The census shambles

I wrote earlier about how people who work for the Donald Trump administration eventually end up losing all self-respect as they are forced to defend the indefensible. This happened in the case of a veteran lawyer Sarah Fabian in the justice department as she tried to defend the government’s practice of denying basic health and sanitary essentials to detained migrant children.

We now have another career justice department lawyer seeing any sense of credibility and integrity slip away as he tries to cope with the utter shambles of the Trump policy on the citizenship question on the census form. I earlier wrote how, following the US Supreme Court’s rejection of the citizenship question because the government’s reasons for including it were ‘contrived’ and thus not credible, the Department of Commerce formally stated that it was no longer going to pursue the matter and that the census forms were being printed without the question. This would normally be the end of the story.
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There are always grey areas in the law

A driver of a minivan in Nevada was pulled over by police because he was alone in a lane reserved for high-occupancy vehicles that require at least one extra person. His justification? He worked for a funeral parlor and he had a corpse in the cargo area in the back. While the police officer let him off with a warning, it appears that it is not at all clear if a dead body meets the requirement.

Nevada’s HOV rules do not clarify whether an occupant must be breathing and leans on federal law, which is not much clearer.

An official with the Federal Highway Administration said it is up to individual states to define what an occupant is – and referred the USA Today Network to the Nevada Department of Transportation for additional information.

The undercover hearse driver pulled over in Las Vegas Monday assumed the body in the back counted toward the two or more occupant requirement for the lane – but Nevada Highway Patrol says passengers must be alive and breathing in order to be counted.

“When you talk about high occupancy vehicle lanes, you’re talking about seats – so a person would need to occupy a seat to qualify,” said Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Jason Buratczuk. “This person was obviously a decedent and in the cargo area of the car, so they would not qualify for the HOV lane.”

There seems to be a general rule that you can never make a law that covers all contingencies. New cases will always arise that fall in the grey areas.

Via David Pescovitz.)

The horrible conditions in speed warehouses

John Oliver on Last Week Tonight exposes the horrible conditions in the warehouses that serve companies that seek to make speed of delivery the main selling point, because that results on demands on the workers who have to rush around to fulfill those orders. Amazon is of course the gorilla in the business, driving up the demands on its workers to the breaking point while at the same time fighting their efforts to unionize.


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Trump might suggest Ivanka to head the IMF

hristine Lagarde, the current head of the International Monetary Fund, has decided to leave that post to become head of the European Central Bank. This leaves a vacancy to be filled at the IMF. The IMF plays a major role in the economies of developing countries and has been accused of pushing austerity policies at the expense of people’s welfare, policies that have harmed the poor and led to destabilization of nations.
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Increasing condemnation of US behavior

The human rights group Amnesty International usually criticizes the behavior of foreign governments, and when it has criticized the US it is usually for its actions against civilians in other parts of the world in the many wars and other military entanglements that the US is involved in. But it has now issued a stinging report criticizing what the US is doing within its own borders.
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Big win on census citizenship question

The Trump administration has decided to print the 2020 census forms without including the question that asked people to state their citizenship status. The Trump administration and Republicans had wanted this question despite fears being raised that this would result in non-citizens being afraid to take part in the census and not filling the forms, thus affecting the many ways in which resources are allocated to states and localities, including the number of congressional seats in each state, that depend only on the number of people that are there, not on the number of citizens. Of course, this likely was exactly what the Trump administration wanted to achieve, though they created some kind of cockamamie rationale for its inclusion.
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The bizarre world of competitive eating

Competitive eating contests, where people try to force as much food as they can into their bodies in a short period of time, has always struck me as a revolting form of entertainment. Current champion Joey Chestnut holds the world record of eating 68 hot dogs in 10 minutes. Take a look at what what else Chestnut has done.

Since 2005, the 27-year-old construction engineer from San Jose, Calif., has won one eating contest after another, downing “meals” that included 241 wings in 30 minutes, 103 Krystal burgers in eight minutes, 42 bratwursts in 12 minutes and 37 slices of pizza in 10 minutes.

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Exposing the rotten core of the immigration agencies

The scandal of how immigrant families are being treated by the Customs and Border Protection agency (and its related agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement and their parent organization the Department of Homeland Security) is finally getting the attention it deserves. Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus led by its chair Joaquin Castro are keeping the heat on by paying a visit to two of the detention sites in Texas and defying the CBP officials who tried to give them a guided Potemkin tour of just selected areas. They demanded access to other areas and the right to talk to the people being detained, and when they were denied, they did so anyway. They described what they saw as “horrifying”.
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