The FRAC Act is back! And CREDO helps you tell your Senator to support it. What does the FRAC Act do? The FRAC Act closes loopholes in the Clean Water Act that gas drillers currently enjoy. Why is that important? Because gas drillers use a method of drilling called "hydrofracturing" -- known popularly as "fracking" -- that pumps dangerous chemicals into the ground, chemicals that wind up in your drinking water. You've seen that scene from Gasland where the fellow lights his drinking water on fire? I rest my case. Meanwhile, Penn Environment tells me that the Department of Energy will hold a hearing tonight in Washington, PA about Marcellus Shale gas drilling. It's at Washington and Jefferson College, 60 South Lincoln Street; the hearing runs from 7-9pm, but if you want to speak, you have to be there at 6.30pm to register. The gas drillers will be busing in their "concerned citizens," so good folks from our side have to go, too. If you can't go, you can still submit a written statement to shalegas at hq dot doe dot gov.

Speaking of Pennsylvania, the regressive state legislature has the chance, and perhaps even the will, to do some real good, by opting out of the federal REAL ID program. In creating a national ID card out of state drivers' licenses, our government would force Pennsylvania to streamline its state DMV database to national standards, and then link said database to all other state DMV databases to create one large national database. Now, if you're an identity thief, which would you rather deal with: a state database with all its state-mandated idiosyncracies, or one big national database? And don't believe the hype that your national ID card would be fake-proof. As anyone in the security business will tell you, any ID can be faked. (As you may know, Bruce Schneier came up with a lot more reasons a national ID card would be a bad idea back in 2004.) The ACLU helps you encourage your legislators to support SB 354, which would block the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania from participating in REAL ID.

Finally, Media Matters provides a petition demanding that advertisers pull all their ads from the Fox News Channel, for all the reasons you might expect. You might call this "starving the beast," except that Fox News also makes good money from cable service providers, and in any case Fox News isn't the entire beast -- News Corp. is the beast, and once upon a time Fox News was one of Mr. Murdoch's money-losing enterprises, a labor of love, I suppose, that News Corp. could absorb as long as Fox's entertainment division made money. So, while shaming advertisers must be done, and doesn't violate any corporation's "rights" -- the First Amendment protects you from your government, not from activists, advertisers, customers, or employers -- we must also remember to support a la carte cable packaging, so we don't have to pay for Fox News if we don't want it in our homes. (You can, of course, amend the Parents' Television Council contact tool to your liking.) Also, we'll need to pass laws preventing corporations from owning media, and vice versa. But that's a long-term project.