#U.S. law

[auncyen]

HUH.

and from ifixit:

The exemption also applies to other commercial kitchen equipment—we’ve heard about undocumented error codes in commercial espresso machines, restaurant owners getting locked out of their own commercial ovens, and missing service manuals for insulated cabinets. But we’re especially excited about the ice cream win.

[theresilientphilosopher]

Discover why the U.S. Constitution protects noncitizens and what would happen if we stripped rights from those not born here. A deep reflection from The Resilient Philosopher.

[dleondantes]

Discover why the U.S. Constitution protects noncitizens and what would happen if we stripped rights from those not born here. A deep reflection from The Resilient Philosopher.

[saywhat-politics]

Louisiana’s controversial law requiring public schools and colleges to post the Ten Commandments violates the U.S. Constitution and cannot be enforced, a federal appeals court ruled unanimously Friday, upholding a lower court’s decision and raising the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court will be asked to weigh in.

A three-judge panel on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law, which took effect Jan. 1, is "plainly unconstitutional." The ruling affirms a lower court’s order barring the state from enforcing the law, which says that Ten Commandments posters printed in “large, easily readable font” must be displayed in every classroom.

BREAKING: In a unanimous decision, a federal court of appeals has ruled that Louisiana's law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in all public school classrooms is unconstitutional.

We’ll keep saying it: Public schools are not Sunday schools.

[mumblesplash]

so are you just s tetris fandom blogger?

i think it’s safe to say i specialize in yassifying block people

[eugenedebs1920]

It doesn’t take a world class detective to figure out why Trump’s DOJ would denote the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or why Trump would remove 17 Inspectors General, who saved Americans $91 billion last year, why they would dismantle the Kleptocracy Unit at the DOJ, why they would kneecap the Public Integrity Unit, or why they would end programs looking to stop foreign interference into American politics.

There’s a simple reason for this. Trump has, and will continue to use foreign interference and corruption to manipulate our elections, to deceive and misinform people, to politicize and divide Americans, to wear down those who care about honesty and integrity.

He has done this for the better part of a decade. Using this bully pulpit as a megaphone, projecting lies, disinformation and misinformation, while the mainstream media is too feckless and weak to point out the blatant falsities, their corporate overlords not understanding the vital role a free press plays in a free country, only focused on profit.

This plays directly into the hands of our adversaries. With a nation divided, with the inability to decipher what’s true and what isn’t, with the constant burden of fact checking and debating objective reality with those who refuse to see it, our society, our country is vulnerable. Weakened by the onslaught of corrupt practices, further straining the capacity for concern on those who would.

This is what keeps me up at night. Trump has also removed high ranking military officers. He removed the heads of the intelligence agencies, purged and stacked the DOJ, removed top law enforcement officials. Pretty much anyone who would or could hold him accountable, gone.

There are two exceptions, one being this pathetic, shameless, spineless Republican majority in the house and senate, the smallest majority since the Great Depression, all too cowardly to uphold the Constitution and adhere to their oath in fear of being primaried by the capitol of the worlds richest man, Elon Musk.

The other being that which has emboldened him to, ever so brazenly, engage in a crime spree starting 3 days before his inauguration and progressing exponentially since. The United States Supreme Court. Although my Conlaw has improved over the last few years, I am no constitutional scholar, but I do possess reading comprehension skills and the ability to think critically.

When I read: No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

This clearly states that no one who has engaged in INSURRECTION or REBELLION and taken the an oath to uphold the Constitution can hold office, and is disqualified thereafter in doing so.

The slate of fake electors is an affront on the Constitution. Riling up his supporters with knowingly false claims of a rigged election is a slide against the Constitution and engaging in rebellion. Then telling his base to “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore” and sending them off to storm the capital, beat cops, and desecrate our nations most sacred place. Thats an insurrection, at minimum it’s rebellion.

Then to CONTINUOUSLY lie and whine about the 2020 election for 5 years now… It’s f*ckin exhausting…. 😑

Not only did the Supreme Court allow an insurrectionist to run and hold office in direct contrast to what the 14th amendment section 3 says, they topped it off by granting absolute immunity for actions taken in office.

This country was founded on the premise that no one is a king, no one has the power to dictate policy themselves, and that no one is above the law. It doesn’t take a constitutional scholar to understand that!

Now, just over 100 days in, we have, by insurmountable numbers, the most corrupt, criminal, lawless and unconstitutional administration to EVER occupy the executive branch.

Never. And I mean NEVER!!! Do I want to hear about Hunter Biden and his laptop, or Joe Biden and his pardons, or Obama and his tan suit, or Clinton and blowjobs, ever, EVER AGAIN from any maga or Republican for as long as this country is still a free nation or I still take breath.

At 100 days the criminality is so rampant it makes organized crime look legitimate! It’s staggering!…

The thing is. This is just setting up for what’s to come. The preparation for the real criminal acts. Just getting warmed up, testing the waters of Congress and SCOTUS, seeing exactly how for they can go before someone of consequence checks them.

There is one last line of defense. The final guardrail of our democracy still secured and bolted down.

Us

It’s not to say that it isn’t out of control already, but when it does TRULY cross that rubicon, endangering the very foundation of our country, it’s up to us to defend that which has so graciously given us the freedom and privileges we’ve enjoyed our entire existence here, and gather en mass, standing up for our nation and the Constitution. So many have given so much for us, it would be blasphemy to relinquish our rights to a second rate reality tv personality.

I believe in us. I believe in the American people. I believe in you.

🎶This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York Islands, from the redwood forests, to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me 🎶

[gwydionmisha]

They'd already had the job offers and had mostly turned down opportunities to become public servants. They have massive college debt and had made plans, like moving to be close to their new jobs.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Earth Day History

Earth Day, first observed on 22 April 1970, is considered the beginning of the modern environmental movement.

As a response to increasing environmental concerns, like the oil spill in Santa Barbara in 1969, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson founded Earth Day to raise awareness about how to protect the environment.

Nelson and activist Denis Hayes organized teach-ins on college campuses that included various groups and organizations, drawing inspiration from protest teach-ins of the era.

With this massive mobilization, the U.S. developed key environmental laws and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created.

Earth Day 2024 Theme

The theme of Earth Day 2024 is “Planet vs. Plastics.”

This is about fighting the big problem of plastic all over the world. Earth Day organization wants to bring people from different places together.

The goal is to make much less plastic, 60% less by 2040.

We want a future without so much plastic. This is not just about having less trash, but it is also about keeping us and the environment healthy.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jack Ohman , Tribune Content Agency

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 4, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

May 05, 2025

In an interview aired today on NBC News’s Meet the Press, reporter Kristen Welker asked President Donald J. Trump if he agreed that every person in the United States is entitled to due process.

“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump answered.

The U.S. Constitution guarantees that “no person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Judges across the political spectrum agree that the amendment does not limit due process to citizens. In his decision in the 1993 case Reno v. Flores, conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: “it is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”

In his oath of office, Trump vowed to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

When Welker pointed out that the Constitution guarantees due process, Trump suggested he could ignore it because honoring due process was too slow. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seems—it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” he said. “We have thousands of people that are—some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.”

“I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he added.

Welker tried again. “[D]on’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States?”

Trump replied: “I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”

Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig explained to MSNBC’s Ali Velshi that far-right scholars have argued that the president does not have to follow the Supreme Court if he doesn’t agree with its decisons: he can interpret the Constitution for himself. Luttig called this “constitutional denialism.” He added that “[t]he American people deserve to know if the President does not intend to uphold the Constitution of the United States or if he intends to uphold it only when he agrees with the Supreme Court.”

Mark Berman and Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post reported today that federal judges are becoming increasingly impatient with the incompetence of the Department of Justice lawyers who are defending more than 200 cases against the administration in court. Judges have accused DOJ lawyers of providing inadequate answers and flimsy evidence, defying court orders, and even behaving like toddlers.

Trump has said the justice system is a “rigged system” run by “radical left lunatics,” but former federal judge John E. Jones III, whom President George W. Bush appointed to the bench, agreed that DOJ lawyers have “lost a fair measure of their credibility.”

Authoritarian governments are based on the idea that some people are better than others. This translates into the idea that some people have special insight based only upon their superiority. They don’t have to listen to experts, who just muddle the clear picture the leader can see. When reality intrudes on that vision, the problem is not the ideology of the leader, it is obstruction by political opponents.

As Trump told Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic about his presidencies: “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”

Trump himself illustrated this ideology again in the interview with Kristen Welker when he explained his trade war. “Look,” he said. “We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we’re essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we’re saving hundreds of billions of dollars. Very simple.”

It is not, in fact, that simple.

This impulse to downplay expertise and concentrate power in a strongman shows in Trump’s tapping of Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting national security advisor, as well as acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Clearly, Trump doesn’t think he needs experts in at least three of those four senior posts. Perhaps it also shows there are few experts still willing to work in a Trump White House.

The results of this disdain for expertise shows these days most immediately in the policies of Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As measles continues to spread across the U.S., a spokesperson for Health and Human Services said Friday that Kennedy will turn the country’s health agencies away from promoting vaccination, which is 97% effective in preventing the disease, and toward exploring new treatments for it, including vitamins.

“It’s not that there’s been a lack of studies,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told Teddy Rosenbluth of the New York Times. Decades of research have not discovered dramatic treatments, while vaccinations have proven safe and effective at preventing the life-threatening disease.

Rosenbluth noted that “[p]ublic health experts are baffled by Mr. Kennedy’s decision to hunt for new treatments, rather than endorse shots that have decades of safety and efficacy data.” This stance seems to contradict Kennedy’s longstanding focus on preventing disease.

Kennedy has also falsely claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) contains “aborted fetus debris,” that parents should “do their own research,” and that he will institute testing for new vaccines with placebo-controlled trials, a practice medical experts warn could be unethical as subjects believe they are protected from disease when they are not.

Infectious disease expert Paul Offit told Jessica Glenza of The Guardian: “It’s his goal to even further lessen trust in vaccines and make it onerous enough for manufacturers that they will abandon it.”

At the end of March, Kennedy also vowed to study possible links between vaccines and autism, although repeated scholarly studies have shown no link. Kennedy has tapped David Geier, who does not have a medical degree and was disciplined in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license, to perform the study.

On Thursday, former New York Times global health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. noted that both Geier and Kennedy have made significant money thanks to their anti-vax stands as they monetize alleged treatments and sue pharmaceutical companies.

In Ars Technica on April 30, microbiologist and senior health reporter Beth Mole explored another angle to understand Kennedy’s policies. She noted that Kennedy, who is neither a doctor nor a public health expert, does not believe in the foundational principle of modern medicine: germ theory.

In a 2021 book, Kennedy argued the idea that microscopic viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi cause disease serves the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry that grew around it by “emphasiz[ing] targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.” He accused those supporting this system, including Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was a proponent of the Covid vaccine, of misleading the American public.

While Kennedy appears to believe germs exist, he also claims to believe in the older theory of disease called “miasma theory,” although as Mole points out, he misunderstands that theory—the idea that diseases are caused by poisonous vapors—and really appears to believe in another old idea: “terrain theory.” Terrain theory maintains that diseases are signs that the internal “terrain” of the body is out of whack.

This would explain Kennedy’s assertion—refuted by doctors—that the children who died of measles were malnourished. As medical blogger Kristen Panthagani, MD/PhD, explains: Kennedy’s way of thinking is “the belief that infections don't pose a risk to healthy people who have optimized their immune system.”

While underlying medical conditions certainly affect people’s health, Mole notes that “the evidence against terrain theory is obvious and all around us.” But if you think germs are less important than overall health, things like the pasteurization of milk to kill E. coli, salmonella, and Listeria bacteria—which Kennedy opposes—are unnecessary.

In 1876, German microbiologist Robert Koch discovered that the cause of anthrax was a bacterium. Germ theory challenged established practices In the U.S., where doctors in the 1860s during the Civil War believed the best demonstration of their skill was their bloody aprons and instruments, instruments they kept in a velvet-lined case.

In 1881 the doctor overseeing President James Garfield’s recovery from a gunshot wound repeatedly probed the president’s wound with dirty instruments and his fingers, prompting assassin Charles Guiteau to plead not guilty of the murder by claiming, “The doctors killed Garfield, I just shot him.”

But just four years later, germ theory was so widely accepted that the U.S. Army required medical officers to inspect their posts every month and report the results to the administration, and by 1886, disease rates were dropping. By 1889, the U.S. Army had written manuals for sanitary field hospitals, and the need to combat germs was so commonplace medical officers rarely mentioned it.

And now, in 2025, the top health official in the United States, a man without degrees in either medicine or public health, appears to be rejecting germ theory and reshaping the nation’s medical system around his own dedication to a theory that was outdated well over a century ago.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[heyy-lovey]

ICE UPDATE

[skypalacearchitect]

op disabled reblogs

where i found this post: https://www.tumblr.com/ninjakittenarmy/766102280532590592

[thestarlightforge]

Spreading this CBS News article that summarizes the L.A. Trump situation right now, which is quickly escalating towards martial law

[saywhat-politics]

By JOSH GERSTEIN

05/12/2025 07:39 PM EDT

Chief Justice John Roberts described the rule of law as “endangered” and warned against “trashing the justices,” but speaking in Washington Monday he didn’t point fingers directly at President Donald Trump or his allies for publicly excoriating judges who’ve ruled against aspects of Trump’s agenda.

“The notion that rule of law governs is the basic proposition,” Roberts said during an appearance at Georgetown Law. “Certainly as a matter of theory, but also as a matter of practice, we need to stop and reflect every now and then how rare that is, certainly rare throughout history, and rare in the world today.”

[jonostroveart]

Sex Criminal Cabinet

For all of you voters out there who held your noses and voted for Trump, how’s it smelling so far? Does it smell like justice? Is it at all defensible?

[militarymenrbomb]