If the shocking news that President Trump fired U.S. Attorney for Eastern Virginia Erik Siebert sounds oddly familiar, it should. As you may recall, in 2006 and 2007, the Bush administration engaged in a political purge of 9 U.S. prosecutors which a 2008 DOJ Inspector General’s report labeled “arbitrary and “fundamentally flawed.” But as it […]

Just six weeks after firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) over a disappointing monthly employment report, President Donald Trump learned the American job market is even weaker than he thought. In its much more thorough annual jobs assessment released today, BLS revealed that the U.S. created 911,000 fewer jobs in the […]

There is much we still don’t know in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. The shooter’s motives and mental state remain a mystery. Exactly how the Secret Service and local authorities failed to secure the would-be assassin’s location and prevent his deadly fire is still undetermined. An authoritative ballistics assessment of the […]

Virtually alone among major world economies, the United States has a debt ceiling which limits how much money the government can borrow to pay the bills it has already incurred. From the time Congress created the debt limit in 1917 to simply the massive borrowing need to fund the U.S effort in World War I […]

It’s amazing how America’s national security landscape changed in just four years. With the Islamic State on the ropes after the fall of Mosul, in February 2017 defense expert Andrew Exum proclaimed, “Donald Trump will defeat ISIS and it will mostly be due to the work of his predecessor.” But with Trump’s successor just weeks […]

Writers, bloggers, commenters, and pundits nearly exhausted the dictionary in the runup to the president's July 4th Trumpapalooza™. With his tanks, parades, flyovers, and personal address, Donald Trump's appropriation of America's Independence Day rightly earned descriptions ranging from inappropriate, disgusting, and self-serving to grotesque, Orwellian, and masturbatory. But word that the Republican National Committee was […]

Zombies have gripped American popular culture for years. In books, television shows, and films, the undead are regularly resurrected for your entertainment. (Even Jane Austen fans were treated to Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy butchering those from beyond the grave in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.) But whatever their reanimation story, the zombie's Achilles' heel […]

Historical events occur twice, Karl Marx famously said, first as tragedy and then as farce. But when it comes to the rampant lawlessness of Republican presidential administrations, the record is a succession of national tragedies for the United States. And the damage to America's democratic institutions is no laughing matter. As President Trump, his attorney […]

Like a recurring biblical plague, they descend across the country. Despite the repeated warnings from both experts and lay persons of good faith and common sense, the media and tens of millions of people are nevertheless still shocked by their arrival. As predicted, they devastate everything in their path, leaving a swath of destruction in […]

During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump gave full-throated support for resurrecting the Bush administration's regime of torture for terror detainees. But Trump's brand of state-sanctioned sadism promised to go much further. Trump warned he would seek reprisals against the kin of suspected terrorists, "because they may not care much about their lives, but […]