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

More than 100 committees and subcommittees claim jurisdiction over DHS. This results in the agency spending inordinate amount of time just responding to congressional requests, instead of focusing on potential threats. “Think of having 100 bosses,” said Kean. “Think of reporting to 100 people. It makes no sense. You could not do your job under those circumstances.” In 2009 alone, the agency spent the equivalent of 66 “work-years” responding to congressional inquiries.   read more

Supporters of the controversial plan said providing undocumented immigrants with driver’s licenses would make California roads safer, improve national security and allow immigrants to fully contribute to the state economy. The bill passed with overwhelming support, 28-8 in the state Senate and 55-19 in the Assembly.   read more

U.S. District Court Judge B. Lynn Winmill temporarily halted the shipment of an oversized water treatment system on U.S. Highway 12 that was bound for Canada’s tar sands fields. Winmill said the government must first conduct a study of environmental, economic and tribal impacts before the equipment move can proceed.   read more

Over the Labor Day weekend, another 20,000 gallons was stolen from the county, this time from the Bridgeville Elementary School. The thief pumped the school’s water tank dry using a garden house and either a water truck or a trailer fitted with tanks, according to police. School officials were forced to cancel school for the day, while maintenance workers replenished the tank with water from an underground well.   read more

Only 52% of middle-income households had savings in a retirement account in 2010, but their savings came to only 8.12% of total savings in retirement accounts. In contrast, 88% of the households in the top income-fifth had retirement accounts, which came to 72% of total retirement savings. White households have more than six times as much saved in retirement accounts as Hispanic and black households, which is even larger than differences in participation.   read more

The order, signed by Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, specifically covers cases concerning the legal interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to justify its indiscriminate collection of domestic telephone metadata. Metadata includes phone numbers of both parties involved in calls, the international mobile subscriber identity number for mobile callers, calling card numbers used in the call, and the time and duration of the calls.   read more

“The total number of extremists who have been indicted has declined from 33 in 2010 to six to date in 2013, domestic terrorist incidents are relatively rare, and the character of the perpetrators has shifted from a mix of plots conducted by groups of extremists or individuals to those entirely conducted by individuals or pairs.”   read more

Lying to the world about your drug use won’t make you liable in court, but lying to your insurance company about it sure will. That’s the bottom line of two recent decisions in two legal cases filed against disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, who admitted earlier this year to extensive doping during his career—something he had aggressively denied for years.   read more

Veronica Valdez, who had worked at the hospital for 13 years, was on the operating table for finger surgery. While she was out cold, Yang cut up medication labels, colored them and stuck them on her face to create teardrops on her cheek and a mustache. Everyone who was conscious had a good laugh.   read more

If convicted, the company faces a fine of $25,000 a day per violation. The leak went on for about 65 days, beginning on November 10, 2010. If Exxon ended up having to pay the full amount for eight violations, it would have to dole out approximately $13 million…less than the annual compensation for XTO CEO Keith A. Hutton.   read more

“He and his fellow troops were constantly under attack by insurgent extremists whose word for the American soldiers was ‘infidel.’ Seeking to reclaim or reappropriate this term as a source of American pride and patriotism, Sergeant Matwyuk and other soldiers came to embrace their identity as ‘infidels.’ He and other American veterans proudly refer to themselves as ‘infidels’ as a reminder of the bond they share as survivors of a bloody war in a hostile part of the world.”   read more

In spending $236 million, Freedom Partners finished No. 2 in helping conservative causes, behind only Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which together spent about $300 million. Tax filings by the group revealed it has about 200 donors, each of whom pay at least $100,000 in annual dues. Among the donors are Charles G. and David H. Koch.   read more

San Francisco was forced to spend its own resources (about $500,000) to care for the patients.The city claims “virtually all” of the patients dumped in California required continuing medical care, something the Nevada hospital failed to arrange for. The complaint also notes that “many of these patients were not California residents” at the time they were discharged and put on buses.   read more

Caroline Kennedy’s financial-disclosure forms, filed as part of her nomination, show her net worth to be between $67 million and $278 million, including family trusts, government bonds, commercial property, and eight Cayman Island partnerships, with a combined value ranging from $542,000 to $1.2 million. She also owns her mother’s 375-acre estate, “Red Gate Farm,” in Aquinnah on Martha's Vineyard.   read more

To draw attention to the problem of illegal poaching, the U.S. government has decided to destroy more than six tons of confiscated ivory that’s been collecting in a federal warehouse northeast of Denver. The move is part of an initiative launched in July by the Obama administration to combat the killing of protected wildlife and end the trafficking of products derived from poaching.   read more

Another fact hard to comprehend is that it is still working and sending back data (which takes about 17 hours to reach earth). Consider this: It stores readings about cosmic rays, ionized gas and magnetic fields on an 8-track tape recorder, and its computers can process only about 8,000 instructions per second. In comparison, a typical smartphone can manage 14 billion instructions a second.   read more