You may have heard that Apple is developing technology that would turn off your smartphone remotely at events where filming is nominally prohibited. Can you say "kill switch," boys and girls? Apple supposedly aims to prevent filming of live concerts, but can we think of anyone else who might not want to be filmed? That's right, Middle Eastern dictators and security forces, whose abuses have been extensively documented by good citizens in the Middle East using smartphones. Think maybe American media figures or politicians also might not want Americans filming them, lest their Macaca Moment get plastered all over the internet? (The 2006 Macaca Moment arrived via analog video, I know, but today it'd more likely arrive via smartphone.) And if you're a band or record company looking to stop people from profiting (such as they do!) from taping your shows, why not hire people to stand in your audience with smartphones and get out the band- or corporation-sanctioned product that way? See? The solution is always to create more jobs. Anyway, Free Press helps you tell Apple to abandon its efforts to create a smartphone "kill switch."

Meanwhile, closer to home, Penn Environment helps you urge the Pennsylvania legislature to renew the Growing Greener program, which helps restore polluted waterways across the state. The program helps fund preservation of farmland, the cleanup of abandoned mines, the restoration of parkland around rivers and streams, the creation of recreational trails, and the upgrading of sewer systems, to name just a few things. These all sound like things that would stimulate the economy, don't they? And they sound like things that protect our most precious natural resource, clean water. We need this program more than ever now that our government lets gas companies use chemicals that set our tap water on fire, but I fear that our state legislators will deep-six the program out of some notion that WE'RE BROKE!!!!!!! WAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!! How many times must I tell these pimps! Always do the right thing by the people you serve. And, er, don't tell us we're "broke" when you refuse to make the income tax more progressive or charge a severance tax on gas drillers, or when you shuttle hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money toward private schools. Excuses, excuses.

Finally, you may know that the U.S. Conference of Mayors has passed a resolution supporting efforts to end our three-plus wars and demanding that the President and Congress "bring these war dollars home to meet vital human needs." The Conference of Mayors apparently hasn't done such a thing since the Vietnam war, and we're now in rather more dire straits, financially, than we were back then. So Roots Action helps you tell your Reps and Senators to heed the U.S. Conference of Mayors' call. It shouldn't be this tough. We went into Iraq and Afghanistan without justifying it and without paying for it; we've drawn down in Iraq somewhat, but just yesterday Mr. Obama told us that he'd only be withdrawing 10,000 troops (or one-tenth) from Afghanistan this year, and would take a full year to withdraw 20,000 more, which puts us back where we started in 2009. And he still maintains he can bomb Libya without authorization from Congress under the War Powers Act. And we're still involved in various shenanigans in Yemen and Pakistan. All this while almost one-fifth of American workers are unemployed or underemployed. Sorry, I guess everything looks simpler to me than it does to a politician or a pundit.