Pennsylvania plans to vote on SB 1, which would give $1 billion in taxpayer money away to private schools in the form of vouchers, today; Keystone Progress helps you, PA resident, email your Senators. You may amend the email tool so as to better get their attention. Maybe like this: "I thought we were 'broke.' If we're 'broke,' how come we're giving away a billion dollars to private schools, in the form of vouchers that don't guarantee payment, don't guarantee admission, and don't guarantee success? You do realize this'll raise property taxes, don't you? You do realize that by refusing, even, to make voucher recipients accountable for the job they do teaching kids, you would give up any credibility you might have as a conservative? I mean, don't conservatives preach accountability? Or is that only for us, and not for big corporate donors? And you do realize that $1 billion is actually a lowball estimate, that the real price could quadruple? How, exactly, is that 'fiscally responsible?' And you do realize that Article III, Section 15 of the Pennsylvania Constitution pretty much forbids this bill?" It's not terribly civil, I know, but they're being damn stupid, and I'm not civil to people when they're being stupid.

Dadgum voucher people prevented me from leading off with this item like I wanted to: Free Press helps you tell the FCC to put an end to "covert consolidation." What's "covert consolidation," you ask? That's when media outlets run news items produced by other media outlets, most obviously on TV, where a station in one market might air the same story run in another market -- same reporters, same camera angels, same biases, everything. It's gotten to the point where the FCC tells us that almost one-third of TV stations run news produced by some other station. Media outlets no doubt consider this a mere cost-cutting move -- why hire all these reporters and camera operators and producers, anyway? Maybe because cost-cutting isn't a media outlet's first responsibility; a media outlet's first responsibility is serving the local community, and that means airing stories that mean something to that community, rather than force-feeding their own idea of what means something so they can more easily gild their plumbing. And, incredibly, doing the right thing by your community also means doing the right thing by the economy -- paying more attention to local matters means more jobs for more people. Some of them might turn into actual journalists!

Meanwhile, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State help you tell President Obama to prevent religious organizations from taking government money and then discriminating in hiring based on religion. Yup, religious organizations who are federal contractors can do that, thanks to Mr. Bush's Executive Order 13279, which carved out an exemption to FDR's landmark Executive Order 11246, which barred defense contractors from discriminating based on "race, creed, or origin." That old word in the middle there, "creed"? Still means something. (Later Executive Orders extended protections to all defense contractors. I've long said, if you take government money, you should play by government rules -- and that's a fairly compelling reason for religious organizations not to take government money at all. Now I say: take our money, don't discriminate against us. I just don't think this is that hard. Of course, to a Beltway insider, it's just too hard to do anything that could possibly help anyone -- except their rich friends, of course. Doing things that help their rich friends is easy.