“I hadn’t thought about pressing charges, but now people are convincing me that it's smart,” she told The Daily Beast. “If I get a really smart attorney, we might be able to get around [the statute]. I’ll be exploring it.”

“Under fire for what many called racist tweets, President Trump said Monday that the minority Democratic congresswomen he said should ‘go back’ to other countries are the ones who should apologize,” USA Today reports.

Said Trump: “When will the Radical Left Congresswomen apologize to our Country, the people of Israel and even to the Office of the President, for the foul language they have used, and the terrible things they have said. So many people are angry at them & their horrible & disgusting actions!”

“He did not detail those alleged actions.”

After negotiating with the VP’s office, pool was taken into an outdoor portal at the McAllen Border Station around 5pm, where almost 400 men were in caged fences with no cots. The stench was horrendous.

The cages were so crowded that it would have been impossible for all the men to lie on the concrete. There were 384 single men in the portal who allegedly crossed the border illegally. There were no mats or pillows—some of the men were sleeping on concrete.

When the men saw the press arrive, they began shouting and wanted to tell us they’d been in there 40 days or longer. The men said they were hungry and wanted to brush their teeth. It was sweltering hot. Agents were guarding the cages wearing face masks.

“Republicans have no real plan to establish a new health care system if the courts strike down the Affordable Care Act before the 2020 election. But plenty of them are rooting for its demise anyway — even if it means plunging the GOP into a debate that splits the party and leaves them politically vulnerable,” Politico reports.

“After a decade of trying to gut Obamacare, Republicans may finally get their wish thanks to a Trump administration-backed lawsuit. Its success would cause chaos not only in the insurance markets but on Capitol Hill. And Republican senators largely welcome it — even if they don’t know what comes next.”

"LCV is withdrawing our participation in the presidential primary candidate climate forum previously announced in New York City on September 23," statement says. "We will remain focused on the important work of elevating the climate crisis in this election and encouraging all the candidates to be prioritizing solutions."

It had to be surreal for Alex Acosta to stand on the South Lawn and hear Donald Trump say that he had wanted his Labor Secretary to stay, but that Acosta had insisted on leaving. It was bad enough that what the President was saying was the total opposite of the truth. What was worse is that everybody knew it. And Trump was making it even more embarrassing by saying that Acosta had been a really great Secretary of Labor without actually citing anything he had actually accomplished.

That’s because everything Trump liked about Acosta’s record as secretary was something almost every American would hate. Acosta’s proposed changes to the overtime rule will take about $1.2 billion a year away from workers. But the President could have at least mentioned an Acosta rule that is now in effect. Say, like, the one that weakened mine safety rules, saving corporations lots of money. So, when the next catastrophic mining disaster occurs, think of Alex Acosta.

So, who replaces Acosta as acting Secretary of Labor? A guy who is much worse. From 1996 to 2000, Patrick Pizzella was a lobbyist for Jack Abramoff’s lobbying firm, the most famously corrupt lobbying firm in the long, heralded annals of corrupt lobbying firms.

Abramoff and his team did some terrible, terrible things, always on behalf of horrible, horrible people. And one of the very worst was on behalf of the garment industry of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI).

It’s bad. And Pizzella was in charge of it. I’ll explain it in a bit. But first some highlights: sweatshops - 18-hour workdays - wage slavery - routine beatings - company barracks infested with rats - forced prostitution – and mandatory abortions. On the other side of the ledger - all-expense-paid luxury junkets for Republican members of Congress and their families and staffers, and right-wing thinkers like Kellyanne Conway all flying first class to and from CNMI – luxurious accommodations at the fancy schmancy Hyatt Regency - golf - tropical drinks with little umbrellas - and propaganda from Pizzella so that when Republican leaders like Tom DeLay returned to Washington, the Majority Leader would call CNMI, “the perfect petri dish for capitalism.”

Quick history of the Northern Marianas. They’re a string of fourteen tropical islands just north of Guam. The biggest island is Saipan, where 55,000 Japanese and American soldiers and civilians died during the 24-day Battle of Saipan in June and July of 1944.

A little over a year later, the Enola Gay took off from Tinian, a small island just below Saipan, and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. WWII was over, and we had let the Soviet Union know we had the atomic bomb!

After the war, the Northern Marianas continued to operate under the auspices of the U.S., and in 1975, it became a territory known officially as the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. To help the CNMI economy, the Ford administration gave it a couple shots in the arm. CNMI businesses would be able to ship products to the U.S. without quotas, tariffs, or duties. They could even label them “Made in the U.S.A.” And – get this – the CNMI wouldn’t have to abide by American labor or immigration laws!

It wasn’t long before American labels like Ralph Lauren, Brooks Brothers, J. Crew, your Tommy Hilfiger, and your Banana Republic were making their clothes in Saipan. Who would do the actual work? Why, impoverished young women recruited from rural villages in China and the Philippines and promised jobs in…the United States! All the young women would have to do is pay several thousand dollars for the privilege. And if they didn’t have the full amount now, they could borrow the money and pay it off as they worked!

The flight to the western hemisphere must have seemed remarkably short. The women found themselves in Saipan, just fifteen hundred miles south-southwest of Japan and were soon working eighteen-hour days in sweatshops under horrible conditions. At night they’d be locked up with hundreds of other women in company barracks infested with rats and equipped with one outside toilet for every fifty women. They were allowed out for one hour every Sunday. But many had signed contracts agreeing not to fall in love, or have a baby, or protest working conditions. Hence, the beatings by factory foremen. And hence the forced abortions.

Those forced abortions sometimes came from a special kind of exploitation. The women who were young and pretty were sent to work at the various nightclubs in town catering to tourists who liked young, pretty girls. Some of them owed money for their trip to “the United States,” and were forced into prostitution. Presumably, the socially conservative Republicans who were on their all-expense-paid junket were steered clear of the clubs.

I happened to write about all this back in 2005 in my book, The Truth: With Jokes. Fortunately, all of this had been carefully documented by the Clinton Labor Department, and by investigative reporters like Brian Ross, whose reports on ABC’s World News Tonight were seen by millions of Americans.

But presumably not by Patrick Pizzella. I know that because when I questioned him about his work with Abramoff in the CNMI, he told me he had not been aware of any of these sordid details. Which is odd in so many ways. Considering, for example, that included in Ross’s report was video of Willie Tan, one of the biggest garment factory owners in Saipan, speaking at a dinner thrown by Patrick Pizzella for the members of Congress who had been flown in by Patrick Pizzella. See, Pizzella and the Abramoff group represented Tan, who paid a $9 million fine to the Labor Department for abuses in the 90s for labor practices in his factories.

That’s why I was so surprised that Pizzella claimed to know nothing about those abuses when he was nominated for Deputy Secretary of Labor in 2017.

I was on the Senate HELP Committee (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) and met with Mr. Pizzella in my office the day before his hearing. As a courtesy, I told him I was going to vote against him because of his work in the CNMI and was going to ask him about that in his hearing.

The next day, Pizzella claimed to have known nothing about these abuses. In retrospect, I wish I had been more emphatic in pointing out that he was lying, but I assumed that was obvious to the rest of my colleagues. Maybe I had overlooked the possibility that a few of the Republicans on the committee had gone on one of those junkets. Besides, once Betsy DeVos got through, it became clear that it would take far more than just having been a lobbyist for horrible people to have your nomination blocked.

One particular moment worth noting. During the hearing, I mentioned that 21 Abramoff associates had been convicted of crimes. Pizzella claimed that he had not known that, adding, “I was not one of them.”

“I know that,” I said. “Congratulations.”

Well, congratulations once again to the new acting Labor Secretary. I’m guessing there won’t be a confirmation hearing anytime soon.