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 authors analyzed the behavior of U.S. presidents during international conflicts from 1816 to 2010 that involved either the threat of force, a show of force, or the use of force. Their analysis shows that when militarized disputes occurred under Southern presidents, they were twice as likely to result in the use of force, lasted on average twice as long, and were three times as likely to result in an American victory.   read more

Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, both former secretaries of defense under Obama, criticized the NSC and the growth of its influence. Panetta said NSC advisors shade their views in order to please the president and "try to influence the direction of policy through the back door." "[This] undermines the very process that a president needs in order to get the best discussion and information possible to be able to make the right decision," Panetta said.   read more

Now the tables have turned--ChemRisk is trying to drop the lawsuit. But the writers are saying, not so fast, arguing that ChemRisk should not be allowed simply to withdraw its lawsuit. Instead, they say the company should pay their lawyers, who have represented them on a pro bono basis, and issue an apology for dragging them through years of litigation. “ChemRisk knows that Karen and Cherri will not be intimidated and will prevail if ChemRisk continues the action,” said one of their lawyers.   read more

Alexander Hamilton has achieved unlikely heights in the lights on Broadway more than 200 years after his untimely death. The first Treasury secretary, in the 18th century, Hamilton has become a 21st-century rap-musical phenomenon, with adults shelling out up to thousands of dollars a ticket and teenagers rapping Hamilton’s life story at the dinner table. Now the fed is leaning toward keeping Hamilton on the $10 note and relegating a vignette of female historical figures on the bill's back side.   read more

The report comes amid growing criticism of unaffordable drug prices from patients, doctors, insurers, Congress and presidential candidates, who have pledged to rein in drug prices. Drug spending keeps growing due to factors including rising prices, fewer blockbuster drugs getting new generic competition and a 10% jump last year in the number of prescriptions filled, to nearly 4.4 billion. Total drug spending rose by $24.3 billion last year.   read more

Presidential candidates like Trump and Sanders may vow to bring back millions of American jobs lost to foreign competitors. But a mere 9% say they only buy American. Asked about a real world example of choosing between $50 pants made in another country or an $85 pair made in the U.S., 67% say they'd buy the cheaper pair. Only 30% would pony up for the more expensive American-made one. People in higher earning households earning more than $100,000 a year would also go for the lower priced item.   read more

As more people store data, Microsoft said the government exploits that trend "as a means of expanding its power to conduct secret investigations." Microsoft chief Brad Smith said: "We appreciate there are times when secrecy around a government warrant is needed. But based on the many secrecy orders we have received, we question whether these orders are grounded in specific facts that truly demand secrecy. To the contrary, it appears that the issuance of secrecy orders has become too routine."   read more

Leopold sought the agency's investigative files, its correspondence and the CIA talking points to uncover how spies spun the squabble to the public. Boasberg rebuffed the request in a scathing, 24-page opinion. The reporter filed four complaints alone related to the CIA's entanglement with Senate investigators, seeking access to the declassified torture report summary, the Panetta review, and the case discussed in this opinion. Boasberg so far has dismissed three of them.   read more

Her criminal case was transferred to three different prosecuting attorneys. It was dropped after several months of litigation, on the condition that Plucinski sign a letter to "apologize for speaking out of turn during a public meeting." Plucinski says her jailing has made her hesitant to stand up against big oil, which has backing of government officials who have chilled her right to "engage in free speech and public discourse."   read more

An international debate is now emerging over whether it is possible to limit the evolution of weapons that make killing decisions without human involvement. “I would argue that [the in-development U.S. missile] LRASM is intended primarily to threaten China and Russia and is only likely to be used in the opening shots of a nuclear war that would quite likely destroy our civilization and kill a large fraction, or most, or nearly all human beings,” said physicist Mark Gubrud.   read more

Sounding the alarm over the current deal, national privacy watchdogs from France, Germany and other EU member states say they worry that U.S. companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon could misuse data, including information from search engine queries and social media posts. They also say they fear that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies might gain access to European citizens’ personal information without sufficient safeguards in place.   read more

The report gives validation to complaints made for years by African-American residents here who have said they were unfairly targeted by officers without justification on a regular basis. In a city where whites, blacks and Hispanics each make up about one-third of the population, 74% of the 404 people shot by Chicago police between 2008 and 2015 were black. Black people were targeted in 72% of thousands of investigative street stops that did not lead to arrests during a recent summer.   read more

Critics have blasted Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as incompetent after errors were discovered in Spanish-language voter guides that could have caused voters to miss registration deadlines. English guides gave voters 21 days to register, while Spanish ones gave 15 days. The Spanish version also omitted passports as an acceptable form of voter ID. Critics say the errors are another example of Kobach--an advocate of photo ID laws--enacting policies that disenfranchise minority voters.   read more

In what became known as the Battle of Blair Mountain, 5,000 coal miners marched to liberate fellow miners living under martial law in West Virginia in late August 1921. That scene, the biggest labor war in U.S. history, was removed from the National Register of Historic Places under pressure from coal mining interests, "without any indicia of reasoned decision-making," a federal judge ruled.   read more

Education Department reviewers found in 2013 that a major for-profit college chain had systematically raised students' tuitions without properly telling them. As a result, the U.S. government demanded a refund — but only for the handful of students whose records had led to the discovery. Though the company's schools had more than 100,000 students, reviewers never investigated further. A new report has concluded that flaws in the government's oversight of student aid were routine.   read more

The notion of using Medicaid to steer people away from jails and into services that offer housing, job training and mental-health or substance-abuse treatment comes at a crucial time for the criminal-justice reform movement. Incarceration numbers are making headlines. States are legalizing marijuana, and police departments hammered over questionable shootings are trying to reconnect with the public they serve. Instead of booking people into jail, police try to enlist them in social services.   read more