Americans are set to receive some bad news regarding the average $1,000 tax refund increase expected for the 2025 tax year.
Soon after winning reelection in November 2024, Donald Trump's lawyers told a state judge in Delaware that a lawsuit brought against him by two co-founders of his social media company should be put on hold because a sitting president does not have time to deal with civil litigation.
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Friedrich Merz has said Germany and its European allies must not shy away from the reality of the new global order
A review of the riskier apps to use when it comes to protecting personal data finds Instagram and Facebook ranking first, collecting the most sensitive information like physical address, device, and user identity.
@#23
Here's one of many article I found ...
Monetary Cost of Air Pollution's Health Impacts Dropped from EPA Assessments (January 2026)
healthpolicy-watch.news
...The US EPA, whose path-finding work on air pollution's health impacts helped set standards internationally, will no longer put dollar amounts to the human health toll of the most hazardous air pollutants, PM 2.5 and ozone, in the course of setting new regulations or assessing the health harms of potentially polluting energy projects, the agency signalled on Monday.
The sea change in four decades of policy was included in a new economic assessment of new emissions standards for gas turbines, which fine-tunes and strengthens slightly regulations on nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, but avoids setting explicit limits for emissions of fine particles, PM2.5, widely considered the most health-hazardous air pollutant.
The costs to industry of the updated rule will amount to roughly $22.6 million annually, the assessment states. But it refrains from making any monetary estimate of health costs and benefits, stating:
"The EPA is no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 and ozone but will continue to quantify the emissions until the Agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts." ...
@#13 ... Hey DJ LampEasy, ...
Since your current trolling alias mentioned that, allow me to post another song ...
Is this what MAGA really thinks about Pres Trump?
Neil Young - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)
www.youtube.com
Lyrics excerpt ...
...
[Verse 1]
I think I'd like to go back home and take it easy
There's a woman that I'd like to get to know, living there
[Chorus]
Everybody seems to wonder what it's like down here
I gotta get away from this day-to-day running around
Everybody knows this is nowhere
La la la, la la la la
Everybody, everybody knows, everybody knows (La la la, la la la la)
Oh yeah
[Verse 2]
Every time I think about back home, it's cool and breezy
I wish that I could be there right now just passing time
...
Trump pushes voter ID 'whether approved by Congress or not!'
www.politico.com
... President Donald Trump insisted Friday that voter ID requirements will be in place for this year's midterm elections regardless of congressional approval, escalating his push for sweeping changes to how Americans vote.
"There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!" the president wrote on Truth Social. He also said he "searched the depths" of legal arguments on the issue and would be "presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future," though he did not specify what legal rationale he would rely on.
"If we can't get it through Congress, there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted," Trump wrote in a separate lengthy post shortly after, adding that he would present his justification in the form of an executive order. ...
OK, I would like to proffer.
I am not against Voter ID to vote. Here in Connecticut I have have to show identification for decades in order to cast my vote(s).
My concern on this current issue is --- what are the hurdles that Pres trump is trying to put into place to prevent legal voters from being able to obtain the ID needed to be able to vote?
imo, that is the crux of this issue.
U.S. Appeals Court Strikes Down North Carolina's Voter ID Law (2016)
www.npr.org
...The appeals court noted that the North Carolina Legislature "requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices" -- then, data in hand, "enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans."[emphasis mine]
The changes to the voting process "target African Americans with almost surgical precision," the circuit court wrote, and "impose cures for problems that did not exist."
The appeals court suggested that the motivation was fundamentally political -- a Republican legislature attempting to secure its power by blocking votes from a population likely to vote for Democrats....
Georgia's GOP House Speaker says vote-by-mail system would be 'devastating to Republicans' (April 2020)
thehill.com
..."... a multitude of reasons why vote by mail in my view is not acceptable," [Georgia state House Speaker David] Ralston went on, before adding "the president said it best, this will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia." ...
"The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you ever agreed to, you would never have a Republican elected in this country again," [fmr Pres] Trump said...
imo, one of the best songs of the Moody Blues ...
Moody Blues - Dream Sequence (1969) (it's a 12 minute tune)
www.youtube.com
Back in the progressive music days when multiple songs were continuum of music.
OK, here's the first song of that musical amalgam ...
...
Spoken:
When the white eagle of the North is flying overhead
The browns, reds and golds of autumn lie in the gutter, dead
Remember then, that summer birds with wings of fire flaying
Come to witness spring's new hope, born of leaves decaying
As new life will come from death, love will come at leisure
Love of love, love of life and giving without measure
Gives in return a wondrous yearn of a promise almost seen
Live hand-in-hand and together we'll stand on the threshold of a dream
...
Yeah, they don't write lyrics like that anymore. :)
More from the article ...