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

The Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act was first introduced last year by supporters who contend federal law does not allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or other U.S. agencies to quickly provide help whenever a mass killing is taking place. But the proposed legislation is currently bottled up in the Senate, after a senator used the upper chamber’s rules to place a “hold” on it. The same rules allow the senator to keep his or her identity from being revealed.   read more

The Obama administration claims the plaintiffs, who are relatives of the deceased, have no legal ground to sue the government for the attacks. Federal lawyers also have threatened to invoke the State Secrets Privilege, which allows the government to seek dismissal of a suit if it could expose national security secrets.   read more

A more extreme example of the unending nature of sunset clauses is the one relating to the creation of the U.S. Parole Commission, a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Justice that decides parole cases involving certain federal and District of Columbia (DC) prisoners. It was supposed to cease to exist in 1992, but its life has been extended five times since then, most recently in 2011. It is now due to dissolve in November 2013.   read more

According to the application, Crossroads planned to spend half its efforts on “public education,” 30% on “activity to influence legislation and policymaking” and 20% on “research,” including sponsoring “in-depth policy research on significant issues.” In fact, Crossroads spent more than $70 million from anonymous supporters on the 2012 election.   read more

“Changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth. The reduction in the top statutory tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie.…However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be correlated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution."   read more

Created in 1962 as part of the Executive Office of the President, the USTR functions as the president’s lead negotiator on all international trade issues. The agency has seen its score decline by more than half—from 74.2 to 32.7—since 2009, when former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk took the helm from Susan Schwab.   read more

Under broad new powers authorized by Attorney General Eric Holder, since March federal counterterrorism officials have been able to collect information on every American citizen, regardless of whether they are suspected of doing anything wrong. The Obama administration quietly authorized the controversial plan that allows the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to collect data on U.S. citizens, even if there is no reason to suspect them.   read more

Driven by an ever-escalating “war on drugs,” the number of federal prisoners incarcerated in the United States has increased by ten times in just 30 years—27 times faster than the rate of population growth. As a result, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is operating at 39% above capacity, creating dangerous overcrowding for guards and prisoners.   read more

Almost half of the 700,000 service members deployed for the gulf war have filed disability claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and more than 85% of these have been granted benefits. According to a 2008 VA report, about 25% to 32% of Gulf War veterans suffer from “Gulf War syndrome,” a medically recognized condition whose symptoms include chronic pain, memory loss, persistent fatigue and diarrhea.   read more

The abuse of the law should not come as a surprise. At the time that the JOBS Act passed through Congress, Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan warned, “We are about to embark upon the most sweeping deregulatory effort and assault on investor protection in decades.…It will allow vast new opportunities for fraud and abuse in capital markets.”   read more

At the top 500 companies in the U.S., women this year accounted for about 14% of executive officer positions and 16.6% of board seats, according to the research organization Catalyst. Catalyst also found that 25% of all Fortune 500 companies had no women executive officers, and 10% had no women directors on their boards.   read more

Car salesman Khaled el-Masri, 49, was abducted on December 31, 2003, by Macedonian authorities after a CIA analyst confused him with an al-Qaeda operative possessing a similar name. He was turned over to the CIA and “severely beaten, sodomized, shackled and hooded,” according to the court’s ruling. Masri was transferred to Afghanistan, where he spent more than four months in prison before the CIA agents realized their mistake.   read more

Broadway has not given up. Col. Jeffrey Sanborn, the garrison commander at Ft. Bragg, has agreed to meet with her soon to address the situation. Given that at least one military spouses club—the Goodfellow Combines Spouses’ Club at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas,—already welcomes gay spouses, the question is whether Col. Sanborn will order club President Mary Ring to cease discriminating against gay spouses.   read more

Obama now has 120 days to submit a list of Russian officials his administration deems guilty of human rights violations. However, a clause in the new law allows the president to keep the names secret by invoking “the national security interests of the United States.”   read more

Television commercials must now air at the same volume level as TV programs, under a new federal law that’s finally gone into effect. Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California), who first introduced the bill in 2008, told the media this week that the change “has been a top consumer complaint for decades. I never dreamed that this would strike the chord that it did with the American public.”   read more

Jack McCullough, 73, was convicted of kidnapping and murdering seven-year-old Maria Ridulph in Sycamore, Illinois. She went missing on December 3, 1957, and her body was found in a field five months later. The long unsolved crime haunted the small town, where residents compared the impact of Ridulph’s death to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.   read more