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

Funding includes $8.4 billion allocated to Project Bioshield, created in 2004, which purchases vaccines for use following an attack involving smallpox, anthrax, and other weaponized pathogens. Meanwhile, critical resources are being diverted away from public health initiatives designed to protect Americans against natural outbreaks of serious viruses. The result has been failures to fully respond to life-threatening pandemics, such as the 2009 swine flu.   read more

In January 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued a memorandum stating that officials could collect calling records of phone company customers without first obtaining a subpoena or any other authorization from a judge. Neither the FBI nor the OLC released a copy of the memo, whose existence only came to light after the Justice Department’s inspector general issued a report in 2010 discussing its legal ramifications.   read more

As part of the $1.6 billion settlement Toyota initially reached with members of the class action lawsuit, more than $100 million in unclaimed funds was going to help a research and education fund focused on driver error. Clarence Ditlow of The Center for Auto Safety objected to this provision, saying it would strengthen Toyota’s original contention that drivers were to blame for the accidents, not the cars’ electronic control systems.   read more

Some the highlights from 2013 included the $23 billion deal between H. J. Heinz and 3G Capital, and Berkshire Hathaway/General Electric selling the remainder of NBCUniversal to Comcast for $16.7 billion. Some of Wall Street’s biggest banks helped advise these deals, earning them billion- dollar paydays. Goldman Sachs made $1.5 billion and JPMorgan Chase $1.3 billion in fees for their advisory work on 395 and 295 deals respectively.   read more

These two scandals and others have drawn attention to the fact that no uniform standards or regulations for forensic labs exist in the United States. Labs are accredited, but by only one organization: the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board (ASCLD/LAB). Accreditation is good for five years, and is supposed to include yearly, planned inspections.   read more

Sanders asked Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, whether it “has spied, or is…currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials.” It would seem that if the NSA had never snooped on Capitol Hill, the agency would have simply assured Sanders that no such surveillance ever had, or is, taking place.   read more

Lockheed Martin, manufacturer of the F-35, claims the country is really getting a bargain by purchasing the plane for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. Overall, the per-plane cost will be only $85 million by 2019, the company argues. An assessment by TIME magazine showed the average F-35 will cost nearly $220 million. Another review, by the Project on Government Oversight, an independent watchdog organization, found that the “cheapest” F-35 will be $181 million.   read more

Proponents thought California voters would approve a 2012 ballot initiative mandating GMO labeling. Six weeks before Election Day, polls showed pro-labelers outnumbering anti-labelers 67% to 22%. But the proposition’s strong level of popular support eroded by Election Day, a victim of a $46 million opposition campaign funded by the likes of DuPont, Monsanto, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft Foods and others. Backers of the initiative were only able to raise $9 million.   read more

Judge Scriven concluded that the state had it all wrong: “In sum, there simply is no competent evidence offered on this record of the sort of pervasive drug problem the State envisioned in the promulgation of this statute.” Going even further, Scriven wrote that if even Florida had been right and the poor actually did have a higher rate of drug use, placing them in a class of people denied constitutional rights would be dangerous.   read more

SFPD unveiled a modified selection process called “banding” for use after the first eleven vacancies were filled. Banding treats exam scores that fall within a particular range or “band” as equivalent, regardless of their exact order. Buckley and Hofmann allege that SFPD decided to use banding because it “felt a need to promote more blacks and Asians to Captain.”   read more

While Medicare offered a single, uniform plan based on the sole eligibility criterion of age, the Obamacare exchanges feature thousands of insurance company plans (each with its own premiums, co-pays, etc.) and a system of premium subsidies based on verifying income, family size and immigration status. As result, Himmelstein and Woolhandler contend, Obamacare overhead costs are expected to run closer to the 13% average of private insurers than to the 2% average achieved by Medicare.   read more

Signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and modified since, Executive Order 12,333 covers government surveillance of Americans’ international communications—but the government’s interpretation of it is secret. the ACLU argues that there is no outside supervision of EO 12,333 surveillance, which is outside the jurisdiction of the FISA Court and is “not meaningfully overseen” by Congress.   read more

DOJ proposes to clarify that the statute covers “persons who are found incompetent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, lack of mental responsibility, or insanity, and that the term includes persons found guilty but mentally ill.” The rule would also “clarify that the statutory term ‘committed to a mental institution’ applies to involuntary inpatient or outpatient treatment.”   read more

The haphazard efforts have undermined counterterrorism aims, and perhaps more importantly, compromised the constitutional rights of Americans. “Many police departments and fusion centers have reported on constitutionally protected activities such as photography and political speech,” Michael Price wrote at Salon. Officers in California often report on “suspicious” activities that amount to little more than standing around at bus or train stations, or talking at length on public phones.   read more

A career Foreign Service Officer who has spent the bulk of his career fighting the so-called “war on drugs” is set to be the next ambassador to the Caribbean island nation of Jamaica, home to more than 29,000 Rastafarians, who regard the smoking of marijuana a holy sacrament. On February 29, 2004, it was Moreno who accompanied Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the airport when he was forced out of office in a military coup.   read more

For two decades, the Educational Credit Management Corporation (ECMC) has received millions of taxpayer dollars from the U.S. Department of Education to hound former students into paying their student loans—even when they’ve already paid off their debt or run into financial troubles stemming from serious health problems. ECMC’s egregious behavior has been particularly evident in trying to stop student loan holders from gaining bankruptcy protection.   read more