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 two lawmakers estimate that a $50-per-ounce tax could raise up to $20 billion annually for the government. This amount would exceed what the treasury receives through taxes on alcohol ($7.9 billion) and tobacco ($15 billion), they claim. Another House bill (the Small Business Tax Equity Act) would allow the Internal Revenue Service to provide breaks on federal income taxes for marijuana businesses.   read more

Rusbridger told the BBC News that “given that there were other copies and we could work out of America, which has better laws to protect journalists, I saw no reason not to destroy this material ourselves rather than hand it back to the government.” He also said that there is little point in fighting the government in court.   read more

From 1776 to 2011, Youngstown did not record a single earthquake. But from January 2011 to February 2012, 109 tremors were recorded, according to research (pdf) published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth. The strongest quake, on December 31, 2011, had a magnitude of 3.9. What changed? In December 2010, a well was dug in neighboring Pennsylvania to pump wastewater produced by fracking.   read more

“The FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court,” U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said in a written statement to The Washington Post. “The FISC does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.”   read more

The GAO said Medicare beneficiaries often don’t know that their doctors stand to profit from the use of radiation therapy. Urologists “referred a substantially higher percentage of their prostate cancer patients” to radiation therapy when they owned the equipment (linear accelerators) or had financial ties to those who provided the treatment, the report said.   read more

For the first time in about 30 years, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had to withdraw from the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs because it could not afford the travel costs. Meanwhile, representatives from Europe and Asia attended the event. Pentagon officials grounded by air travel cuts have not been able to use video conferencing as a substitute due to lack of online security.   read more

Officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees the food inspection system, say government inspectors were unable to use the computer system for two days earlier this month (August 8-9). This led to meat at 6,500 plants going out to stores, restaurants and other locations before it could be checked for E. coli bacteria and other contaminants that can cause food poisoning.   read more

Created in 2007 following a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, PCLOB has done little if anything for six years. Finally, though, PCLOB has its first-ever executive director, Sharon Bradford Franklin. With Franklin and others in place, the board finally held a public hearing (on July 9) to discuss the NSA’s surveillance programs exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.   read more

Since the creation of the post in 1989, Americans’ attitudes towards marijuana have changed, with a majority in recent polls showing support for legalizing it. Dissolving the Office of National Drug Control Policy would also save the government money, considering its annual budget is around $300 million. Pro-legalization proponents were frustrated with Kerlikowske, a former police chief of Seattle, who refused to alter his tough stance on keeping marijuana illegal.   read more

Included with the units and pens are air conditioners to provide cool air for piglets that eventually will be slaughtered as part of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) agribusiness program. The Texas Civil Rights Project’s Prisoners’ Rights Program has documented fourteen cases in which prisoners died of heat stroke between 2007 and 2012.   read more

In a new Census Bureau report, the government calculated that 58.2% of U.S. residents age five and older who speak a language other than English at home speak English “very well” and another 19.4% speak English “well.”   read more

Contrary to the assurances made by the Obama administration only one week ago, a “Top Secret” 2012 National Security Agency (NSA) report leaked by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden admits not only that the agency routinely violates federal law and its own rules, but also that the agency has been actively covering up its misdeeds from Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.   read more

In some cases, landowners failed to read all the fine print of the contracts they signed that allow drillers to deduct expenses related to drilling or maintaining wells from the royalties owed. In other cases the drilling companies sell the oil and gas to their own subsidiaries at reduced value and then resell it at a higher price. The property owner’s royalty is based not of the second, more profitable sale, but on the first transaction.   read more

After a failed attempt to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day 2010 with a bomb hidden in underwear, Chertoff appeared on the major TV news shows and wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post advocating the use of full-body scanning systems at airports without disclosing that Rapiscan Systems—the leading maker of the machines—was a client of his firm. The Transportation Security Administration ordered 300 Rapiscan machines and Rapiscan made $118 million from the government between 2009 and 2010.   read more

Vermont has sought to prevent the Vermont Yankee reactor, whose original 40-year license expired in March 2012, from being re-licensed, but the court ruled that federal regulation of nuclear power safety preempts state authority over safety completely. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already re-licensed the plant for another 20 years.   read more

Although it took her grandmother’s motivational talk to get Hessler-Radelet to join the Peace Corps, her family’s multi-generational involvement with the Corps make her career seem almost inevitable. Her aunt, Ginny Kirkwood, served in Turkey from 1964 to 1966 and was the country director in Thailand from 1990 to 1993; her grandparents, Howard and Ruth Pearsall, joined the Peace Corps after retiring as university professors and served in Malaysia from 1972 to 1973.   read more