By Leah Litman and Kyle Skinner/TakeCare

It was just over a month ago that the Supreme Court stayed the injunction prohibiting President Trump from reappropriating funds to construct the border wall. The stay has largely gotten lost in the never-ending cycle of Trump administration news – and like many of those stories, this one dropped late on a Friday evening: By a 5-4* vote, with the conservatives in the majority, the Court allowed the president to reappropriate funds that were originally set aside for the military. The decision will allow construction on the wall to begin.
Since this case was neither fully briefed nor argued, the Court did not issue a full opinion explaining its decision. Instead, the Court released a summary order suggesting there were several reasons for granting the stay. But it provided only one reason to think that the challengers would ultimately lose: “[T]he plaintiffs have no cause of action to obtain review of the Acting Secretary’s compliance with Section 8005, the statutory provision that allows the Defense Secretary to transfer funds, when doing so ‘is necessary in the national interest,’ and the funds will be used ‘for military functions (except military construction).'”
Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan would have denied the stay request entirely. And the asterisk to the 5-4 vote breakdown is that *Justice Breyer would have stayed the decision announcing the injunction, but only with respect to the government’s ability “to finalize the contracts at issue,” “not to begin construction” on the wall.
The Court’s decision is troubling for many reasons. We will focus on just two of them.

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Posted on September 13, 2019

By Feeding America

A new report released Wednesday by the United States Department of Agriculture found that 1 in 9 households (11.1%) in the United States encountered difficulty at some time during 2018 in providing enough food for their family.
This represents a decline of 0.7 percentage points from last year and is the lowest rate since prior to the recession. There was a particularly large decline in food insecurity among households with children, which went from 15.7% in 2017 to 13.9% in 2018 and represents the lowest rate in at least 20 years.
While the declines are certainly good news, 37.2 million Americans still face hunger, including 11.2 million children. Some of the groups experiencing above-average rates of food insecurity include households with children led by single parents, households with children under age 6, and households with low incomes.

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Posted on September 5, 2019

By The Illinois Emergency Management Agency

The Illinois Terrorism Task Force announced Wednesday significant steps to improving trauma management training at schools in Illinois.
Following the recommendations of the School Safety Working Group, more than 7,000 STOP the Bleed kits have been distributed to schools in Illinois ahead of the 2019-2020 school year. STOP the Bleed is a national campaign intended to train, equip and empower bystanders to help in a bleeding emergency before professional help arrives.
A STOP the Bleed kit contains a C-A-T tourniquet, QuikClot Bleeding Control Dressing, Emergency Trauma Dressing, MicroShield Mask, Nitrile gloves, Trauma shears, Permanent marker and Instruction card.

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Posted on September 4, 2019

By Leah Litman/TakeCare

The free speech police are at it again. No not the Berkeley undergrads. Not the #cancelculture Twitter mobs. Not the #MeToo harpies who cry wolf when men’s expressive conduct involves whipping it out in hotel rooms.
It’s the free speech warriors themselves – who also happen to be pretty anti-speech when it suits their purposes. The last 24 hours brought into stark relief just how the selective and self-serving some of the free-speech warriors’ claims can be.

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Posted on August 29, 2019

By Andy Warcrime

Biden: Imagine what would have happened if Obama were assassinated https://t.co/XmD5d3cf37 pic.twitter.com/t7xBkCT8KX

— NBC Chicago (@nbcchicago) August 24, 2019

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Posted on August 25, 2019

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as a people began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation.
Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote those words in her introductory essay to The 1619 Project, a special issue of The New York Times Magazine she edited that commemorates the 400-year anniversary of the arrival of 20 enslaved Africans who were sold into slavery to the shores of Virginia.
Often referred to as America’s original sin, slavery is so pervasive that its residual effects can be found in everything from the stock exchange to our prison system. Slavery was instrumental in the formation of the United States. It’s crucial that we understand its inner workings and aftereffects; only then can we create a moral, economic and social roadmap to achieving our democratic ideals.

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Posted on August 20, 2019

By Ernest A. Canning/Common Dreams

In his book Failed States, preeminent linguist Noam Chomsky described the significant gap between the policy positions of the U.S. electorate and their elected “leaders” as a “democracy deficit.” That gap, he concluded, is the product of the deceptive manner in which “elections are skillfully managed to avoid issues and marginalize the underlying population . . . freeing the elected leadership to serve the substantial people.”
At its essence, the Bernie Sanders-inspired “political revolution” entails a substantive, issue-driven strategy designed to eliminate the “democracy deficit.” It offers a unique vehicle for societal transformation from what President Jimmy Carter described as “an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery” to the realization of the promise offered by President Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address: “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
As a movement, the “political revolution” can succeed only if progressives come to understand the symbiotic relationship between the corporate public relations industry, commercial media outlets, and the politicians who have been subsumed by corporate wealth and power. This includes the need to identify and expose the methodology deployed by that unholy troika (corporate PR flaks, commercial media and corporatist politicians), to wit, the adroit use of select words and phrases (“talking points”) to frame public discourse and to conceal the deceits utilized to persuade the electorate to vote against its own interests.

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Posted on August 9, 2019

By Kyle Skinner and Leah Litman/TakeCare

Many commentators have pointed out the overlap between the racism that President Donald Trump regularly articulates and the policies his administration pursues.
On the rhetorical side, Trump told several American congresswomen to “go back” to where they came from (all the congresswomen are women of color), and he countenanced a chant to “send her back” regarding one of the women, Ilhan Omar, who also happens to be a refugee.
Trump has referred to countries in South and Central America as “shithole countries” and asked why we couldn’t get more immigrants from (white) Norway. Trump calls Don Lemon “stupid” while pronouncing that he (Trump) is the “least racist person ever.” Trump pronounced Elijah Cummings’s district in Baltimore “infested,” and asked “Who would want to live there?” Trump announced his presidential campaign by declaring that Mexico was not sending its best people to the United States – it was sending criminals and rapists. Trump routinely bemoans how America is being “invaded” by Central and South American migrants. And the list goes on.
The sentiments that the President routinely shares are also reflected in his policies. The Trump administration instituted an entry ban that suspended entry from several Muslim majority countries. The administration has attempted to prevent people who cross the border outside of ports of entry from applying for asylum. It has narrowed the eligibility for asylum in numerous cruel ways. It has not initiated a single Voting Rights Act lawsuit. It has switched positions and argued that states can purge voters from voter rolls and that state laws disproportionately disenfranchising voters of color do not discriminate on the basis of race. The administration has attempted to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as well as temporary protected status for persons from Haiti (as well as other countries). It has attempted to require asylum seekers to first seek asylum in a third country. And this list, too, goes on.

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Posted on August 6, 2019

By The Office Of Inspector General

The Office of Inspector General’s Public Safety Section has issued a report regarding the Chicago Police Department’s non-compliance with the review of randomly selected body-worn camera recordings.
CPD Special Order S03-14 requires watch operations lieutenants to review one recording daily, across all watches. These reviews enable CPD supervisors to assess whether officers are properly using BWCs and conducting themselves according to CPD policy.
In addition to failing to complete all required random reviews from November 2017 through March 2018 in seven districts, CPD also failed to implement a standardized process for randomly selecting recordings for review, and did not provide guidance, standards, or training for WOLs. Furthermore, CPD’s BWC Program Evaluation Committee, tasked with ensuring compliance and evaluating program effectiveness, did not initially hold quarterly meetings as required.

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Posted on August 1, 2019

By Eoin Higgins/Common Dreams

House Democrats are watching this week as the latest scandal to engulf the caucus’s campaign arm – this one on minority representation in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee – is deepening divisions on Capitol Hill.
The committee, known as the DCCC, acts as the election wing for Congressional Democrats. The DCCC is currently run by Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), who began the job with the new Congress in January.

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Posted on July 31, 2019