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

Government inspectors reported unsafe and unsanitary conditions at the prison, including prisoners having to use plastic bags for defecation and cups for urination. The inspectors also reported padlocked fire exits, likely falsification of food service records and a failure to monitor “pill call” when prisoners receive medications. The prison has experienced a 20% turnover among staff and a 21% increase in violent attacks since CCA took over.   read more

Americans have no Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures if they happen to be within 100 miles of the border, according to the “Executive Summary” of a still-secret report by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The entire populations of Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, DC, and Michigan—live in this “Constitution free” zone.   read more

U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), who represents the El Paso area in Congress, bolstered Napolitano’s remarks. “The fact is, the border has never been more secure—whether measured in the $18 billion spent annually on border security, the 22,000 boots on the ground, the record number of criminal deportations in the past four years, or the record-low immigrant apprehensions this past year,” O’Rourke said.   read more

If it weren’t a religious institution, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles might be in a heap of legal trouble for taking $115 million from a cemetery maintenance account to pay clergy sex abuse settlements. The money represented 88% of the perpetual care fund when the church tapped it in 2007 after signing over $660 million to victims of priest molestation.   read more

The U.S. “War on Terror,” specifically the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have exacted a frightening toll on American military personnel the past eleven years. More than 50,000 Americans have been wounded in action and 6,656 have died. More than 1,700 troops have lost one or more limbs, almost 130,000 have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and more than 253,000 have experienced some form of traumatic brain injury (TBI).   read more

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) last week claimed that U.S. drone strikes were causing less than 10 civilian casualties a year worldwide. That claim would seem to clash with reports from more than one source indicating that civilian deaths from drones have averaged in the double digits for years, up through 2012.   read more

White returned to Debevoise, specializing in white collar criminal defense and essentially defending the same sort of people from the same sorts of charges as she had been prosecuting the previous decade. Her defense work for several highly placed Wall Street insiders accused of fraud and similar wrongdoing related to the Wall Street meltdown of 2008, like Bank of America’s Ken Lewis and Morgan Stanley’s John Mack, has led many to wonder whether she will coddle white collar criminals.   read more

A Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan survey of consumers revealed an unusual divergence of financial change among different income groups in January, with 32% of those with household incomes of less than $75,000 a year reporting that their income had dropped, compared with 23% of those with incomes of more than $75,000. Only 13% of lower-income households reported an increase income, whereas 38% of upper-income households did so.   read more

Thousands of beds sit empty in Texas state prisons, while the state pays $123 million a year to lease beds from private prisons, including Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the biggest of the private prison operators. Specifically, there are as many as 10,000 empty beds in Texas’s 111 state prisons, and hundreds of empty slots at the state’s six detention centers for teens, according to Texas state Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire (D-Houston).   read more

Despite several years’ worth of positive progress reports and more than $1 billion, the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced they are abandoning their attempt to create a unified, shared electronic health-records system for service members and veterans. Now, DoD and VA say merging the existing systems presents a faster, cheaper path toward eventual integration of medical records.   read more

Over a four-year period (2006-2009), the number of dental-related ER visits increased 16%, rising from 874,000 to 936,432 visits. In 2009 nearly 13,000 hospital inpatient stays were related to dental problems. Dental abscess was the principal diagnosis for 63% of the inpatient stays, while 42% of ER visits were related to cavities.   read more

The lawmakers cited a 2012 Mitsubishi document, entitled “Root Cause Analysis Report for Tube Wear Identified in the Unit 2 and Unit 3 Steam Generators of San Onofre Generating Station,” which, they maintain, shows the two companies knew about the problems and “rejected enhanced safety modifications” to avoid “triggering a more rigorous license amendment and safety review process.”   read more

GOP Representative Rob Bacon and eight other Republicans introduced legislation that would amend the definition of a person in murder cases to “an individual human being, without regard to age of development, from the moment of conception, when a zygote is formed, until natural death.” The term “zygote” refers to a cell that is created when a sperm fertilizes an egg.   read more

Freshman Representative Raul Ruiz (D-California) has the distinction of owing the most, between $115,001 and $300,000. The son of migrant farmworkers, Ruiz graduated from Harvard Medical School. Four other House members also owe at least $100,000: Republicans James Bridenstine of Oklahoma, John Carter of Texas and Tom Rooney of Florida, and Democrat Grace Meng of New York.   read more

The research also revealed that Florida had the nation’s longest lines (45 minutes), followed by the District of Columbia (33.8), Maryland (28.8), South Carolina (24.8) and Virginia (23.6). In Vermont, on the other hand, the average wait was just two minutes, and in Alaska and Maine 3.7 minutes. In addition, a study by Ohio State University professor Theodore Allen and The Orlando Sentinel concluded that more than 200,000 voters in Florida “gave up in frustration” without voting.   read more

Legislation introduced by Senator Jason Rapert would prevent an abortion if a heartbeat can be detected using an abdominal ultrasound. Originally, Rapert wanted to ban the procedure after six weeks, but then changed it to 10-12 weeks. The proposal includes exemptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. Even with the amendment, the plan would still be the strictest abortion ban in the U.S.   read more