You recall President Trump's executive order allowing employers with "strong religious convictions" to opt out of covering birth control in health care plans? Turns out Mr. Trump issued another order allowing non-religious organizations with "sincerely-held moral convictions" to opt out as well -- and he apparently crafted this order to satisfy a grand total of two anti-abortion groups. If the Supreme Court doesn't uphold this order, it may be because it's impossible to tell if an anti-abortion group is "closely-held" (which was their rationale for letting some corporations opt out of the birth control mandate in the first place) -- but by then the far-rightists who are Mr. Trump's true audience will be quite satisfied.
Two federal judges block President Trump's infamous Muslim Ban 3.0, this time because the ban "plainly discriminates based on nationality" without demonstrating that letting in folks from the countries listed on the ban would be "detrimental to the interests of the United States." Particularly all those nasty folks from Chad and all those politicians from Venezuela who aren't beating down the door to emigrate here anyway! If Mr. Trump's ban really does ban folks from Libya and Venezuela more or less randomly, it might not survive John Roberts's scrutiny. (Of course it'll survive Neil Gorsuch's scrutiny, such as that is.)
The EPA issues a guidance, mainly concerning communication during a nuclear meltdown or dirty bomb attack, which claims that first responders can tolerate radiation levels ten times higher than the standard the EPA previously set for drinking water. Now the EPA hasn't actually changed any of its standards, because doing so would require months of public commenting and be subject to other laws, but while this "guidance" may not have the force of law, it'll have the force of clouding up any lawsuit a first responder might file after getting cancer. Also, even Tha Bush Mobb's EPA never called any amount of radiation safe.
From Adam Johnson at FAIR, we learn that "Iran Doesn't Have a Nuclear Weapons Program" even though the "liberal" media "Keep Saying It Does." If you're thinking the constant reference to Iran's "nuclear weapons program" is just lazy wording on journalists' part, remind yourself that journalists and their editors are all super-proud of their writing acumen, and then ask yourself how likely it would be that they'd write something like that without knowing what they were saying. Also, a fatwa is serious business -- at least to the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran, who declared one against nuclear weapons in 2003, right around the time of the world intelligence community's last sighting of a nuclear weapons program there.
Finally, Activists in Maine try to get a universal home care for seniors and disabled folks -- to be paid for with a 1.9% payroll tax on income over $127,000 and a 3.7% tax on investment income above that same figure -- on the 2018 ballot. Why 2018? Probably because Senatorial and gubernatorial races will drive up turnout. The ballot initiative would also mandate that home care service providers receiving money under this plan will have to spend at least three quarters of that money paying their workers, which should help discourage fever dreams of executives aspiring to rip off the taxpayer. If this passes -- and though I'm sure the right will squeal about TEH TAXEZ!!!! it's obvious who's actually paying them -- it could multiply good works across the nation.
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