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

At an October gathering, Humboldt County Sheriff Mike Downey, District Attorney Paul Gallegos, two county supervisors and a state Department of Fish and Game biologist talked about the environmental impacts of marijuana production, and possible policy changes. Future lecture subjects include an examination of Dutch drug policy and the impacts of legalization on local economies.   read more

The idea is based on a misinterpretation of the 12th Amendment. The amendment states that when no candidate receives a majority in the Electoral College, the decision moves to the House, where each state would have one vote and a quorum of two-thirds of the states would be required. The two-thirds reference in the 12th Amendment is a reference not to the Electoral College but rather to the establishment of a quorum in the House of Representatives.   read more

Edamaruku, who is known for explaining away religious myths, spoiled the religious excitement by declaring the water was coming from a leaky pipe in the wall behind the statue. The remark got Edamaruku indicted on charges of violating India’s blasphemy law, which can result in a three-year prison sentence. This, coupled with death threats, prompted him to seek exile in Finland.   read more

Within the administration there are disagreements over how often drones should be utilized. The Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency favor “greater latitude to carry out strikes,” wrote Scott Shane in the Times, while the Department of Justice and the State Department, as well as the president’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, prefer more restraint.   read more

“The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer said. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only.…‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us.’” Former Republican Governor Charlie Crist said party leaders approached him while he was in office from 2007 to 2011 about changing early voting. Again, the intent was to suppress Democrat turnout.   read more

Three of the seven DHS agencies whose morale is below the DHS average are ones whose employees engage in substantial contact with the public: the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).   read more

Three experts from the fields of philosophy, science and computer engineering have come together in the United Kingdom to study the possible threat that robots may pose for the human race. “At some point, this century or next, we may well be facing one of the major shifts in human history–perhaps even cosmic history–when intelligence escapes the constraints of biology,” Huw Price said.   read more

According to the flight manifests, a Syrian transport plane made eight round-trip flights between Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport and Damascus International Airport, with each trip involving 30 tons of bank notes. The logs do not specify the type of currency that was shipped.   read more

Among the provisions advocated by the Campaign to Fix the Debt is a territorial tax system, which would allow corporations to bring home overseas profits and pay little or no tax on them. In all, the savings could amount to $134 billion for the 63 publicly-held companies that have joined the Bowles-Simpson group. The biggest winners would be General Electric ($35.7 billion), Microsoft ($19.4 billion), Merck ($15.5 billion) and Cisco Systems ($14.5 billion).   read more

A Washington Post review of the 73 NEMJ articles on new drugs published over one year (August 2011 to August 2012) found that “60 were funded by a pharmaceutical company, 50 were co-written by drug company employees and 37 had a lead author, typically an academic, who had previously accepted outside compensation from the sponsoring drug company in the form of consultant pay, grants or speaker fees.”   read more

On Election Day, voters in Longmont—both Republicans and Democrats—approved a local measure (Ballot Question 300) that prohibits the use of hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) to extract natural gas from beneath the earth. The new law also bans the storage and disposal of fracking-created waste. Support for the ban was indeed bipartisan, with about 63% of precincts that voted for Mitt Romney endorsing it, as well as 96% of pro-Obama precincts.   read more

Tolkien’s estate claims the studio and the film’s producers, Saul Zaentz Co., exceeded their merchandising rights in using the movies’ character for a gambling enterprise. The Tolkiens also contend that their father, who was a devout Catholic, never would have approved using his creations in slot machines.   read more

Among the sprinkling of paper bits were long narrow strips containing information from local police reports. The strips were large enough for parade attendees to spot social security numbers, dates of birth and other details of detectives, as well as the emblem for the Nassau County police department.   read more

The key income tax reforms in 1986 raised the maximum tax rate on long-term capital gains to 28% from 20% while reducing the maximum rate on ordinary income to 28% from 50%. Capital gains are income arising from investments, while ordinary income arises from work. Thus the 1986 reform taxed income from work and from investment equally, ending the discrimination against work and in favor of investments that had favored the wealthy.   read more

Vice Admiral David “Jack” Dorsett, the director of naval intelligence, retired on August 1, 2011, and immediately took a job as vice president of cybersecurity with defense contractor Northrop Grumman. Seven months later, Northrop Grumman won a $16.3 million contract to provide cybersecurity and information operations support for the Navy.   read more

“You might park a UAV over a house, waiting for someone to come in or come out, and that’s where the boredom comes in,” explains Mary “Missy” Cummings, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT. “It turns out it’s a much bigger problem in any system where a human is effectively babysitting the automation.”   read more