Yet another example of the corruption and failure of the federal government. Neither the Presidency nor the Congress seems to understand the importance and urgency of protecting the earth’s matrix of life. Future generations are going to hate us for our stupidity and greed.
Data: US Fish and Wildlife Service/National Marine Fisheries Service. Illustration by Eleanor Taylor for Vox
Exactly five decades ago, Congress did what would be unimaginable today: It passed a powerful environmental law with almost unanimous support. In 1973, the House voted in favor of the Endangered Species Act, 390 to 12.
“Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed,” Republican President Richard Nixon said upon signing the act into law.
Among the most comprehensive environmental laws worldwide, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was set up to protect the nation’s many plants and animals that are at risk of extinction. It makes it a federal crime to harm species that it deems endangered, with some exceptions. The act also requires that government agencies, such as the Army or the Federal Aviation Administration, try to avoid jeopardizing endangered species or the habitat they need to survive.
Over the last five decades, the law has undoubtedly helped save dozens of creatures from extinction, from American alligators to […]
As this article describes, this is one of the worst House of Representatives in over 200 years. The MAGAt Republicans control it and it has been a catastrophe for the country. Why? Because Republicans are not interested in fostering wellbeing in the United States. They are only interested in personal greed and personal and party power. I would say they ought to be ashamed of themselves, but they don’t have sufficient ethics to know what shame is. If you vote Republican you are voting to damage your own wellbeing, whether you want to face that or not.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, left, and Rep. Andy Barr Credit: Getty
The data doesn’t lie. This Republican House of Representatives passed just 22 bills that became law in 2023. In contrast, under Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi the previous House passed 85 bills in 2021, including landmark COVID-19 legislation and the infrastructure law.
In last week’s House Rules Committee hearing, Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado pointed that out, blasting Republicans for the profound waste of time they’ve been all year. “The data speaks for itself,” he said. “This will go down as the least productive Congress since 1933.”
“Think about that: the least productive Congress since the Great Depression,” he continued. ”That is what Republicans have brought the country in the form of their majority.” They’ve also brought the ridiculous and utterly baseless formal impeachment inquiry, which is what the House Rules Committee was wasting its time on when Neguse called Republicans out.
This House did manage to get the debt ceiling lifted and keep the government’s doors open. Their other accomplishments? They renamed some Veterans Affairs clinics and authorized a coin […]
I think it time for each of us who want democracy to survive to realize that there is a very strong chance that the United States is likely to become a fascist dictatorship if criminal Trump is re-elected as President, and there is a considerable probability that may happen unless you and everyone you know who is a voter votes only for Democrats. I am not exaggerating here. This poll of Iowa voters should scare the hell out of you. In this country we have a growing White minority who support fascism and a dictator like Trump. This past weekend their were several hundred bombs threats all over the country against Jewish synagogues and temples. I think we are on the edge of violence. This is how it always starts with fascists. I warn you to take this very seriously.
As Donald Trump seeks the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, he has laid out his vision for a second term that includes locking up political opponents, conducting sweeping immigration raids and searching for replacements for Obamacare.
On the campaign trail, he has engaged in harsh rhetoric to describe political enemies as “radical thugs that live like vermin,” said that immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S., touted himself as “the only one who will prevent World War III,” and suggested suspending parts of the Constitution because of the “stolen” 2020 presidential election.
The former president’s comments have ignited concerns from critics and scholars who have warned that a second Trump administration threatens democracy — even as his advisers push back on those fears, dismissing them as baseless.
Many likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers have no issue with several of Trump’s recent controversial statements, a new Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll has found — and more often than not, they say the same statements make them more likely to support the former president.
Jamelle Bouie lays it out. Criminal Trump is just the leader. It is the troops, the White minority for fascism, that are the problem. The only way we are going to keep a country we recognize is rewrite the tax laws, so the rich are not favored, and to make fostering wellbeing the core value of all social policies, a massive rewrite of our laws just as happened with Roosevelt after WWII.
Credit: Damon Winter / The New York Times
The easy and obvious way to understand the various Republican power grabs underway in states across the country is to look at them as attempts to secure as much unaccountable political power as possible and to curtail the expression of identities and beliefs Republicans find objectionable. That’s how we get the “Don’t Say Gay” laws and attacks on gender-affirming care and aggressive efforts to gerrymander entire state legislatures.
But there is another angle you can take on the Republicans’ use of state power to limit political representation for their opponents or limit the bodily autonomy of women or impose traditional and hierarchical gender relations on those who would prefer to live free of them. You could say the point is the cultivation of political despair.
Now, it is too much to say that this is premeditated, although you do not have to look hard to find Republican officeholders expressing the belief that political participation should be made more onerous.
American police are the least educated, least trained, most violent, and least accountable of all the police in other developed nations. The idea for body cameras was excellent but, as this report describes, it was never really put into practice as originally planned. The killing just keeps going on.
In the last 10 years, taxpayers have spent millions to outfit police officers across the country with body-worn cameras in what was sold as a new era of transparency and accountability. But a survey by ProPublica shows that when civilians die at the hands of police, the public usually never sees the footage.
At least 1,201 people were killed in 2022 by law enforcement officers, about 100 deaths a month, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit research group that tracks police killings. ProPublica examined the 101 deaths that occurred in June 2022, a time frame chosen because enough time had elapsed that investigations could reasonably be expected to have concluded. The cases involved 131 law enforcement agencies in 34 states.
In 79 of those deaths, ProPublica confirmed that body-worn camera video exists. But more than a year later, authorities or victims’ families had released the footage of only 33 incidents.
Philadelphia signed a $12.5 million contract in 2017 to equip its entire police force with cameras. Since then, at least 27 people have been killed by Philadelphia police, according to Mapping Police Violence, but in only two cases has body-camera […]
