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

Nearly half of the poor—43.9% or 20.4 million Americans—live below one-half of the poverty line, or $9,150 for a family of three. Thus 6.6% of the total population lives in “deep poverty,” including 9.7% of children. Poverty, regardless of its depth, along with the daily stresses that accompany it, is especially harmful to children, especially young ones. Studies have shown that living in poverty impairs the cognitive development of children.   read more

By introducing the exemption for past bad acts, Coffee argues, “the SEC is here acting, not simply as a weak-kneed enforcer, but rather as a generous Board of Pardons, granting immunity to those few persons that it has enjoined or held otherwise accountable within the last decade. If one were seeking to further tarnish an already compromised agency’s reputation and image, this would be the way to do it.”   read more

In a unanimous decision, a New York state appeals court sided with 50 citizens and residents of Israel who sued the Bank of China after they or their families were victimized by terrorist acts committed by Palestine Islamic Jihad and Hamas between 2005 and 2007. The government of China has majority ownership of the bank. The plaintiffs sued the Bank of China in New York alleging it had handled international fund transfers that helped pay for the terrorist actions.   read more

To celebrate the first airmail flight, the Post Office decided to issue a commemorative 24-cent stamp, with a picture of a Curtiss JN-4 biplane, or “Jenny,” the aircraft being used to carry the mail. The Post Office accidentally issued 100 Jenny stamps showing the biplane flying upside down. Printing inspectors and the postal clerk who sold the sheet to a collector missed the error, the clerk later explaining, “How was I to know the thing was upside down? I never saw an airplane before.”   read more

“This case started as one featuring allegations of brazen abuse of authority, violation of the law and corruption of the criminal justice system,” the Judge Englehardt wrote. “Unfortunately though the focus has shifted from the accused to the accusers, it has continued to be about those very issues.”   read more

Instead of paying costly expenses to ship the material to dumps, the Air Force could simply bury it on-site and walk away. There are reportedly seven bases in California that could face similar situations. State regulators rebuffed the Air Force in 2011 when it lobbied hard to classify its McClellan radioactive waste as “naturally occurring” so it could qualify for shipment to Clean Harbors’ Buttonwillow landfill. Instead, it sent 43,000 tons of soil to an Idaho dump.   read more

In a moral transgression that received much less attention than her statements about the Benghazi attack, in September 2012 Rice flew to Addis Ababa and gave a glowing eulogy for Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi that had human rights advocates wincing, at best. Rice has also been an enthusiastic supporter of Rwanda’s dictator, Paul Kagame, who was one of her clients when she worked for Intellibridge.   read more

Kant’s categorical imperative rules out torture, which can never be moral or ethical; in contrast, utilitarian ethics says that torture might be acceptable when its goal is important enough. In rejecting this idea that “the end justifies the means,” Kant urged that human beings are ends in themselves. In contemporary terms, in debating the U.S. use of torture in the years after 2001, Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) is a Kantian, while Vice President Dick Cheney (R) is a utilitarian.   read more

A new study published in the Journal of Patient Safety estimates that between 210,000 and 440,000 patients annually don’t make it out of hospitals because of some kind of preventable harm. This means hospital deaths are now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., behind only heart disease (No. 1) and cancer (No. 2).   read more

The researchers concluded that differences in levels of sanitation, infectious disease and urbanization accounted statistically for about a third of the discrepancy in Alzheimer’s rates between countries. In other words, people need to be exposed to enough bacteria so their immune systems can fully develop and fight off disease, which doesn’t happen in countries obsessed with hand sanitizers and other germ-killing methods.   read more

U.S. military veterans who fought in Vietnam decades ago are entitled today to government-paid disability benefits and health care if they suffer from exposure to Agent Orange, an herbicide widely used during the conflict. But the same coverage is not available to the Vietnamese enduring the same effects from Agent Orange after fighting alongside American soldiers, and who later immigrated to the U.S.   read more

The latest ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo is a State Department Africa specialist who has served as the U.S. Special Representative for Somalia since August 2011. James C. Swan previously served as the number two official at the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa, and he is well acquainted with the situation in war-torn central Africa.   read more

These workers, who assist seniors and disabled with everyday living, have been exempt from federal wage laws since 1974. At that time the government categorized home care aides as doing work similar to babysitting, which was Washington’s way of saying they didn’t deserve the same rights as most other types of employees. But with America’s senior population rapidly growing because of aging Baby Boomers, demand for home health care has increased dramatically.   read more

Obama appeared on Telemundo, a Spanish-language network, claiming it was “not an option” to freeze deportations, estimated at more than 1,000 per day, because to do so “would be ignoring the law in a way that would be very difficult to defend legally.” Immigration reform leaders soundly rejected Obama’s remarks.   read more

On Capitol Hill, which was only 1.5 miles from the Washington Navy Yard slaughter, lawmakers don’t plan to introduce new bills or revive those that failed following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December. Many Democrats say they would like to take another try at adopting tougher gun-control measures. But they add that there’s no point in trying right now because support in Congress hasn’t changed, even after 12 people were gunned down on Monday.   read more

“[Liking] is the Internet equivalent of displaying a political sign in one’s front yard, which the Supreme Court has held is substantive speech,” the three-judge panel wrote in their opinion. The case centered on a Hampton sheriff’s deputy, Daniel Ray Carter, who claimed he was fired for liking the campaign Facebook page of his boss’s opponent.   read more