on, these are Democrats we're talking about -- they're either weak, or they're actively collaborating with evil while merely appearing weak. But that's why we're here: to provide the steel in their spine so they can do the right thing.

Around the table: just because it's free speech doesn't mean it's not whining! And other lessons.

Our President received a well-covered setback in court last week, concerning his ability to keep Congress from seeing his tax returns, but he also got smacked down in two other rulings. A federal district judge stayed his rule denying green cards to folks who've ever received certain forms of public assistance -- calling the rule "simply a new agency policy of exclusion in search of a justification" -- and another federal district judge declared unlawful the "national emergency" declaration he used to fund a vanity border wall, and said he'd block the plan after getting input from both sides. Victories are hard to come by, but they do sustain us through tough times.

Georgia Southern University students burn books by a Latina author after a "contentious" Q-and-A she held there. Book-burning is as much constitutionally-protected speech as flag-burning, but I won't linger too long on that point, nor will I linger too long on how kids look like Nazis when they burn books, or the university's apparent ignorance of their in loco parentis rights -- rather, I'll linger, as is my habit, on the fact that anyone who burns books because they think they should have all the say about everything is a whining, diaper-loaded brat loudly advertising not their "toughness" but their insecurity. You know, like our President.

FAIR finds most of our big "liberal" media news organs strangely uninterested in studies finding that our military is a major driver of climate change. I'd long supposed that our obsession with building and moving was the main driver behind climate change, but I hadn't actually considered that our obsession with war-making plays a comparable role. And just as more efficient drive trains in automobiles got cancelled out, emissions-wise, by an increase in their construction, our military's honest efforts to combat climate change is likely to be cancelled out by the next 47 wars our politicians want to fight. And our "liberal" media loves war, so you won't hear about it from them.

On the heels of our surprise withdrawal from Syria/leaving of the Kurds to destruction at the hands of Turkey, Stephen Zunes at TruthOut reminds us how often our government has used the Kurds like a wet dishrag. And not just during the Persian Gulf War, either! We've also given Turkey truckloads of help in oppressing their own Kurdish population, all 15 million of them. (Mr. Zunes doesn't address it here, but the Kurds also did fight for the Allies in World War II, despite the impression our President may have given you. They fight the Nazis, they fight ISIS -- what does a brother have to do?)

Finally, in case you were wondering, Thom Hartmann at TruthOut reminds us how our Founders felt about impeachment. Long story short: our Founders obsessed about corruption, and how much damage an "executive" or "magistrate" (they weren't calling him "President" yet) could do. You probably already knew that in a general sense, but it's good to have it spelled out. Elbridge Gerry -- who ultimately didn't sign our Constitution because it didn't (yet) include a Bill of Rights -- spells out the need for "the necessity of impeachments" most plainly: "(a) good magistrate will not fear them. A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them."

Around the table: from government spying to right-wing whining.

We have just learned that a FISA judge ruled a year ago that our FBI has been improperly searching through all the personal data our NSA has been hoovering up. And THAT! Is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD! Who could have predicted that data collected about alleged foreign perpetrators would sweep up so much data on Americans, and that law enforcement would use that data? Who besides "anyone who thought about it for a minute," I mean? And you like how our FBI calls their investigations "assessments" so they can justify not following our Constitution and getting warrants?

William Rivers Pitt at TruthOut reminds us that "Abandoning the Kurds is Not an Anti-war Move." You probably didn't need that reminder, being a subtle enough thinker thanks to your Master of Science at The School of Politicians Constantly Lying to You, but maybe you know someone who's got too much else to think about who needs to hear that the only two choices in foreign policy are not "stay in Syria forever" and "let all the Kurds die." (Dig, also, the National Security Council source who says our super-awesome greatest deal-maker ever President got "rolled" by Turkey.)

Book-length study reveals that, for the first time ever, the 400 richest American families pay a lower average tax rate than the bottom half of American families. BUT WHATZ ABOUTZ TEH 47 PERCENTZ WHO PAYS TEH NOTHINGZ!!!!!, say the haters. Well, the study takes into account all the things that right-wing trope doesn't, not just by including state and local taxes, but by including "indirect taxes" like business licenses and drivers' licenses, which cost the same for everyone and thus represent a larger percentage of working families' income than they do of the super-rich's income. Now cue right-wingers moving the goal-posts and cherry-picking irrelevancies.

You heard someone say Elizabeth Warren lied about being told to leave that teaching job she had years ago because she was pregnant? Well, they're wrong. The minute I read that Ms. Warren's employer actually voted to renew her contract and accepted her resignation with regret, I said "well, that doesn't actually prove that no one told her she shouldn't be working there because of her pregnancy"; I'd say it's gratifying that people have to go this far to prove her wrong, but lies travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on, as they say, and our super-corrupt President did successfully attach the "corruption" label to Hillary Clinton, so he'll also try to attach the "liar" label to Ms. Warren, even though he's the biggest liar we've ever seen; she'll be harder to take down, because she actually has a real agenda, unlike Mrs. Clinton, whose only agenda was victory. I guess right-wingers like lies OK as long as they're big. Or "bigly."

Finally, Rudy Giuliani, who almost fled the country the other day, compares his and our President's predicament favorably to the Salem witch trials, and thankfully Bess Levin at Vanity Fair corrects the record about the Salem witch trials' supposed "fairness." When will right-wingers finally tire of their heroes constantly whining? They won't, because they characterize their own whining, and the whining of their heroes, as legitimate, and they characterize the legitimate grievances of folks who aren't on their "team" as "whining." They are truly irredeemable, and I leave their souls to God.

Action: concerning human rights in Iran and Yemen.

If you've missed previous opportunities to tell the government of Iran to release human rights lawyer/activist Nasrin Sotoudeh, then Amnesty International still helps you do that. Iran threw Ms. Sotoudeh in prison back in 2011, ostensibly for "spreading propaganda" and "conspiring to harm state security" but more likely for representing opposition figures in court; Iran threw her in jail again in 2018, this time supposedly for "espionage," "dissemination of propaganda," and "stoking corruption and prostitution," but also for two other charges, "being a member of a human rights organization" and "disparaging the Supreme Leader of Iran," which you'll easily recognize as charges snowflake governments throw at people. The latter prison sentence is likely really over her activism against compulsory wearing of the hijab (or head covering) in public (hence "prostitution," I suppose). If Iran throws people in jail for that, they deserve all the bad PR they get from the rest of the world. So let's help them change their ways -- or give them what they deserve.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that our Congress is finishing up its annual defense spending bill, and annual appropriations bills are often our best opportunity to force our government to do right by us, so Demand Progress helps you tell Congress to include amendments defunding our involvement in the Saudi/UAE-led war on Yemen. We've gone extensively into why we shouldn't fund this war: because we're aiding and abetting in the committing of war crimes in Yemen, because the Houthi rebels targeted by the Saudi/UAE coalition are some of the best al-Qaeda fighters around, and because the Saudi/UAE rationale for war has always seemed like inside baseball at best and petty absurdity at worst. Why should we antagonize a President who has already vetoed some form of disengagement from the war on Yemen four times this year? Because duty is duty and will is will, and we have a much better chance of having our will done if we communicate it to our Congressfolk, even when it's not convenient for them to hear it. And of course, we should not worry about antagonizing the President. He should worry about antagonizing us.

Action: concerning banksters, whistleblowers, and abortion.

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

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

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

Action: concerning cable fees, abortion, and public lands.

Tired of surprise cable TV fees that inflate your bill by over $35 a month? Well, H.R. 1220/S. 510, the TRUE Fees Act, would essentially outlaw those fees by forcing cable corporations to include all of them upfront in a base subscription price. The bill would also let you get out of your cable contract without penalty if your provider pushes some new fee on you. Big cable corporations of course oppose the TRUE Fees Act, and they might well be telling you that TEH BIG GUMMINT FORCEZ UZ TO IMPOSEZ TEH FEEZ!!!!!, but you should know that they've lied about that in court before, and you should also consider that such an objection really doesn't matter, since the TRUE Fees Act requires transparency. And if the big cable corporations call it a "rate-fixing" maneuver (which it's not!), they should be prepared for your reaction to be we can only hope! Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to support cable customers by passing the TRUE Fees Act.

Meanwhile, H.R. 1692/S. 758, the EACH Woman Act, would repeal the Hyde Amendment that has (except in very limited circumstances) prevented our government from funding abortions over the last 40-plus years. The problem with the Hyde Amendment is that it essentially makes a matter of right (you have a right to have an abortion, after all, per our Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade) into a matter of means -- folks who have the right to have an abortion but can't afford abortions can't get them (if Medicare, Medicaid, or other government-subsidized health insurance won't help them). I guess for some folks that's a feature, not a bug, but a right is a right for everyone, not just for the people who can afford it, and none of us should use the powerless as a political pawn in order to gain a small advantage. Do I particularly want abortions to happen? Of course not! No one does! But a right is a right, regardless of what we "want," and we don't ask of rights that they never challenge us. So Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to support abortion rights by passing the EACH Woman Act and thus repealing the Hyde Amendment.

Finally, H.R. 4273/S. 2467, the Transit to Trails Act, would fund more public transportation buildout to public parks, so that everyone can enjoy the public parks we all pay for with our taxes. After all, why should only people who can afford cars get to visit public parks? Why shouldn't everyone? Remember: anyone whose answer would include words like "riffraff" is an elitist, and elitism is un-American. At least, that's how I was brought up. And anyone would would answer with a statement like THEY GET TEH GOODIEZ WHY CAN'T I!!!! very likely isn't counting the goodies they already get with their tax dollars. Seriously, if you pay taxes, as prescribed by law, you should get to enjoy the things your taxes buy. And folks who ask WHEREZ TEH MONEYZ COMINGZ FROMZ!!!!! should note the $10 million annual price tag, which ain't much in the context of an annual $4 trillion federal budget. So the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to improve our access to our public parks by passing the Transit to Trails Act.

Around the table: from Kentucky to Syria, and guess where we find more hope?

Hazard (KY) job program helps give recovering drug addicts work, pay, and "a sense of purpose" as they help build affordable housing. "Research is starting to show what advocates have known anecdotally: having a job makes a significant difference in long-term addiction recovery," but try getting a job without skills, or with a criminal record. The program helps half a dozen folks annually gain construction skills and get jobs; maybe a few of our billionaires could break off some of their largesse and fund more programs like these, particularly in rural areas like Hazard? Or do we have to tax them harder to get it done? It's a question worth pondering.

Ho hum, our "liberal" media repeatedly insinuates that Messrs. Sanders, Warren, and Biden for being "too old to be President." Mr. Sanders's heart attack is obviously worth contemplating when deciding whom to vote for in a Democratic primary, but writing off all septuagenarians as physically and mentally unable to do the job is an awfully convenient argument given that the Democratic nominee will almost certainly be one of three septuagenarians. Maybe the one who takes selfies for four hours after a rally? And our "liberal" media never seem to mention the 73-year-old who currently occupies the Oval Office. Maybe that's because he constantly acts like a spoiled brat.

Also ho hum, Republican megadonor/notorious "America Firster" still manages to get H1-B visas for foreign workers even as our President cracks down on said H1-B visas. Of course, our President also uses undocumented immigrants wherever he can, and his votaries excuse that, because BUILDZ TEH WALLZ!!!!!. When Charles Baudelaire said that genius was the ability to hold two disparate ideas in the mind at one time, I don't think he was actually describing hypocrites or their enablers.

Uh oh: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has apparently violated a court order preventing her office from going after some indebted Corinthian College students, and could face jail time. You'll remember Corinthian College as the for-profit college chain that went under in 2015, but not without putting a lot of its students in a big debt hole first; the Obama Administration set up a program to help some of them get loan forgiveness, but this Administration's Education Department has virtually (and unlawfully) shut down the program, resulting in students incorrectly getting billed for loans and even getting their wages or tax refunds garnished. Again: you can't just skimp on your duty under the law just because you don't want to do it, or because you don't believe it's your duty under the law.

Finally, I've been loathe to go after our President for pulling out of Syria, since I'm no fan of our presence in the Middle East, but I find it hard to believe that our only two choices were "stay in Syria indefinitely" or "let the Turks kill all the Kurds," especially with this supposedly uniquely talented "deal-maker" in charge. Naturally our President has opened himself to charges of corruption, given that he has, well, business in Turkey that he doesn't have with the Kurds. One sad part of all of this is that now even more of our descendants will say this is the way the world is and there's no sense in trying to change it. We can help avert that catastrophe by making this President into the poster child for How Not to Be.

Action: concerning anti-Semitism, corporate welfare, and endangered species.

You may have heard that a group of racists have begun compiling a "list" of Jewish critics on the Telegram chat platform. You may not have heard that this project was apparently too racist for both 4chan and Twitter! The compilers claim they don't intend any violence, but of course they haven't explained what other purpose the list could have -- it couldn't be a mere attempt to alert folks about who their critics are, because it only has Jews on it; gosh, you'd think fighting a World War over this crap would have given contemporary folks more instruction. But nobody said winning and securing victories over evil was easy, so Jewish Voice for Peace helps you tell Telegram to take down the anti-Semitic list. Again, this is a public list, and Telegram's own terms of service indicate they're a lot tougher on public utterances than private ones, and again, our First Amendment does not protect terroristic threats (and what else could this public list of Jews be?).

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania residents, take note: HB 1100 -- which supporters call the "Energize PA Legislative Package," but detractors call the "Ethane Cracker Welfare" bill -- would indeed give corporate welfare handouts to manufacturers of petrochemicals and fertilizers. They act like not paying taxes on your expenses isn't enough! Does HB 1100, in its purported effort to "energize" our power grid, include any tax breaks for solar, wind, or geothermal corporations? Of course not -- it's almost like the reactionary state legislature only cares about handing out welfare to corporations that pollute more. Not to pile on, but ethane crackers (which are "petrochemical," after all) generally turn fracked gas into single-use plastic, and nobody thinks we really need more of that clogging up our land and water. Hence both Penn Environment and Food and Water Watch help you tell your state Senators to fight pollution and corporate welfare by rejecting HB 1100.

Finally, in the wake of our Administration's regulatory changes designed to gut the Endangered Species Act, H.R. 4348/S. 2491, the Protect America's Wildlife and Fish in Need Conservation (or PAW and FIN) Act, may give us yet another clumsy legislative acronym, but it would essentially nullify these recent changes, and prevent any other Administration from using "economic factors" to decide how it's going to enforce the Endangered Species Act. You know, there really aren't that many people who complain about "burdensome" regulations; mostly CEOs complain about it, because it forces them to spend some of that money they'd earmarked for gilding the plumbing in their 19th vacation home. They don't put it like that, of course -- they say it's a "burden on small businesses," as if "small businesses" go around killing endangered species with drilling projects! The Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect endangered species by passing the PAW and FIN Act.

Action: concerning Senate intransigence, impeachment, and Social Security.

Happy Monday, good peoples! It's time, once again, to call your Senator and tell them to support voting rights, civil rights, fair wages, higher wages, public lands, internet freedom, and secure elections by passing 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; H.R. 1146, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act, H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act; and H.R. 2722, the SAFE Act. And none of them get to play the well-the-bills-aren't-getting-voted-on card, because they could use the prestige of their offices -- that which remains, at least -- and publicly pressure Mr. McConnell into holding a vote on the bill. Of course, none of them really want to do that, since he's making himself look bad on their behalf, knowing that if he allows a vote on these bills and they all vote against them, they'll look bad. But again: their 13-dimensional chess games don't matter; only our will matters.

After that, you may want to get your House Reps on the phone and demand that they support an impeachment inquiry against our President. I haven't advocated for his impeachment up until now, partly because the President I really wanted impeached (that would be Bush the Lesser) did worse, partly because I didn't want the Russia investigation to distract us from our duties as citizens, and partly because, well, I wanted him to twist in the wind until his own vanity and ignorance buried him. But when a man admits to trying to leverage foreign aid into a foreign investigation of a political opponent, then Congress would be derelict in its duty if they did not impeach. The fact that he's tried to un-admit it in the following days means nothing. Really, though, impeachment is too good for him. Whatever happens to him, one thing must happen: I want our descendants to point to this man and say see this guy? Don't be him. If you're gonna be like him, you deserve to be alone until death.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your House Reps to pass H.R. 860/S. 629, the Social Security 2100 Act, then Social Security Works still helps you do that. The Social Security 2100 Act would accomplish much of what we've been trying to accomplish for years: it would put Social Security on sounder financial footing (not that you should believe any hysteria about the "cost" of "entitlements"!) by expanding the income that can be taxed into the system, and although I think it's actually rather odd to exempt income between $132,900 and $400,000, that's still a big improvement. The bill would also expand benefits to ensure our seniors have a more dignified retirement, and would index future cost-of-living increases to a measure of inflation that would actually reflect the bills seniors face -- and not the stupid "chained CPI," which would assume that if a price rises too high, folks will just switch to something else! Seniors have fixed costs (like medicine) they can't just "switch" their way out of! So let's pass the Social Security 2100 Act and treat our seniors better.

Around the table: concerning public banking, internet freedom, our IRS's priorities, our President's options, and small farmers.

State of California enacts public banking legislation. If I were the author of this article, I might not have run from noting that the only other public bank in America is in North Dakota right to TEH CRITICZ SAYZ!!!! in paragraph six, at least not without noting that North Dakota survived the end of the fracking bubble mostly because it has a public bank which even that state's Republican-dominated government has made no move to dismantle. And dig the fool comparing public banking to the DMV (dude, 1985 just called, it wants its right-wing propaganda back) and saying public banking "just doesn't work," as if he's oblivious to the fact that private banks nearly destroyed this economy not that long ago.

In case you were wondering why the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the FCC's nefarious net neutrality repeal: the judges agreed that the FCC had "broad authority" to reclassify (or, perhaps, re-reclassify) broadband services as "information services" as long as they could come up with a convincing argument to do so. But I still suspect a lawsuit challenging the FCC's process in soliciting public comments would succeed, and this Buzzfeed report, in part describing efforts to jam the FCC's inboxes with fake anti-net neutrality comments, could provide plenty of ammo toward that effort.

ProPublica finally hears back from the IRS on why it targets poor folks disproportionately vis a vis rich folks, and you won't like the answer: it's too expensive to target rich folks. On one hand, thanks, Republicans who gin up BS scandals to justify cutting IRS funding, and thanks also, Democrats, for going along with Republican drama! On the other hand, the IRS should know that great reward only follows great risk. And Democrats who run campaign ads on how the IRS goes after poor people oh never mind these are Democrats we're talking about.

Austin Sarat at The Conversation asks the horrifying question: "Could President Trump be impeached and convicted – but also reelected?" His answer: yes, since our Constitution is silent on the matter of what a man removed from office could do afterward -- specifically deferring that question to the Senate, in the course of its trial of the House's impeachment. My answer: yes, if Democrats spend 2020 doing victory laps and don't stand for anything regular Americans want. You know, kinda like they did in 2016.

Finally, I'm as displeased as anyone else that our Agriculture Secretary told Wisconsin dairy farmers that small dairy farms may not be able to survive in a world dominated by factory farms -- seriously, a dairy farmer about to cut his own wrists doesn't want to hear that our economy doesn't guarantee him a livelihood! -- but I am puzzled that Secretary Perdue seems to think the rise of big ag corporations is a relatively recent development, as if Hollywood didn't make half a dozen films about this very subject all at once in the mid-'80s. I feel compelled to note, of course, that his pessimism about small farmers is a bit odd, coming as it does from a public servant who has some power to protect small farmers from oblivion. Such pessimism certainly isn't part of the American can-do spirit.

Action: concerning drug policy, fossil fuels, and family planning funding.

H.R. 3884/S. 2227, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (or MORE) Act, would remove pot from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act -- which would make pot legal all across America -- and would also provide for reinvestment in communities most affected by pot arrests and would help folks serving pot-related sentences get them commuted or reduced. Frankly, the MORE Act's sentencing reforms and community reinvestment provisions aren't as direct (and therefore not as effective, I would think) as those of H.R. 1456/S. 597, the Marijuana Justice Act, but the Marijuana Justice Act's lead sponsor, Sen. Booker, is now a co-sponsor of the MORE Act. The Drug Policy Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the MORE Act, but they allow you to edit the message, so nothing stops you, really, from using it to demand more effective drug policy reform legislation like the Marijuana Justice Act. Be sure to read both bills at Congress.gov beforehand, though; they're not long.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club helps you tell General Electric to scuttle its plan to build coal plants across the planet. They must be figuring that since coal doesn't make any money in America anymore -- and that's not because of some imaginary "war on coal" but because of natural gas that's now much cheaper and renewable energy sources that are getting there -- they can make money building coal plants overseas. They might even be figuring that some of these countries would be lucky to have a coal plant! But that would be short-sighted and self-serving of them, since those countries would be even luckier to have renewable energy systems, which are just as easy for a corporation to build anymore. You have to wonder why GE doesn't do that! It couldn't be because, as Ralph Nader used to say, you can't own the sun and the wind, could it? I kid, of course -- the stew of short-sightedness and self-servingness I've already identified explains everything quite well. It's why I like people better than corporations.

Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) to stop handing out Title X funds to notorious anti-birth control and anti-abortion centers, then Daily Kos still helps you do that. I expect this HHS effort to die in court one day -- the law authorizing our government to disperse Title X funding mandates that it fund comprehensive family planning services, not services that withhold information about abortion for supposed "conscience" reasons. Seriously, if that's your conscience, you're in the wrong business! I feel compelled to note that it's not necessarily conservative to oppose abortion -- Barry Goldwater used to say that the uterus was one more thing our government shouldn't meddle in. But a real conservative who opposes abortion wouldn't direct public funds to anti-abortion centers like this; a real conservative would amend our Constitution to outlaw abortion. You have to wonder why they don't.

Action: concerning government spying, climate change, and endangered species.

Demand Progress helps you tell your House Reps to repeal Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, which allows our government to collect information (like financial transactions and medical records) on good Americans who've done not a damn thing wrong. Hopefully we're running out of people who would protest but you could become a terrorist one day, you never know! Sadly, the surest way to run out of those people would be to have more of them know their government is spying on them, because we all think we're completely innocent and it's only those people who need our government to keep tabs on them. But when you give government that power, you know they're going to have their own definition of "those people," and that definition is going to skew black and brown and Muslim. You may not be black, brown, or Muslim, but this is America, so someone you know and love probably is, and you shouldn't wait until they get caught in our government's dragnet before you do something about it.

Meanwhile, you may have heard that several big asset management corporations have begun to push big corporations to address climate change -- but BlackRock hasn't, and has, in fact, undermined shareholder resolutions aimed at getting big corporations to change their ways and pollute less. Shareholder resolutions are about the closest thing investors have to democracy in the corporate world (though it's certainly not preferable to democracy!), and even a resolution with substantial minority support can get corporate boards to do the right thing, but BlackRock, with all the billions it controls, doesn't seem to be on board, and that may be your money tied up in there if you have a pension or retirement account somewhere. Hence the Sierra Club helps you tell BlackRock to start pushing corporations to do more to combat climate change. Don't believe them if they tell you retirees will suffer if you make us do the thing! Hopefully you recognize that as a) hostage-taking and b) not at all the American can-do spirit.

Finally, H.R. 2245, the Ceasing the Importation of Large Animal Trophies (or CECIL) Act, is of course named for the endangered African lion killed by a hunter back in 2015 -- you remember Walter Palmer, the most hated man in America that week? -- and it would help prevent more "trophies" from coming into the United States. If you're hung up on the notion that an animal that's endangered over there might not be endangered here, please note that our Endangered Species Act does list animals from other nations. And you'll also want to attend Sec. 3 of the bill, which would mandate that our Secretary of the Interior certify, before handing out any hunting permits, that the a potential trophy animal's country of origin "adequately provides for the conservation and monitoring for that species." If we enact and enforce such protections, we'll have fewer rich jerks showing off their trophies of vulnerable animals. So Environmental Action helps you tell your House Reps to protect endangered species by passing the CECIL Act.

Action: concerning hate speech, pollution, and paid family leave.

Facebook may have instituted a ban on explicit racist hate speech, but they seem to be having a little trouble enforcing it; that couldn't be because Facebook makes millions of dollars from ads promoting hate speech, could it? I suppose they'll tell us that they have a big platform and it's just very hard to find every instance of hate speech, but that only means their executives can break off some of their billions and hire more people to do the job. And remember what Dean Baker taught us: that Facebook is really a publishing platform, and thus should be subject to the same rules every other publishing house has to follow (though the law doesn't see it that way); they don't have a "right" to put up all manner of hate speech any more than ABC has to accept every single idea for a sitcom they get. Hence Free Press helps you tell Facebook to do a damn sight better at keeping racist pablum off its platform. (While we're at it, we might as well let CREDO helps us tell Twitter to do the same, since Twitter's brain trust, such as it is, doesn't even seem to find it a priority.)

Meanwhile, another day, another Obama-era anti-pollution regulation our current Administration wants to roll back because Obama! This time, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) wants to make it easier for coal corporations to spew out coal ash, because what's a little undrinkable water when there are already absurdly high executive salaries to plump up even further? Of course, our EPA will accept public comments on their proposal until October 15, so Environmental Action helps you tell our EPA to reject its own proposal to roll back coal ash protections. Coal ash puts arsenic, lead, and other carcinogens in our groundwater, which makes folks sick; just ask the good citizens of Roane County, TN, where a coal ash pond ruptured in 2008, spewing forth over a billion gallons of coal ash slurry, or the good citizens of Eden, NC, where a pipe running underneath a Duke Energy coal ash pond ruptured and spewed nearly 40,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River. They're the folks our EPA is supposed to protect from pollution.

Finally, H.R. 1185/S. 463, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (or FAMILY) Act, would, as you may know, establish a paid family leave program in America, to be funded by a 0.4% payroll tax to be divided equally between employer and employee, and no, that's not "4 percent" or "40 percent," in case our "liberal" media tells you that. People who make that "mistake" on cable news programs should be fired! Sorry, I've seen that too often to just let it go. This means that if you make $50,000 annually, you'd pay a total of $100 annually to support a program where everyone who works (including yourself!) can get family medical leave benefits. $100! That's $8.33 a month! That's a little over five junior bacon cheeseburgers at Wendy's! I don't like how we always sacrifice so that Our Glorious Elites don't have to, but this is hardly a crippling sacrifice, and (unless you're self-employed) you won't even be footing the whole bill out of your paycheck. Hence CREDO helps you tell our Congressfolk to support working families by passing the FAMILY Act.

Around the table: impeachment is too good for this clown! And other lessons.

Remember when our President said he wouldn't cut Medicare? Well, apparently he's planning an executive order that would expand privatized "Medicare Advantage" health insurance plans -- which would likely result in Medicare benefit cuts for everyone else. Remember when Republicans used to whine about President Obama's executive orders? AMURIKAN CAESAR!!!!!, they squealed. Good times! The idea that our President will save a socialist government program from "socialism" is laughable, and should only remind you that the whole idea of Medicare for All is that everyone gets the "advantage."

Justice Department Inspector General's report on a week-long power outage at a Brooklyn jail in the middle of winter "seems more preoccupied with the episode as a public relations blunder than as a humanitarian disaster," says Nick Pinto at The Intercept. And that's exactly why we're a sick, immoral, and decadent society: we constantly grope at the "optics" of something evil, rather than just getting up and calling that thing evil. Also too, we don't think of America as a place where "humanitarian disasters" occur, though we should, since they do.

Former Bush Mobb advisor opined back in January that our President won't be impeached and removed from office, but will resign in exchange for immunity for himself and his family. I'd rather let him twist in office than cut that deal -- a deal that'll likely never happen anyway simply because of the number of people, at state and federal levels, you'd have to get on board with it. And if the economy is going to be as bad in 2020 as Mr. Steinberg says (and I'm far from convinced it will be that bad), what leverage would our President have to cut a deal? Why, even the damn Democrats might not take that deal!

We learn from Connor Sheets at ProPublica that sheriffs in Alabama are releasing prisoners on "medical bond" when they get sick so the state won't have to pay any of their medical bills. Naturally at least one Alabama DA is worried that prisoners who get out on medical bond will break into your house, and one sheriff also seems to think prisoners can get "a dozen honey buns" on commissary. Are we sure it's the inmates who are sick? And note well that if we a) get rid of cash bail and b) expanded Medicare to include everyone, we wouldn't be faced with decisions like this in the first place.

Finally, the incomparable Dean Baker calls our Administration's attempt to drill for oil in ANWR "a gratuitous act of environmental destruction." Further, "people in power" are "taking actions that show they don’t give a damn about the world they pass on to future generations" and "spitting in the face of people who value the environment to show they can wreak destruction for no good reason whatsoever." These are all completely accurate statements, and it is not "uncivil" to say them -- and people who would say so are telling you (guess what?) that they can't win the argument on the merits.

Action: concerning war with Iran, billboards in space, and facial recognition technology.

As you no doubt know, our President's in a good bit of trouble right at the moment! And you know what that could mean? Why, it could mean war with Iran! Yeah, I know, he's made noises about not wanting war with Iran, and he did cut John Bolton loose not too long ago, but he's also done a lot of saber-rattling lately and plans to send more troops to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Now, a lot of his attempts to gin up a war have fallen flat so far, and you have to hope we all remember how Bill Clinton fired a couple of missiles in Mr. bin Laden's direction a couple days after admitting to his affair with Ms. Lewinsky -- not to mention all the times we got color-coded terror alerts from Tha Bush Mobb after some unrelated reversal or other! But, just in case our President is able to change the subject from his own rotten doings, Demand Progress helps you tell our Congressfolk to ensure our President can't go to war with Iran without Congressional approval. You know, like our Constitution says.

Meanwhile, some corporations want to put giant billboards in orbit! Yes, it's true! Like we don't have enough crap in the sky! Actually, the "billboards" will be groups of satellites that congregate to form the image of a corporate logo, but the difference is semantic, and the end result will be the same: you won't be able to look up at the sky without someone trying to sell you something. And, ah, you can imagine what'll happen if even more satellites occupy the night sky, right? Some of them will accidentally crash into each other. This may be what led the late, great Carl Sagan to call billboards in the sky an "abomination." Yes, not only is this a bad idea, it's an old idea, which also makes it a zombie idea. Well, we all know what to do with zombies, so Environmental Action helps you tell your House Reps to put the beatdown on the notion of giant floating billboards in the sky. People spend their time wishing for a better future and floating billboards is what they come up with?

Speaking of which, Fight for the Future helps you tell major live event corporations not to use facial recognition technology at their events. Why? Facial recognition technology invades the privacy you expect to have at a live event -- yes, you do expect some privacy, even at a "public event"; does everyone need to know where you are at all times? Facial recognition technology is also pretty terrible; no doubt you have heard that facial recognition technology, like your Tea Party uncle, can't tell black people apart very well. No government at any level regulates facial recognition technology very well -- for example, none of them regulate how long a corporation can hold onto the data it's scraped at a live show. And using this bad, unregulated, invasive technology can do folks real harm -- it can get them deported, detained, or otherwise harassed, again because our governments don't do their job and regulate how corporations can use the technology. And rather than hold our breath and wait for governments to do their job, let's just not use the crap, OK?