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

Of the $586,000 in contributions, the largest amount went to the Democratic National Committee, which received more than $245,000 in “dead money.” In second place, the Libertarian Party received $163,200, followed by the Green Party ($96,329), the Obama Victory Fund ($31,203) and the National Committee for Effective Congress ($25,000), a pro-Democrat PAC.   read more

The children are forbidden to utter certain “illegal words”—forever. In court, James Swett, representing Range Resources, made it clear that the gag order applied to the whole family, not just the parents, and that his client intended to enforce the gag order. Jessie Allen, an assistant professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that applying the non-disclosure agreement to kids was “strange” and “over the top.”   read more

Cell phone “information is, by and large, of a highly personal nature: photographs, videos, written and audio messages (text, email and voicemail), contacts, calendar appointments, web search and browsing history, purchases and financial and medical records.” Stahl also wrote: “It is the kind of information one would previously have stored in one’s home,” and accessing that by police has historically involved getting a warrant first.   read more

“One by one, the tools and attitudes of the war on terror, of a world in which the “gloves” are eternally off, have come home,” Van Buren wrote. “The comic strip character Pogo’s classic warning—“We have met the enemy and he is us”—seems ever less like a metaphor. According to the government, increasingly we are now indeed their enemy.”   read more

Up until about a decade ago, the FBI didn’t even bother to keep track what crimes its informants were committing. But the bureau had to change its ways after it was revealed that FBI agents allowed Boston mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger to run his illegal operations in exchange for information about the Mafia.   read more

The U.S. still holds 67 non-Afghan detainees at the facility. The question now is what to do with these individuals, most of whom are from Pakistan and deemed too dangerous to release by the administration. This despite the fact that informal military review boards cleared many of them, the newspaper reported. None of them have been put on trial. Unlike the prisoners at Guantánamo, those at Bagram do not have habeas corpus rights.   read more

Inflating the credit-worthiness of dicey Wall Street financial securities was a winning strategy for the nation’s top ratings agencies before the financial collapse of 2008 put a crimp in their style. But despite multiple multi-billion-dollar lawsuits filed by the federal government and more than a dozen states, Standard & Poor’s is revisiting those discredited practices, according to a study commissioned by the New York Times.   read more

• In 2011, Thomas and Scalia were the main speakers at a fundraiser for the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group with strong ties to Republican politics. • In 2010, both attended secretive political events sponsored by Koch Industries intended “to review strategies for combating the multitude of public policies that threaten to destroy America as we know it,” just months after they voted in the landmark Citizens United case to allow corporate money to flood politics.   read more

The judge cited a friend-of-the-court submission from Senator Durbin about the true meaning of the law—along with a footnote to Strunk & White’s Elements of Style on how to use basic English—to castigate the board for its “blatant act of policymaking that runs counter to Congress’s will.”   read more

Feinstein's proposal defines journalists as those who earn salaries regardless of their qualifications. Thus, under Feinstein’s bill, if Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh does volunteer work for WikiLeaks, he would not be a journalist, but if Fox News pays Sean Hannity to be on TV, he is.   read more

Until recently, chemical and other related industries opposed federal laws governing their products, but have changed their tune since individual states have become more aggressive in overseeing their behavior. Conservative arguments about states’ rights trumping federal authority have morphed into an argument that allowing individual states to set policy preempts the authority of other states by pressuring industries to change on a national scale.   read more

Besides threatening court action, they are seeking legislation at the state and federal level to snuff out the nascent movement, and revving up advertising campaigns to argue their case. However, as David Brodwin of U.S. News and World Report put it, “it's hard to see why bailing out homeowners with a program of this sort is any less an affront to the principles of capitalism than bailing out banks that made bad investments in mortgage backed derivatives.”   read more

Republican legislators in Missouri—and in fourteen other states—want to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, by refusing to set up state health insurance exchanges for their residents, but then regulating the federal exchanges to make them harder for consumers to use. More than 850,000 Missouri residents are uninsured. Many could qualify for coverage through the exchange, if they are able to understand the system and claim their rights.   read more

Several Exxon employees testified during the 2009 trial that MTBE “might render water undrinkable,” and that they informed Exxon managers that it has “low taste and odor thresholds.” A jury found Exxon liable for product liability, failure to warn the public about the dangers of MTBE, trespass, public nuisance and negligence.   read more

The next chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will be an advocate for energy efficiency and renewable sources who angered coal mining interests and electric companies during his tenure as chairman of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission from 2007 to 2011.   read more

Ryan served on the White House staff of First Lady Hillary Clinton as special assistant to the First Lady’s chief of staff from 1994 to 1997 and as deputy director of scheduling from 1997 to 2000. In 2007 and 2008, Ryan was deputy campaign manager for the presidential primary campaign of Joe Biden, who was then serving as U.S. Senator from Delaware. After Biden was nominated to run for vice president, she worked for the general election campaign as well.   read more