Links

I heard that some people are unhappy because they say Instagram is becoming more like Facebook. I have been unhappy recently because Facebook is becoming too much like Instagram. When I post a link, it brings in a huge picture, with a few words of text, although it's the text I want to share. It's supposed to be possible to delete the picture before you post, but when you do, the picture disappears when it is posted. I have started putting spaces at strategic places in link address so that people can see the source, but it is not recognized by Facebook as a link, and pasting in the text that I want to share. Of course, this is MUCH less convenient than it used to be. I have complained to Facebook a bunch of times. I am an adult who can read, not a baby who wants to look at picture books.


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-12/devos-loses-states-suit-over-borrower-defense-rule-delay
Sept 12, 2018
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos [appointed by Trump] lost a lawsuit brought by 19 states and the District of Columbia, accusing her department of wrongly delaying implementation of Obama-era regulations meant to protect students who took out loans to attend college from predatory practices.


https://variety.com/2018/politics/news/net-neutrality-california-1202962726/
https:// variety. com/2018/politics/news/net-neutrality-california-1202962726/
Sept. 30, 2018
California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the the country’s strongest net neutrality bill protections, a move that will be met by a legal challenge from the Trump administration.
The Justice Department announced on Sunday that it filed a lawsuit against the state for passing the law, arguing that only the federal government can dictate such a sweeping framework for how ISPs like Comcast and AT&T provide internet service.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/climate/offshore-drilling-safety-deepwater-horizon.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
Sept. 27, 2018
The Trump administration has completed its plan to roll back major offshore-drilling safety regulations that were put in place after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in 2010 that killed 11 people and caused the worst oil spill in American history.
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which was established after the spill in the Gulf of Mexico and regulates offshore oil and gas drilling, has finalized a proposal for loosening the regulations as part of President Trump’s efforts to ease restrictions on fossil fuel companies and encourage domestic energy production.


https://hillreporter.com/the-supreme-court-case-fueling-republicans-rush-to-confirm-brett-kavanaugh-8463
Sept. 26, 2018
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/09/trump-pardon-orrin-hatch-supreme-court/571285/
Sept. 25, 2018
The Utah lawmaker Orrin Hatch, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, filed a 44-page amicus brief earlier this month in Gamble v. United States, a case that will consider whether the dual-sovereignty doctrine should be put to rest. The 150-year-old exception to the Fifth Amendment’s double-jeopardy clause allows state and federal courts to prosecute the same person for the same criminal offense. According to the brief he filed on September 11, Hatch believes the doctrine should be overturned.
Within the context of the Mueller probe, legal observers have seen the dual-sovereignty doctrine as a check on President Donald Trump’s power: It could discourage him from trying to shut down the Mueller investigation or pardon anyone caught up in the probe, because the pardon wouldn’t be applied to state charges. Under settled law, if Trump were to pardon his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, for example—he was convicted last month in federal court on eight counts of tax and bank fraud—both New York and Virginia state prosecutors could still charge him for any crimes that violated their respective laws
If Trump were to shut down the investigation or pardon his associates, “the escape hatch, then, is for cases to be farmed out or picked up by state-level attorneys general, who cannot be shut down by Trump and who generally—but with some existing limits—can charge state crimes even after a federal pardon,” explained Elie Honig, a former assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey. “If Hatch gets his way, however, a federal pardon would essentially block a subsequent state-level prosecution.”
the case’s implications may not be as significant as they seem. “It is at least plausible that if the Court gets rid of the [doctrine], it would mean that an acquittal in state court would prevent a second trial in federal court and vice versa,” Rosenzweig told me. But Trump’s pardon power is “explicitly limited in the text of the Constitution to pardons for ‘offenses against the United States,’” Rosenzweig said. If that language is interpreted to mean federal criminal offenses specifically, a Trump pardon wouldn’t protect against a state criminal prosecution, he said, no matter what happens to the double-jeopardy clause in Gamble.
[Of course, Trump and the republicans are trying to put people on the supreme court who rule in their favor when interpreting Trump's pardon power.]


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/climate/epa-trump-mercury-rule.html
Sept. 30, 2018
The Trump administration has completed a detailed legal proposal to dramatically weaken a major environmental regulation covering mercury, a toxic chemical emitted from coal-burning power plants, according to a person who has seen the document but is not authorized to speak publicly about it.
The proposal would not eliminate the mercury regulation entirely, but it is designed to put in place the legal justification for the Trump administration to weaken it and several other pollution rules, while setting the stage for a possible full repeal of the rule.
Mercury is known to damage the nervous systems of children and fetuses.
The proposal also highlights a key environmental opinion of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the embattled Supreme Court nominee, whose nomination hearings have gripped the nation in recent days.
The coal industry initially sued to roll back the mercury regulation, and in 2014 its case lost in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. However, Judge Kavanaugh wrote the dissenting opinion in that case, highlighting questions about the rule’s cost to industry.
Should the legal battle over the proposed regulatory rollback go before the Supreme Court, some observers expect that Judge Kavanaugh, if elevated to a seat on the high court, would side with the coal industry.



https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-reliable-are-the-memories-of-sexual-assault-victims/
Sept. 27, 2018
Incomplete memories of sexual assault, including those with huge gaps, are understandable–if we learn the basics of how memory works and we genuinely listen to survivors. 
Such memories should be expected. They are similar to the memories of soldiers and police officers for things they’ve experienced in the line of fire. And a great deal of scientific research on memory explains why.


https://twitter.com/OfficialJonZal/status/1045381049881120770
Jon Zal ‏ @OfficialJonZal
My wife just now: “I’d love to see @LindseyGrahamSC stand in a room full of vets and tell them that their trauma isn’t real because they can’t remember the day and time that their leg got blown off.”
11:33 AM - 27 Sep 2018


https://twitter.com/NormEisen/status/1046225717497921536
7:30 PM - 29 Sep 2018
What, the White House “has given the FBI a list of witnesses they are permitted to interview"? At the WH, I helped vet hundreds of job candidates. Every one got an FBI background check. We never told the FBI who they could & could not talk to.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/us/politics/chad-ludington-statement-brett-kavanaugh.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
Sept. 30, 2018
Chad Ludington, a Yale classmate of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s who said he often drank with him, issued a statement on Sunday saying the Supreme Court nominee was not truthful about his drinking in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. :
In recent days I have become deeply troubled by what has been a blatant mischaracterization by Brett himself of his drinking at Yale. When I watched Brett and his wife being interviewed on Fox News on Monday, and when I watched Brett deliver his testimony under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, I cringed. For the fact is, at Yale, and I can speak to no other times, Brett was a frequent drinker, and a heavy drinker. I know, because, especially in our first two years of college, I often drank with him. On many occasions I heard Brett slur his words and saw him staggering from alcohol consumption, not all of which was beer. When Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive. On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face and starting a fight that ended with one of our mutual friends in jail.
I do not believe that the heavy drinking or even loutish behavior of an 18- or even 21-year-old should condemn a person for the rest of his life. I would be a hypocrite to think so. However, I have direct and repeated knowledge about his drinking and his disposition while drunk. And I do believe that Brett’s actions as a 53-year-old federal judge matter. If he lied about his past actions on national television, and more especially while speaking under oath in front of the United States Senate, I believe those lies should have consequences. It is truth that is at stake, and I believe that the ability to speak the truth, even when it does not reflect well upon oneself, is a paramount quality we seek in our nation’s most powerful judges.
I can unequivocally say that in denying the possibility that he ever blacked out from drinking, and in downplaying the degree and frequency of his drinking, Brett has not told the truth.


https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/brett-kavanaugh-classmates_us_5bb157bce4b027da00d46d72
Sept. 30, 2018
Classmates Of Brett Kavanaugh Say He Drank More Than He Lets On
Ludington’s not the only one countering parts of Kavanaugh’s testimony. 
Former Yale classmates Liz Swisher, James Roche, and Lynne Brookes have also made public statements about Kavanaugh’s excessive drinking during their youth. Swisher told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Friday that though she never saw Kavanaugh be sexually aggressive, the judge was a “sloppy drunk.”
“There’s no problem in drinking beer in college, the problem is lying about it,” Swisher told CNN. “He drank heavily, he was a partier, he liked to do beer bongs, he played drinking games, he was sloppy drunk.” 
Roche, a roommate of Kavanaugh’s during freshman year, told the New Yorker he found Ramirez’s claims to be credible. Roche added that he saw Kavanaugh “frequently, incoherently drunk.” Another unnamed classmate told the New Yorker Kavanaugh could be “aggressive and even belligerent” when he drank. 
Brookes, who also attended Yale, told CNN Thursday that Kavanaugh was “lying” to the Senate Judiciary Committee about his drinking. 
“There is no doubt in my mind that while at Yale, he was a big partier, often drank to excess and there had to be a number of nights where he does not remember,” Brookes told CNN. 
Lying to Congress under oath is a federal crime.