Here are some excerpts from the August
Harper's Index:
• Portion of people living in Illinois who say they would move elsewhere if they could: 1/2
• Estimated number of U.S. children aged two or three being prescribed ADHD medication: 14,000
• Estimated portion of sex crimes in U.S. jails and prisons that are committed by correctional officers: 1/2
• Rank of homicide among causes of on-the-job death for American women: 1
• Chances that the word “pushy,” when used in U.S. media, is used to describe a woman: 2 in 3
• Portion of college freshmen from low-income backgrounds who will receive a college degree by the age of 27: 1/4
• Of freshmen from high-income backgrounds who will: 9/10
• Estimated number of people held in forced labor worldwide: 21,000,000
• Portion who are 18 or younger: 1/4
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—Rove defies second Congressional subpoena.:
FISA's over. Now back to our regularly scheduled defiance of the law and lack of punishment:
Former White House adviser Karl Rove defied a congressional subpoena to testify Thursday about allegations of political pressure at the Justice Department, including whether he tried to influence the prosecution of a former Democratic governor of Alabama.
Rep. Linda Sanchez, chairman of the House subcommittee that called Rove, ruled with backing from fellow Democrats on the panel that Rove's claim of immunity was invalid—perhaps the first step toward holding him in contempt for refusing to cooperate.
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Hmm. The president and his advisors appear to be above the law. I wish we had been alerted earlier to the necessity of the legislative branch asserting its powers against the expanding executive, so as to preserve what's left of the Constitution's checks and balances. But everyone knows that every battle is a discrete and unconnected event floating in the vacuum of space, so what would be the difference even if someone had?
Ah, me!
Anyway, what happened was that Rove's lawyer wrote to the committee the other day to say he wasn't gonna show, and decline to appear "on the grounds that Executive Privilege confers upon him immunity from process to respond to a subpoena directed to this subject." That's a new one on me. Executive privilege not with respect to declining to answer specific questions or produce specific documents, but a new breed of executive privilege that manifests itself as an absolute immunity from Congressional subpoenas.
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Tweet of the Day
On
today's encore Kagro in the Morning show, it's the 7/12/13 podcast: yeah, we talked about Sharknado. But also,
Monte Frank of Team 26 joined us this morning to update us on their latest activities and plans. We also read
where4art's e-mail on Eliot Spitzer's Comptroller bid. And finally, the moment we've all been waiting for: the big, final installment on the exposition on the nuclear option. All the parliamentary maneuvering that went into perfecting the procedure. How it got derailed over and over before striking paydirt in 1975. What does it all mean for this time around? This is the stuff you simply cannot get anywhere else.
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