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

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan), the head of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, estimates that the U.S. government loses $100 billion a year in lost taxes because 83 of the nation’s largest 100 corporations maintain subsidiaries in ...   read more

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on January 12 in a case in which a gold mining company, Coeur Alaska, wants the right to dump mining wastewater into Lower Slate Lake, near Juneau, killing all the fish and other aquatic life. Coeur was repre...   read more

A recent study of surveillance cameras in San Francisco found that cameras in public places led to a significant decrease in pickpocketing, purse snatchings, and theft from automobiles and buildings. However, the cameras appear to have little noti...   read more

In times of economic difficulty, many people find solace in entertainment. In the sports world, Barack Obama stirred interest with his explicit support for creating a playoff system for college football’s Division I. He told “60 Minutes,” I’m goin...   read more

Elena Kagan, the first woman to serve as solicitor general, brings with her a reputation for defending civil liberties while also asserting the power of the presidency. Her nomination stirred mild controversy because the solicitor general represen...   read more

Gary Gensler, Barack Obama’s choice to chair the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is a longtime player on Wall Street and in Democratic circles in Maryland and Washington, DC, who has donated substantially to his party. The Commodity Futures ...   read more

Every two years the U.S. Office of Personnel Management conducts a Federal Human Capital Survey, in which it asks federal employees their opinion regarding dozens of work-related matters. The vast majority of federal employees are satisfied with t...   read more

This week, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, in a rare public disclosure, released a censored version of a decision it secretly handed down last August. The court ruled that the government may intercept international calls and...   read more

Where is the bailout money going? One place is to pay for Barack Obama’s inauguration. Reporting for the Huffington Post, Marcus Beram points out that bailout recipient Citibank has contributed at least $113,000 to the inauguration fund, Goldman S...   read more

As the presidency of George W. Bush draws to a close, it is worth reviewing one of the lowlights of media coverage of the Bush II era. In 2006, FAIR: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, compiled a list of quotes from media pundits about the Iraq War...   read more

At the 2008 Super Bowl in Phoenix, Joseph Band, a longtime attorney for the United States Marshals Service who moonlighted as a sports statistician for Fox Sports, arranged, with permission from superiors, to use a Marshals Service vehicle to brin...   read more

Barack Obama has shown a reluctance to address the issue of possible crimes committed by President Bush and his administration. In this context, the office of John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has issued a 487-page report (P...   read more

Susan J. Crawford, Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ pick for convening authority of military commissions, has become the first senior Bush official to refer to the treatment of a Guantánamo prisoner as torture. Mohammed al-Qahtani of Saudi Arabia w...   read more

The U.S. deficit is doing its best impression of Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, racing to set new records with little visible effort. Last year’s record-setting annual budget deficit of $454.8 billion has already been broken by fiscal year 2009’s f...   read more

The United States spends at least $52.4 billion a year on nuclear weapons-related expenses. According to a report by the Carnegie Endowment, of this total, 56% ($29 billion) goes to operating, maintaining and upgrading the U.S. nuclear arsenal. On...   read more

Highlighting the catastrophic failure of the U.S.’s rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction Report (PDF) (page 38), shows that of $512.9 million allocated to Medical clinics from 2002-2008, o...   read more