Late last week, the Saudi-led coalition bombed a school bus in Yemen, killing upwards of 29 children. And our own Defense Department can't say whether the coalition used U.S.-supplied munitions to do the deed, or if we refueled the planes that dropped the bombs, because CENTCOM doesn't track these planes. I have to say that seems awfully convenient. And for decades Congress has let Presidents do pretty much what they like overseas, and even now is mulling a bill that would abdicate even more of their Constitutional responsibility to declare war. And if you thought this President would "be different" and "put America first" and "be laser-focused on fighting al-Qaeda and ISIS," recall that the Houthi rebels Saudi Arabia keeps fighting are some of the finest fighters against al-Qaeda on Earth. Peace Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to end American support for this undeclared and unconstitutional war that has put over two-thirds of Yemen's people in need of immediate humanitarian aid.
Meanwhile, you know all about the nefarious "cost-benefit analysis" that right-wingers constantly use to say regulations are "too costly" for businesses? Well, our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) is now proposing to make their cost-benefit analyses even worse, by forcing the EPA to consider the "harm" its regulations might do to corporate profits before considering the health benefits of its regulations. Scott Pruitt may be gone, but this particular proposal, somehow entitled "Increasing Consistency and Transparency in Considering Costs and Benefits in Rulemaking Process," surely comes from his gnarled hand. One can only hope that this particular Administration initiative, like so many of their pro-pollution initiatives, will die an ignominious death before a federal judge, but in the meantime, Public Citizen helps you tell the EPA to reject its plan to put polluters before people, and mammon before life.
Finally, the Project on Government Oversight helps you tell our government to do a considerably better job protecting whistleblowers who expose wrongdoing at the Veterans Administration. We can't reasonably blame this state of affairs on our most recent President, but on his predecessor, Barack Obama, who seemed to have a visceral hatred of whistleblowers across our government, including VA whistleblowers. But hatred of whistleblowers is a bit hard to understand on the face of it when you consider that a whistleblower's complaint will either be proven in a court of law or it won't; you may be tempted, as I am, to consider that our government must hate whistleblowers because our government can't win the argument on the merits. But we the people have an absolute, inviolate right to stop our government from screwing us over, and whistleblowers are often our only way of knowing our government's doing that. So, as civilized people, we protect whistleblowers with laws.
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