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

Kanye West has become the latest celebrity to get into trouble for attending a Central Asian dictator’s lavish celebration. This time the country was Kazakhstan, where West showed up—after getting paid $3 million—to participate in the wedding festivities of Aysultan Nazarbayev, grandson of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the country’s ruler.   read more

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Fresno led an effort with author and former Central Valley resident Tim Z. Hernandez to raise money for an official memorial, complete with the names of those who died. It was unveiled on September 2 at a ceremony attended by more than 500 people, including family members of some of the farmworkers who traveled all the way from Mexico.   read more

The 10 lawmakers supporting the resolution received 83% more campaign contributions on average from defense contractors than the committee members who voted “no.” The top three recipients who voted “yes” were Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) at $176,000; Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) at $127,350; and Timothy Kaine (D-Virginia) at $101,025.   read more

Under the rules, importers would have to ensure that their foreign suppliers comply with FDA safety rules or equivalent local regulations. Industry groups, which the FDA consulted during the drafting process, generally support the rule. Although consumer advocates were cautiously supportive of the new rules, they also worried that the companies were getting too much discretion over whether to require on-site inspections of the sites where food is grown and processed.   read more

For-profit schools use veterans to avoid a federal requirement that no more than 90% of their revenues can come from government sources like Pell grants—but a loophole says that GI Bill benefits don’t count toward the 90% cap. This makes the veterans’ aid more valuable, and the Senate committee report cited constant phone calls by recruiters, pressuring applicants to sign contracts before speaking to a financial adviser.   read more

According to the brief, the NSA domestic spying program undermines one of the key reforms included in FISA: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which is supposed to supervise surveillance activities and which is “empowered…to consider each instance of placing an electronic wiretap.” “In contrast,” say Mondale and Hart, “the NSA’s program…delegates such oversight to the executive, leaving all further inquiries of the databases to the agency involved.”   read more

The full court held that because the text message was not labeled as either “classified” or “sensitive,” MacLean’s disclosure may be protected by the Whistleblower Act if he believed his leak helped expose dangers to public safety. George Randy Taylor, head of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association’s air marshal unit and also a former whistleblower, said MacLean had suffered legal harassment for “raising the B.S. flag on mismanagement.”   read more

Louisiana comes out on top when convictions are measured on a population basis. Calculated that way, the Bayou State is a clear No. 1, at 8.76 convictions per 100,000 people, followed by North Dakota (8.2), South Dakota (7), Kentucky (7), Alaska (6.6), Montana (6.2), Mississippi (5.7), and Alabama (5.6). The states with the lowest rates were South Carolina, Oregon, Washington, New Hampshire, Minnesota and Utah, each with no more than 1.3 convictions per 100,000.   read more

Beale’s fraud began as far back as 2000, while he served as a senior policy adviser in the Office of Air and Radiation making $164,700 a year. He spent a lot of his time over the next 12 years away from his job, telling his superiors that the CIA needed him on clandestine missions. Another colleague of Beale, speaking anonymously to the Post, agreed. “We all actually believed that maybe there was something going on.” Indeed there was.   read more

Medical experts decided to test the effects of gut bacteria. They transferred the bacteria from human twins—one lean, the other obese—into mice. The result: mice with bacteria from fat twins grew fat, and those that received bacteria from lean twins stayed lean. Fischbach said he was “very excited” by the work, and insisted the next step should be to use gut bacteria to treat obesity by transplanting feces from thin people.   read more

Resident attitudes reflect, to some extent, the frustration of living in a rural community that is answerable to a state which is attentive to a much larger urban electorate. But the rural life that compels their desire for independence is also the tie that binds them to the state. “Siskiyou is one of the largest counties with one of the smallest populations,” Mark Lovelace told a local reporter. “It is also full of state roads that they won't be able to maintain.”   read more

Klotz served as assistant vice chief of staff and director of Air Force Staff at USAF Headquarters from August 2007 to August 2009, retiring from the military after a stint as commander of the Air Force Global Strike Command at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, at the time a new organization of 23,000 that assumed responsibility for all U.S. nuclear-capable bombers and land-based missiles under a single chain-of-command, from August 2009 to January 2011.   read more

The most recent news about the National Security Agency (NSA) finds that American analysts teamed up with British counterparts to crack much of the online encryption that’s supposed to shield the privacy of personal data, banking transactions and emails of hundreds of millions of Internet users. Classified documents revealed that the NSA and GCHQ have used supercomputers, “technical trickery,” court orders and other methods to undermine the privacy of everyday communications on the Web.   read more

With flavors like raspberry, peach and watermelon, e-cigarettes are proving an enticing sin for young people who may never have tried traditional cigarettes filled with tobacco. And though e-cigs may be less harmful than their predecessors, they are causing concerns among health officials who worry about the growing number of people smoking the high-tech alternatives.   read more

Civil libertarians envision RFIDs as tracking devices by the authorities to monitor the movements of law-abiding citizens. Privacy advocates worry about it contributing to a future where myriad data sources, public and surreptitious, feed into a central database that can be accessed by unknown parties, marketed everywhere and hacked at will. RFID proponents say the technology can be made safe and secure by using encryption and random number generators.   read more

After reviewing classified materials regarding the U.S. intelligence budget, The Washington Post concluded: “No other nation draws as much scrutiny across so many categories of national security concern.” The “black budget” documents also revealed that the Obama administration has critical intelligence gaps when it comes to knowing what’s going on inside Pakistan, which has received nearly $26 billion in U.S. aid over the past 12 years.   read more