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

Gallup says 42% of Americans identified as political independents in 2013. That’s the highest rate since the longtime survey company switched to phone interviews in 1989. The GOP’s popularity declined last year, with only 25% of respondents claiming to be Republican. Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones wrote that the last time the party’s ID was lower was 1983, when it dipped to 24% amid President Ronald Reagan’s struggle to bring the country out of recession.   read more

FBI agents referred 10,000 white-collar crime cases to prosecutors in 2000. By 2005, the total had plummeted to 3,500 cases. “I think they’re trying to rebrand,” Kel McClanahan, a Washington-based national security lawyer, told Foreign Policy. “So many good things happen to your agency when you tie it to national security.”   read more

For that, JPMorgan Chase received a deferred prosecution agreement from Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan. It will pay a $2.6 billion penalty. Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets said, "once again, not a single individual working for JPMorgan Chase has been held accountable. Banks do not commit crimes; bankers do."   read more

Goodwin says the three-term incumbent, who was unanimously chosen speaker of the city council on Wednesday, won the election after she put a Caribbean curse on the building in which Goodwin lives. Goodwin insisted that it was the mural painted on her apartment building that cost her the election, she claims in a lawsuit.   read more

Funding includes $8.4 billion allocated to Project Bioshield, created in 2004, which purchases vaccines for use following an attack involving smallpox, anthrax, and other weaponized pathogens. Meanwhile, critical resources are being diverted away from public health initiatives designed to protect Americans against natural outbreaks of serious viruses. The result has been failures to fully respond to life-threatening pandemics, such as the 2009 swine flu.   read more

In January 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued a memorandum stating that officials could collect calling records of phone company customers without first obtaining a subpoena or any other authorization from a judge. Neither the FBI nor the OLC released a copy of the memo, whose existence only came to light after the Justice Department’s inspector general issued a report in 2010 discussing its legal ramifications.   read more

As part of the $1.6 billion settlement Toyota initially reached with members of the class action lawsuit, more than $100 million in unclaimed funds was going to help a research and education fund focused on driver error. Clarence Ditlow of The Center for Auto Safety objected to this provision, saying it would strengthen Toyota’s original contention that drivers were to blame for the accidents, not the cars’ electronic control systems.   read more

Some the highlights from 2013 included the $23 billion deal between H. J. Heinz and 3G Capital, and Berkshire Hathaway/General Electric selling the remainder of NBCUniversal to Comcast for $16.7 billion. Some of Wall Street’s biggest banks helped advise these deals, earning them billion- dollar paydays. Goldman Sachs made $1.5 billion and JPMorgan Chase $1.3 billion in fees for their advisory work on 395 and 295 deals respectively.   read more

These two scandals and others have drawn attention to the fact that no uniform standards or regulations for forensic labs exist in the United States. Labs are accredited, but by only one organization: the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board (ASCLD/LAB). Accreditation is good for five years, and is supposed to include yearly, planned inspections.   read more

Sanders asked Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, whether it “has spied, or is…currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials.” It would seem that if the NSA had never snooped on Capitol Hill, the agency would have simply assured Sanders that no such surveillance ever had, or is, taking place.   read more

Lockheed Martin, manufacturer of the F-35, claims the country is really getting a bargain by purchasing the plane for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. Overall, the per-plane cost will be only $85 million by 2019, the company argues. An assessment by TIME magazine showed the average F-35 will cost nearly $220 million. Another review, by the Project on Government Oversight, an independent watchdog organization, found that the “cheapest” F-35 will be $181 million.   read more

Proponents thought California voters would approve a 2012 ballot initiative mandating GMO labeling. Six weeks before Election Day, polls showed pro-labelers outnumbering anti-labelers 67% to 22%. But the proposition’s strong level of popular support eroded by Election Day, a victim of a $46 million opposition campaign funded by the likes of DuPont, Monsanto, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft Foods and others. Backers of the initiative were only able to raise $9 million.   read more

Judge Scriven concluded that the state had it all wrong: “In sum, there simply is no competent evidence offered on this record of the sort of pervasive drug problem the State envisioned in the promulgation of this statute.” Going even further, Scriven wrote that if even Florida had been right and the poor actually did have a higher rate of drug use, placing them in a class of people denied constitutional rights would be dangerous.   read more

SFPD unveiled a modified selection process called “banding” for use after the first eleven vacancies were filled. Banding treats exam scores that fall within a particular range or “band” as equivalent, regardless of their exact order. Buckley and Hofmann allege that SFPD decided to use banding because it “felt a need to promote more blacks and Asians to Captain.”   read more

While Medicare offered a single, uniform plan based on the sole eligibility criterion of age, the Obamacare exchanges feature thousands of insurance company plans (each with its own premiums, co-pays, etc.) and a system of premium subsidies based on verifying income, family size and immigration status. As result, Himmelstein and Woolhandler contend, Obamacare overhead costs are expected to run closer to the 13% average of private insurers than to the 2% average achieved by Medicare.   read more

Signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and modified since, Executive Order 12,333 covers government surveillance of Americans’ international communications—but the government’s interpretation of it is secret. the ACLU argues that there is no outside supervision of EO 12,333 surveillance, which is outside the jurisdiction of the FISA Court and is “not meaningfully overseen” by Congress.   read more