war on poverty

Ridiculous licensing rules are holding back people who want to work

"Occupational licensing is corrupt and idiotic. It’s idiotic because no one needs a license to braid hair, arrange flowers, or do interior decorating, or 300 hours of training to shampoo hair, all real examples of occupations subject to licensure. And it’s corrupt because although it’s couched in language about protecting the consumer, it’s actually about fleecing consumers and protecting existing players from competition via government power."

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Nine charged for giving food to homeless in California

"Nine people in California have been charged after they handed out food to the homeless, violating a rule about sharing food in public places. The group were protesting against an emergency ordinance in the city of El Cajon which was introduced in response to California's hepatitis A outbreak. They handed out food, clothes and toiletries on Sunday before police arrived and issued citations."

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Feds planning massive Northern California immigration sweep

"Federal officers would look to arrest more than 1,500 undocumented people while sending a message that immigration policy will be enforced in the sanctuary state, according to a source familiar with the operation. Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, declined to comment Tuesday on plans for the operation. The campaign, centered in the Bay Area, could happen within weeks, and is expected to become the biggest enforcement action of its kind under President Trump, said the source, who requested anonymity because the plans have not been made public."

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Both Sides of the Aisle Fire Back At Jeff Sessions’ New War on Weed

"With legal marijuana enjoying consistent majority support in opinion polls—a Pew poll released Friday at support at 61%--the blowback has been immediate, fierce, and across the board. Feeling particularly vulnerable, legal pot state Republicans howled especially loudly."

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DC Mandates College Degrees For Daycare Workers

"'Outrageous and tone deaf.' 'Madness.' 'Completely counterproductive and wrong-headed.' And that's just within the first few of more than 400 pages of comments submitted by residents of Washington, D.C., a city where child care costs are already some of the highest in the country, in response to an onerous new licensing requirement for daycare workers. The Office of the State Superintendent for Education (OSSE), which regulates daycares and early childhood education programs in the nation's capital, last year passed a rule requiring all daycare workers to have a college degree by 2020."

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Orgies, devil men, knife-wielding maniacs: A history of cannabis in California

"California was home to the Haight-Ashbury counterculture movement, the Grateful Dead and Cheech & Chong. It’s also the home state of Richard Nixon, who birthed the modern drug war, and Ronald Reagan, the president who made Nixon’s war metaphor all too literal. Today, we’ll look at cannabis in California up until about the late 1960s."

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Deporting 200,000 El Salvadorian Refugees Will Tear Families Apart

"The Trump Administration decided Monday to deport nearly 200,000 El Salvadoran refugees who fled gang violence and natural disasters. El Salvadorans received TPS in in 2001 after a series of earthquakes left tens of thousands homeless. The program was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1990."

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How Immigration Crackdowns Screw Up Americans’ Lives

"Although the U.S. has been illegally deporting citizens for over a century, the number started soaring when Congress eliminated the right to judicial review for criminal aliens in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The idea was to remove the barriers to ejecting immigrants who posed a danger to Americans. But the result was a general weakening of legal protections and the rise of an unaccountable immigration bureaucracy that itself has become a danger to Americans."

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Conservatives Were Wrong about Ending Stop-and-Frisk

"I and others argued that crime would rise. Instead, it fell. We were wrong. Major crime in New York City has continued to decline almost across the board in the four years of the de Blasio administration, to the lowest rates since New York City began keeping extensive records on crime in the early 1960s. Crime is literally off the charts — the low end of the charts. To compare today’s crime rate to even that of ten years ago is to observe a breathtaking decline."

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