Wednesday, February 12th, 2020
Stephan: How many times have you heard someone say: What makes America special is that it is a nation of laws? That sentence should now probably be phrased in the past tense. Not only did the entire team of lawyers who handled Roger Stone's prosecution resign en masse in revulsion over William Barr's corruption of their work to satisfy his master criminal Trump, but there was also this, which got much less coverage.
The Trumplicans in the senate have been beavering away for three years at corrupting America's judiciary by appointing grossly unprepared, incompetent, but reliably ideological judges. Meanwhile, criminal Trump and his familiar Attorney General William Barr have been gutting the Department of Justice. But it is even more grotesque than most people realize. How about Hookers for Jesus?
It is going to take a long painful time, if it happens at all, to repair what Trump and the Trumplicans have done. A nation of laws, maybe, maybe not.
Trump minion William Barr
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is under fire after a whistleblower complaint revealed that the department had given over $1 million in anti-human trafficking grants to two groups, Hookers for Jesus and the Lincoln Tubman Foundation, rather than highly recommended, established groups.
A September 12 internal DOJ memo recommended that the grant money go to the Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Palm Beach and Chicanos Por La Causa of Phoenix, according to an exclusive report by Reuters. The recommendations were based on reviews from outside contractors. Instead, the grant money went to two organizations the contractors gave lower ratings: Hookers for Jesus and the Lincoln Tubman Foundation.
The funding decision was made in order to “distribute funding across as many states as possible,” according to a September 23 memo obtained by Reuters. Head of the Office of Justice Programs, Katharine Sullivan, approved the decision, telling Reuters, “Our funding decisions are based on a merit-based review system.”
Hookers for Jesus is a Christian organization founded by […]
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Tuesday, February 11th, 2020
Stephan: We already spend sums so vast that our military-intelligence industry has a larger budget than the seven next largest countries combined. Note, however, there is not a dime committed to preparation for climate change, and it wreaks great damage on our already sorely compromised healthcare food systems. But more than anything what stands out for me in criminal Trump's budget is its nastiness. Its contempt for the poor. Its utter uninterest in social wellbeing.
President Donald Trump‘s budget request on Monday will pitch billions of dollars in cuts to non-defense spending despite a budget deal he already negotiated with Congress, in addition to seeking major savings by targeting the federal safety net, a senior administration official told POLITICO on Sunday.
Trump also will ask Congress for a slight spending increase for the Pentagon as he releases his $4.8 trillion budget blueprint for the upcoming fiscal year, all proposals sure to be rejected by Democrats who control the House.
The president aims to cut $4.4 trillion in spending over a decade and projects an end to annual deficits in 15 years, rather than a more aggressive 10-year goal. Much of the savings would stem from the Trump administration’s push to overhaul food stamp benefits and cap Medicaid spending, among other reforms. The federal deficit is forecast to blow past $1 trillion this year.
Trump will also ask Congress for an extra $2 billion for border […]
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Tuesday, February 11th, 2020
Tarpley Hitt, Reporter - Daily Beast
Stephan: First, it was Roman Catholics, then Ultra-Orthodox Jews, then Mormons, now Jehovah's Witnesses. It makes people uncomfortable, but as a culture it is time to deal with the strong correlation of strict religiosity and sexual dysfunction, particularly the sexual exploitation by men of women, girls, and young boys. It is amazing how often reports like this one come up. I only point out this trend a few times a year, when it is particularly notable, as it is in this report. Any more would just be salacious.
This is part of abandoning Abrahamic values and creating a society where power expressed sexually is not acceptable. It is a step to recognizing we are not outside but very much a part of the Matrix of consciousness, and that gender equality is part of that. Recognizing that will foster wellbeing and show us a way through the catastrophe of climate change.
On April 1, 2014, a high-ranking member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses named Richard Ashe was answering deposition questions about cases of child sexual abuse when he made a rare, perhaps unintentional, admission: somewhere in their organization, a group comprising nearly 11,000 congregations in the U.S. alone, exists an archive of documents detailing the names and locations of every known child abuser within their American membership.
The deposition, footage of which appears in The Witnesses, a two-part Oxygen documentary compiling five years of reporting from the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Trey Bundy and which debuts Feb. 7 and 8, marked the first public evidence that such a database existed. But it was not the last. Over the following year, internal documents obtained by Bundy would show that since 1997, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the faith’s nonprofit oversight arm, had been collecting extremely precise data from its American congregations about child sexual abuse with a form that amounted to something like a 12-question survey. Elders, or overseers who report to the faith’s governing body, were
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Tuesday, February 11th, 2020
Stephan: As I predicted, the dying process of the petroleum industry is underway. Here is an early datapoint on that trend.
Illustration: Eniola Odetunde/Axios
The world’s oil and natural gas companies are drilling their way into financial and social hell.
Driving the news: The industry’s stocks are in the toilet, and climate change is fast becoming a mainstream investor worry. These problems overlap and neither is going away any time soon — if ever.
Why it matters: We all use products from oil and natural gas, those products are heating up the Earth, and many of us probably own (perhaps unwittingly) stock in these companies. The financial and social standing of these companies will somehow affect us all, whether we hate or love them.
The intrigue: CNBC’s Jim Cramer raised eyebrows by saying recently that he was “done” with fossil fuels and likened them […]
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Tuesday, February 11th, 2020
Aimee Picchi, - USA Today
Stephan: Here is the reality of the IRS. Act accordingly.
Credit: The Balance
Taxes are one of life’s certainties, but getting audited by the IRS is increasingly less certain these days. In fact, an audit is about half as likely as it was five years ago.
Even so, some groups face higher audit rates than others.
The tax agency is auditing fewer individual taxpayers not because we’re more honest, but because the IRS is working with fewer employees. The agency’s workforce has dropped from 94,000 workers in 2010 to roughly 78,000 in the most recent fiscal year, according to IRS data.
With fewer agents available to perform audits, the agency’s audit rate has been whittled to 0.45% of individual returns in fiscal 2019, the IRS said recently. That compares with an audit rate of 0.9% in the fiscal 2014.
Two types of taxpayers are more likely to draw the attention of the IRS: […]
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