Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
32 DAYS UNTIL JOE BIDEN AND KAMALA HARRIS TAKE THE OATH OF OFFICE
Robyn Pennacchia at Wonkette writes—Well This Is Just A Swell Time For Trump To Cut Healthcare Funds To California Over Abortion:
California is having a difficult time. It's had more cases of COVID-19 than any other state in the country, and trails only New York and Texas in total deaths. In fact, just two days ago, the state confirmed more than 61,000 cases in a single day.
It's really, really bad!
So if you were a normal, compassionate human being, you would probably be like, "Yeah, California definitely needs healthcare. We should definitely not cut off their healthcare funding at this time, particularly for a really stupid reason." But Donald Trump is not a normal, compassionate human being. Obviously.
That is why, we can assume, he is cutting $200 million in Medicaid funding to California because the state requires employers to provide health care insurance that covers abortion. On Wednesday, Trump's Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar explained in a press release that this violates the Weldon Amendment, which "prohibits federal agencies and programs and state and local governments that receive money under the bill from 'discriminating' against individuals, health care facilities, insurance plans, and other entities because they refuse to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions."
THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING
“No animal, according to the rules of animal-etiquette, is ever expected to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter.”
~~Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908)
At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—Due process at Guantánamo:
There was an important development on Tuesday at Guantánamo. A ruling by the judge in Salim Hamdan’s military commission appears to require entirely new hearings for any prisoners who claim to be POWs. Hamdan had appealed for a POW status hearing under Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention. The ruling by Navy Captain Keith Allred went strongly in his favor.
Allred rejects the Congressional view that Combatant Status Review Tribunals had been adequate to determine POW status. That view was asserted forcefully by Sen. Lindsay Graham in 2006 during hearings for the Military Commissions Act. Allred, however, concludes that CSRTs concerned themselves with whether the prisoners were "enemy combatants" and therefore weren’t competent to determine whether the men were prisoners of war.
The military commissions are defective by design and should not be permitted to stand in for civil trials, but at least one prisoner has been assigned a judge who is willing to face up to the plain flaws in the legal "system" that the Bush administration slapped together.