House Reps are home this week, so, thanks to NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice lobby, you may call your Reps at their home district offices and tell them that any debt "deal" must include revenue increases. Need more to talk with your Rep about than the usual corporate-profits-high-regular-folks-suffering? Then check out this letter-to-our-government written by high-profile religious folk, calling for a "circle of protection" around programs that actually help good Americans in times of trouble. Seriously, only the "liberal" media means "you must make sacrifices" when they say "we all must make sacrifices." And that's because they're owned by big corporations, or are big corporations themselves.

Meanwhile, despite long-standing bipartisan support, Congress still hasn't been able to keep big corporations from using antibiotics as a growth aid in livestock. Apparently pumping antibiotics into farm animals makes plumper, meatier animals (and, not incidentally, helps them survive miserable lives penned up in factory farms). But it also makes new strains of hard-to-kill bacteria, and it also makes farm animals less able to fight off infections with each successive generation. Who could have predicted that using antibiotics for some purpose other than their actual purpose would backfire? CREDO helps you support the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. Some 70% of all antibiotics in America go, no, not to sick people, but to healthy animals. What votary of government accountability could possibly support that insanity?

Meanwhile, closer to home, Pennsylvania wants to wrap up its state budget by June 30 so they can go to Cancun or wherever, so Penn Environment helps you tell your Pennsylvania legislature not to pass a budget without an impact fee for gas drillers. Since "we're broke," the same corporations who are, as we speak, throwing billions of dollars into expanding their activities in Pennsylvania can pay what gas drillers pay in every other big gas-drilling state in America. Even though Tom Corbett has vowed to veto any budget containing an impact fee therein. Even though Tom Corbett thinks an impact fee is "un-American" despite the fee's majority support among Pennsylvanians. What a terrible human being. Who can, like anyone else, redeem himself by doing the right thing.

Finally, over 70 Democratic lawmakers signed a letter defending the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, including some names you'd expect (Dan Boren, Henry Cuellar) as well as some names you wouldn't (Raúl Grijalva? Peter Welch?). It gets better: almost all of these 70-plus lawmakers got campaign contributions from AT&T. In other words, what Chief Justice Roberts calls "free speech" looks, to the unjaundiced eye, suspiciously like bribery. The rest of the universe also knows that the merger will kill jobs, kill competition, jack up prices, and destroy net neutrality, so Free Press helps you tell your Rep these things, and tell them to take their name off the letter shilling for the AT&T merger.