President Donald Trump’s border wall is facing a surprising new legal hurdle down in Texas: an obscure legislative provision crafted by House Republicans in 2014 when the GOP was targeting then-President Barack Obama’s budget powers.
The amendment, carried forward into current law, has resurfaced with a vengeance in El Paso, Texas. U.S District Court Judge David Briones has been quoting back its words in a series of rulings against Trump’s decision to take $3.6 billion from military construction projects to expedite his wall.
As first adopted, the Republican language specifically prohibited Obama from taking any step to “eliminate or reduce funding for any program, project, or activity as proposed in the President’s budget request” until it’s cleared with Congress.
The triggering event was a relatively narrow dispute in 2013 over funding for space exploration. But when they were enacted in Jan. 2014, the restrictions applied government-wide. And a year later, under full Republican control, Congress added the word “increase” alongside “eliminate or reduce” funding.
Category: Knowledge and News
“Researchers at ETH Zurich have now collaborated with an Israeli scientist to develop a means of storing extensive information in almost any object. ‘With this method, we can integrate 3D-printing instructions into an object, so that after decades or even centuries, it will be possible to obtain those instructions directly from the object itself,’ explains Robert Grass, Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences. The way of storing this information is the same as for living things: in DNA molecules. ”
“DNA of Things”
“His name was Bass Reeves — a former slave and one of the first black U.S. deputy marshals west of the Mississippi. He became legendary during the late 19th and early 20th centuries for his prowess at hunting down criminals in Indian Territory.”
The complete “list includes a man convicted of reckless homicide, a convicted child rapist, a man who murdered his parents at age 16 and a woman who threw her newborn in the trash after giving birth in a flea market outhouse.”
One (particularly egregious and obviously corrupt) example:
Patrick Brian “Baker was convicted in 2017 of reckless homicide, robbery, impersonating a peace officer and tampering with evidence for his role in a 2014 home invasion that resulted in the death of Donald Mills. Baker had served just two years of his 19-year sentence when Bevin pardoned him to time served on Dec. 6.”
I’m guessing that the people who testified against him may not be happy to see him on the streets again.
Why would anyone free such a man so soon after such major crimes? I dunno. I guess it’s just a coincidence that Baker’s brother hosted a fundraiser for the lame-duck governor and donated to him over the years.
Actually just Lev this time.
(Ol’ Igor is keeping a low profile.)
“Parnas poses an extreme risk of flight, and that risk of flight is only compounded by his continued and troubling misrepresentations”
The government’s position is based on Parnas’s misrepresentation of his financials and a failure to disclose vast assets, including a recent million-dollar deposit from Russia into his wife’s bank account.
Probably just his wife’s birthday. Russia really goes all out on birthdays.
From the article:
Trump had been repeatedly told that US freedom of action against North Korea was constrained by the fact that the regime’s artillery could demolish the South Korean capital in retaliation for any attack, inflicting mass casualties on its population of some 25 million in the total metropolitan area.
“They have to move,” Trump said, according to Bergen, who adds that his officials were initially unsure if the president was joking. But Trump then repeated the line. “They have to move!”
Trump then told his national security team: “I want an evacuation of American civilians from South Korea.”
A senior official warned that such an evacuation would be interpreted as a signal that the US was ready to go to war, and would crash the South Korean stock market, but Trump is reported to have ignored the warning, telling his team: “Go do it!”
Alarmed Pentagon officials ignored the order.
I wonder if she can outlive Chuck. Will she be succeeded by her grandson?
That’s still no record. France’s Louis XIV outlived his sons and his grandsons. He reigned 72 years and 110 days. His great grandson, Louis XV, in his own turn, ruled for 59 years and was succeeded by his grandson.
This selection will undoubtedly drive Trump nuts. He thought he had it locked up, but they managed to find the only person in the world even more melodramatic.
(OK, not the only one, but Celine Dion was not in the nominee pool.)
A long-awaited Justice Department inspector general’s report examining the FBI’s investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia rebuts allegations of illegal spying and that political bias played a role in the probe begun ahead of the 2016 election, but finds serious faults in other areas.
From the report:
“The decision to open the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was made by the
FBI’s then Counterintelligence Division (CD) Assistant Director (AD), E.W. “Bill” Priestap, and reflected a consensus reached after multiple days of discussions and meetings among senior FBI officials. We concluded that AD Priestap’s exercise of discretion in opening the investigation was in compliance with Department and FBI policies, and we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced his decision.”
Remember when lenders made all those mortgage loans to people who couldn’t possibly make the payments, especially to minorities? Those were some good times when that came to a head.
Guess what’s going to happen when lenders realize that they have made student loans to people who can’t possibly make the payments, especially to minorities. One major complication: this time, in a great number of cases, the lender is the government.
“Already in the student loan world, we are seeing default levels that approach what there was in the subprime mortgage world.”
Just like the 2008 crisis, this one reverberates through the housing market. Late or defaulted payments hurt young people’s credit scores, and that prevents them from getting mortgages.
Forget the new movies. Spend a few hours with “Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment.” (2019 version, no nudity)
What a page-turner!
And in case you hate all the reboots today, here’s the original 1974 version. (SPOILER ALERT for the original: the bad guy high-tailed it out of Dodge before the marshall arrived. It was the only plot with less development than Picnic at Hanging Rock.)
The House gave him no choice. They stripped away his right to vote, so he needed to resign in order to get that vote back onto his party’s side.
That means that the first two congressmen to endorse Donald Trump have now both pled guilty to felonies. The charges against them have been known since the summer of 2018, but they were both re-elected in November of that year!
“And in some places, it doesn’t even make sense to try.”
The evidence of this has been significant for decades now, but Americans have kinda sorta ignored it since it always seemed to affect faraway places like the Solomons and Maldives, or little-known island countries with exotic names, like Nauru and Tuvalu.
Now, however, some of America’s natural treasures, the low-lying Florida Keys, are in immediate danger, and their county is evaluating engineering projects that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars to benefit very few people – in one case affecting only 20-30 homes. Their decision will likely be to give up.
“How do you tell somebody, ‘We’re not going to build (up) the road to get to your home’? And what do we do?” Mr. Gastesi asked. “Do we buy them out? And how do we buy them out — is it voluntary? Is it eminent domain? How do we do that?” Administrators and elected officials are going to have to start to rely on a “word nobody likes to use,” Mr. Gastesi said, “and that’s ‘retreat.’”
They are still around, and still weird (see a new one below), but the web seems to ignore them these days.