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

Long characterized as merely a collector of intelligence to protect the United States, the National Security Agency (NSA) has played a key role in the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) drone program to assassinate overseas targets.   read more

Wesner has donated about $300,000 to Democratic candidates and organizations, including more than $148,000 to the Democratic National Committee. Not only did she donate $9,600 to Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, Wesner also acted as a campaign bundler, raising more than $500,000 for each of Obama’s presidential runs. In early 2008 she founded a political action committee called Blue Texas that spent nearly $1 million on legislative races that year.   read more

At the Vicksburg Convalescent Center in Mississippi, employee Lee Ray Martin billed $101,000 in personal expenses to the trust accounts of 83 residents. She pleaded guilty in August to multiple counts of exploitation of vulnerable adults. Martin and others managed to go so far with their crimes because of lax oversight by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which regulates nearly all of the nation’s 16,000 nursing homes.   read more

Baghdad was labeled the epicenter of violent deaths during the war. Coalition forces were blamed for 35% of the killings, followed by militias at 32%. However coalition forces were responsible for most of the deaths of women. According to the report, “Gunshots were reported to cause 63% of violent deaths; car bombs, 12%; and other explosions, 9%.”   read more

The government relied upon national security claims to suppress evidence and convict Basaaly Moalin in February, along with three other Somali immigrants, of funneling $8,500 to al-Shabaab in 2007 and 2008. That evidence, it turned out, was obtained via the type of mass phone surveillance of U.S. citizens that former NSA contractor Eric Snowden made known after the trial, and which the government acknowledged in July.   read more

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the city on behalf of several plaintiffs, including Marlene Baldwin, a 77-year-old disabled Hopi woman who was arrested for panhandling. Baldwin was arrested in February and later released after begging for $1.25 for bus fare from an undercover police officer. Political support for the law has waned. In late September, the Flagstaff City Council voted unanimously to stop enforcing the statute, and agreed to settle the lawsuit.   read more

Mark B. Childress has served as an assistant to President Barack Obama and deputy chief of staff for planning at the White House since 2012. From 2011 to 2012, he served as senior counselor for Access to Justice at the Department of Justice, before moving on to his White House job. In that job, he received plaudits for guiding White House strategy on several politically difficult issues, including the exemption for some religious institutions from the ACA contraception mandate.   read more

Buried within the bill that restored funding to Washington and averted a default on the U.S. debt was $2.9 billion for the Olmsted Lock and Dam project, which would impact Illinois, Tennessee and Kentucky. McConnell had championed funding for the dam in his home state in previous years. The original allotment for the project—which is to be constructed on the Ohio River by URS Corporation—was $775 million.   read more

The nation’s second largest defense contractor has been caught four times in the last five years overcharging the government for military equipment or parts. In the latest discovery, Boeing wrongly charged the Department of Defense $16 million by billing for new helicopters parts, but only delivering used ones.   read more

“Much like a private homeowner is able to tell his guests whether they can bring a gun into his yard, FedEx should have the right to decide what it will and will not allow on its private property,” Mark Hogan, vice president of U.S. security for FedEx Express told Tennessee lawmakers last year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Gun-rights advocates claim the laws increase worker safety, and say that workers have a right to protect themselves during their commutes.   read more

An egregious example involved Stephen Hadley, who was often identified during his television appearances as George W. Bush’s national security advisor while calling for the Obama administration to hit Syria. What wasn’t mentioned was Hadley’s place on the board of directors of Raytheon Company, or that he owns stock in the firm. Why is this important? Raytheon manufactures the Tomahawk cruise missile, which likely would have been the weapon used to conduct strikes on Syria.   read more

In Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War, his memoir of the 2009 battle that made him famous, Meyer claimed insurgents swarmed his vehicle, leading to his fighting off the attackers with both a rifle and a machine gun. But a McClatchy investigation has uncovered videos from an Army medevac helicopter that showed no Taliban in the area where Meyer was at the time of the attack.   read more

“By the end of December 2001, it became evident that the Americans were serious about getting rid of me,” he stated. “People were telling me, ‘They want your head.’” He said that Saddam Hussein’s government indicated two years before the U.S. invasion that Iraq was interested in joining the Chemical Weapons Convention, which OPCW oversees. That move would have required Iraq to allow inspectors to visit and verify that no such munitions existed.   read more

More than half of the families of fast-food workers “are enrolled in one or more public programs, compared to 25 percent of the workforce as a whole,” according to the academics’ report. It also noted that 26% of the workers are parents, and 42% are older than 18. McDonald’s employees, who number 700,000 in the U.S., collected $1.2 billion in public assistance, the most of any fast-food chain.   read more

The NSA pulls in about 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services, as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based email accounts, which also provide the agency with the first few lines of a message. This data collection has not been authorized by the U.S. Congress or by the FISA Court that is supposed to oversee the NSA’s activities. Therefore, in order to maneuver around the law, the NSA intercepts the data from non-U.S. telecommunications companies and foreign intelligence services   read more

“NGI shall return the incorrect candidate a maximum of 20% of the time, as a result of facial recognition search in support of photo investigation services,” the FBI report said. NGI was a little more accurate when the search involved a “repository” of data, bumping the success rate up from 80% to 85%. The system’s iris-scan technology was found to be 98% accurate as long as the repository was in play, otherwise the rate dropped to 90%.   read more