Champion of Truth
“The United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) is an updated version of the nearly 25-year-old, trillion-dollar North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It includes major changes on cars and new policies on labor and environmental standards, intellectual property protections, and some digital trade provisions.”
“The “one country, two systems” principle — enshrined in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s de facto constitution — has been in place ever since Britain handed back control of the territory to China in 1997.
As Vox’s Jen Kirby explains, “The ‘one country’ part means [Hong Hong] is officially part of China, while the ‘two systems’ part gives it a degree of autonomy, including rights like freedom of the press that are absent in mainland China. China is supposed to abide by this arrangement until 2047, but it has been eroding those freedoms and trying to bring Hong Kong more tightly under its control for years.””
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“Beijing’s imposition of this new national security law is the most direct and dramatic move China has made toward erasing those freedoms once and for all.”
https://www.vox.com/2020/7/2/21308487/latino-hispanic-vote-trump-biden
“Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents and U.S. marshals dressed in military gear and brandishing large weapons have been stationed in Portland since around the start of the month, per an executive order from President Donald Trump. The feds are allegedly there to protect national monuments and guard against potential domestic terrorism.
Instead, this deliberately intimidating gaggle of outside “law enforcement” officers has been agitating peacefully assembled people who are merely exercising their constitutional rights. This has included shooting one man directly in the head with an impact munition of some sort (sending him to the hospital and necessitating facial reconstruction surgery) and, reportedly, forcing protesters into unmarked vans.
According to an internal Homeland Security memo, “federal agents facing backlash for their militarized approach to Portland were not specifically trained in riot control or mass demonstrations,” The New York Times reports.
That doesn’t bode well for the idea that they were sent in with mitigation in mind.
Despite federal agent actions last week, large Portland protests continued over the weekend…
…and so did federal agents acting in unnecessarily hostile and abusive ways ”
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“Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler told CNN on Sunday that “they’re not wanted here, we haven’t asked them here, in fact we want them to leave.””
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“Oregon Gov. Kate Brown has suggested the feds’ presence was a “deliberate effort to provoke.” She told The Washington Post “that her contacts with Trump administration officials about the situation had convinced her that ‘they are not interested in problem solving,’ and this has ‘nothing to do with public safety.'””
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“Oregon’s Department of Justice is suing the DHS, the U.S. Marshals Service, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Federal Protection Service. The lawsuit, filed in federal court on Saturday, alleges that “they seized and detained Oregonians without probable cause,” explains Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum.”
https://www.vox.com/2020/7/2/21311144/putin-russia-vote-president-2036
“The upshot of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for a 7-2 Court is that thousands of teachers at religious schools are no longer protected by anti-discrimination laws. If one of them is fired for being Black, or gay, or a woman, the law may do nothing to intervene.
The case involves the “ministerial exception” to civil rights laws. As a general rule, religious institutions have total control over whom they employ as “ministers.” That means that if a church wants to fire its preacher because of that preacher’s race or gender, it may do so, even though such discrimination ordinarily is illegal.
As Alito explains, the Constitution protects “the right of churches and other religious institutions to decide matters ‘of faith and doctrine’ without government intrusion.” Implicit in this right is a certain “autonomy with respect to internal management decisions that are essential to the institution’s central mission. And a component of this autonomy is the selection of the individuals who play certain key roles.””
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“a teacher at a religious school whose duties include religious instruction qualifies as a “minister,” and is therefore unprotected by anti-discrimination law.”
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“Under Alito’s decision, this fairly small amount of religious instruction — a little more than three hours a week — was enough to trigger the ministerial exception. “Implicit in our decision in Hosanna-Tabor,” Alito writes, “was a recognition that educating young people in their faith, inculcating its teachings, and training them to live their faith are responsibilities that lie at the very core of the mission of a private religious school.””
“The US Supreme Court issued its ruling in Little Sisters v. Pennsylvania Wednesday, holding the Affordable Care Act gives the Trump administration broad authority to grant exceptions to a federal regulation requiring employers to provide birth control coverage to their employees.
On the surface, Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion appears to be focused exclusively on birth control, and it also endorses a policy that could cease to exist in less than a year.
The immediate upshot of Little Sisters is to let stand Trump administration rules allowing employers opposed to birth control to refuse to provide contraceptive coverage to their employees. If presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden becomes president next year, however, his administration could repeal the Trump administration’s policy and implement a new policy more favorable to contraception coverage.
But dig just one inch below the surface of Justice Thomas’s opinion, and it has deeply radical implications: Little Sisters opens up a new front in the seemingly endless judicial war on Obamacare. And it gives Republicans a new weapon it can use to attack the landmark legislation President Obama signed more than a decade ago.
Thomas’s opinion does not simply allow the Trump administration to limit many individuals’ access to birth control, it could also allow courts to dismantle a key provision of Obamacare that ensures patients receive preventive care without having to pay out-of-pocket costs.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/iran-admits-troops-shot-down-212446264.html
“The centerpiece is simple. Take America’s biggest rental assistance program — Section 8 housing vouchers — and make it available to every family who qualifies. The current funding structure leaves out around 11 million people, simply because the pot allocated by Congress is too small. Then pair it with regulatory changes to help the housing market work better for more people. It’s the general consensus approach among top Democratic Party politicians and left-of-center policy wonks.”
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“because key provisions would be eligible for budget reconciliation treatment, which would require a majority vote in the Senate instead of a supermajority, it’s the kind of thing that really might happen in 2021 if Biden won.”
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“the government gives low-income people vouchers that landlords can redeem for money and lets them rent whatever kind of house someone will rent to them. Since the voucher program, when created, became Section 8 of the US Housing Act of 1937, the vouchers have come to be known as Section 8 vouchers.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that more than 5 million people receive help from the program.
It has various flaws, including, most notably, the widespread discrimination against voucher tenants that Stephanie Wykstra has written about for Vox. Another huge flaw is that that, unlike Medicaid or SNAP — which, at least in theory, provide benefits to everyone who meets the eligibility criteria — Section 8 is capped in the amount of money available to it by the whims of Congress. As it stands, about three-quarters of eligible people don’t get the help because there simply isn’t enough money in the pot, which is a huge missed opportunity to improve the lives of millions of Americans.
CBPP data shows that receipt of housing vouchers leads to a decline in children experiencing separation from their parents, a decline in domestic violence, a decline in food insecurity, and, most of all, a steep decline in housing instability.”
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“When land is expensive and demand for housing is high, the natural market response would be to build denser structures — townhouses or mid-rise apartments or even big towers — so as to spread the land cost across more households. The origins of these zoning rules were intimately connected to now-forgotten segregation battles in the first half of the 20th century, when the Supreme Court rules essentially that cities couldn’t formally exclude Black people from certain neighborhoods but they could try to exclude all low-income people and count on economics to do the rest.
Later, redlining policies excluded Black neighborhoods from much New Deal housing assistance, depriving Black families of wealth-building opportunities and creating pockets of poverty and exclusion that persist today.
Handing out money to those in need helps the problem on one side, but breaking down the zoning barriers on the other is important as well. Biden picks up a proposal from Sen. Cory Booker and Rep. James Clyburn to require localities that benefit from Community Development Block Grants or Surface Transportation Block Grants to develop plans to change zoning rules that block development of more housing types.
While expanding vouchers is a straightforward liberal pitch, changing exclusionary zoning involves more complicated politics. Many of the most exclusionary places in America are affluent inner-ring suburbs of big coastal cities — places that these days send Democrats to Congress, but that presumably don’t want to be made to change their zoning rules. The potential good news is that, conceptually at least, liberalizing regulation is something Republicans might support.”