Trump said he would send the National Guard to Toronto and impose 50% tariffs on all Los Angeles products. AllGov reporter Sidney Finster suggested that perhaps Trump had confused the two cities. Because Toronto is in Canada, not the United States, Trump can’t send the National Guard there. And because Los Angeles is in the United States, Trump can’t impose tariffs on a U.S. city. Trump defended his position by saying, “I’m always right.”   read more

Former Navy admiral Dennis Blair is no stranger to controversy, thanks to a career that has included water skiing behind a combat vessel, ignoring orders from civilian officials by offering  the Indonesian dictatorship military assistance without ...   read more

Nancy Sutley’s selection as chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality not only pleased environmentalists, but gay rights activists as well—thanks to Sutley’s “green” credentials and the fact that she is openly gay. Throughout her c...   read more

Citing safety concerns, the Israeli military has barred foreign journalists’ access to Gaza, defying a mandate last week from the Israeli Supreme Court ordering that a small number of international journalists be allowed into Palestine. Yet despit...   read more

The U.S. has reclaimed its preeminence as the leading arms supplier to developing nations in 2007, a position Russia had occupied since 2004. Arms transfer agreements totaled $60 billion in 2007, with $42.3 billion (70%) going to the developing wo...   read more

In advance of the upcoming Guantánamo trial of six 9/11 conspirators, military judge Stephen R. Henley issued a protective order on December 19th which will allow classification of any information, including that already in the public domain, that...   read more

The controversy surrounding embattled Governor Rod Blagojevich is nothing new for Illinois politics.  Five of the last 10 Illinois governors, including Blagojevich, faced criminal charges, but the tradition of paying for a Senate seat actually str...   read more

Hillary Clinton was the first First Lady to be elected to Congress and will be the first First Lady to serve in a cabinet position.   Born Hillary Diane Rodham on October 26, 1947, in Chicago, IL, Clinton was raised by her parents, Hugh Ellswort...   read more

While running for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan asked, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Most Americans answered: No, and Reagan was elected one week later. As the era of George W. Bush draws to a close, the answer to a sim...   read more

Mary L. Schapiro is Barack Obama’s choice to take over the Securities and Exchange Commission—a demoralized agency that failed repeatedly to head off financial disasters involving Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Bernard Madoff. Some observers co...   read more

Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi-born U.S. legal permanent resident, won $120,000 in a court settlement with JetBlue and employees of the Transportation and Security Administration (TSA) after being forced to cover up his T-shirt which said in both English a...   read more

In response to conservative economists’ claims that FDR’s New Deal actually prolonged the Great Depression, two-time New York Times bestselling political commentator David Sirota reviewed detailed unemployment data (PDF) from the U.S. census to di...   read more

In a going away present to some of his most trusted aides, President Bush has appointed 45 individuals to positions that will expire in the midst of Barack Obama’s term, or afterwards. He has appointed 12 individuals to 5-year terms on the United ...   read more

After years of watching industry-friendly appointees of the Bush administration run roughshod over environmental concerns, conservationists had hoped Barack Obama’s election would bring a new day at the Department of the Interior. But the selectio...   read more

Eleven years after scientists determined that carmine and cochineal extracts from the female cochineal bug can cause severe allergic reactions, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a rule (PDF) requiring food companies to list the ext...   read more

When Barack Obama takes office on January 20th, he will be the fifth youngest president, and he will be working with the oldest Congress ever. The average age of 57 in the House and 63 in the Senate both represent historical highs. The age increas...   read more

A new report (PDF) issued by Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA), Ed Towns (D-NY), and Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) of the House Oversight Committee, has found that the Bush administration has squandered $26 billion by ignoring 13,800 recommend...   read more