There's Already a Wall at the U.S.-Mexico Border

There's already a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. 

Here's what you should know about it:

Thank-you Bush & Clinton

A Comment from Dan Rather

Dan Rather

7 hrs · 

https://www.facebook.com/theDanRather/posts/10158124886660716

Today I shed a tear for the country I know and love, the one I believe still beats in the heart of most of its citizens.

The United States became the most powerful nation in the history of mankind not merely on the basis is its fearsome military, as lethal and well trained as that may be. It wasn't solely based on its unprecedented economic engine, as dynamic and far-reaching as that may be. America's greatness was forged by a Constitutional compact of grand and universal ideals that the country has tried to live up to ever since.

For generations, we have been an imperfect but vital beacon of freedom to a world too often wandering and failing in moral confusion. But that ultimate strength has dimmed considerably in light of the recent actions on immigration from the new President Donald Trump. We are turning around desperate refugees. We are singling out men, women, and children on the basis of their faith - and we are doing all of this with a randomness and capriciousness that defies reason.

A colleague of mine used the term "heartless" to describe so much ot the President's executive actions. Sadly, I found it an apt and dispiriting diagnosis—especially when faced with the results of his executive order on immigration. For over the years, I have seen that our greatest American leaders extol empathy rather than condemnation. They have known that in a complicated world, it is best to make policy choices with a scalpel - not a hacksaw. Sometimes, when our national security is threatened at the level of World War II, all-out conflict is the only recourse. But those instances are by far the exception.

From Vietnam, to the Iraq War, from Japanese internment camps to the centuries-long persecution on the basis of race and ethnicity that almost toppled our democratic experiment, broad strokes channeling our least compassionate and most jingoistic impulses have always made us weaker rather than stronger.

Today, in the wake of his one-man decision to wreck and reverse immigration policy so suddenly, there is chaos and confusion mixed with heartbreak and fear. A well thought-out, measured overhaul of immigration policy, with organized-in-advance measures to implement that is one thing—and one that perhaps a majority of Americans would support, But this mess, created overnight, is quite another. With this, we have embolden our enemies who want to see nothing else than to compete in a world of moral relativism. In the Cold War, our struggles over civil rights fed into the propaganda of the Soviet Union - as our new actions fuel the extremism Mr. Trump claims to be attacking.

Too many people during the campaign explained away Mr. Trump's irresponsible rhetoric as metaphors and euphemisms. These are not concepts he understands. Serious foreign policy experts know that this is a boon for our enemies and undermines our democratic principles. But too many Republican leaders in Congress, even ones that denounced the Muslim ban during the campaign, stand by cheering it now. History will mark their names, as it marks this moment.

This will be challenged in the courts, who may very well strike it down. But damage, real damage, has been done to our global image. I believe Vladimir Putin is smiling, and would-be global powers like China see a vacuum forming that they will be eager to fill.

I still remain optimistic that the vast majority of American people will recoil and speak out at this unwise policy. But whether we like it or not, as the detentions and impediments already springing up make all too real, this is the stated de facto policy of the United States today. Every day that it goes on, every day the chaos, confusion and heartbreak deepens, America loses more pieces of its soul and standing in the world.

Anonymous Responds to Trump

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjvydsJzAYY&feature=share

https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=XZXBPXnVIqQ&u=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DrM-WpZ0ZO4Y%26feature%3Dshare

The Doomsday Clock is Now 2.5 Minutes to Midnight

http://www.sciencealert.com/the-doomsday-clock-is-now-2-5-minutes-to-midnight-but-what-does-that-really-mean

The Doomsday Clock is now 2.5 minutes to midnightbut what does that really mean?

It's later than you think.

IAN LOWE, GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY

28 JAN 2017

It made headlines recently when the Doomsday Clock was shifted from three minutes to midnight to a new setting of two and a half minutes to midnight.

That is the nearest the clock has been to midnight for more than fifty years. The body responsible for the clock said, "the probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon".

It should be an urgent warning to world leaders.

The idea of a Doomsday Clock was conceived by the editorial staff of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which was founded by many of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project.

When that publication graduated from being an internal newsletter among the nuclear science community to being a formal magazine in 1947, the clock appeared on the cover. The magazine’s founders said the clock symbolised:

the urgency of the nuclear dangers that [we] – and the broader scientific community – are trying to convey to the public and political leaders around the world.

The clock was set at seven minutes to midnight. Two years later, with the news that a nuclear weapon had been tested by the USSR, the communist state centred on modern Russia, the clock was moved to 11.57.

In 1953, the USA first tested the hydrogen bomb, a fusion weapon much more powerful than the fission bombs that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The USSR followed a few months later and the clock was advanced to 11.58 with a warning there was a real chance that:

from Moscow to Chicago, atomic explosions will strike midnight for Western civilisation.

Then there was a period of modest progress. It gradually became apparent that the new weapons were so powerful that only a deranged leader would consider using them against a similarly armed enemy, given the inevitability of catastrophic retaliation.

In 1963, after they had been continuously testing more and more deadly weapons, the USA and the USSR signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited atmospheric testing. The clock was moved back to 11.48.

It was a false dawn. The two super-powers simply shifted their testing of new weapons to underground facilities, while other countries such as Britain, France and China developed their own nuclear arsenals.

EPA/Jim Lo Scalzo

The clock gradually moved closer and closer to midnight until the mid-1980s when it stood at 11.57. Then Mikhail Gorbachev assumed the leadership of the USSR and began a series of negotiations to ease tensions and reduce the risk of nuclear war.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 effectively marked the end of the so-called Cold War between communism and capitalism. The subsequent collapse of the USSR led to large reductions in the nuclear arsenals, and by 1991 the clock had moved back to 11.43.

Once again, there were optimistic hopes of an era of peace and an end to the threat of nuclear weapons. It was not to be. The political system in the US made it almost impossible to scale back arms production.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, negotiated in the 1970s, aimed to prevent the spread of weapons beyond the five nations that had already acquired them.

But those countries did not implement their promise to disarm, so inevitably other nations decided that they would be more secure if they had nuclear weapons: India, Pakistan and Israel. The clock moved forward again year by year, reaching 11.53 by 2002.

New threats

Since then, the managers of the Doomsday Clock have added new threats to the original fear of nuclear war. In 2007, they said "climate change also presents a dire challenge to humanity" and advanced the clock to 11.55.

More recent annual reports have warned that:

international leaders are failing to perform their most important duty – ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilisation.

The change should be welcomed. Even if nuclear weapons did not exist, climate change and the accelerating loss of biodiversity are serious threats.

Damage to ecosystems is already taking place; climate change is causing loss of life and property, as well as affecting natural systems.

At the same time, the nations with nuclear weapons are still testing new devices and more sophisticated delivery systems.

The number of weapons has dropped from its peak of over 60,000 to about 10,000. But that is still enough firepower to wipe out civilisation several times over.

And there are new players, including North Korea and perhaps Iran. As the 2017 report said:

It is two and a half minutes to midnight, the Clock is ticking, global danger looms. Wise public officials should act immediately, guiding humanity away from the brink. If they do not, wise citizens must step forward and lead the way.

This really is a call to arms and deserves more attention from our media.

Ian Lowe, Emeritus Professor, School of Science, Griffith University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Democrat Minus "Demo" Equals RAT

...and you wonder why, after forty-four (44) years, I am no longer a Democrat.......

Take off the "Demo" and you'll get RAT...... We need to get the mousers in there (and I don't mean Mickey Mousers: they run the GOP)

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/01/27/what_the_hell_is_wrong_with_senate_democrats.html

What the Hell Is Wrong With Senate Democrats?

(Do you want a list?)

5.8k

360

145

By Osita Nwanevu

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) (C), speaks while flanked by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA),(L), and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), during a news conference on Capitol Hill, January 5, 2017 in Washington, DC.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii won his race in November with nearly 74 percent of the vote. He had the biggest margin of victory of any senator on the ballot in 2016, in a state that gave Hillary Clinton her biggest margin. He is ensconced. By all rights he should be, if not a leader, at least a foot soldier in the Democratic resistance to President Trump.

It was perhaps with these things in mind that the Huffington Post interviewed him on Tuesday over his votes in favor of Donald Trump’s nominees—five in all thus far. The Democratic Party, Schatz explained, should work to approve “reasonable” Trump appointments. “The door swings both ways in Washington,” he said. “At some point we’re going to want a Democratic president to stand up a Cabinet. So we’re trying to be reasonable when the nominees are reasonable.”

Leave aside for a moment Schatz’s evident willingness to support as “reasonable” the nomination of Mike Pompeo, a man who thinks the CIA’s torturers are “patriots,” as the agency’s director. As anyone who has been awake for the past eight years should be well aware, the notion that the Republican Party will reward Democrats in the future for their deference now is utterly laughable.

So just what the hell is going on in the Senate?

One can understand, perhaps, the ease with which Defense Secretary James Mattis won the support of Senate Democrats given the possibility that he’ll be a moderating influence on Trump’s foreign policy. The same is true, for similar reasons, of Nikki Haley’s confirmation as ambassador to the United Nations. Wilbur Ross and Elaine Chao’s fairly uncontroversial nominations sailed through the Senate Commerce Committee on voice votes—one can also understand, perhaps, Democrats having a hard time getting worked up over those two. But 37 Democrats in the Senate voting to confirm John Kelly as secretary of Homeland Security, even though he has pledged to go after sanctuary cities and declined to give a clear answer as to how he would deal with DREAMers? Fourteen Democrats voting to confirm Mike Pompeo, a man who said that Islamic leaders in America were generally complicit in terrorism, as CIA director? All 11 of the Senate Banking Committee’s Democrats voting unanimously—unanimously—to advance the nomination of Ben “Grain Silo” Carson—a man who has stated that he could not, in good conscience, vote for a Muslim president and is, by his own reported admission, unqualified to run anyfederal agency? What gives? The answer, as always, is the Democratic Party.

Part of the acquiescence may be explained by the electoral calendar. During Carson’s hearing, two of the Senate’s leading progressives,  Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, grilled Carson on the minimum wage, fair housing, and Trump’s conflicts of interest. But both voted for Carson anyway. Jennifer Bendery and Sam Stein of the Huffington Post suggest that Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown did so in part because both face re-election next year. “Warren has been criticized back home for being oppositional to Trump, and Brown, like nine other Democrats trying to hang on to their seats in two years, hails from a state that Trump carried in 2016,” they wrote. “For those members, there is some political upside to demonstrating willingness to work with Trump when the time and conditions allow it.”

But that explanation only goes so far, as Schatz demonstrates. The broader truth is this: the Democrats, unlike the Republican Party, haven’t a clue how to build and wield power. As ThinkProgress’s Ned Resinkoff noted recently on Twitter, the GOP realized early on in the Obama administration that obstruction could have a strategically important galvanizing effect:

Alcohol vs. Cannabis

Trump Shut Down White House Phone Line

http://usuncut.com/politics/trump-white-house-phone-line/

Trump shut down the White House phone line — so Bernie’s team created this hilarious workaround

Tom Cahill | January 27, 2017

Bernie Sanders’ communications team now has a fun way to continue contacting the Trump administration despite the closure of the White House’s phone line.

Previously, anyone wanting to leave a message for the White House was encouraged to call 202-456-1111. However, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, anyone who called that line got a message that said the line was “currently closed.” So Revolution Messaging, who Bernie Sanders hired to manage his campaign communications, has a solution — call Trump’s businesses instead.

The project is appropriately referred to as White House Inc. The way it works is simple — all you have to do is put in your phone number and your email, and then Revolution Messaging will connect you to one of Trump’s business entities. As of this writing, President Trump has not provided documentation proving he has separated himself from any of his businesses, meaning that Trump has created, as Revolution Messaging notes on its website, “satellite White Houses all over the world.”

“Don’t be fooled, they’ll ask you to make a reservation or a tee time, but remember, you’re talking to the White House, so use the opportunity to discuss important issues,” the site reads.

White House Inc even includes some samples of what to talk about when connected to a receptionist at one of the president’s golf courses or hotels:

Yanking Federal funding for any charitable organization who supports a “nasty” woman’s right to choose. And why stop there? Let’s tell doctors all over the world how to do their job, too. That’s leadership.

Building a wall to keep out brazen Mexican immigrants who have the nerve to try to provide a better life for their families. All of those taco trucks would be an eyesore, am I right?

Repealing the Affordable Care Act. So what if 24 million people lose insurance?

Doing nothing to address the student loan debt. Let’s put those whiny millennials in their place.

And so much more!

Trump’s stated plans to hand off his business empire to his two adult sons, Don Jr. and Eric, has been blasted by Office of Government Ethics chief Walter Shaub as “inadequate.” The only sure way for Trump to avoid conflicts of interest as president would be if he sold off all of his assets and put the proceeds in a blind trust, which he has flatly refused to do.

Tom Cahill is a writer for US Uncut based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact him via email at tom.v.cahill@gmail.com, or follow him on Facebook.

10 Things That Happened in Trump's White House

Storm is Coming

Yesterday at 11:39am · 

From a friend.
"It's a nightmare. They warned us. Each day, it's getting more difficult to stay informed. Information management is critical in our new information war.
Find your strategies.

10 Things That Happened:

1. The White House wiped the pages for civil rights, workplace rights for LGBT people, and climate change from the official WH website.

2. Our new President made a statement at the CIA in which he blatantly lied about how many people were in attendance at his inauguration. He claimed 1.5 million (there were closer to 220,000) and said the "lying press" was "going to pay." Yes, our President threatened the media for reporting the truth the day after his inauguration.

3. The WH Press Secretary held his first press conference and spewed straight propaganda, continuing DT's stint saying the photographs of inauguration in the media were photoshopped, etc. He took no questions from the press.

4. The President's top advisor responded to the above press conference as being a presentation of "alternative facts." aka... lies.

5. The current National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, is under investigation for phone calls to Russia.

6. Trump's budget blueprint includes cuts to the Departments of Commerce and Energy and Transportation. Programs like the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities will be done away with entirely.

7. Said budget would also nix 25 grant programs which distribute funds to organizations committed to ending sexual assault, domestic abuse and dating violence through the Department of Justice.

(Pausing here to reiterate that U.S. intelligence officials are investigating our President's national security advisor. Let that sink in.)

8. Trump's advisor also told the press this weekend that, "It's really time for Trump to put in his own security and intelligence community." His... his own security and intelligence...

9. Trump's health plan would convert Medicaid to Block Grants, which would most certainly lead to cuts. His voters will be among those suffering most.

10. Republicans quietly introduced a bill to withdraw the United States from being a member state of the United Nations. Additionally, the new administration has failed to initiate contact with our most critical partners in Europe, including Germany.

If a lot of these actions sound rather authoritarian to you, you're not wrong! Experts and historians have been warning us about this since the campaign started in 2015. They were called alarmists, and so far everything they warned about has occurred. You should be very, very concerned."

Add: Reinstated the climate-changing pipelines, threatened martial law to end "carnage" in Chicago.

Please pass this on- Copy and paste

State Department’s Entire Senior Administrative Team Just Resigned

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/01/26/the-state-departments-entire-senior-management-team-just-resigned/?utm_term=.6e3de611bff7

State Department’s entire senior administrative team just resigned

By Josh Rogin January 26 at 11:02 AM 

The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin explains what the recent resignation of senior State Department management means for the agency going forward under the Trump administration. (Jorge Ribas, Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s job running the State Department just got considerably more difficult. The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.

Tillerson was actually inside the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom on Wednesday, taking meetings and getting the lay of the land. I reported Wednesday morning that the Trump team was narrowing its search for his No. 2, and that it was looking to replace the State Department’s long-serving undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy. Kennedy, who has been in that job for nine years, was actively involved in the transition and was angling to keep that job under Tillerson, three State Department officials told me.

Then suddenly on Wednesday afternoon, Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned unexpectedly, four State Department officials confirmed. Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Missions, followed him out the door. All are career Foreign Service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

[In his first major TV interview as president, Trump is endlessly obsessed with his popularity]

Kennedy will retire from the Foreign Service at the end of the month, officials said. The other officials could be given assignments elsewhere in the Foreign Service.

In addition, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Gregory Starr retired Jan. 20, and the director of the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, Lydia Muniz, departed the same day. That amounts to a near-complete housecleaning of all the senior officials that deal with managing the State Department, its overseas posts and its people.

“It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate,” said David Wade, who served as State Department chief of staff under Secretary of State John Kerry. “Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector.”

Senior State Department diplomats resign right before Tillerson takes charge

Play Video1:37

Washington Post senior national security correspondent Karen DeYoung talks about the unexpected resignations of senior State Department officials, and what it means for the Trump administration and international diplomacy. (The Washington Post)

Several senior Foreign Service officers in the State Department’s regional bureaus have also left their posts or resigned since the election. But the emptying of leadership in the management bureaus is more disruptive because those offices need to be led by people who know the department and have experience running its complicated bureaucracies. There’s no easy way to replace that via the private sector, said Wade.

“Diplomatic security, consular affairs, there’s just not a corollary that exists outside the department, and you can least afford a learning curve in these areas where issues can quickly become matters of life and death,” he said. “The muscle memory is critical. These retirements are a big loss. They leave a void. These are very difficult people to replace.”

Whether Kennedy left on his own volition or was pushed out by the incoming Trump team is a matter of dispute inside the department. Just days before he resigned, Kennedy was taking on more responsibility inside the department and working closely with the transition. His departure was a surprise to other State Department officials who were working with him.

[‘They never saw this coming’: A Q&A with Kellyanne Conway]

One senior State Department official who responded to my requests for comment said that all the officials had previously submitted their letters of resignation, as was required for all positions that are appointed by the president and that require confirmation by the Senate, known as PAS positions.

“No officer accepts a PAS position with the expectation that it is unlimited. And all officers understand that the President may choose to replace them at any time,” this official said. “These officers have served admirably and well. Their departure offers a moment to consider their accomplishments and thank them for their service. These are the patterns and rhythms of the career service.”

Ambassador Richard Boucher, who served as State Department spokesman for Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, said that while there’s always a lot of turnover around the time a new administration takes office, traditionally senior officials work with the new team to see who should stay on in their roles and what other jobs might be available. But that’s not what happened this time.

The officials who manage the building and thousands of overseas diplomatic posts are charged with taking care of Americans overseas and protecting U.S. diplomats risking their lives abroad. The career Foreign Service officers are crucial to those functions as well as to implementing the new president’s agenda, whatever it may be, Boucher said.

[What’s the method in Trump’s madness?]

“You don’t run foreign policy by making statements, you run it with thousands of people working to implement programs every day,” Boucher said. “To undercut that is to undercut the institution.”

By itself, the sudden departure of the State Department’s entire senior management team is disruptive enough. But in the context of a president who railed against the U.S. foreign policy establishment during his campaign and secretary of state with no government experience, the vacancies are much more concerning.

Tillerson’s job No. 1 must be to find qualified and experienced career officials to manage the State Department’s vital offices. His second job should be to reach out to and reassure a State Department workforce that is panicked about what the Trump administration means for them.

A Few NOT "Alternative" Facts

GOD's Will

Storm is Coming

1 hr · 

Day two and the Koch Brothers already get a big wet kiss from the Congress they bought.

Call your Senator and tell them NO on the REINS Act!

"Last, week, under the cover of a media bliss-out except among Koch funded right-wing channels, the House of Representatives passed a bill which would effectively repeal future standard setting under every important environmental, public health, consumer protection, labor standards, occupational safety and civil rights law on the books."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-pope/the-most-dangerous-bill-y_b_14067390.html

The Most Dangerous Bill You’ve Never Heard Of Just Passed The House

 01/10/2017 02:27 pm ET | Updated Jan 10, 2017

Last, week, under the cover of a media bliss-out except among Koch funded right-wing channels, the House of Representatives passed a bill which would effectively repeal future standard setting under every important environmental, public health, consumer protection, labor standards, occupational safety and civil rights law on the books.

The bill, called the REINS Act, requires that any future major regulation adopted by an Executive Agency — say a new toxic chemical standard required by the recently enacted Chemical Safety Act, or a new consumer protection rule about some innovative but untested kind of food additive — must be approved by a specific resolution in each House of Congress within 70 days to take effect.

To give a sense of the scale of this road-block, in 2015 there were 43 such major federal regulations passed to protect the public; among them were food safety regulations, the Clean Power Plan regulating pollution from electrical generating facilities, net neutrality rules protecting the internet from monopoly, restrictions on predatory lending and energy efficiency standards for appliances.

If the REINS Act had been in effect, it’s unlikely that the Tea Party-dominated Republican caucus in the House would have approved of any of these rules. Future standard setting under the entire body of legislation enacted over the past 40 years to protect the public, from the Clean Air Act to the Dodd Frank financial sector reforms, would be frozen. Over time, as new health, safety, consumer and labor protection issues arise, all of these laws will effectively have been repealed, with no public debate and no accountability. It will also be impossible to restore them as long as the REINS Act is in effect, because by requiring Congress to approve every regulation, it makes it impossible to pass technically complex and scientifically valid rules on any topic of controversy.

As one example, the REINS Act would totally neuter the new Chemical Safety Act, just passed by the Republican Congress last year. The Act requires EPA to review and set standards for 10 widely abused chemicals in the next six months alone. The Act passed only because in exchange, states gave up much of their power to protect their citizens from toxic chemicals; without that incentive, the Tea Party will certainly act to prevent EPA from restricting the use of these chemicals. But the states only agreed to give up in exchange for the promise that EPA would act. But the REINS act neuters this promise. Even if the House Republican caucus was willing in theory to consider such rules, there is simply no way Congress could add 10-40 new pieces of legislation to its work load in the chemical safety area alone. In fact, the House also just passed legislation to allow it to REPEAL all of President Obama’s regulatory acts in the last eight months of his term in office with ONE vote. Why? Because House members said there was not time for individual votes on each rule — exactly the requirement they just established for new rules.

Worse, Congress totally lacks the technical competence to review these kinds of complex rules. Do we really want members of Congress deciding whether a chemical can safely be used in food packaging? Or the proper procedures for approving new drugs as safe and effective? Or setting the allowable safety standard for heavy metals in drinking water?

The vote was 237-187. All Republicans voted for it; only two Democrats, Colin Peterson of Minnesota and Henry Cuellar of Texas, joined them. A Google search five days after the bill passed the House revealed no mention in major media except one Reuters story with limited pick-up and a Washington Post op-ed by one of its major supporters. Even on-line virtually all of the commentary was from the backers of the REINS Act; the only significant alerts of the danger came from the Blue Green Alliance and DeSmogBlog.

Progressives may be counting on the fact that the Senate has previously refused to pass the bill, and that it’s broad over-reaching will doom it. But these are not ordinary times and past behavior is far from reliable in predicting today’s politics.

It’s time — past time — for a massive mobilization to make clear to Congress and the new President that a wholesale repeal of 40 years of progress in environmental protection, civil rights, labor standards, health and safety and consumer protection is a third rail, and that pretending that the REINS act increases accountability is a fig-leaf that public scrutiny must shred.

Ask your favorite public interest organization what it is doing today to stop the REINS Act in the Senate.