“Just to be clear, the city attorney is arguing that a white jury was acting with racial prejudice when it ruled against police officers who killed a black man.”
“With legal marijuana enjoying consistent majority support in opinion polls—a Pew poll released Friday at support at 61%–the blowback has been immediate, fierce, and across the board. Feeling particularly vulnerable, legal pot state Republicans howled especially loudly.”
Read more: https://www.alternet.org/drugs/america-declares-war-jeff-sessions-threatened-war-weed
“‘Outrageous and tone deaf.’ ‘Madness.’ ‘Completely counterproductive and wrong-headed.’ And that’s just within the first few of more than 400 pages of comments submitted by residents of Washington, D.C., a city where child care costs are already some of the highest in the country, in response to an onerous new licensing requirement for daycare workers. The Office of the State Superintendent for Education (OSSE), which regulates daycares and early childhood education programs in the nation’s capital, last year passed a rule requiring all daycare workers to have a college degree by 2020.”
Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2018/01/05/everyone-hates-dcs-daycare-mandate
“The Affordable Care Act slowed ambulance response times by almost 20 percent. According to a new working paper by David J. G. Slusky of the University of Kansas and Leon S. Moskatel of Scripps Mercy Hospital, some people are foregoing ambulances and opting for ride-hailing services instead.”
Read more: https://fee.org/articles/move-over-ambulances-uber-s-coming/
“Recently, the growth in health-care employment is stemming more from administrative jobs than physician jobs. The number of non-doctor workers in the health industry has exploded in the last two decades. The majority of these jobs aren’t clinical roles, like registered nurses. They are mostly administrative and management jobs, including receptionists and office clerks. It’s not always clear that these workers improve health outcomes for patients.”
Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/health-care-america-jobs/550079/
“These aren’t predictions at all. These are all stories that took place in 2017.”
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/12/29/civil-liberties-predictions-for-2018/
“The Trump administration’s foray into linguistic decrees is not a new phenomenon among the American Right. One recent comparable instance of state-decreed censorship: John Ashcroft, a Christian fundamentalist and the first attorney general under George W. Bush, insisted on covering the breasts of a marble statue of the ‘Spirit of Justice’ that stood in the main Justice building. This act of modesty reportedly cost $8,000 of taxpayer money.”
Read more: https://www.salon.com/2017/12/16/trump-bans-cdc-from-using-words-like-transgender/
“Sessions noted that more fatal accidents are now caused by drugs than by alcohol, and he said the American Medical Association ‘is crystal clear’ that ‘marijuana is not a healthy substance.’ But when the intern challenged that assertion, Sessions seemed dismissive, addressing the intern as ‘Dr. Whatever Your Name Is.’ ‘I don’t think America’s going to be a better place if marijuana’s sold in every corner grocery store,’ Sessions said.”
Read more: https://www.leafly.com/news/politics/jeff-sessions-faces-tough-cannabis-questions-from-doj-interns
“Appointing an Opioid Czar and strictly restricting access to said drugs is not the way to stop the ‘opioid epidemic,’ if I may use the term. People, good people, people with families and jobs and homes, people who just want to be able to do something that approximates functioning, are having serious issues getting medicine that they need. Because they’re having trouble getting medicine their doctor deemed they needed, more and more are finding themselves in pain crises and heading to their local emergency rooms for relief, clogging up an already-congested system and causing delays in care for people who are dealing with other critical emergencies.”
Read more: https://fee.org/articles/opioid-regulations-cause-needless-suffering/
“Ramos remained in jail for 158 days until he was found not guilty in Lehigh County Court after blood tests showed no illegal substances or alcohol in his system. While Ramos was jailed, he was fired from his job and lost his home. He lost his car, too: The tow truck operator notified Ramos by mail about a deadline to retrieve his vehicle, but because Ramos was in jail, no one was at his residence to receive the letter. Ramos’ lawsuit charged that Troopers Summa and Vanfleet conspired to falsely arrest him despite finding no evidence that he was impaired or had drugs in his car.”
Read more: https://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2017/dec/05/pennsylvania_false_drug_imprisonment