White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney speaks about of U.S. President Donald Trump’s budget in the briefing room of the White House in Washington, U.S., March 16, 2017.
Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney asserted on Tuesday that President Donald Trump had produced the first federal budget that provides “compassion” for taxpayers.

During a briefing at the White House, Mulvaney defended Trump’s drastic cuts to entitlement programs to pay for increased military spending, a border wall and sizable tax reductions that would benefit the wealthy.

According to Mulvaney, the proposal looks “at the budget through the eyes of the taxpayer” instead of those who receive benefits from federal programs.

“If I can look you in the eye and say I’m going to take this money from you so I can help this injured vet, I can do that in good conscience,” …

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The Duggar family, examplars of the ‘christian” cult that is growing in America

It was a cold morning on the campus of the little Christian college I attended in Western Pennsylvania. Along with about 20 other students, I’d trundled in and unwrapped my coat and scarf. Now we all sat there sipping our coffees, waiting for the hardest class of the year to get rolling.

Our literary criticism professor paused as he announced the optional reading titles on our list for the next week, a funny look on his face.

“This one,” he said, “you may not like. It was written in 1984, published in ’85 or ’86, and was a reaction against the rise of the religious right — against the values that places like our school stand for. It’s pro-feminist, and anti-complementarian — against traditional gender roles. It sort of parodies what we believe in, in an interesting …

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The ExxonMobil Torrance refinery in Southern California, after an explosion on February 18, 2015 had ripped through the facility, dislodging a hulking 40-ton chunk of debris that narrowly avoided a tank containing tens of thousands of pounds of highly toxic modified hydrofluoric acid.
Credit: Chemical Safety Board

At 8:48 a.m. on the morning of February 18, 2015, an explosion at the ExxonMobil Torrance refinery in Southern California ripped through the facility with such ferocity, the resulting shockwaves registered on the Richter scale. Dust was scattered over the densely populated neighborhood up to a mile away from the blast. Four workers suffered minor injuries. A hulking 40-ton chunk of debris from the refinery’s Electrostatic Precipitator narrowly avoided hitting a tank containing tens of thousands of pounds of highly toxic modified hydrofluoric acid.

The damning findings of a Chemical Safety Board (CSB) review of the accident were made public earlier this month. …

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President Trump’s first major budget proposal on Tuesday will include massive cuts to Medicaid and call for changes to anti-poverty programs that would give states new power to limit a range of benefits, people familiar with the planning said, despite growing unease in Congress about cutting the safety net.

For Medicaid, the state-federal program that provides health care to low-income Americans, Trump’s budget plan would follow through on a bill passed by House Republicans to cut more than $800 billion over 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that this could cut off Medicaid benefits for about 10 million people over the next decade.

The White House also will call for giving states more flexibility to impose work requirements for people in different kinds of anti-poverty programs, people familiar with the budget plan said, potentially leading to a flood of changes in states led by conservative governors. Many anti-poverty …

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Donald Trump’s election has led to such a steep rise in fundamentalist Christian evangelizing and religious bigotry in the U.S. armed forces that the matter is reaching the level of a “national security threat,” according to information shared exclusively with Newsweek by an organization that represents and advocates for secular and minority religious views in the military.

Related: Christian sex advice websites reveal evangelical political agenda

The number of complaints from servicemen and -women in the Army, Air Force, Marines and other service branches to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has doubled in number since November 2016, according to lawyer Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, a former Air Force officer who founded the organization.

Many of the recent charges are coming from members of minority religions, including Roman Catholics, Jews and Muslims, and from atheists. Among the complaints: military family and marital therapy programs are being infused with Protestant Christianity, which would …

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President-elect Donald Trump stands with Betsy DeVos after their meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Saturday.
Credit: Mike Segar/Reuters

To see for yourself how school choice leads to segregation, I recommend a visit to Betsy DeVos’ hometown of Holland, MI.

Here, two decades of the policies that the Trump/DeVos education budget now wants to take national, have resulted in white flight and school closures, leaving Holland’s poor and minority students segregated in the few schools that remain open. I traveled to Holland last week for the annual Tulip Time festival, a celebration of the city’s Dutch heritage. But along with Dutch shoes and swagger, the legacy of Michigan’s now two decade-long experiment with school choice was on vivid display as well, and it wasn’t pretty.

First, some background. During the endless runup to DeVos’ confirmation hearing last year, it was the Wild West-style school choice she’d pushed in Detroit that …

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