Thursday, January 4th, 2018
CHRISTOPHER MORAFF, - Daily Beast
Stephan: Jeff Sessions, perhaps the worst Attorney General since Nixon's appointment of John Mitchell, has very strong views about marijuana. The fact that his views have nothing to do with the actual facts does not deter him a whit. Like all grifters he also associates with grifters, so his association with Robert DuPont seems very natural. But it could mess up the lives of thousands of people. Here's the latest.
Robert DuPont and Jeff Sessions
Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/Daily Beast.
A adviser on marijuana policy to Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants to see doctors make drug testing a routine part of primary-care medicine and force some users into treatment against their will, he told The Daily Beast.
Dr. Robert DuPont was among a small group of drug-policy experts invited to a closed-door meeting with Sessions last month to discuss federal options for dealing with the rapid liberalization of state marijuana laws. California became the sixth state to allow the sale of marijuana for recreational use on Jan. 1.
DuPont, 81, is one of the most influential drug warriors of the past century. He began his career as a liberal on drug control in the 1970s, calling then for the decriminalization of marijuana possession and launching the first U.S. methadone treatment program for heroin in Washington, D.C. in 1971. By the 1980s, he shifted to the right, popularizing the claim marijuana was a “gateway drug.”
At the December 2017 meeting with Sessions, DuPont was slated to present on […]
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Thursday, January 4th, 2018
Stephan: Here is good news, and another example of how the Nordic countries, which are dedicated to societal wellbeing, are able to produce the kind of successful society that we can not seem to attain in the United States, where greed and profit are the only priorities.
Young girl in Iceland
Credit: Daniel Mihailescua/AFP
Over here in the United States, women are still struggling for the right to not have their boss dictate whether they have health insurance coverage for their birth control. In Iceland, instead of fighting like mad to not slide back into a real-life The Handmaid’s Tale-esque dystopia, women just got a big boost in getting fair wages; gender pay inequity is now officially illegal in the country. AlJazeera reports:
The legislation, which came into force on Monday, the first day of 2018, makes Iceland the first country in the world to legalise equal pay between men and women.
Under the new rules, companies and government agencies employing at least 25 people will have to obtain government certification of their equal-pay policies.
Those that fail to prove pay parity will face fines.
People familiar with Iceland’s history in handling gender inequality wouldn’t be surprised. According to the World Economic Forum, Iceland ranks #1 in the world for gender equity—and has for nine years in a row. For comparison, […]
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Thursday, January 4th, 2018
ELIZABETH PREZA, - Raw Story
Stephan: Under the guise of voter fraud, which factual analysis has shown does not exist in any meaningful way, the Trump administration under former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a noted architect of voter suppression, attempted to gain access to personal voter data. The states very properly resisted and, I am happy to report, carried the day. Trump has just announced the dismissal of the commission. Here's the story. I consider it good news.
Donald Trump on Wednesday dissolved the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which was tasked with curbing voting fraud following the 2016 election.
Trump created the commission after railing against illegal voters, which he attributed—without evidence—to losing him the popular vote. In a statement attributed to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the administration cites states’ refusal to provide voter data to the commission as the reason for the president’s decision. The actual statement is written in the first person and appears to be from Trump himself.
The commission faced fierce opposition, including a federal lawsuit arguing its voter information collection efforts violated citizens’ right to privacy.
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Wednesday, January 3rd, 2018
Walter Scheidel, Dickason Professor of History Stanford University - The Economist (U.K.)
Stephan: Anyone who studies history knows that when social inequality reaches a certain extreme civil violence follows. It's different for different cultures but the principle is always the same, and I am afraid we are getting close to our threshold. Here is an excellent assessment of this trend.
The Great Leveller: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century By Walter Scheidel. Princeton University Press; 504 pages; $35 and £27.95.
AS A supplier of momentary relief, the Great Depression seems an unlikely candidate. But when it turns up on page 363 of Walter Scheidel’s “The Great Leveler” it feels oddly welcome. For once—and it is only once, for no other recession in American history boasts the same achievement—real wages rise and the incomes of the most affluent fall to a degree that has a “powerful impact on economic inequality”. Yes, it brought widespread suffering and dreadful misery. But it did not bring death to millions, and in that it stands out.
If that counts as relief, you can begin to imagine the scale of the woe that comes before and after. Mr Scheidel, a Vienna-born historian now at Stanford University, puts the discussion of increased inequality found in the recent work of Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson, Branko Milanovic and others into a broad historical context and examines the circumstances under which it can be reduced.
Having assembled […]
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Wednesday, January 3rd, 2018
Stephan: You have probably heard about this New York Times interview; it has certainly caused a storm of commentary. I have sat on it for a couple of days just thinking about it, because when I read it I found it so alarming I wasn't quite sure how to process it. Commentators are describing it as a sign of the onset of dementia, or mental illness.
I'm not a psychiatrist so will not presume a psychiatrist's skills. But even as a layman it is obvious something is deeply wrong. It isn't just the multiple lies and misstatements; that's the new norm, as weird as that sounds. It is is also the internal self-contradictions, and the incoherence of Trump's thinking. More than anything it reminded me of the kind of rants I heard on mental wards when, as a teenager, I volunteered to read to patients at Longview State Hospital.
I think we are in dangerous and uncharted waters.
President Trump spoke on Thursday with a reporter fromThe New York Times, Michael S. Schmidt. The interview took place in the Grill Room of his golf club in West Palm Beach, Fla., whose noise made some portions at times hard to hear.
The following are excerpts from that conversation, transcribed by The Times. They have been lightly edited for content and clarity, and omit several off-the-record comments and asides.
Read more coverage and analysis of the interview »
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The interview started with a discussion of an interview Mr. Schmidt conducted with Mr. Trump in July, when Mr. Trump said he would not have appointed Jeff Sessions as attorney general had he known that Mr. Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
DONALD J. TRUMP: I thought it was a terrible thing he did. [Inaudible.] I thought it was certainly unnecessary, I thought it was a terrible thing. But I think it’s all worked out because […]
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