The majority of voters did not vote for Donald Trump for president; the majority of voters did not vote for Republican candidates for the Senate; and fewer than 51% of voters cast their ballots for Republican candidates for the House of Representatives. The Republican Party now controls the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, no matter how that came to be. I believe it is worth bearing in mind that a majority of U.S. citizens did not support the Republican winners.   read more

Kennedy, however, took exception to Florida’s rule, saying it disregarded “established medical practice in two interrelated ways. It takes an IQ score as final and conclusive evidence of a defendant’s intellectual capacity, when experts in the field would consider other evidence. It also relies on a purportedly scientific measurement of the defendant’s abilities, his IQ score, while refusing to recognize that the score is, on its own terms, imprecise.”   read more

An analysis by the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness found each person without a place to live wound up costing $31,000 a year in law enforcement and medical care expenses, such as emergency room services. But if local governments provide permanent housing for these individuals, the cost would amount to only about $10,000 a year per person—a savings of $20,000.   read more

Another 2012 trip was made by Blaine Collison, then EPA’s director of Green Power Partnership, to a Midland, Michigan, meeting of large corporate energy users. Altenex, a Boston-based energy management network, paid $800 for meals and transportation for Collison. Some of Collison’s expenses were also paid by Dow Chemical. Two years later, Collison left the agency and went to work for Altenex to serve as its managing director of network services.   read more

First elected in 1980, Hall was attacked by Ratcliffe and the super PAC Now or Never for being too old. The Missouri-based super PAC spent $100,000 on ads to defeat Hall, who had represented the voters of the Fourth District since Jimmy Carter was in the White House. At least one commercial featured a rocking chair, and the recommendation for Hall’s constituents to bring him home for good.   read more

Job creation overall is back to where it was before the Great Recession. But not all types of jobs have returned, at least not in the numbers that existed prior to the economy tanking. The U.S. lost a bevy of middle-class employment opportunities from 2008 to 2010, particularly construction, teaching and clerical positions, according to the study. Many of these jobs have not returned, thanks to a sluggish housing market and cutbacks in government budgets (which impact public school hiring).   read more

The latest recall came on May 23, when GM officials said 500 redesigned full-size pickups and SUVs (model years 2014 and 2015) need to be brought in to fix a flaw in the airbag system. The week of May 19 alone was a busy one for GM, which issued seven recalls during that span. In total, the carmaker has recalled 13.79 million vehicles in the U.S. since January 1   read more

Ordinarily, GE crops come under federal regulation as long as they contain genetic material from “plant pests”—the beings that the gene manipulation are designed to resist. But Scotts decided to use DNA from other plants in creating the new kind of Kentucky bluegrass, along with other techniques that avoided triggering the USDA to step in and require testing, as well as its approval, before the grass could be sold to consumers.   read more

Last year, Americans holding a college degree made on average 98% more per hour than those who skipped post-secondary education, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington. That gap was the largest ever recorded. But the difference between the college grads and the high school grads has been significant for some time. In the 1980s, it was 64%. By the 1990s, it was up to 85%. And by last decade it had reached 89%.   read more

To date, 154 of the approximately 250 machines owned by TSA have been sold to state and local prisons, including those in Iowa, Virginia and Louisiana, where inmates and their visitors aren’t in a position to complain about privacy rights. TSA won’t say how much of its money has been reclaimed through the sales. But the Los Angeles Times reported that “several law enforcement agencies paid only a fraction of the original cost under a federal surplus program.”   read more

While on one hand the federal government goes after companies employing undocumented immigrants, it doesn’t have a problem using some of these same people to fill jobs in its detention centers. These detainees perform a wide variety of tasks at the detention facilities, from preparing and serving food to cleaning floors. Correction officials claim the work is voluntary. However, many have complained that they were coerced into working during their detentions.   read more

The Department of Energy, which oversees all nuclear weapons facilities and operations, says some of the containers located half a mile underground may have been packaged improperly before being delivered to the WIPP for storage. And by improperly packaged, they mean someone used the “wrong” kitty litter during the process. Mineral-based cat box filler is used to absorb moisture and stabilize materials inside containers of nuclear waste before they’re sealed.   read more

GOP lawmakers, by a vote of 231-192, pushed through an amendment that prevents the Department of Defense from spending money on matters related to climate change, or using funds on alternative sources of energy. The national security implications of climate change include future flooding in areas of key military bases and growing overseas threats created by weather-related famine.   read more

The changes are never publicized or made clear, leaving judges and academics with no choice but to put the old and new versions side-by-side to determine what was altered. Adam Liptak at The New York Times says the edits “have not reversed decisions outright, but they have withdrawn conclusions on significant points of law.” Nevertheless, what the justices are doing amounts to changing the law, with most people being unaware of it.   read more

The CIA refused to release the Volume V draft. The majority opinion stated “that a draft of an agency’s official history is pre-decisional and deliberative, and thus protected under the deliberative process privilege.” Judge Brett Kavanaugh did concede that “there may be no final agency document because a draft died on the vine.” That means the CIA could sit on the document indefinitely as long as it never finalizes the draft report.   read more

Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives claim they have addressed the problems of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) notorious bulk collection of data, made so famous last year by whistleblower Edward Snowden. But the legislation adopted to end this controversial practice contains huge loopholes that could allow the NSA to keep vacuuming up large amounts of Americans’ communications records, all with the blessing of the Obama administration.   read more

Demonstrating they value costly weapons programs—and the jobs they provide back home in their districts—more than making tough economic choices, lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly agreed to adopt a new Pentagon spending plan that rejected multimillion-dollar savings provided by defense officials.   read more