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

A complex catastrophe is defined as: “Any natural or man-made incident, including cyberspace attack, power grid failure, and terrorism, which results in cascading failures of multiple, interdependent, critical, life-sustaining infrastructure sectors and causes extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage or disruption severely affecting the population, environment, economy, public health, national morale, response efforts, and/or government functions.”   read more

Retired Air Force General Richard B. Myers told The Washington Post that deporting veterans “is not fair, and it’s not appropriate for who we are as a people.” “One thing America has always done is revere its veterans,” he said. “To say to them, ‘You swore to support and defend the Constitution and put your life on the line for the rest of us. But you’re not a citizen. So, too bad. You’re gone.’ I just think that’s not us.”   read more

Davis recommends shrinking the general officer corps. He notes that in 1945, at the end of World War II, 2,000 general and flag officers led a force of about 12 million. Today, although there are only 1.4 million U.S. troops, there are 900 generals and admirals.   read more

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reported 1,130 people appeared on the list of citizenship renunciations during the second quarter of this year. That’s more than the previous high of 679 in the first quarter—and more than were reported for all of last year. Americans are giving up their citizenship or permanent-resident status in response to the federal government going after Americans who stash assets overseas to avoid paying the IRS.   read more

In Barnhart, Texas, residents turn on their taps and get nothing, a product of shale gas fracking operations that have drained water from underground wells. In the nearby county of Crockett, fracking uses up to 25% of the water, according to the groundwater conservation district.   read more

Determined to not repeat the embarrassing Edward Snowden affair, the National Security Agency (NSA) is eliminating 90% of its system administrators and replacing them with machines. Snowden was a contract employee and system administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton who used his top-secret security access to NSA computers and databases to divulge classified operations about domestic snooping on Americans.   read more

Banks are so willing to pony up sizeable contributions that House leaders over the past three decades have kept adding seats to the Financial Services Committee, expanding it from 44 members in 1980 to 61 members today. Both parties like to put newly elected members of Congress on the committee because they are considered more vulnerable in their reelection battles and need more campaign funds.   read more

The basic thrust of Obama’s position is that the snooping is constitutional because “Supreme Court precedent” says that callers “lack any reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment in the metadata records generated by their telephone calls.” None of the cases cited, however, dealt with anything like the NSA’s indiscriminate bulk collection of records.   read more

“The Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court,” Judge Carney wrote. But the Ninth Court of Appeals said that wasn’t true and reversed his ruling. You can, apparently lie to a judge if later on you admit you lied. The FBI had initially released eight heavily-redacted pages of information in response to the lawsuit brought against them and said that was all there was. But eventually they coughed up another 100 pages of equally heavily-redacted documents.   read more

The courts rejected efforts to assign liability according to company market shares, out of fear that this approach “risks exposing these defendants to liability greater than their responsibility and may allow the actual wrongdoer to escape liability entirely,” as the Missouri Supreme Court put it in 2007. That court, apparently, thought that letting all the wrongdoers escape liability entirely was a better alternative, and most other courts have agreed.   read more

By reducing the case to whether or not O’Connor had been “hired,” the Court also reduced the entire employment relationship to a question of money: “Where no financial benefit is obtained by the purported employee from the employer, no ‘plausible’ employment relationship of any sort can be said to exist.” The Court did not explain why the promised educational benefits of the internship were not sufficient to serve as O’Connor’s remuneration.   read more

“There’s no reason why NSA needed to have its own database containing the phone records of millions of innocent Americans in order to get the information related to Moalin,” said Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colorado), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who has been critical of the spying. “It could have just as easily gone directly to the phone companies with an individualized court order.”   read more

A group of legal and medical professionals reviewed 451 GRAS notifications that were submitted to the FDA between 1997 and 2012. Out of these 451, 22.4% were made by an employee of an additive manufacturer and 13.3% by an employee of a consulting firm selected by the manufacturer—meaning 35% were determined by individuals who may have had a conflict of interest.   read more

Until last week, Lavabit, which was used by NSA whistleblower Edward J. Snowden, and Silent Circle, a fast-growing startup, provided encrypted email services for those who wanted extra privacy. Based on the carefully worded statements of company owner Ladar Levison, Lavabit likely received a secret search order relating to Snowden and is choosing to shut down to avoid being “complicit in crimes against the American people.”   read more

A combination of economic, educational and cultural factors were cited by the Pew Research Center to explain the rising trend of young adults not living on their own. For one thing, young people are having a tougher time finding jobs. In 2012, 63% of 18- to 31-year-olds were employed, down from the 70% in 2007. Forty-five percent of unemployed Millennials were living with parents, versus 29% of those with jobs.   read more

Dr. Katherine O’Regan is an associate professor of Public Policy and director of the Public and Nonprofit Management and Analysis Program at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. O’Regan’s primary research interests are to study the intersection of poverty and space—the conditions and fortunes of poor neighborhoods and those who live in them.   read more