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

Lisa Jackson, the first African American to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is faced with the task of restoring morale to an agency whose scientific advisers and staff were often overruled by the Bush administration on issues rangi...   read more

Jane Lubchenco, one of the nation’s most prominent marine biologists, has devoted much of her career to encouraging scientists to become more engaged in public policy debates, and is a vocal proponent of curbing greenhouse gases linked to global w...   read more

A collection of 160 bills making its way through the Senate may possibly bestow the nation’s highest level of environmental protection on over 2 million acres of public land, the largest act of wilderness preservation in 25 years. The bill will al...   read more

Author and libertarian talk show host Neal Boortz has berated President-elect Obama’s proposed stimulus plan, writing, “He is proposing to use the occasion of an economic crisis to provide cover for increased government spending that he’s been pro...   read more

You might think that with financial luminaries like Hank Paulson (former Goldman Sachs CEO) in charge of the Treasury Department, the government would need little outside help in determining how best to allocate bailout funds. Yet from October thr...   read more

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has issued a 34 page opinion (PDF), overturning a 15-year old precedent allowing illegal aliens to make appeals on the basis that their case was weakened by their lawyers’ ineptitude or errors. Immigration courts m...   read more

The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the relatively unknown arm of the Justice Department (DOJ) with the vitally important job of defining the legal limits of executive power, released a number of previously classified legal opinions regarding the w...   read more

Although Larry Flynt’s attempt to secure $5 billion in bailout money may have been little more than a comedic ploy, it raised the question of who exactly is receiving government funds, and why they deserve it. Cerberus Capital Management, a premie...   read more

Nine Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientists have written to Obama’s transition team, complaining of managerial corruption abetting business interests, and calling for reform of the evaluation and approval process for new products and device...   read more

Derogatory insinuations about Juan Valdez, the Colombian coffee industry’s mythical icon, have been a call to arms for the Colombia Coffee Growers Federation, which threatened to sue cartoonist Mike Peters for $20 million. The Valdez character was...   read more

In the recently released details of its $13.4 billion, 3-year loan to GM, the government included a condition permitting it to call in its loan and bankrupt GM, if “any labor union or collective bargaining unit shall engage in a strike or other wo...   read more

In a recent article for the Boston Review, economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, reexamines the way the debate over deregulation has been defined. He writes, “In general, political debates over regulatio...   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