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 5-member Congressional panel tasked with overseeing the $700 billion bailout has issued its first report. The Department of the Treasury has so far doled out $165 billion to 87 banks in exchange for stock and warrants. Treasury also gave AIG $...   read more

The Bush administration issued revised endangered species regulations that will eliminate some of the mandatory, independent reviews that government scientists have performed for 35 years on dams, power plants, timber sales and other projects. In ...   read more

Fragments of bricks, engraved with cuneiform characters thousands of years old, lie mixed with the rubble and sandbags left by the US military on the ancient site of Babylon in Iraq. From April 2003 to June 2004, US troops built embankments, dug d...   read more

With so much attention centering on the developing financial crisis, it isn’t surprising that other important stories have slipped through the cracks. Nevertheless, as the Bush administration winds down, there has been a surprising flurry of activ...   read more

Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner [Obama’s nominees for Director of the National Economic Council and Secretary of the Treasury] are both protégés of another master of the universe, Robert Rubin. His appearance in the photo op for Obama-transi...   read more

When George W. Bush took charge of the White House, he chose as his National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who spent 14 years on the board of directors of Chevron Corporation and even had an oil tanker named after her. When Barack Obama won e...   read more

Washington Monthly editor Charles Homans presents a roadmap for digging out the most important secrets that the Bush administration wants to keep hidden forever. It won’t be easy. As Vice-President Cheney said in a speech in 2007, “I learned early...   read more

Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a devout Catholic, was called up as a military lawyer after 9/11 and served in Iraq, Bosnia and Africa. In 2007, he became a prosecutor for the military commissions trying terrorist suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, a rol...   read more

According to a report by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, in the last 25 years the cost of a college education has gone up at triple the rate of family income. Increasingly, middle-class parents are going into debt to pu...   read more

The Labor Department is racing to complete a new rule, strenuously opposed by President-elect Barack Obama, that would make it much harder for the government to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to which workers are exposed on the ...   read more

Cyber-attacks aimed at the U.S. military come on two fronts, said Tim McKnight of Northrop Grumman. A number of countries are actively working to develop methods for disabling the computer systems the U.S. military relies on during wartime. And ad...   read more

During a break in a youth soccer tournament a few years ago, one of the other fathers on my son’s team surprised me when he told me that he was a strong supporter of gay marriage. He explained that it was good for his business.   “What do you do...   read more

I don’t think that anyone would accuse me of being soft on George W. Bush. For example, I have argued that Bush should be indicted for violating the U.S. War Crimes Act. However, the man is not all bad. I believe that his lack of racism played a s...   read more

The government is paying millions for risky medications that have never been reviewed for safety and effectiveness but are still covered under Medicaid, an Associated Press analysis of federal data has found. Millions of private patients are takin...   read more

Each year for the past 20 years, the Multinational Monitor has chosen the 10 worst corporations of the year. There have been some terrible ones before, but 2008 produced a bumper crop. They are: AIG, Cargill, Chevron, Chinese National Petroleum, C...   read more

In the parade of regulators that missed signals or made decisions they came to regret on the road to the current financial crisis, the Office of Thrift Supervision stands out. OTS is responsible for regulating thrifts, also known as savings and lo...   read more