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

Among the many contracts in the works are 36 Lockheed Martin F-16IQ Block 52 fighter jets, 25 Bell attack helicopters armed with Lockheed Martin laser-guided AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, 140 upgraded Abrams main battle tanks built by General Dynamics Land Systems and 160 Guardian armored security vehicles manufactured by Textron Marine and Land Systems.   read more

The governments of Turkey and Iraq don’t get along so well, but that hasn’t stopped Turkish goods and businesses from being invited into the war-torn country. Over the past 10 years, Turkey’s goods and services to Iraq have ballooned by more than 25% a year. In 2012, the total value of the exports reached $10.8 billion. Iraq is now the second biggest importer of Turkish goods (behind Germany). Turkish construction companies are also flourishing in Iraq.   read more

Discretionary spending is that portion of the federal budget that has to be approved by Congress, as opposed to mandatory spending, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on the national debt. Historically, half of discretionary goes to the military and half goes to such non-military programs as government operations, law enforcement, education, transportation, national parks, research, and welfare assistance.   read more

According to the report, “those born in 1943–51 are wealthier than those born in 1934–42, who are wealthier than those born in 1925–33. This pattern does not hold for the younger among us. People born starting in 1952 no longer find their wealth above the prior cohort.”   read more

NSLs allow the government to demand—without a warrant—that Internet service providers, libraries, banks, etc., hand over people’s confidential records, such as profile information, books checked out, phone numbers dialed, websites visited, and more. They are prone to abuse because they include an indefinite gag order barring the recipients from disclosing to anyone that they have even received an NSL.   read more

“Given these official acknowledgments that the United States has participated in drone strikes, it is neither logical nor plausible for the CIA to maintain that it would reveal anything not already in the public domain to say that the agency ‘at least has an intelligence interest’ in such strikes,” wrote Garland.   read more

Initiated under the George W. Bush administration and expanded during the Obama years, S-Comm checks the fingerprints of arrestees at local jails against FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) databases for immigration problems. Since 2008, S-Comm has identified more than 918,000 possible problem cases—but has also ensnared citizens, as well as immigrants whose infractions are minor.   read more

Although the Arkansas bill bans abortion after external detection of a pulse via abdominal ultrasound, which is generally possible at about 12 weeks of gestation, the North Dakota measure bans abortion after a pulse is “detectable” using “standard medical practice,” which could include intrusive transvaginal ultrasound, a procedure capable of detecting a pulse as early as 6 weeks of gestation.   read more

In fact, the most important restriction on the new gTLDs appears to be their $185,000 “evaluation fee,” which is far out of reach for all but wealthy individuals and large corporations. Online retail giant Amazon (2012 sales: $61 billion) for example, made bids for more than 60 domains, including .amazon, .app, .author, .book, .cloud, .fire, .imdb, .map, and .read.   read more

The problem isn’t a labor shortage―not with unemployment still well above 7%. “In order to induce domestic workers to supply their labor to farm jobs, agricultural wages must rise apace with nonagricultural wages.” As the growing season approaches and farm labor problems become more acute, growers may be left with only a few choices that they haven’t already tried―like a living wage and decent working conditions.   read more

at least 116,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,800 coalition troops died between the invasion in March 2003 and the U.S. withdrawal in December 2011. The civilian fatalities included those killed in the fighting and others who became ill as a result of nation’s crippled infrastructure (water, sanitation, electricity). Iraqi civilians area still dying if war-related causes. According to IraqBodyCount.org, that included 345 in January 2013.   read more

Many of the “bad neighbors” are concentrated in India, Vietnam and Brazil. In fact, one ISP, BSNL in India, accounted for 7.4% of all spamming addresses in the world. But then there’s Spectranet in Nigeria, labeled the Internet’s most crime-ridden network because 62.5% of its addresses were found to distribute spam.   read more

Another Budget Committee member, Roger Williams (R-Texas), said, “Everybody in America has to balance their family’s budget or their business’ budget, not every ten years, not even every single year, but every single day.” Williams may balance his own debt every day, but he and his car dealership still owe $2.5 million of business loans and lines of credit.   read more

Leaving government after the 2000 election, Burwell was immediately hired by the Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation to work as its chief operating officer and executive director, posts she held from January 2001 until a reorganization in 2006, when she became president of Global Development. Passed over for the CEO position when it became available in 2008, Burwell left the Gates Foundation in late 2011 to become president of the Wal-Mart Foundation, which she led starting in January 2012.   read more

On Friday prison spokesman Navy Capt. Robert Durand denied that the hunger strike was widespread, but did acknowledge that 14 prisoners were “hunger strikers” and that at least five are being force fed through tubes. The hunger strike began on February 6 after guards confiscated detainees’ letters, photographs and legal mail, during which copies of the Koran were roughly handled during searches.   read more

Known as the “Democracy is for People Amendment,” the new law would bar all corporate entities from spending their general treasury funds in elections. It would do this by codifying in law that the right to vote belongs solely to people. Sanders and Deutch admit that getting the amendment adopted will not be easy. Such a change would require the House and Senate each to approve it by a two-thirds vote, and it would have to be ratified by three-fourths of the states.   read more