Zelenskyy explained, “I told him that if he gave us the weapons we need and stopped supporting Putin, we would let him build Trump-branded hotels and other Trump-branded buildings in Ukraine’s ten largest cities, as well as Trump golf courses in the countryside. He was quite excited.”   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

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