Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sought to clarify his claim that the National Security Agency does not collect information on millions of Americans, telling NBC News' Andrea Mitchell that he gave the "least untruthful" answer possible on the agency's surveillance program. During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on March 12, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked the intelligence czar if the NSA gathers "any type of data at all on millions of Americans.” "No, sir," Clapper responded. "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly." Clapper's response appears to contradict recent revelations about the agency's large scale phone records collection program, first reported on by the Guardian last week. However, during the NBC interview, Clapper said Wyden's question did not have a straightforward answer. "I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked-- "When are you going to start-- stop beating your wife" kind of question, which is meaning not-- answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no," Clapper said in the interview, which aired Sunday. "So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying 'no'." Clapper said his remarks also reflected his definition of "collection," which he said has a specific meaning in an intelligence context. "What I was thinking of is looking at the Dewey Decimal numbers-- of those books in that metaphorical library-- to me, collection of U.S. persons' data would mean taking the book off the shelf and opening it up and reading it," he said. In a Tuesday statement, Wyden said he had notified Clapper of his question in advance, and had given his office a chance to give a "straight answer" after the March hearing. “So that he would be prepared to answer, I sent the question to Director Clapper’s office a day in advance. After the hearing was over my staff and I gave his office a chance to amend his answer,” Wyden said. “Now public hearings are needed to address the recent disclosures and the American people have the right to expect straight answers from the intelligence leadership to the questions asked by their representatives."

AIG Financial Products, the derivatives unit that nearly toppled the insurance company in 2008, is under fresh scrutiny after regulators alleged it may have failed to properly measure and manage risk, misled supervisors and investors, and lacked appropriate checks to limit outsized risk-taking. The concerns, recently raised with AIG by the New York Department of Financial Services, the state’s top financial regulator, have led the department to escalate its inquiry into the company, according to people familiar with the matter. It may take years for AIG to fully address the state's concerns, these people said the regulator noted. That delay in rectifying the company’s risk management practices may expose holders of AIG securities to possible harm. AIG recently repaid the government for its $182 billion rescue of what was once the world’s largest insurer, delivering a profit. Bad bets in the company’s Financial Products unit on a type of derivative known as credit default swaps nearly sank the insurer. In recent years, the financial group has slimmed down, focusing less on business lines and generally reporting profitable quarters. Last week, U.S. regulators preliminarily designated AIG as “systemic”, one of a handful of non-banks whose potential failure could threaten the nation’s financial system. But the probe by the New York DFS, led by Benjamin Lawsky, could delay the company’s plans to fully put its toxic past behind it. Lawsky last year threatened to revoke the state banking license -- the equivalent of a corporate death sentence -- of Standard Chartered, a large U.K. bank, over alleged money-laundering violations. Lawsky, who some bank attorneys privately said is the New York regulator they most fear, has set his sights on AIG, an insurer whose giant derivatives portfolio could once again damage the company and its stakeholders if not properly managed. As a result, AIG may be subject to heightened supervision, a prospect that may curb investing and limit earnings if DFS decides to rein in certain business lines or activities. After recording losses of $101.8 billion and $8.4 billion in 2008 and 2009, respectively, AIG has since posted $34.1 billion in combined profit over the last three years. During this year’s first quarter, the company recorded $2.2 billion in net income. AIG declined to comment. A representative for Lawsky declined to comment. In its latest quarterly filing with securities regulators, the company said its Financial Products "portfolio continues to be wound down and is managed consistent with our risk management objectives. Although the portfolio may experience periodic fair value volatility, it consists predominantly of transactions that we believe are of low complexity, low risk or currently not economically appropriate to unwind based on a cost versus benefit analysis.” AIG, already partly supervised by the Federal Reserve, is due to come under increased oversight by the Fed once federal regulators finalize the company’s systemic tag. Designation as a “systemically important financial institution,” or SIFI, carries with it stricter rules governing activities, capital, liquidity, dividends and executive pay schemes. But until that process is complete and the Fed finalizes the rules that govern the systemic label, Lawsky’s oversight of the company may represent the government’s last line of defense against the kind of risk-taking that nearly rendered AIG insolvent during the financial crisis in 2008. Already, Lawsky’s office has raised questions over how the insurer manages the risk of possible losses from its securities holdings. DFS also has challenged company models that attempt to estimate possible trading losses. Regulators around the globe have been questioning banks’ use of “value at risk” models, known as VaR, since they proved inept during the financial crisis. In a May 3 presentation to investors, the company said that the aggregate VaR on a portion of its derivatives holdings from the financial products division was “effectively zero.” The regulatory concern from Lawsky’s office comes as AIG works to shed risk in its Financial Products division. At its peak in 2008, the unit had $2.7 trillion in exposure to counterparties through derivatives and other obligations. As of March 31, that had been whittled down to $122 billion, according to the company. The number of treading positions had fallen to 1,600, a reduction of 95 percent from the 35,200 positions the unit had in 2008. “Over time, significant progress has been made to stabilize the company by reducing its risk profile and implementing an orderly restructuring plan,” the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which oversaw a portion of the government bailout, says on its website. “Many of the risk areas that brought AIG to the brink of failure have been addressed, or are in process of being addressed, including the orderly wind-down of AIG Financial Products.” The company declared in 2011 that it had completed its active wind-down of the Financial Products unit’s legacy positions.

There's a lot of controversy over recent revelations that the National Security Agency is logging and retaining metadata on every single phone call, email, and Web visit. But President Obama tells us that, "No one is listening to your phone calls." And ranking members of Congress assure us that everything is being overseen by a federal court. So what's all the fuss about? Well, looking only at the U.S. domestic implications, perhaps two things. First, the court they're talking about is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (usually referred to as the "FISA" or "FISC" court). Most knowledgeable people consider it a "rubber-stamp" court that approves whatever the intelligence services want. This was confirmed by an April 30 letter from the Justice Department to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid which said in part: "Of the 1,789 applications [in 2012], the FISC did not deny any applications in whole or in part." The second issue is that the law allows government intelligence agencies to collect "metadata" without a warrant or court approval (not even the FISA court). "Metadata" is, for example, the phone number a call was placed from (which tells them who made the call), the number (and therefore who) the call was made to, and how long it lasted. Metadata also includes the email address a message was sent from, the address it was sent to, and (possibly) the subject line. Same for text messages. Same for websites and web purchases. Well, so what? Who cares? Most people have secrets they want kept secret -- mostly about sex or money, not terrorism or crime. As an example, let's look at sex. What kind of secrets concerning sex might someone have? An affair they're keeping secret from their spouse. Regular calls to the "HotSweatySex" phoneline or visits to a pornography website. Online purchase of sex-related products. Communications with a VD clinic, or a licensed sexual therapist, or a law firm specializing in employer sexual harassment cases. Membership in a kinky-sex club. Appointments with an abortion clinic or the existence of an unacknowledged child. And so it goes. Metadata does not reveal the content of phone calls or email messages, but it does reveal patterns, and patterns reveal all. "Happily-married" Joe makes multiple calls a day to "Sweet Sue" (not his wife) -- what does that tell you? Congresswoman Moralista is a regular customer of the Good Vibrations online store -- what would her constituents think? Now government agencies have all this data revealing all these personal patterns. Can a prosecutor subpoena them? What about a divorce attorney? Might State's Attorney Nogoodnick who's in a tight reelection race ask his agency buddies for some inside dope on his opponent? There's a long and sordid history of American police and intelligence agencies leaking private information for political purposes such as discrediting a critic, or threatening to do so unless whomever agrees to do whatever, now all this pattern info is just a few tempting keystrokes away. And not just in the Obama administration, but in all future administrations to come. Fortunately we know that the honor and honesty of every single person in government is above reproach, so of course we can thankfully be confident that none of the hundreds (thousands?) of bureaucrats with access to this pattern-revealing metadata would ever download any of it for personal gain through blackmail, or insider trading, or career advancement, or just personal titillation. And I'm sure that all the employees of private defense contractors and security consultants are of equally high moral character. But what about hackers? If they can hack into the Air Force computers what can't they hack in to? But our President and Congressional leaders assure us no one is listening to our calls or reading our emails (unless the FISA court permits them to), so what's all the fuss about?

When I was a reporter for the U.S. Army in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971, I knew who was looking over my shoulder at what I was writing - Uncle Sam, of course, because I was forbidden to write a word that would hurt the mission (winning the war) or harm the morale of the troops. You could probably say the same about scrutiny (read surveillance) for the more than 5,000 journalists who covered the war in Vietnam between 1964 and 1973, which helps to explain how Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers come in. In some ways it's hard to believe that it's taken more than 40 years for the Ellsbergs of today - Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden to come forward. It's not like we stopped doing all the bad things we ever did or were going to do when we left Vietnam. But that's another story, as yet to be written . . . Much of today's hubbub reminds me of that great quote by James Madison, one of authors of the U. S. Constitution. Madison wrote, "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prelude to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both." The tragedy has to do with the Obama Administration's vigorous support of the Bush crowd's culture of mega-surveillance. The farce part has more to do with where I live, James Madison's namesake town in Wisconsin no less. As reported in The Huffington Post, the Wisconsin Legislature's Joint Committee on Finance (JCF), the architects of the state's biennial budget for the next two years, included this in their biennial budget: "Prohibit the Board of Regents from permitting the Center for Investigative Journalism to occupy any facilities owned or leased by the Board of Regents. In addition, prohibit UW employees from doing any work related to the Center for Investigative Journalism as part of their duties as a UW employee." As far as I can tell, the Center, which opened in 2009, exists to increase the quality and quantity of investigative journalism in Wisconsin while training the next generation of investigative journalists. It is nonprofit, nonpartisan and, is totally committed to accuracy and fairness. Its goal is to inform, not persuade, something James Madison would admire. But this is 2013 where politics trumps everything, even sanity it appears. The amendment passed on party lines, 12 Republicans voting for it and all four Democrats on the committee voting against the measure and publicly denouncing it. Most impressive to me were the sentiments of former students of the program. They wrote a letter in which they stated: "We can attest that the award-winning Center's presence on campus has been fundamental to helping us begin our careers as journalists. At the Center, we exposed how college campuses fail to support victims of sexual assaults; a former governor's violation of state travel regulations; the exploitation of foreign workers in Wisconsin tourist zones, and conducted dozens of other important investigations. Many of us have built upon our experiences at the Center by later reporting for Wisconsin and national media including Bloomberg, the Associated Press and Forbes, in cities and towns across Wisconsin and the United States, and in several countries throughout the world." So what does this have to do with Vietnam and surveillance and whistleblowers and James Madison? Everything! Because whether Vietnam or Washington or Baghdad or Madison, those of us who value democracy, who understand that a government which functions in public is a government that does right by the people it represents, know that we all lose when we allow elected officials in Wisconsin or elsewhere to shut off independent watchdog journalism. And we know we lose when we silence the voices of those who speak the truth about what we are doing to others, and to our own citizens. Which is why we need to put an end to this. As Neil Sheehan, who covered the war in Vietnam for The New York Times, wrote in 1966: "My quiet worry concerns what we are doing to ourselves in the course of prosecuting this war. . . in the process we are corrupting ourselves . . . and I hope we will not do this again." Sadly, we have, and we are. Here, there, and everywhere . . .

Today, Mayor Michael Bloomberg presented the city's long-term plan to prepare for the impacts of a changing climate in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. "We haven't waited for Washington to lead the climate change charge," Bloomberg said at the Duggal Greenhouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. "If we did, we'd still be waiting." The 400-page adaptation plan he presented, the work of the Special Initiative for Resilience and Rebuilding, which was established by the mayor in December of last year, is an important step for New York City in the right direction. Most impressively, the $19.5 billion plan has a comprehensive approach for reducing the risk of catastrophic flooding through multiple initiatives from surge barriers to improved building codes from Staten Island to Far Rockaway, from Red Hook to lower Manhattan. The plan looks not just to the regions devastated by Superstorm Sandy but uses projections developed by top climate scientists for the rising threat of man-made global warming in the coming decades, Bloomberg said: In fact, we expect that by mid-century up to one-quarter of all of New York City's land area, where 800,000 residents live today, will be in the floodplain. If we do nothing, more than 40 miles of our waterfront could see flooding on a regular basis, just during normal high tides. An especially welcome component of the plan is a $1.2 billion program "to encourage all vulnerable property owners to make additional flood-protection improvements to their properties," not just those mandated to own federal flood insurance. Unfortunately, there are major flaws. First, the plan fails to address New York's role in creating the pollution that threatens its future existence. Instead of a blueprint for how Wall Street can stop financing fossil fuels or how to make the city's infrastructure carbon-free, there's literally a chapter on protecting fossil fuels from climate change: The report asserts it is making the city "resilient," but there is no climate resilience without divestment from fossil fuels and pollution barons like David Koch, New York's richest man. Furthermore, the report's authors seemed uninterested in how New York's communities survived the storm's aftermath. In particular, the crucial achievements of Occupy Sandy in responsive, community-based disaster relief and recovery are buried, if not ignored. Most importantly, basic realities of economic and social inequality are not sufficiently addressed. For example, even though over the report recognizes that over half of the Rockaways' residents live in public or low-income housing, only two of 13 building initiatives address that population. In sum, this report comes far closer to recognizing the reality of our carbon-polluted future than has been achieved on the national stage, but that is a very low bar. Existing infrastructure -- physical, social, economic, and political -- is built upon fossil-fuel dependence. Only a dedicated and full-scale effort to fight the polluters who profit at the expense of the very existence of cities such as New York will offer us a fighting chance. Most of the nation is far less prepared for the ravages of fossil-fueled global warming than Mayor Bloomberg's New York City. Unfortunately, it appears even Bloomberg is unprepared to take the necessary steps to turn back the rising tide of our polluted climate.

Enough already: it's time to stop talking about tax reform. Not about necessary and useful changes to the tax code - by all means, let's talk about them. But let's do away with anodyne invocations of "tax reform" as a useful shorthand for this debate. The phrase probably meant something once, but it doesn't anymore. And its feel-good connotations obscure the real hurdles to improving the tax system. Sometimes, a little bit of ambiguity can help grease the legislative skids. When it works, aspirational rhetoric can blur points of contention and get people moving forward. After which, with any luck, momentum will carry them over the finish line. Arguably, that's what happened in 1986, when a bipartisan drive for "tax reform" made it possible to enact a lot of difficult but useful changes to the tax laws. But in 2013, "tax reform" has become an obstacle to legislative achievement, masking fundamental disagreements that must be resolved before anything useful actually gets written into law. In a recent blog post, Stan Collender argues that "tax reform" -- in the general sense of useful revisions to the tax law -- is years away. That's a safe bet, I think. There are many reasons why the current drive won't succeed. But the main one is foundational: there is no broad consensus on the meaning of reform. Among tax experts there still is; most are chanting the mantra of 1986: "broaden the base, lower the rates." This tried and true definition undergirds the yeoman work being done by the professional staffers of the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees, the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Treasury Department, and much of the broader tax policy community. My colleague Bruce Bartlett has recently made the same observation: Almost everyone agrees that the ultimate goal of tax reform should be to lower statutory tax rates and that it should be revenue-neutral, that is, neither raising nor lowering net federal revenues over some reasonable time period. This will require the elimination of many tax expenditures benefiting both individuals and businesses. There is much truth to this. But ultimately, this is a definition of tax reform that resonates principally with wonks, not the general public or even the larger political community. To be sure, partisan wrangling still goes on among tax experts, but it unfolds within certain boundaries -- the boundaries defined by traditional tax reform. Meanwhile, a much larger and more important battle is raging in Washington over the meaning of tax reform. For most Democrats, reform means raising new money from the tax system, preferably from the rich. For most Republicans, reform means tax reduction of one sort or another. This debate over tax reform, meanwhile, is just part an even bigger, almost epic battle over the size and shape of government. The stakes of that battle are so high as to render tax reform little more than an afterthought. Optimists will say that I am being unreasonable -- and ahistorical, too. They will point out that the meaning of "tax reform" was also contested in the 1980s; Republicans considered rate reduction the essence of reform, while Democrats focused on base broadening. Indeed, the basic bargain of traditional tax reform was politically appealing precisely because it was ambiguous; it made ample ideological room for all parties to the debate. Fair enough. But the definitional differences of 1986 were questions of emphasis and degree; while important, they seem almost quaint in the context of our current politics. In the 1980s, the parties were arguing over relatively small changes to the size and role of government in society. Today, they are having a much more serious, vastly more fundamental debate over the kind of government we want to have. The stakes are much higher. Until that debate gets settled, tax reform will remain a chimera. And no amount of happy talk (or detailed position papers) will make it any more real. This is one of those times when wishing will not make it so. Thorndike is director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts and a visiting scholar in history at UVA.

During the height of the financial meltdown in 2009, Congress became obsessed with changing the tax treatment of carried interest. The idea that wealthy hedge fund managers could receive preferential capital gains treatment on their carried interest income shocked Democrats, and the media ran several stories that seemed to create public furor over the inequity. Carried interest legislation actually passed Nancy Pelosi's House but fell apart in the Senate when Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus, D-Mont., expressed reservations. Despite practitioner fears and the IRS's belief that legislation was imminent, carried interest reform hasn't gotten close since. But that may finally be changing. Carried interest is taxed under capital gains rates because of Rev. Proc. 93-27, 1993-2 C.B. 343, which states that the IRS will not tax the issuance of a profits interest. (That is a simplification of a complex issue, but a correct one.) Hamstrung by its longstanding administrative position, the Service doesn't believe it can change the tax treatment of carried interest without new legislation. Practitioners have never been completely convinced that it would take a new law for the carried interest party to come to a close. They frequently press the IRS for reassurance that the rule won't be changed absent a new law and they almost always get it. Whether the IRS is right about its ability to administratively change the tax treatment of carried interest isn't that important. It's going to take an act of Congress. But if carried interest reform legislation couldn't make it out of a Democratic Congress in the midst of a recession that was blamed on the financial sector, is there really any chance of it becoming law now? The answer, surprisingly, is yes. The prospects for carried interest reform have changed. The IRS has long been delaying any administrative action in the area because it believed Congress could pass a law at any moment. While that didn't seem likely, it was always possible. (Remember economic substance codification? No one thought that was likely to pass until it suddenly did.) Now the thinking on Capitol Hill might be shifting. The Senate Finance Committee recently released its eighth tax reform discussion paper, and changing the tax treatment of carried interest was front and center. The Finance Committee paper is important because Baucus's opposition to carried interest reform is what killed it during the height of Democratic legislative power. House Ways and Means Chair Dave Camp, R-Mich., has said that everything is on the table and wouldn't deny that his tax reform plan might alter the taxation of carried interest. Carried interest can be an attractive pay-for. Some estimates say it would raise $30 billion over 10 years, which could be used to pay for sweeteners that affect a much larger bloc of the taxpaying public (like, say, homeowners, who want to keep the mortgage interest deduction off the table). There is a lot of misinformation out there about carried interest, what it represents, and who would be hurt by taxing it at ordinary rates. The fact is that under the current legislative proposals (which would tax only a portion of carried interest compensation at ordinary rates), almost no one outside the hedge fund industry would be harmed. There wouldn't be any less capital available for investment. There wouldn't be a sudden withdrawal of hedge fund managers from the industry (would that really be such a bad thing for the economy?). Nothing would change but an inequitable tax policy that the IRS administratively created to benefit only a small class of very wealthy taxpayers. Carried interest reform will almost certainly be part of any major tax reform bill offered by Camp or Baucus. But it's also possible that even if tax reform efforts fail or stall, carried interest legislation could find its way into an extenders package or as a pay-for for deficit reduction or an extension of the debt limit. As Republican and conservative Democratic resistance has waned, the prospects for a change in carried interest rules has increased. And, frankly, it's about time. Jeremy Scott is editor of Tax Analysts' Tax Notes magazine. He also blogs at taxanalysts.com.

By Carey Gillam June 11 (Reuters) - Pigs fed a diet of only genetically modified grain showed markedly higher stomach inflammation than pigs who dined on conventional feed, according to a new study by a team of Australian scientists and U.S. researchers. The study adds to an intensifying public debate over the impact of genetically modified crops, which are widely used by U.S. and Latin American farmers and in many other countries around the world. The study was published in the June issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Organic Systems by researchers from Australia who worked with two veterinarians and a farmer in Iowa to study the U.S. pigs. Lead researcher Judy Carman is an epidemiologist and biochemist and director of the Institute of Health and Environmental Research in Adelaide, Australia. The study was conducted over 22.7 weeks using 168 newly weaned pigs in a commercial U.S. piggery. One group of 84 ate a diet that incorporated genetically modified (GM) soy and corn, and the other group of 84 pigs ate an equivalent non-GM diet. The corn and soy feed was obtained from commercial suppliers, the study said, and the pigs were reared under identical housing and feeding conditions. The pigs were then slaughtered roughly five months later and autopsied by veterinarians who were not informed which pigs were fed on the GM diet and which were from the control group. Researchers said there were no differences seen between pigs fed the GM and non-GM diets for feed intake, weight gain, mortality, and routine blood biochemistry measurements. But those pigs that ate the GM diet had a higher rate of severe stomach inflammation - 32 percent of GM-fed pigs compared to 12 percent of non-GM-fed pigs. The inflammation was worse in GM-fed males compared to non-GM fed males by a factor of 4.0, and GM-fed females compared to non-GM-fed females by a factor of 2.2. As well, GM-fed pigs had uteri that were 25 percent heavier than non-GM fed pigs, the study said. The researchers said more long-term animal feeding studies need to be done. Biotech seeds are genetically altered to grow into plants that tolerate treatments of herbicide and resist pests, making producing crops easier for farmers. Some critics have argued for years that the DNA changes made to the transgenic plants engineer novel proteins that can be causing the digestive problems in animals and possibly in humans. The companies that develop these transgenic crops, using DNA from other bacteria and other species, assert they are more than proven safe over their use since 1996. CropLife International, a global federation representing the plant science industry, said more than 150 scientific studies have been done on animals fed biotech crops and to date, there is not scientific evidence of any detrimental impact.

Gil Troy, The Daily BeastSamantha Power seems like an ideal nominee to represent the United States in the United Nations.  A Pulitzer-Prize winning Harvard professor, she not only has academic credentials paralleling the greatest U.N. ambassadors, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, she has their smarts and moxie. Power has crusaded passionately against genocide. She believes American “foreign policy should inject first-order concern for human rights into every policy decision.” And she has blasted Democrats and Republicans cleverly and justifiably, noting that if Bill Clinton...

Michael Gerson, Washington PostWASHINGTON -- President Obama's newly designated national security adviser, Susan Rice, and his proposed United Nations ambassador, Samantha Power, are political loyalists. They are also known as liberal interventionists -- emotionally seared by American passivity during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and advocates for military action to prevent a Libyan bloodbath in 2011. So the question arises in Washington and foreign capitals (say, Moscow, Tehran and Damascus): Is the president repaying his debts or making a foreign policy statement?To Rice, a debt is clearly owed. Following the...

The Truth-o-Meter says: Mostly False | Rush Limbaugh says HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was the "one person" to determine fate of 10-year-old lung patient Sarah Murnaghan Many Americans were transfixed recently by the story of Sarah Murnaghan, a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl with cystic fibrosis whose family won a court battle to improve her chances of getting a lung transplant. Under the existing transplant rule, Murnaghan was too young to qualify for a place on the waiting list for adult lungs. So the girl’s family asked Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, to waive the rule. On May 31, 2013, Sebelius did order a policy review of the age requirements, but that option could take months -- likely longer than the ... >> More

Henry Payne, Detroit NewsIn October, 1991 Morgan Stanley, Merck and AT&T were among the corporations, lobbyists and Washington insiders who laid out $600,000 to honor Rep. John Dingell, D-Ann Arbor, in a glitzy gala at the Washington Hyatt Regency. I was a young journalist in Washington, D.C., and Dingell was at the height of his powers as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.“A Tribute to John Dingell” was a typical D.C. shakedown operation by politicians who are the gatekeepers of legislation that can make or break companies — a result of the enormous...

Tim Carney, Examiner"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in 2009, "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."This line was creepy enough coming from one of President Obama's confidants and fundraisers. It takes on added weight now that the Washington Post and the Guardian have reported that the National Security Agency's Prism program, in the days before Obama was sworn in, tapped into Google's servers, gaining access to every message sent or received over Gmail.

Joan Walsh, SalonIf successfully running a presidential campaign was as easy as launching a kickass Twitter account, Hillary Clinton would be unbeatable in 2016. Her widely hailed Twitter debut was perfect, embracing her public and private roles – wife, mom, senator, Secretary of State – sending up the sexist mockery she’s endured — “hair icon,” “pantsuit aficionado” – and leaving the next entry in her bio a teasing “TBD.”Her cheeky Twitter debut told me two almost contradictory things: Hillary...

John Hinderaker, PowerLineThe Federation for American Immigration Reform commissioned Pulse Opinion Research to conduct polling on key provisions of the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill in seven states: Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and West Virginia. You can see the results here. In general, they show that if you tell voters what is actually in the bill, they don’t like it.

The Truth-o-Meter says: Mostly True | Sex crimes in the military: Gillibrand says over half the victims are men Congress is putting pressure on the American military to crack down on rape and other types of sexual crimes. The latest Department of Defense report estimates that last year there were 26,000 incidents of unwanted sexual contact ranging from groping to forced sex. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., was talking about the full gamut of these offenses on Face the Nation on June 9, 2013. While much of the focus has been on women, Gillibrand emphasized that "this is not just a woman's issue. More than half of the victims are men." This seemed like a strong ... >> More

Michelle Cottle, The Daily BeastOK. Maybe those were not Michelle Obama’s exact words to the LGBT activist who disrupted her speech at a private DNC fundraiser last Tuesday. If, indeed, one insists on being a stickler about it, Mobama’s response was more along the lines of, “One of the things that I don’t do well is this!”

William Saletan, SlateWhat’s wrong with the National Security Agency’s phone surveillance program? The answer, according to civil libertarians, is its scope. Edward Snowden, the ex-NSA contractor who exposed the program, calls it “omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance.” Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who broke the story, accuses the U.S. government of  “collecting the phone records of all Americans, regardless of any suspicion of wrongdoing … monitoring them, keeping dossiers on them.” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., says the feds...

Gen. David Petraeus, The Telegraph

So it's true, as filmmaker Michael Moore once warned us, the Carlyle Group is Big Brother. That's the $176 billion private equity firm that once employed former President George H.W. Bush, his Secretary of State James A. Baker III and a host of political luminaries that would put any other list of America's ruling elite to shame. Plenty of Democrats too, including former President Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff Mack McLarty and Arthur Levitt, the man Clinton appointed to head the SEC during the creation of the housing bust. It is also the firm that owns Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., which, thanks to the revelations of one of its employees, whistle-blower Edward Snowden, we now know collects and stores much of the government's immense PRISM database spying on the lives of this nation's citizenry. This is systematic snooping through the telephone and Internet records of hundreds of millions of Americans conducted by Snowden and others in Booz Allen's employ who had the highest access to our most private personal data while working at a for-profit company. Our data is their commerce, and ever since 9/11, observing us has become mega lucrative. "Booz Allen Hamilton," The New York Times reported Sunday, "has become one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the United States almost exclusively by serving a single client: the government of the United States." The word "serving" might be pushing it here, since 98 percent of the firm's revenue of $5.8 billion last year came from the taxpayers, who are the same folks being spied upon. Heck, Booz Allen knows all about those taxpayers, since back in 1998, during the Clinton presidency, the firm was hired to "modernize" the IRS. "We made some very dramatic changes in the way the IRS is organized," Booz Allen's CEO claimed at the time. How perfect: Make tax collection more efficient and less painful, so the suckers might not notice when you scoop up the loot at the other end. Of course, to those swinging through the revolving door between the government and its defense contractors, it must be difficult to draw a distinction between their changing roles. James R. Clapper, the chief intelligence official in the Obama administration, who is now investigating this security lapse, was himself a top Booz Allen executive. And it should be of little surprise that John M. McConnell, currently vice chairman of Booz Allen, was previously the chief intelligence official in the George W. Bush administration. It's crony capitalism at its patriotic best. "The national security apparatus has been more and more privatized and turned over to contractors," Danielle Brian, executive director of the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, told the Times. "This is something the public is largely unaware of, how more than a million private contractors are cleared to handle highly sensitive matters." Brian points out that the for-profit folks spying on us also get to grant high level government security clearances. Those private sector employees are then entrusted to work in the most secretive sectors of the government's national security apparatus, including at the National Security Agency. It's good work if you can get it. In January, the Defense Department granted Booz Allen a five-year, $5.6 billion deal assigning its private sector employees in key positions to advise Pentagon personnel on crafting military policy. Maybe they can find some new conventional wars to fight just in case the one against terrorism loses its profitability. That could happen now that the American public has been alerted to the fact that in the grand design of that war, it is the ordinary American citizen, even when shopping on the Internet, who gets to play enemy. That reality is what seems to have turned Snowden, like others before him, into a courageous whistle-blower. He signed up for training with the Army Special Forces to go fight in Iraq because he bought the Bush administration's line that it was a war "to help free people from oppression." That misplaced idealism collided with the observation that "Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone," Snowden told the British newspaper The Guardian. Still, he continued to serve the government, both with the CIA and then at the NSA, where he worked as a Booz Allen contractor. There he witnessed a part of the sordid story that he chose to share with his fellow Americans. As he explained to The Guardian: "The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. ... If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things. ... I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded." The folks at Booz Allen, and its parent company the Carlyle Group, love that world as a fabulous profit center, and it is truly inspiring that there are still folks like Snowden whom they can't buy.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I.-Vt.) shared some impassioned criticism of NSA surveillance on MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes" Monday night. Sanders criticized the "Orwellian" future he sees looming for the United States if it continues to record its citizens' activities in the name of national security. The Vermont Senator argued that focusing too much on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden -- how he leaked the information and how he'll be dealt with by the US government -- is a distraction from the more fundamental questions raised by his disclosures about the NSA. "The question is what freedom and liberty mean in the United States of America? What does our constitution mean? What kind of country do we want to be?" Sanders said. "Kids will grow up knowing that every damn thing that they do is going to be recorded somewhere in a file, and I think that will have a very Orwellian and inhibiting impact on our lives," he argued. Sanders made it clear that he believes terrorism is a serious threat to the United States, but that doesn't mean it's worth sacrificing the bill of rights. "I want our law enforcement people to be vigorous in going after terrorists," Sanders said. "But I happen to believe they can do that without disregarding the constitution of the United States or the civil liberties of the American people." Sanders is known for his tenacity when it comes to speaking out about his convictions. Perhaps most memorably, in 2010 he spoke for eight and a half hours to filibuster the extension of the Bush tax cuts. Though some top Senators have defended the NSA's gathering of phone logs, Sanders is not the alone among his colleagues in being outraged. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky). said on Sunday that he is weighing whether the NSA's "extraordinary invasion of privacy" can be challenged in the Supreme Court. Watch the whole segment from Monday's "All In With Chris Hayes" above.

President Barack Obama is poised to nominate Amanda Renteria, a former Senate staffer, to replace Gary Gensler atop the main U.S. derivatives regulator amid an intensifying fight between Gensler and the world’s major banks and regulators over cross-border transactions. If Renteria is confirmed to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the former chief of staff to Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) would become the first minority and Latina to lead a member agency of the Financial Stability Oversight Council during the Obama era. Renteria's nomination may be announced as early as this week, according to administration officials, CFTC personnel, industry executives and congressional aides. Amy Brundage, White House spokeswoman, declined to comment on personnel matters. Gensler declined to comment. Renteria did not respond to requests for comment. Renteria has little experience in financial regulation. Congressional aides who worked on the 2010 overhaul of financial rules known as Dodd-Frank said she played a bit role in formulating the law. Most of her career has been focused on public service, except for a few years when Renteria worked at Goldman Sachs after graduating from Stanford University. Renteria’s elevation would end Gensler’s tenure as the nation’s top derivatives overseer. A former Goldman Sachs executive who was viewed skeptically by some liberal lawmakers when he was first nominated in 2009, Gensler has become perhaps Wall Street’s leading foe as he has sought to curb risk and expand transparency and competition in the previously opaque market for a type of derivatives known as swaps. Gensler has transformed a once-unknown agency to one at the forefront of financial regulation as CFTC rules are shaking up a marketplace unaccustomed to government supervision. His rules threaten to decrease profits at the nation’s largest banks as formerly unregulated activities are forced to comply with provisions that help buyers compare prices and compel banks to stump up more cash to back their trades. One of the administration’s longest-serving regulators, Gensler has clashed with the Treasury Department, foreign regulators from countries including the United Kingdom and Japan, dozens of U.S. lawmakers and the leading world banks over his efforts to impose stringent rules on a once little-regulated market that fueled the financial crisis and nearly toppled financial groups including AIG, the giant U.S. insurer. Left-leaning interest groups and pro-reform outfits like Better Markets have cheered Gensler over the years, as he led what has appeared at times to be a one-man effort to clean up a risky marketplace dominated by a subset of what is known as the G16 dealers, or the 16 global banks that control the swaps market. His latest fight -- extending the reach of U.S. swaps rules to activities involving U.S. firms that occur with overseas counterparties -- may be harmed by Renteria’s nomination. Already, three of the other four CFTC commissioners have signaled outright opposition or concerns with Gensler’s approach. A July 12 deadline looms as the industry’s temporary exemption from rules governing so-called cross-border swaps is set to expire. Renteria’s nomination could weaken Gensler at a time when he needs to marshal support to advance his agenda. Stabenow, as agriculture committee chairwoman, would help to confirm Renteria for the post. Stabenow could fast-track the confirmation in a bid to push Gensler out the door, government officials said. Invoking financial groups that have rung up major swaps-related losses from overseas activities in recent years, Gensler has been pushing a plan that would extend U.S. provisions such as requiring a middleman to stand between most trades and increased transparency around pricing to transactions involving U.S. counterparties on the belief that such rules could help to prevent another AIG-like disaster. For example, Gensler’s plan would extend the reach of U.S. rules to JPMorgan Chase’s London branch as well as to Deutsche Bank’s Frankfurt office if it’s offering a swap to a Chicago investment firm. To garner support for his agenda, Gensler has mentioned that AIG’s swaps division was run out of London and that Long-Term Capital Management, a leading hedge fund that was rescued in the late 1990s thanks to the efforts of the U.S. government, booked its disastrous swaps “in a Cayman Islands affiliate that wasn’t much more than a P.O. Box.” He’s also said that the U.S. “had another stark reminder that swaps booked offshore can send risk straight back to the United States” when JPMorgan suffered a $6 billion trading loss from swaps executed by its London branch by a group of traders led by the so-called “London Whale.” Last week, Gensler warned that all of the U.S. government’s efforts to reform the swaps market “could be undone” if U.S. banks’ foreign affiliates and branches whose activities are guaranteed by their U.S. parent companies “are allowed to operate outside of these important requirements.” Obama’s nomination of Renteria would come as banks step up their lobbying over the CFTC’s cross-border rules. In recent days, representatives from banks including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs met with CFTC officials to ask that they not penalize the banks if they inadvertently run afoul of the CFTC’s rules governing cross-border swaps if Gensler allows the temporary exemption to lapse on July 12. The exemption ending in July would subject banks and other market participants to what they and some regulators characterize as vague, unworkable Dodd-Frank rules. The law calls on the CFTC to regulate transactions that have a “direct and significant” effect on U.S. commerce. The representatives signaled that they would suffer a short-term but manageable hit to their businesses, and ultimately would recover once the rules are finalized, officials and bankers said. Foreign banks and U.S. institutions that derive much of their revenues from overseas activities -- such as Citigroup -- would be much more heavily impacted by the CFTC’s rules than banks such as JPMorgan and Goldman, which are more focused on U.S. customers. The sector is hoping that the CFTC will renew its exemption through the end of the year, around the time Gensler’s term would expire. Otherwise, the agency may finalize proposed guidance governing cross-border transactions, which the industry vehemently opposes. JPMorgan and Goldman declined to comment. The CFTC’s proposals differ from those of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees the small bit of the swaps market outside the CFTC’s purview. The SEC proposed exempting some overseas activities of U.S. banks from some U.S. rules. Kenneth Bentsen Jr., president of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, said that if Gensler declines to renew the exemption, “it would be preferable, though not optimal, that they do nothing.” Regulators from Europe and elsewhere have complained to Jack Lew, U.S. Treasury secretary, about Gensler’s approach. Some U.S. officials fear that overseas regulators could retaliate by forcing those that do business with their banks to comply with their rules, setting up a possible conflict with U.S. regulations. Renteria would have to deal with the fallout if she takes office. The daugher of Mexican migrant workers, Renteria was heavily pushed for a CFTC role by her former boss, Stabenow. The Michigan Democrat originally advocated for Renteria to replace Bart Chilton, a CFTC commissioner whose term expired in April, but Renteria emerged as a top candidate in recent months to replace Gensler as chairman after the previous leading contender received a spate of negative publicity surrounding his positions on various rules. Mark Wetjen, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), had been seen as Gensler’s eventual replacement until news articles left the impression that the commissioner was tilted toward Wall Street. Wetjen took office at the end of 2011 and has since been trying to forge compromises at the five-person commission. Dan Berkovitz, who recently left the CFTC as general counsel, is under consideration to replace Chilton if he is not re-nominated, government officials said. Gensler likely would retreat to a quiet life after leaving the CFTC, unless the Obama administration offered him another position. He served as a top adviser to Hillary Clinton when she ran for president in 2008 and may assume a similar post if Clinton runs again in 2016.