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

Only 52% of middle-income households had savings in a retirement account in 2010, but their savings came to only 8.12% of total savings in retirement accounts. In contrast, 88% of the households in the top income-fifth had retirement accounts, which came to 72% of total retirement savings. White households have more than six times as much saved in retirement accounts as Hispanic and black households, which is even larger than differences in participation.   read more

The order, signed by Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, specifically covers cases concerning the legal interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to justify its indiscriminate collection of domestic telephone metadata. Metadata includes phone numbers of both parties involved in calls, the international mobile subscriber identity number for mobile callers, calling card numbers used in the call, and the time and duration of the calls.   read more

“The total number of extremists who have been indicted has declined from 33 in 2010 to six to date in 2013, domestic terrorist incidents are relatively rare, and the character of the perpetrators has shifted from a mix of plots conducted by groups of extremists or individuals to those entirely conducted by individuals or pairs.”   read more

Lying to the world about your drug use won’t make you liable in court, but lying to your insurance company about it sure will. That’s the bottom line of two recent decisions in two legal cases filed against disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, who admitted earlier this year to extensive doping during his career—something he had aggressively denied for years.   read more

Veronica Valdez, who had worked at the hospital for 13 years, was on the operating table for finger surgery. While she was out cold, Yang cut up medication labels, colored them and stuck them on her face to create teardrops on her cheek and a mustache. Everyone who was conscious had a good laugh.   read more

If convicted, the company faces a fine of $25,000 a day per violation. The leak went on for about 65 days, beginning on November 10, 2010. If Exxon ended up having to pay the full amount for eight violations, it would have to dole out approximately $13 million…less than the annual compensation for XTO CEO Keith A. Hutton.   read more

“He and his fellow troops were constantly under attack by insurgent extremists whose word for the American soldiers was ‘infidel.’ Seeking to reclaim or reappropriate this term as a source of American pride and patriotism, Sergeant Matwyuk and other soldiers came to embrace their identity as ‘infidels.’ He and other American veterans proudly refer to themselves as ‘infidels’ as a reminder of the bond they share as survivors of a bloody war in a hostile part of the world.”   read more

In spending $236 million, Freedom Partners finished No. 2 in helping conservative causes, behind only Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which together spent about $300 million. Tax filings by the group revealed it has about 200 donors, each of whom pay at least $100,000 in annual dues. Among the donors are Charles G. and David H. Koch.   read more

San Francisco was forced to spend its own resources (about $500,000) to care for the patients.The city claims “virtually all” of the patients dumped in California required continuing medical care, something the Nevada hospital failed to arrange for. The complaint also notes that “many of these patients were not California residents” at the time they were discharged and put on buses.   read more

Caroline Kennedy’s financial-disclosure forms, filed as part of her nomination, show her net worth to be between $67 million and $278 million, including family trusts, government bonds, commercial property, and eight Cayman Island partnerships, with a combined value ranging from $542,000 to $1.2 million. She also owns her mother’s 375-acre estate, “Red Gate Farm,” in Aquinnah on Martha's Vineyard.   read more

To draw attention to the problem of illegal poaching, the U.S. government has decided to destroy more than six tons of confiscated ivory that’s been collecting in a federal warehouse northeast of Denver. The move is part of an initiative launched in July by the Obama administration to combat the killing of protected wildlife and end the trafficking of products derived from poaching.   read more

Another fact hard to comprehend is that it is still working and sending back data (which takes about 17 hours to reach earth). Consider this: It stores readings about cosmic rays, ionized gas and magnetic fields on an 8-track tape recorder, and its computers can process only about 8,000 instructions per second. In comparison, a typical smartphone can manage 14 billion instructions a second.   read more

Garcia was brought to the United States from Mexico by his parents when he was an infant. He returned to Mexico with them at age 9 and came back to the U.S. at 17. The 36-year-old put himself through college and Cal Northern School of Law. Garcia was working as a paralegal when he applied to the bar. He passed the examination on his first try in 2009. Garcia applied for admittance to the bar in 2011 and is applying for U.S. citizenship, which could take up to 15 years.   read more

As President Obama’s drug czar, Kerlikowske supported the continued federal crackdown on marijuana. On the other hand, after three years on the job, he admitted to Congress that he had failed to notice the “national crisis” of prescription drug abuse even though more Americans were dying from overdoses of prescription pain killers than from heroin and cocaine combined.   read more

In 2010 alone, 16,651 overdose deaths were attributed to overuse of these painkillers, according to a report this year from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number—a 300% increase from about a decade earlier—amounted to enough opioid painkillers to medicate every American every four hours for a month, claimed the Center.   read more

Israel can pretty much do whatever it likes with the “raw Sigint” (signal intelligence) it gets from the NSA. The raw Sigint includes “unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content,” and possibly more. Also, the NSA does not filter out any of the data before forwarding it, which means Americans’ emails and phone calls could be sent to Israel.   read more