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

Democratic leaders in some counties, including Montgomery and Allegheny, decided to authorize the issuance of poll-ready identification cards through county-run nursing homes and colleges. The move is legal because the voter ID law contains a provision allowing higher education institutions and senior-care centers to provide such cards to anyone who lives in the county, and not just to the people who attend those colleges or reside in those centers.   read more

Since 1954, the IRS has prohibited tax-exempt organizations, such as churches, from publicly supporting campaigns. The IRS enforced the law under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, however since Barack Obama became president, the IRS has stopped enforcement. Oddly, the “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” movement was created in 2008 by the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom to oppose Obama’s candidacy.   read more

15% of black students and 14% of Latino students attend “apartheid schools,” where whites make up less than 1% of enrollment. Half of black students in the Chicago metro, and one-third in New York, attend apartheid schools.   read more

John Littrell, a public defender helping defendant Sergio Santiago Syjuco, wrote that an undercover FBI agent, using the alias Richard Han, spent thousands of taxpayer dollars on prostitutes in the Philippines. Syjuco claims Littrell got the sex workers, many of whom were underage, “for himself and for defendants, and paid up to $1,600 for each group visit to a club called Area 51.   read more

From 1990 to 2008, white women without a high school diploma lost an average of five years off their life span, from 78 to 73. White men with similar education levels lost an average of three years, from 70 to 67. Experts from the University of Illinois at Chicago said several factors may have caused the decline: an increase in prescription drug overdoses; higher rates of smoking among women; rising obesity, and growing numbers of people without health insurance.   read more

According to the lawsuit, filed on behalf of four living Texans who received notices that their voter registration was subject to cancellation because they are “potentially deceased,” Andrade recently told registrars across Texas that “potentially dead” voters must provide “evidence within 30 days that they are alive…[or] they are to be purged from the voter rolls.”   read more

The 2004 law required that DNA be collected from anyone arrested on suspicion of committing a felony and from some convicted of certain misdemeanors. No charges need to be filed. No conviction needs to be obtained. Lily Haskell, one of the people challenging the law, was arrested at an anti-war demonstration. She was released without any charges being filed, but was compelled to give a DNA sample while in custody.   read more

Nearly three months after the U.S. government sued a reluctant JPMorgan Chase & Co. for documents during an investigation of allegations that it had manipulated California energy prices, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is threatening to suspend its energy trading unit from the state market. JPMorgan denied manipulating the market and said it had committed an “inadvertent factual error in papers related to discovery and promptly informed the commission of this mistake.”   read more

What Nixon lacked in affinity for nature, he made up for in practical deal-making that put him in a position to compromise with Democrats. Under his watch, the government created the Environmental Protection Agency and adopted numerous landmark pieces of legislation, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, and the Endangered Species Act.   read more

Consistent with the Obama administration’s policy of focusing deportation policy on those with prior criminal records, in 2011 the U.S. expelled a record 188,000 immigrants with criminal records, 55% of all those returned without a removal order. The majority of these were charged with drug-related offenses, criminal traffic offenses (such as hit-and-run and driving under the influence) and immigration violations.   read more

It is true that prisoners have used dental floss to escape, although it is rare. In 1994, Robert Dale Shepard made an 18-foot rope out of floss and then used it to scale the walls of a West Virginia prison. In 2002, Scott Brimble used dental floss and toothpaste to weaken wire mesh surrounding the exercise yard at Okanogan County Jail in Washington and then pried open enough of an opening to slip through.   read more

Under a controversial plan proposed by President José Mujica, Uruguay would create a state monopoly over the production and sale of marijuana, making it the first government in the world to sell the drug directly to citizens. Supporters say the radical move would reduce drug-related crime, decrease health risks among users and be more effective than the U.S.-touted war on drugs, which is wearing thin in countries other than the United States.   read more

The Department of Defense has lifted a 26-year-old ban on New Zealand warships entering U.S. bases. The prohibition came in response to a New Zealand law adopted in the 1986 that denied the docking of any American warship carrying nuclear weapons. New Zealand has sent troops to support the U.S. war in Afghanistan, and ten New Zealand soldiers have been killed there, including five last month.   read more

President Obama has nominated an international development expert to be the next ambassador to the central African nation of Burundi, one of the world’s poorest countries. Dawn M. Liberi, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, has specialized in sub-Saharan Africa for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), although she the past few years she has been posted to the hot spots of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.   read more

Nearly half (48%) of all mail is now of the junk variety. With Americans disposing much of it into the garbage, and thus landfills and recycling centers, local governments are trying to prevent the Postal Service from delivering unwanted mail. Meanwhile, the newspaper industry is also opposing the Postal Service’s push to lower the cost of sending junk mail…because it will mean less junk advertising fliers and inserts in Sunday papers and a potential loss of $1 billion a year in revenue.   read more

Among the other Ig Nobel prizes this year were awards for a joint Dutch-American study that discovered that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends; a French paper that advised doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode; and a Dutch study titled “Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation.”   read more