Former White House counsel Don McGahn
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court Friday severely limited Congress’ ability to enforce subpoenas it sends to the executive branch, in a decision dismissing the US House of Representatives’ lawsuit to force former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify.
William Barr the don’s personal consigliere
President Donald Trump views his alliance with the Christian right as essential to his 2020 campaign, and two Trump loyalists — Attorney General William Barr and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — were clearly pandering to religious conservatives this week during a speech at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, which is being held in Nashville, Tennessee and continues through this Friday, February 28.
Barr’s speech was sponsored by the nonprofit group Save the Persecuted Christians, which is headed by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. — a far-right conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe who has claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to infiltrate the U.S. government and impose sharia law. Before Barr spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, Gaffney stressed that he was not sponsoring a panel that would be held later and feature attorney Asma Uddin (who he smeared as a “sharia supremacist”).
During his speech, Barr (who is a Catholic, not a Protestant evangelical) railed against secularism in the United States — […]
Autopsy team
Say you are found on your bathroom floor, on the grassy knoll of someone else’s front yard, in the berth of your tractor-trailer, in your own bed, at the foot of a bridge, under a car wheel, in the car, caught in the bend of a river, collapsed in the bar, alone in the remains of a scorched kitchen. Your death is sudden and unexpected, a death that no one plans for but that approximately half a million of us will experience this year in America. No death is special, but this kind of death requires special care, procedurally, from a number of people you will never meet. The procedural aspects of your death, which you will never see, begin with a phone call.
One afternoon in the summer of 2018 in Cleveland, a man returned home to find his wife slumped over her computer keyboard. She was in her 50s and had been in poor health, but nothing seemed urgent or life-threatening. It looked as if she died while shopping online. […]
In states that restrict access to reproductive health care options, maternal mortality rates climb precipitously.
Credit: Ruslan Dashinsky/Getty
From 2007 to 2015, Syria‘s maternal mortality rate rose from 26 deaths per 100,000 live births to 31 deaths per 100,000 live births, a result of the country’s war and a crumbling health care system.
In Washington, D.C., where politicians make decisions about both what the United States will do about the war in Syria and American women’s access to reproductive health care, the average maternal mortality rate across the same eight-year period was 33 deaths per 100,000 live births.
And that is for woman of all races: The rate of maternal mortality for African American women living in our nation’s capital is 59.7 deaths per 100,000 live births — worse than Panama (52) or Ecuador (59).
There is no war on American soil and we spend more on health care per capita than any other country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. However, […]
ICE troops invading homes
Credit: Getty
Rights advocates expressed outrage and severe concerns after the U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday it is creating an official task force devoted to “denaturalization”—the process by which the government strips citizenship from foreign-born Americans, or naturalized citizens.
“Of all the dystopian shit—a department of denaturalization at DOJ might take the biscuit,” tweeted activist Joel Braunold. “Means immigrant Americans (such as myself) will always have a threat to displace us if we step out of line.”
“Trump is weaponizing the DOJ to make naturalized immigrants look like second-class citizens.”
—The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights
The Justice Department claimed in its announcement that the motivation for the new unit stems from a desire to strip citizenship from terrorists or sex offenders whose citizenship was “illegally procured” by lying about past crimes.
“When a terrorist or sex offender becomes a U.S. citizen under false pretenses, it is an affront to our system—and it is especially offensive to those who fall victim to these criminals,” Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt said in a statement.
Officially […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
