No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.

The President shall, at stated times, receive for his services, a compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that period any other emolument from the United States, or any of them.

The Trump administration's crackdown on campus criticism of Israel is Orwellian

-- Joshua Leifer
23 Sep 2019
The Guardian

Trump’s department of education is using the threat of defunding to achieve its political goals – to great effect

If you criticize Israeli policy, you will lose your federal funding. That is the message the Department of Education is sending with its threat to withdraw federal support for the Consortium for Middle East Studies, operated jointly by Duke University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, if it does not alter the content of its programming.

Just three months after Education Secretary Betsy Devos ordered an investigation into a conference about the politics of the Gaza Strip that the consortium had sponsored – an authoritarian threat, in and of itself – the Department of Education issued a letter demanding that the Duke-UNC consortium remake its curriculum. Or else.

The Department of Education’s letter, published last Tuesday, charged that the Duke-UNC program was failing to meet its federal mandate – by focusing too much on cultural studies and topics like “Love and Desire in Modern Iran” and not enough on “advancing the security and economic stability of the United States”. In other words, it seems the program was teaching its students about the complex and varied cultures of countries in the Middle East instead of how to dominate them.

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“Kochland”: How David Koch Helped Build an Empire to Shape U.S. Politics & Thwart Climate Action

Billionaire conservative donor David Koch died Friday at the age of 79 from prostate cancer. David Koch — who was worth some $42 billion — and his brother Charles poured massive amounts of money into funding climate change denial through conservative think tanks and politicians. The Koch brothers founded the political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity in 2004, which is credited with turning the “tea party” into a full-fledged political movement. They also backed “right-to-work” efforts, which aim to weaken labor rights and quash union membership. The brothers made their fortune running Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held company in the United States. We speak with the business journalist Christopher Leonard, who just last week published a major new book examining the business dealings of the Koch brothers. It’s titled “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.”

AMY GOODMAN: But “David Koch Was the Ultimate Climate Change Denier.” Now, if he is one individual, that’s his own business. But this affected the entire country. Explain what Kochland is and how he and his brother had such a massive effect on the issue of climate change and denialism in this country.

CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: Yes, I will. And maybe to start, we could back up and look at the corporate empire that made David and Charles Koch the richest — some of the richest people in America. They’ve owned this privately held firm in Wichita, Kansas, for decades, Koch Industries. And as we said earlier, Koch Industries is one of the largest corporations in America. Its annual sales are bigger than Facebook, Goldman Sachs and U.S. Steel combined.

And the thing about Koch Industries is that it specializes in the kinds of businesses that underpin civilization. You couldn’t boycott Koch Industries if you wanted to.

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[ video and transcript at link ]
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/8/27/christopher_leonard_kochland_koch_brothers

Mitch McConnell Is Panicking As The ‘Moscow Mitch’ Label Sticks

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has always been shameless in his efforts to ignore what’s best for the country in order to protect his party and his president.

But as the ‘Moscow Mitch’ label continues to stick to him after he refused to advance commonsense election security legislation through the Senate, he looks to be increasingly panicked.

That was clear earlier on Monday as he took to the Senate floor to defend himself from a chorus of backlash that he’s faced in recent days.

On Twitter, the Senate majority leader played damage control, desperately (and laughably) accusing his critics of “doing Putin’s destabilizing work for him.”

https://twitter.com/senatemajldr/status/1155949756792725510

As Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, said on Monday, “Clearly Mitch McConnell is a bit freaked by #MoscowMitch.”

https://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/1155964123936505858

[ ... more at link ... ]
https://www.politicususa.com/2019/07/29/mitch-mcconnell-is-panicking-as-the-moscow-mitch-label-sticks.html

Emergency rooms push Medicaid patients out more often than privately-insured people

By Nicole Wetsman

Before 1986, emergency rooms in the United States routinely turned patients away at the door if they didn’t have insurance. In fact, it was legal to do so. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), passed that year, looked to stop that practice: The law mandated that hospitals screen and stabilize any patient, regardless of their ability to pay.

While the law has helped cut down on overt refusal of care, gaps in emergency room access persist, according to research published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Uninsured patients or those on Medicaid who come to the emergency department with pulmonary conditions like pneumonia or asthma are more likely to be transferred to another hospital than patients on private insurance, the study found. They are also more likely to be discharged directly from the emergency department than patients with private insurance.

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The new study also found that patients without insurance or with Medicaid had nearly half the rate of admission after an emergency department evaluation than patients with private insurance. “That was definitely surprising,” Venkatesh says. Prior research has shown that uninsured patients are more likely to be discharged from the emergency department—uninsured patients with brain injuries or other types of trauma, for example, were less likely to be admitted. The pulmonary conditions examined in this study, though, have standard assessments that guide decision making around hospital admission, which the study authors note makes this particular gap stand out.

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