According to aides who were present when Trump discussed the issue, but who choose to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, Trump said he was sick of Vance and wanted to fire him. “I wanted him to be my attack dog,” said Trump, “but he appears foolish on television. He dropped the college football trophy. He met with Pope Francis and the next day the pope died. Vance is toxic, and I don’t want him to come near me. He just doesn’t look as good on television as I thought he would.”   read more

The agency, which represents irrigators in the Klamath River Basin, was supposed to use some of the money to pay for a feasibility study examining the effects on fish and wildlife of farmers using groundwater instead of river water. Instead, the money was spent by the agency to supply farmers with groundwater during the drought. PEER Senior Counsel Paula Dinerstein said the money “became a kind of slush fund for this irrigation agency. It’s not benefiting the fish or the wildlife.”   read more

“The smoke from these fires has risen above 20,000 feet, and the jet stream has been acting like a highway and transporting that smoke all across the country,” said meteorologist Dustin Bonk. The biggest impact has been in Minnesota, where the air quality has been compared to that in areas of heavy pollution such as Beijing. Minnesota’s state Pollution Control Agency reported that “fine particle levels had reached unhealthy levels in a diagonal band across the state.”   read more

Tribe chairwoman Cecile Hansen criticized the agency’s decision, saying “we have again been denied our rightful place in the history of Seattle.” The tribe’s existence goes back 8,000 years in the Puget Sound region. “Shame on the Bureau of Indian Affairs!” Hansen said in a statement. The decision could cost tribal members important benefits, like subsidized housing, education, health care and the opportunity to open a casino.   read more

Senate Republicans are on pace to confirm the fewest federal judges since Nixon was president in 1969. Since the GOP and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took over the Senate, not a single circuit court nominee has been approved. Republicans are hoping they’ll have one of their own making nominations after the 2016 elections. That means, od course, that the nominees won’t come down the pike until a few years from now. "Republicans are hoping [for] a lot of vacancies...to fill,” said Paul Gordon.   read more

Holder will make at least seven figures at Covington & Burling. In addition, it will be a kind of Justice Department reunion for him. His former enforcement chief, Lanny Breuer, decamped for the firm in 2013. Breuer’s company biography states that “he specializes in helping clients navigate financial fraud investigations, anti-corruption [and] money laundering investigations, securities enforcement actions, cybercrime . . .” Just the kinds of crimes that often weren’t pursued under Holder.   read more

“What this shows us is that, in the context of a growing crisis that we all recognize in criminal justice in this country, we have a system where incredible power and discretion is concentrated in the hands of one demographic group,” lead author Brenda Carter told the Times. In 14 states, all the elected prosecutors are white. The study also found that 66% of states that elect prosecutors have no blacks in these offices. Latinos are also grossly underrepresented.   read more

The complaint says police and legal officials engaged in a “stunning pattern” of evidence destruction, presumably to cover up the issuing of 850,000 bogus summonses resulting from the NYPD’s quota system. “It is simply not tenable that Commissioner Kelly and Chief Esposito did not — in the entire period of 2007 through the present — write or receive emails using terms” related to the word “summons,” wrote Suttons. NYPD is also accused of shredding crime statistics documents.   read more

The great television numbers will not be matched by the money going to the U.S. women’s team, which will receive only $2 million for winning the title from FIFA, soccer’s governing body. Last year’s victor of the World Cup, Germany, got $35 million. That team was composed of men, of course. The teams that lost in the first round got $8 million. The men’s teams played for a total of $576 million in World Cup prizes last year.   read more

Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito have created potential conflicts of interest by participating in decisions that potentially affected their stock portfolio. The study focused on 19 cases in which the three justices owned stock in companies that filed “friend of the court” briefs. The report says that 68% of the time they sided with the companies in which they owned stock. Not once did any of them recuse himself from a case due to such conflicts.   read more

The law signed by Governor Dan Malloy gives employees the ability to collect double the amount owed to them by their employers. Studies show that $50 billion in earnings per year is stolen from U.S. workers. Bhandary-Alexander called wage theft “the biggest crime wave in the country.” Labor advocates hailed the new law, though some said it did not go far enough in punishing employers. Organizer Megan Fountain said that 10 other states require employers to pay triple damages.   read more

Relying on cheap labor is nothing new for Suniva, the third-largest producer of solar modules in the U.S., which was using factories in Asia until 18 months ago to keep costs down. Signing a contract with UNICOR has enabled them to transfer their operations. “By making panels in the U.S., Suniva has been able to capture lucrative federal contracts, avoid U.S. government tariffs on Chinese-made panels, and appeal to private sector customers who want American-made products,” said Reuters.   read more

Rand Paul got an “A” grade for his support of states to establish their own marijuana policies. He also backs decriminalization of small-quantity pot possession. Chris Christie earned an "F." He opposes legalization and the New Jersey medical marijuana law. He also said that he would restore federal prosecution of Colorado pot smokers. Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton got a B-. She supports states that legalized pot, but hasn’t taken a position on decriminalization.   read more

In his dissenting opinion, Roberts wrote that allowing homosexuals to lawfully wed could result in polygamists making the same legal argument to sanction and legalize their definition of marriage as well. Collier married his first wife, Victoria, in 2000. He applied for a second marriage license with the clerk in Billings to marry his second wife, Christine, after hearing what Roberts wrote. “It’s about marriage equality,” Collier told AP. “You can't have this without polygamy.”   read more

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) keeps a count of police killings, but their list is woefully incomplete, as they rely on voluntary reporting by police agencies. The FBI’s count of police killings has hovered around 400 for the past several years. The Guardian also keeps a list and theirs does include the killing of Gray and others who die from means other than gunshots. That list had 550 names on it for the year as of last week.   read more

Hood County residents Jim Cato and Joe Stapleton, who have been together 27 years, still can’t get a marriage license from Lang’s office. Lang's excuse? She says it will take three weeks to acquire the necessary forms for the licenses. When it was pointed out that more than 200 other Texas counties are issuing the licenses from forms readily available over the Internet, Lang stood firm.   read more

Independent studies have shown time and again that abstinence-only education is not effective in preventing pregnancies or sexually-transmitted diseases. Programs such as CTB’s often perpetuate dangerous gender stereotypes, in one instance saying: “‘Occasional suggestions and assistance’ from women ‘may be alright, but too much of it will lessen a man’s confidence or even turn him away from his princess.’”   read more