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Last updated: Tuesday, May 21 2013 05:38 PM

Watch Live: Apple CEO Tim Cook Faces Senate Questions on Taxes

Tuesday, May 21 2013 03:42 PM

Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook testifies on Capitol Hill to explain the company's tax strategy. This live stream will be temporarily interrupted at 1 p.m.

WASHINGTON -- A Senate panel says Apple Inc. is avoiding billions of dollars in U.S. taxes by shifting profits to foreign affiliates and is prepared to question the company's chief executive Tuesday about the "loopholes."

Apple CEO Tim Cook is expected to explain the company's tax strategy to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which released a detailed report Monday on the company's practices.

The world's most valuable company says it complies with the laws and pays "an extraordinary amount" in U.S. taxes.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the panel's chairman, says Apple's use of loopholes in the U.S. tax code is unique among multinational corporations.

"Apple is exploiting an absurdity," Levin said at the start of the hearing.

The tone of the hearing turned tense before the Apple executives were scheduled to appear, as Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., an anti-tax hawk who reflects tea party sentiment, insisted that the subcommittee apologize to Apple for unfair scapegoating.

"If anyone should be on trial here it should be Congress ... for creating a bizarre and byzantine tax code," said Paul. "If you want to assign blame, this committee needs to look in the mirror and see who created that mess."

Levin countered angrily that no such apology would be forthcoming. "Apple's a great company, but no company should be able to determine how much it's going to pay in taxes ..... by using gimmicks," he said.

The spotlight on Apple's tax strategy comes at a time of fevered debate in Washington over whether and how to raise revenues to help reduce the federal deficit. Many Democrats complain that the government is missing out on billions of dollars because companies are stashing profits abroad and avoiding taxes. Republicans want to cut the corporate tax rate of 35 percent and ease the tax burden on money that U.S. companies make abroad. They say the move would encourage companies to invest at home.

Cook and the other Apple executives are expected to face tough questions. Levin and other panel members could hold up Apple as an example of a powerful company using its privileged position to avoid taxes while ordinary Americans must pay them. The subcommittee last fall derided executives from other technology giants over similar allegations.

Apple is holding overseas some $102 billion of its $145 billion in cash, according to the subcommittee's report.

Apple's strategies are legal, and many other multinational corporations use similar tax techniques to avoid paying U.S. taxes on profits they reap overseas. But Apple uses a unique twist, the report found. The company's tactics raise questions about loopholes in the U.S. tax code, lawmakers say.

Apple refuted the subcommittee's assertions in testimony prepared for the hearing. Apple said it employs tens of thousands of Americans and pays "an extraordinary amount" in U.S. taxes, citing the roughly $6 billion it paid in fiscal 2012.

Apple "complies fully with both the laws and the spirit of the laws," the testimony says. "And Apple pays all its required taxes, both in this country and abroad."

"Apple does not use tax gimmicks," the statement says.

The company has made clear that given current U.S. tax rates, it has no intention of repatriating its overseas profits to the U.S. Apple reiterated in its testimony its support for comprehensive tax reform as a way to support economic growth and boost U.S. companies' competitiveness.

The subcommittee also has examined the tax strategies of Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other multinational companies, finding that they too have avoided billions in U.S. taxes by shifting profits offshore and exploiting weak, ambiguous sections of the tax code. Microsoft has used "aggressive" transactions to shift assets to subsidiaries in Puerto Rico, Ireland and Singapore, in part to avoid taxes. HP has used complex offshore loan transactions worth billions while using the money to run its U.S. operations, according to the panel.

The subcommittee's report estimates that Apple avoided at least $3.5 billion in U.S. federal taxes in 2011 and $9 billion in 2012 by using the strategy. The company, based in Cupertino, Calif., paid $2.5 billion in federal taxes in 2011 and $6 billion in 2012.

Apple uses five companies located in Ireland to carry out its tax strategy, according to the report. The companies are located at the same address in Cork, Ireland, and they share members of their boards of directors. While all five companies were incorporated in Ireland, only two of them also have tax residency in that country. That means the other three aren't legally required to pay taxes in Ireland because they aren't managed or controlled in that country, in Apple's view.

The report says Apple capitalizes on a difference between U.S. and Irish rules regarding tax residency. In Ireland, a company must be managed and controlled in the country to be a tax resident. Under U.S. law, a company is a tax resident of the country in which it was established. Therefore, the Apple companies aren't tax residents of Ireland nor of the U.S., since they weren't incorporated in the U.S., in Apple's view.

The subcommittee said Apple's strategy of not declaring tax residency in any country could be unique among corporations.

Levin and Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the subcommittee's senior Republican, are proposing legislation to close loopholes in the tax code.

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Ask The Headhunter: Over 50? Show How You'll Do the Job

Tuesday, May 21 2013 03:40 PM

Have you ever been skeptical of headhunter Nick Corcodilos' unconventional advice? One job seeker decided to put some Ask The Headhunter methods to the test and the results were extremely successful. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

Nick Corcodilos started headhunting in Silicon Valley in 1979, and has answered over 30,000 questions from the Ask The Headhunter community over the past decade.

In this special Making Sense edition of Ask The Headhunter, Nick shares insider advice and contrarian methods about winning and keeping the right job, on one condition: that you, dear Making Sense reader, send Nick your questions about your personal challenges with job hunting, interviewing, networking, resumes, job boards, or salary negotiations. No guarantees -- just a promise to do his best to offer useful advice.

Nick Corcodilos: Once in a while, I like to publish a success story from a reader. It helps people see that others are using the methods we discuss -- and that the approach works. Here's one that just came in.

Andy H.: I just wanted to tell you that I got a new job. Though I got this job by responding to a posting on LinkedIn, I used some of your methods during the process. (See "The Basics.")

This employer required a personality test, a cognitive test, a panel interview during which I had to figure out a problem, and a puzzle test. I also had one extra interview with the vice president. Your typical HR-centric process.

So, what did I do to follow your advice? I made a package, which I sent to the VP, showing how I would do the job.

I created an outline of how I would approach the job. I defined a process called a "Business Intelligence Baseline" that I would do on my first weeks on the job. I enclosed a sample of a similar project I had done for another employer. I also included a quick summary of a conference I went to on Big Data, because I knew that this firm was looking to get into Big Data.

I was offered the job with a slight raise and twice as much vacation time as my previous employer. (I should have gotten your salary book to help me with negotiations!)

I don't think this is my "it" job. It is a "for now" job.

Meanwhile, I am going to start networking and doing the other things you recommend. (See "I don't know anybody.") I like the point you make in [the PDF book] How Can I Change Careers? that a person should be doing this all the time. When I need to move on, I will be ready.

To put this all in context, I was laid off from my job on March 22. I contacted these people on April 9, and got a formal offer on April 30. I just want to thank you so much. I will continue to follow you online and via subscription. I am not expecting a response. I just want you to know that on this pass I was only a fair disciple of your methods. I promise next time I will do better. Thanks again.

P.S. Sept.14 is my 59th birthday!

Nick Corcodilos: Your story needs no reply and no advice from me. Just a hearty congratulations!

Readers sometimes ask me for a 'template" they can use to implement the job hunting methods we discuss in this column. You're 58 -- theoretically almost unemployable. (Isn't it bizarre that extensive experience and acumen brand people as unhireable?) Your template works because you delivered a clear plan to the employer about how you'd do the job. While age discrimination is very real, so is the promise of doing a great job. Sometimes, to help employers look past the grey (and their silly preconceived notions), you have to show them the green: How you will contribute more to their bottom line. And you've clearly done that. Thanks for sharing your experience.

(If you're running into problematic employment tests, please see Erica Klein's excellent article, "Employment Tests: Get an edge.")

I'd love to hear from job hunters who use approaches similar to this reader's. The steps closely follow what we discuss on Ask The Headhunter. This individual showed how he'd do the job! Please post your comments below -- Is this approach really so difficult?

Nick Corcodilos invites Making Sense readers to subscribe to his free weekly Ask The Headhunter© Newsletter. His in-depth "how to" PDF books are available on his website: "How to Work With Headhunters...and how to make headhunters work for you," "How Can I Change Careers?" and "Keep Your Salary Under Wraps."

Send your questions to Nick, and join him for discussion every week here on Making Sense. Thanks for participating!

This entry is cross-posted on the Making Sen$e page, where correspondent Paul Solman answers your economic and business questions. Follow @paulsolman

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Ask The Headhunter: Over 50? Show How You'll Do the Job

Tuesday, May 21 2013 03:19 PM

By Nick Corcodilos

Nick Corcodilos started headhunting in Silicon Valley in 1979, and has answered over 30,000 questions from the Ask The Headhunter community over the past decade.

Andy H.: I just wanted to tell you that I got a new job. Though I got this job by responding to a posting on LinkedIn, I used some of your methods during the process. (See "The Basics.")

So, what did I do to follow your advice? I made a package, which I sent to the VP, showing how I would do the job.

I was offered the job with a slight raise and twice as much vacation time as my previous employer. (I should have gotten your salary book to help me with negotiations!)

I don't think this is my "it" job. It is a "for now" job.

MORE FROM NICK CORCODILOS: Am I Getting Stiffed on Salary?

P.S. Sept.14 is my 59th birthday!

Nick Corcodilos: Your story needs no reply and no advice from me. Just a hearty congratulations!

(If you're running into problematic employment tests, please see Erica Klein's excellent article, "Employment Tests: Get an edge.")

Send your questions to Nick, and join him for discussion every week here on Making Sense. Thanks for participating!

Copyright © 2013 Nick Corcodilos. All rights reserved in all media. Ask the Headhunter® is a registered trademark. This entry is cross-posted on the Rundown -- NewsHour's blog of news and insight. Follow Paul on Twitter. Follow @PaulSolman

Watch Live: Senate Finance Committee Hearing on IRS

Tuesday, May 21 2013 02:39 PM

Watch the Senate Finance Committee hearing to review criteria employed by the IRS to identify tax exemption applications for greater scrutiny. Former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman is scheduled to testify.

WASHINGTON -- A leading Senate Democrat says the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups was intolerable, and he is promising to get to the bottom of how it happened.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus made his remark Tuesday as his panel began Congress' second hearing on the extra scrutiny the IRS gave tea party and other conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

The Montana Democrat says his committee will follow the facts wherever they lead.

Scheduled to testify to Congress for the first time was former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, who headed the agency for most of the period when it was improperly focusing on the conservative groups.

We will live stream the hearing in the player above.

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Politics Put On Hold As Nation Surveys Oklahoma Tornado Damage

Tuesday, May 21 2013 12:55 PM

Flipped vehicles are piled up outside the heavily damaged Moore Medical Center after a powerful tornado ripped through the area on Monday in Moore, Oklahoma. Photo by Brett Deering/Getty Images

A massive tornado ravaged a suburb of Oklahoma City on Monday, leveling buildings, killing at least 51 people, and temporarily brushing aside a trio of brewing political storms that had been the focus of official Washington in recent weeks.

President Barack Obama will receive a briefing from senior members of the administration's response team prior to delivering a 10 a.m. ET statement on the Sooner State rescue and recovery efforts from the White House State Dining Room. (Mr. Obama's original schedule had a series of closed meetings, including one with people affected by immigration policy.)

Watch the president's remarks on the situation in Oklahoma here.

At the same time, a Senate Finance Committee hearing will get underway on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers will hear testimony from the ousted acting IRS commissioner and the former head of the agency who was in charge during the period agents were targeting conservative groups that had applied for tax-exempt status.

But the congressional investigation into the IRS's conduct will most certainly be overtaken by whatever developments emerge from the city of Moore, where the death toll is expected to rise Tuesday. A spokesperson for the state medical examiner's office has been told to expect another 40 bodies.

Among the confirmed dead are 20 children. The storm ripped through Plaza Towers Elementary School, where a search and rescue operation is ongoing. According to the New York Times, area hospitals reported at least 145 people were injured, including 70 children.

"This is bigger than anything I've ever seen," Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin said Tuesday on NBC's "Today Show."

The president spoke Monday with Fallin and Rep. Tom Cole, whose congressional district includes Moore. Mr. Obama also signed a major disaster declaration to immediately free up federal resources for recovery efforts in Oklahoma.

Speaking with NPR's "Morning Edition," Cole said the area would need federal assistance. "This is what disaster aid is for," said Cole.

As the NewsHour went on the air Monday night, we were still learning about the extent of the devastation. We talked with several Oklahoma-based officials who gave us the latest.

Watch the segment here or below:

Watch Video

As for the Finance Committee hearing, it will include a now-familiar cast of characters who testified last Friday about the scandal -- acting/outgoing IRS commissioner Steven Miller and J. Russell George, the Treasury Department inspector general for tax administration who conducted the audit released last week. Also expected to appear for the first time is former IRS commissioner Doug Shulman, who led the agency at the time that groups with "tea party," "patriot" or "9/12" in their names were being singled out for extra scrutiny.

On Monday, the White House gave a new timeline about when officials in the building learned about the IRS findings. White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler opted against telling the president because the IRS inspector general's report was not finished, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters.

And Roll Call's Eliza Newlin Carney explored in detail the campaign finance problems this dustup highlights.

Jon Cohen and Dan Balz reported on a new Washington Post-ABC News poll showing majorities of Americans believe the IRS "deliberately harassed" conservative groups.

A new CNN poll found sentiment about the tea party movement has improved since the news of their targeting surfaced. Tea party activists are 9 percentage points more popular than when CNN asked about them in March.

CNN's pollsters found 55 percent of Americans surveyed believe the IRS scandal is a big deal. Still, Mr. Obama remains likable.

The Post poll also found the president's numbers remaining steady, with a 51 percent positive and 44 percent negative approval rating.

LINE ITEMS

Rep. James Lankford said Monday that a similar Oklahoma tornado in 1999 cost $1 billion to clean up.

Partisans are already noting that both Oklahoma senators voted against relief for victims of Superstorm Sandy along the East Coast.

Voters in Los Angeles choose a new mayor Tuesday. The Los Angeles Times lays out the candidates and the issues. Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti are racing to win what is expected to be a low turnout race. Garcetti, backed by top Obama adviser David Axelrod, held a slim lead. Both candidates are Democrats, thanks to the Golden State's jungle primary. Politico has more on Axelrod's support contrasted with former President Bill Clinton's for Greuel.

Mr. Obama will travel to Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania from June 26 through July 3, the White House announced.

Pew Research Center's Andy Kohut puts some of the numbers about race and voting in context.

Sen. Chuck Schumer called a meeting with a number of gay rights activists, including leading New York City mayoral candidate and city council speaker Christine Quinn, in New York earlier this month to discuss an amendment to the immigration bill that would include same-sex couples. The issue is one that could upset the delicate bipartisan coalition that supports comprehensive immigration reform. Politico's Maggie Haberman has details.

And Senators are close to the markup finish line, meaning a bill could be on the Senate floor by early June.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Tom Daschle, the man who once held his job are at odds over who should run in South Dakota for retiring Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson's seat.

Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., tells his hometown paper he isn't so sure about running for a seventh term.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told a gathering of New Hampshire Republicans on Monday that the GOP needs to broaden its reach if the party is to win back the White House in 2016.

The Washington Post reports that the Susan B. Anthony List will spend millions for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's Virginia gubernatorial bid, hoping to make the November contest a test run for anti-abortion efforts in the 2014 Congressional midterms.

The National Republican Congressional Committee didn't completely abandon Mark Sanford after all. The South Carolina Republican Party Federal Campaign Committee received $164,000 from the NRCC three weeks before the 1st Congressional District special election, which Sanford went on to win.

The New York Times examines Reublican Gabriel Gomez's chances against Democratic Rep. Ed Markey in next month's Senate special election in Massachusetts. Stu Rothenberg has more on polling in the race.

The Associated Press keeps up with the story we linked to on Monday about Arkansas Treasurer Martha Shoffner, reporting that an affidavit filed in federal court alleges the Democrat "repeatedly took cash payments, sometimes rolled up and hidden inside a pie box, from a broker who invested state money."

The Club for Growth is crowing that its members have raised more than $500,000 toward a $1 million goal to fund ads against Arkansas Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor, one of the most vulnerable incumbents on the ballot next year.

Jurors heard closing arguments in the case involving New York's controversial Stop and Frisk policy.

Mia Love is going to give a Congressional bid another chance in Utah next year.

Tuesday morning, low-wage federal contractors who service food courts and run tourist gift shops will strike at Washington, D.C. buildings, including the Ronald Reagan and Old Post Office Buildings, the Smithsonian museums, and Union Station. They are asking for a living wage. The strikes come as the major cities of Milwaukee and Detroit saw fast-food-worker and retailer strikes.

Virginia Republicans will select a challenger for Democratic Sen. Mark Warner at a convention in 2014, a process likely to lead to a more conservative candidate.

Politico's Morning Score noticed that Sen. Marco Rubio will be the headline speaker at a July conference in Miami for Maverick PAC, the group started by George P. Bush to recruit young Republicans.

With the cicada invasion upon us, it shouldn't be surprising to see the insect referenced in politics. They've had legs in the past, once used by Reagan to describe Democrats and in an attack ad on John Kerry.

Democratic fundraiser Scott Dworkin may run for Rep. Mel Watt's seat in North Carolina. The president named Watt to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency earlier this month.

The Supreme Court has chosen to hear a case next term on praying at government meetings.

The NewsHour's Supreme Court correspondent, Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal, gets name-dropped in this comic by Charles Fincher.

Ray Manzarek, we'll miss you.

This might be the only time you'll ever see "Party of Five" and "Nancy Pelosi" in the same sentence.

David Axelrod's Chicago Institute of Politics made a spoof video to get students to come to former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau's study group. "Where's the change? Where's the hope?" Axelrod complains to Favreau. "You're supposed to be the big genius!"

Watch:

NEWSHOUR ROUNDUP

Jeffrey Brown looked at Yahoo's $1.1 billion blockbuster deal to buy Tumblr. And we explored the questions that matter about the purchase.

Miles O'Brien honored Sally Ride at the Kennedy Center. Read his reflections of her impact on education in science, technology and math.

TOP TWEETS

I'm giving $1000 for tonight's HR and every HR until the All-Star break for the victims of my hometown in OKC. #PrayforOklahoma
— Matt Kemp (@TheRealMattKemp) May 21, 2013

Text "REDCROSS" to 90999 for $10 donation to help tornado victims in #OKC #okwx
— Kevin Durant (@KDTrey5) May 21, 2013

The images coming out of Oklahoma today are horrifying. Our thoughts and prayers are with all those affected. #PrayForOklahoma
— Governor Christie (@GovChristie) May 20, 2013

Movie pitch: Gary Oldman is a spy engaged in a cat-and-mouse leak hunt before realizing he can just break into a reporter's Gmail account.
— Alex Burns (@aburnspolitico) May 20, 2013

My back is still sore from pulling weeds & throwing mulch but our yard in Wauwatosa did look good when I left at 5:45am
— Scott Walker (@ScottKWalker) May 20, 2013

Haters gon hate. Theme of the day. They always say more money more problems. Or mo' money mo' problems. Yea I'm cultured #DealWithIt
— Robert Griffin III (@RGIII) May 20, 2013

Katelyn Polantz and desk assistant Mallory Sofastaii contributed to this report.

For more political coverage, visit our politics page.

Questions or comments? Email Christina Bellantoni at cbellantoni-at-newshour-dot-org.

Follow the politics team on Twitter:

Follow @cbellantoni

Follow @burliji Follow @kpolantz Follow @elizsummers Follow @tiffanymullon Follow @meenaganesan Follow @ljspbs

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Mile-Wide Tornado Rips Through Suburban Oklahoma City

Tuesday, May 21 2013 01:20 AM

Watch Video

Television footage shows the massive funnel cloud that moved across the suburbs of Oklahoma City Monday.

Update 11:48 p.m. President Obama signed a disaster declaration for Oklahoma, minutes ago.

BREAKING: President Barack Obama declares major disaster in Oklahoma after devastating tornado
— The Associated Press (@AP) May 21, 2013

Update 11:28 p.m. | The following AP video shows survivors being pulled from the debris and loaded into waiting ambulances.

Update 11:03 p.m. | Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin and city officials held a press conference earlier this evening. Fallin said that Oklahoma had received offers for resources from governors from other states across the nation, as well as from President Obama. She added that for now, downed power lines, blocked roadways, and overloaded telephone networks were hindering the emergency response.

The Associated Press has published a set of maps and graphics showing the path of destruction in Oklahoma, the latest information about the number of people killed or injured in the storm, and some background information on tornadoes.

Update 10:19 p.m. | Earlier today, the National Weather Service provided these details on the tornado:

Newcastle-Moore OKC Tornado was on the ground approx. 40 minutes. Tornado warning was in effect for 16 minutes before tornado developed.
— NWS Norman (@NWSNorman) May 20, 2013

Update 9:16 p.m. | AP has tweeted that the state medical examiner's office is now reporting 51 killed in the Oklahoma tornado, with children among the dead.

BREAKING: State medical examiner's office: 51 killed in Oklahoma tornado, with children among the dead -RJJ
— The Associated Press (@AP) May 21, 2013

Update 8:55 p.m. | There are at least 37 people reported killed. Authorities expected the death toll to rise as emergency crews moved deeper into the hardest-hit areas. At least 60 people were reported hurt, including more than a dozen children.

Update 7:02 p.m. | The Associated Press is following the story in Moore, Okla., where the twister touched down. Follow their updates via Twitter:

BREAKING: Several children pulled out of rubble alive at Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla. -RJJ
— The Associated Press (@AP) May 20, 2013

Update 6:17 p.m. | The National Weather Service says the tornado that hit Moore had wind speeds up to 200 mph. The weather service's preliminary classification of Monday afternoon's tornado was an EF-4 on the enhanced Fujita scale.

Update 5:30 p.m. | Authorities also report that an elementary school in the area took a direct hit from the twister.

Gary Knight with the Oklahoma City Police Department says the school suffered "extensive damage."

Update 5:05 p.m. EDT | The Associated Press is reporting that a mile-wide tornado has ripped through suburban Oklahoma City Monday afternoon.

Video showed homes and buildings in Moore, Okla., were reduced to rubble, and vehicles littered roadways south and southwest of Oklahoma City.

Live updates from NPR member station KGOU in Oklahoma.

Live updates from The Oklahoman, including a map of the twister's path and video from the scene.

Follow the tweets from the National Weather Service in Norman, Okla.

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5 Questions: Why Yahoo Hopes Tumblr Will Expand Its 'Coolness'

Monday, May 20 2013 11:00 PM

Photo illustration by PBS NewsHour created with Pic Stich

Yahoo, the languishing tech pioneer, officially unveiled its acquisition of social blogging platform Tumblr on Monday. The $1.1 billion purchase by Yahoo could mean a whole world of things for both of the Internet companies, as well as for Yahoo chief executive -- and former Google executive -- Marissa Mayer.

We spoke with Rebecca Lieb, a research analyst of digital advertising and media for the Altimeter Group and Steven Levy, a writer for Wired, about the deal and Yahoo's strategy behind it.

Where does Tumblr fit into the Yahoo strategy?

There are handful of things Yahoo wants from this buy, according Rebecca Lieb, a research analyst of digital advertising and media for the Altimeter Group. They want to vastly expand the Yahoo audience, Lieb told the PBS NewsHour. "Not just eyeballs, but expanding into a demographic, the millennials, the 20-somethings."

Yahoo was once a relevant Internet body, Lieb said:

It very badly needs to re-invent itself, to be, if not cool at least relevant again ... And Tumblr brings an elusive component of coolness. One of Mayer's big challenges is keeping it cool when it is owned by a less cool corporate entity.

Steven Levy, a writer for Wired, dubs Tumblr an "image-enhancer" for Yahoo. Tumblr provides Yahoo with a way to increase its content output by repurposing user-generated material, Levy said, adding that the site elevates a platform already loved by so many people. "The technological success for Tumblr, and now Yahoo, will be teasing content out of people for free."

What does the Tumblr experience say about the future role of mobile?

Lieb said that mobile is increasingly about imagery and cites Facebook's revamp and focus on images after its acquisition of the social photo sharing tool Instagram. "A picture is worth a thousand words," she said. "People don't type about their dinner. They upload photos." Yahoo's pick-up of Tumblr could mean even more change in the future of Yahoo's mobile strategy visually.

While Yahoo has seen significant plays on mobile, Lieb said the company, along with Facebook and Google, has yet to find the winning formula yet. "No one has won," she said. "The battle is just beginning."

Why was there negative reaction among Tumblr users?

"Tumblr has a very indie feel to it," said Levy of what some have called the "hipster blogging service."

The idea of a conglomerate led by a former Gooogler taking hold of that content, he added, could be disturbing. The social website revolt is a familiar tale. You can see some of those reactions here.

Levy also noted that pre-Melissa Mayer, the Web pioneer had a "miserable reputation of taking on new companies and doing nothing with them." (Note Yahoo's 2005 acquisitions of Flickr and del.icio.us.)

Is there any way to tell how difficult it will be for Yahoo to make money with Tumblr?

"The model Yahoo doesn't want you to look at is NewsCorp buying Myspace, and the model they want you to look at is Google buying YouTube," said Levy. The strategy there? "Google made the smart decision to not call YouTube Google Video."

On Yahoo's newfound relationship with Tumblr, Lieb's advice is to be hands-off and leave it alone. "If Yahoo goes in and makes radical changes, the audience will defect." But Yahoo can build Tumblr's advertising model, Lieb said. "At the same time, Tumblr will bring a new form of non-advertising," or native content marketing to Yahoo.

Content marketing is less alienating to the young millennial audience Yahoo is courting, signaled in this acquisition, said Lieb.

Are these tech sector deals still running ahead of their real value or are they starting to calm down?

While the jury's still out on the $1 billion Facebook-Instagram deal, YouTube surely helped Google, both Lieb and Levy agree. But these acquisitions are not the type that are expected to break even by the next quarter or even by the end of the next fiscal year, said Lieb.

"Generally these mergers don't work," said Levy, noting that for every Google success met by companies like Android and YouTube, there are ten other companies that acquired and had failures.

Watch Monday's NewsHour for more on the blockbuster merger.

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What DSM-5, Updated Mental Health 'Bible,' Means for Diagnosing Patients

Monday, May 20 2013 10:35 PM

Watch Video | Listen to the Audio

JUDY WOODRUFF: Next: changes to the so-called “bible” of psychiatry and what it means for diagnosis and treatment.

This weekend, the American Psychiatric Association released a revision to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, often referred to as “the DSM.” It's the first comprehensive update since 1994.

Doctors often utilize the DSM to diagnose mental illnesses. And there's been much debate over the years about its role. We look at the changes to this manual now with two experts.

Dr. Michael First, he's a psychiatrist at New York Presbyterian Hospital and a professor at Columbia University. And Dr. Steven Hyman, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health at NIH. He's the director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute.

Gentlemen, we welcome you both.

Dr. First, let me turn to you. Why is this updated diagnostic manual so important?

DR. MICHAEL FIRST, Columbia University: Well, the reason it's so important is, the DSM is the guidebook that is used by all mental health professionals. It's crucial to their ability to practice.

It defines all of the psychiatric diagnoses. And the psychiatric diagnosis, arriving at a correct psychiatric diagnosis is the first step in trying to pick the best treatment for patients. So, it is something that has enormous influence on everybody's ability to provide the best treatment that's possible.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Dr. Hyman, you have a somewhat different take on the value of it.

DR. STEVEN HYMAN, Broad Institute: Well, I think it's critically important, as Dr. First said, for diagnosis and for insurance reimbursement.

But I think that the DSM is scientifically early. The brain gives up its secrets grudgingly. And we have to understand the DSM as a set of guidelines to diagnosis of often very serious disorders, but not as the bible of psychiatry. It is hardly meant to be by either the people who wrote it or in reality a perfect mirror of nature.

JUDY WOODRUFF: If it's an imperfect thing, Dr. First, how does that affect what doctors can do and how patients are helped or not helped?

MICHAEL FIRST: Well, it's imperfect mainly because our understanding of the core of how mental disorders, what's behind mental disorders, remains -- there's a lot more to be understood.

And certainly, as we understand more over the years, our ability to provide the ultimately best treatment will continue to be improved. But what the book does now, it's really a culmination of what we know about mental disorders. And that's very, very helpful in being able to pick the right treatment.

So I agree with Dr. Hyman. It's certainly not a bible. I think a better way to look at the DSM, it's like a dictionary. It allows people to communicate. It allows mental health professionals to communicate with one another. It allows them to communicate with their patients. It allows us to communicate with administrators, so that we're all talking about the same conditions.

It has its limits because our knowledge of the way mental disorders work has their limits.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Dr. Hyman, so how are patients affected by the changes in this new version of the manual?

STEVEN HYMAN: Well, I think the most important thing are patients. I mean, after all, diseases like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, depression, OCD -- and I could go on -- are the most disabling disorders in aggregate in the United States and cause enormous suffering.

It's critical that doctors and in fact all mental health professionals have ways of matching patients with treatments, and also that the whole administrative apparatus around medicine has a way of reimbursing those things.

What the DSM does is to provide a shared language so that mental health professionals and patients and insurance companies know they're talking about the same thing. And I think that is all well and good, as long as we don't assume that every semicolon in the document is somehow rigidly guiding us.

And so, in the end, I hope that with this new revision and with -- despite the controversies, that well-trained mental health professionals will still make sure that all patients in need of services get services. And I don't really see anything in the revisions that should get in the way of that.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, that's a question.

Dr. First, if -- I mean, how much danger is there? Because there are some changes in here. For example, Asperger's is I guess no longer in a separate category. It's put under the heading of autism. But that's just one of a number of modifications that were made. How do you see patients being affected by this?

MICHAEL FIRST: Well, the belief is, is that since the manual reflects the current science -- and science continues to move along, perhaps slower than a lot of people would like it to, but there is still a continuing improvement in our description of mental disorders and our being able to -- ability to be able to predict their course.

So the DSM will provide patients, as well as their clinicians, with the most up-to-date information to be able to provide help. Again, it's far from perfect, but it's still extremely useful. And it's the best we have. And I think we have a lot to offer our patients, and the DSM is really the most up-to-date tool to provide that help to our patients.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But I heard Dr. Hyman say that if -- if professionals interpret it too rigidly, that could be harmful.

MICHAEL FIRST: That's true.

One of the rules on the front of the DSM that has been there actually since the beginning is -- it says it very, very clearly. It's not to be used as a cookbook. Clinical judgment -- people go and learn how to be mental health professionals and spend years in practice gaining a skill. And that skill is the ability to use their clinical judgment in making decisions.

And that clinical judgment remains crucial. The DSM is part of the decision-making process for making a psychiatric diagnosis. And Dr. Hyman is actually -- absolutely right. If somebody were to open up the book and just read the words and just apply them without using any clinical judgment, that could be very, very harmful. But that's completely at odds with the way the book is supposed to be used.

And it says so in front of the book in plain language: This is not a cookbook. This must be used with clinical judgment.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Dr. Hyman, what about the use that insurance companies and others make, educational institutions make of this and how doctors use it?

STEVEN HYMAN: Well, I often say that doctors use the book, but just in the way that Dr. First said, with clinical judgment.

People who are insurance claims adjustors and educators and people in courts of law are not trained as clinicians and tend to read the book quite literally. And I think -- I think it's important that, with the revision, there be appropriate educational efforts again to make sure that nobody who really is in need of services is denied services or the book is taken to be too literal.

I think, given our current state of knowledge, there have to be compromises. And the book provides a way of communicating between clinicians and patients and people like insurance claims examiners. That said, I think the greatest problem with the book -- and I think Dr. First and I agree with this -- the people who should take it least literally are scientists, because you can get yourself into the fix that if you recognize that the book is imperfect, but you force yourself to follow every dictate quite literally, then you find yourself unable to make the very necessary progress that psychiatry needs.

Again, the brain is the most complicated organ in the history of human scientific endeavor. And we need to be able to approach it with an open mind.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, it is -- it does offer some big changes. And we help -- we thank you both for helping us at least understand a part of how it all works.

Dr. Michael First, Dr. Steven Hyman, we thank you both.

STEVEN HYMAN: A pleasure.

MICHAEL FIRST: Thank you.

Coding Skills Combine With Civic Consciousness to Improve Government

Monday, May 20 2013 10:32 PM

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JEFFREY BROWN: Making cities work better through high-tech innovation,that's the ambitious goal of one San Francisco startup.

NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels has our report.

SPENCER MICHELS: The scrambled eggs and homemade waffles disappeared quickly at this free breakfast for children and their moms in East Palo Alto, a largely minority community in the heart of California's wealthy Silicon Valley.

Many residents here, possibly tens of thousands, qualify for food assistance programs, but aren't accessing them. Some are simply unaware such programs exist. That was the case with Jackie Owens, a single working mom who says she was struggling to get by before she learned about the nonprofit Ecumenical Hunger Program.

JACKIE OWENS, Mother: I was in touch with social work, and I never heard about this program until word of mouth through a friend.

SPENCER MICHELS: Beverly Johnson is in charge of food assistance programs for San Mateo County.

BEVERLY JOHNSON, San Mateo County Human Services Agency: We actually had been struggling with the issue of providing access to food, to free food, to reduced-priced food for our residents of our county.

SPENCER MICHELS: Johnson and her government colleagues decided to try a very un-governmental approach to the problem. They reached out to a group of savvy young techies for help.

This is the headquarters of Code for America, Code as in computer code. It's a new San Francisco-based nonprofit which connects technology professionals, like Web programmers and designers, to local governments, like San Mateo County, which are seeking innovative ways to improve their services.

MAN: You have a well-defined community with attributes around who is participating.

SPENCER MICHELS: Code for America, which has been dubbed the Peace Corps for geeks, offers a one-year paid fellowship for high-tech applicants who want to give back. The organization receives funding from the Knight Foundation, Google, and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's foundation, as well as from the cities which receive help.

Fellows have developed more than 50 websites and applications, or apps, to help solve a specific problem facing a city and its residents. This one in Boston allows residents to adopt a fire hydrant and be responsible for shoveling it out when it snows and a website in New Orleans tracks how the city is dealing with blighted properties.

JENNIFER PAHLKA, Founder, Code for America: We think the people who have the skills of coding and design at creating technology really have something to offer the country right now, and we think government is where they need to bring it.

SPENCER MICHELS: The goal of Code for America, says 43-year-old founder Jennifer Pahlka, is to inject some Silicon Valley enthusiasm and know-how into local governments.

JENNIFER PAHLKA: So few people vote these days, and I think it's partly because they don't feel like the institution really means anything to them. If you want them to vote, give them opportunities to do something else other than vote, to help. Government is supposed to be about how we do things together, and we can do that much more together if we use technology smartly right now.

SPENCER MICHELS: Some fellows have come from well-known tech companies like Apple and Yahoo, and many take a sizable pay cut, receiving $35,000 dollars for the year.

Moncef Belyamani came to Code for America from AOL. He is part of a three-person team, including Sophia Parafina and Anselm Bradford, assigned to work with San Mateo County.

MONCEF BELYAMANI, Code for America: I saw a unique opportunity to use my skills and being surrounded by smart and talented people who share the same vision for improving society.

SPENCER MICHELS: Ten cities and counties were chosen this year to receive Code for America's help, out of dozens that applied. The San Mateo County team spent a month meeting with residents and officials involved in food distribution to understand how the whole process worked.

SOPHIA PARAFINA, Code for America: We have worked at community shelters, and with food distribution, helping sort food, prepare food, and helping people carry the food out to cars and talking to them.

MONCEF BELYAMANI: Another project we participated in was the food stamps challenge. So we all pledged to try to live on the average weekly allotment, which is $37.25. And that was very eye-opening.

SPENCER MICHELS: Were you hungry?

MONCEF BELYAMANI: Yes, we were hungry.

SPENCER MICHELS: The three discovered many social service workers lacked up-to-date information about food programs. They are now developing a program they think could help.

ANSELM BRADFORD: We're going to build an application that helps the different community-based organizations refer clients to the services that they would be eligible for.

SOPHIA PARAFINA: If we put this thing on the web, people can go and look for themselves, and access these services.

ANSELM BRADFORD: So if you need something like say food, you can type food in here.

SPENCER MICHELS: They met recently met with Donald Hunter, program manager of the Ecumenical Hunger Program, to get his feedback

DONALD HUNTER, Ecumenical Hunger Program: It sounds like it is a good idea. It will be very important that individuals get involved with the agencies because a majority of people don't have computers or access to Internet. So I see it missing a lot of people in this area because of that.

SPENCER MICHELS: Despite Hunter's reservations, the team believes that many residents in the community will be able to access the technology they are developing.

SOPHIA PARAFINA: In our focus groups, we talk to people, and they have access to the Web. They go to the libraries. They borrow other people's computers. Some of them have smartphones. So the technology is pervasive, and it is there, and people are willing to use it. It's a matter of taking that technology and turning it into something that anybody can use.

SPENCER MICHELS: They also have stayed in close touch with human services director Beverly Johnson.

BEVERLY JOHNSON: I assume that we have to have, with whatever is developed, someone who says, I'm the -- sort of the keeper of the data.

SPENCER MICHELS: Johnson says she is excited about how the project is developing, but she has one big question.

BEVERLY JOHNSON: If we invest in the time and energy and we come up with something that's beautiful and simple and easy to use, but a year from now, they go away, and we don't have the resources to make it really a reality for our organization, have we done anything, other than sort of create an expectation?

JUDY NADLER, Former Mayor of Santa Clara, Calif.: I think this is an opportunity to help, but I don't see it as any kind of a magic pill.

SPENCER MICHELS: Judy Nadler is the former mayor of Santa Clara, California and now teaches at Santa Clara University. When she was at City Hall, she found it was tough for government to actually implement new programs imposed from the outside.

JUDY NADLER: Having great ideas is wonderful, but how can you pay for it and how can you sustain that? It takes people and it takes resources, and government is short right now on both.

SPENCER MICHELS: Code for America's Jennifer Pahlka says keeping the projects going once the fellows' year is over is one of her top priorities.

JENNIFER PAHLKA: What we have seen is some of our projects don't live on, but most of them have. The team that worked with New Orleans on this project around being able to see the status of blighted properties ...

SPENCER MICHELS: Blighted properties?

JENNIFER PAHLKA: Blighted properties are ...

SPENCER MICHELS: From Katrina?

JENNIFER PAHLKA: Exactly. They did a really fantastic job there. The city was so happy, they offered the team a contract to continue to maintain and further develop that software, so that New Orleans always has access to it.

SPENCER MICHELS: Pahlka says governments should be open to new and more cost-effective ways of doing business.

JENNIFER PAHLKA: We're spending too much money on government technology. That's absolutely clear. We saw last year that the California court system shut down an effort that had so far cost two billion dollars, and it wasn't to send a man to the moon. It was to get the courts to be able to share documents.

We're not going to be taking on two billion dollar software projects, but we are showing what's possible, and then giving people in government the political will to say, no, let's not do it that way this time.

SPENCER MICHELS: Code for America isn't the only current effort hoping to bring technology solutions to government. Last year, the White House began a Presidential Innovation Fellows program. And some cities are inviting tech-savvy volunteers to develop civic apps during sessions known today as “hackathons.”

After getting more feedback from residents and officials, the San Mateo team expects to launch its food app by October. And, in January, a new group of eager young tech enthusiasts arrives to take on a new set of civic challenges.

JEFFREY BROWN: Online, Spencer sat down with two Code for America fellows who founded BlightStatus, the app that tracks how the city of New Orleans is dealing with abandoned buildings. You can watch their conversation on the Rundown.

New Chapter Begins for U.S. Relations With Myanmar, Though Concerns Remain

Monday, May 20 2013 10:22 PM

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JUDY WOODRUFF: We turn now to the Southeast Asian country Myanmar, whose president visited the White House today.

Ray Suarez has that story.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We very much appreciate your efforts and leadership in leading Myanmar in a new direction.

RAY SUAREZ: At the White House, President Obama greeted the president of Myanmar, Thein Sein, the first leader of his country welcomed to Washington in nearly 47 years.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We want you to know that the United States will make every effort to assist you on what I know is a long and sometimes difficult, but ultimately correct path to follow.

RAY SUAREZ: For a half-century, a military junta ruled Myanmar, also known as Burma, and home to some 48 million people. Then, in 2007, Thein Sein, himself a general and junta member, became prime minister and began gradual reforms.

Three years later, the country held its first elections in 20 years, and a week after that, the government released longtime opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from years of house arrest. In the following months, thousands of other political prisoners were freed.

Then, in late 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a landmark visit to Myanmar, meeting with both Suu Kyi and Thein Sein.

FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON, United States: I made it clear that he and those who support that vision which he laid out for me, both inside and outside of government, will have our support as they continue to make progress, and that the United States is willing to match actions with actions.

RAY SUAREZ: In 2012, the country again held elections that brought Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy party to power in parliament. And last November, President Obama made his own historic visit to Myanmar, where he received a hero's welcome.

Speaking at Yangon University, he lauded the progress made between the two nations.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: America now has an ambassador in Rangoon, sanctions have been eased, and we will help rebuild an economy that can offer opportunities for its people and serve as an engine of growth for the world.

RAY SUAREZ: On the other hand, some opponents of Thein Sein's regime oppose the Washington visit. They say he's been too slow on reforms and on stopping the bloodshed and displacement of ethnic groups, Muslims and Buddhists.

Even today, the State Department again designated Myanmar a country of special concern, for severe violations of religious freedom. For his part, Thein Sein denies Myanmar's military has carried out pogroms against any group.

For more, we turn to Priscilla Clapp, a retired Foreign Service officer who headed the U.S. Embassy in Burma between 1999 and 2002. She's now an analyst and consultant to think tanks and foundations. And Jennifer Quigley, the executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, an organization that supports democratization and human rights assistance in Myanmar.

And, Priscilla Clapp, this is still a very new relationship. Where does it stand right now?

PRISCILLA CLAPP, Former State Department Official: Well, I would say that, with President Thein Sein's visit to Washington, we will start a new chapter in the relationship.

I think that the relationship is -- over the past year has become much more normalized than it was before. And I expect that we will be working very closely with Myanmar in the future to help them build a sustainable democracy and overcome the many challenges that they're facing right now.

RAY SUAREZ: Jennifer Quigley, how do you see it?

JENNIFER QUIGLEY, U.S. Campaign for Burma: I agree that there has been a warming of relationships between the two countries. And it worries us that it has been very much done by just the government, as opposed to involving ethnic armed groups or civil society organizations.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, both sides have made promises to each other during this early phase.

JENNIFER QUIGLEY: Yes.

RAY SUAREZ: What do they want? What does the United States want from Myanmar and the other way around?

JENNIFER QUIGLEY: Well, I think it's first easiest to ascertain the Burmese government's ambitions. They want all the sanctions lifted and a full normalization of relations between the two countries.

On the U.S. side, I think that there is a complex set of -- to the equation. They want to balance out China in the region. They want to promote democracy in the country. And they also want to make sure that American businesses get the opportunity to invest in all sectors of Burma's economy.

RAY SUAREZ: Priscilla Clapp, has Burma given enough on American demands to get all those things it wants?

PRISCILLA CLAPP: Yes, I think that they have certainly been very responsive to our demands.

You will recall that, for the past 20 years, we have been asking them to reconcile with the opposition and with the minority ethnic groups. And they have now more or less reconciled with the opposition. They have brought Aung San Suu Kyi into the government -- well, she has won a seat in the government. And they have treated her as -- almost as an equal leader in the government.

They still have a long way to go with the ethnic minorities, but they have opened the door in a way that the previous government never did. They have instituted press freedoms. They have allowed people to become politically active, join in the political process.

They have -- now have elected government. It may not be perfect, but it is certainly headed in the right direction, more or less doing the things that we have been asking them to. There are still some political prisoners left, but they have released many of them. And I'm sure that they are on the road to releasing the rest of them.

They have recently reconstituted the commission dealing with political prisoners, and nearly half the members of the constitution are former -- of the commission -- excuse me -- are former political prisoners themselves. I could go on. It's a very, very long list.

RAY SUAREZ: Jennifer, the idea that from time to time Myanmar will make the news because there's either civilian-on-civilian unrest, people being burned out of their homes, shops being looted, that sort of thing, or people in uniforms with rifles are pushing people away from a place they say is theirs, what's been the state of that ethnic conflict? Is it something that has slowed down Burma's path to democratization?

JENNIFER QUIGLEY: Well, I think this gets at the heart of the role that the military plays inside the country.

We have seen a worsening of the military's attitude and tactics against the minorities. And so while there may have been overtures by the government to arrange cease-fires with the ethnic groups, we have seen in just the past few months alone that the military has attacked and threatened cease-fires against the Shan, against the Palaung, and to a lesser extent to the Karen, while they have ignored cease-fire orders from the president three times over the last two years to stop attacking the Kachin.

And so it's a very worrying trend that regardless of the intentions of the government, the military continues to act as it always has.

RAY SUAREZ: Priscilla Clapp, do those sorts of facts on the ground, of events in Myanmar make it too soon to host the president, Thein Sein, in Washington?

PRISCILLA CLAPP: No, I don't believe it does at all.

I think that they are trying to tackle these problems honestly. The former regime didn't. They denied that there were any problems in the country. They thought that everything was perfect. This government recognizes that they have these problems. And President Thein Sein is here asking us to help. I think that we certainly should help, because they are doing more or less what we have been asking them to do. It is incumbent upon us to help them.

RAY SUAREZ: I will ask you the same question, Jennifer. Too soon to host Thein Sein at the White House?

JENNIFER QUIGLEY: Yes, we feel it's too soon.

We like, the past several months, there hasn't been much on the positive front that has taken place in Burma. There's been more on the negative front. And one of the key issues we have is that the government hasn't really acknowledged that there are government actors, whether that be police or security forces, that have been a part of the violence or allowed the violence to happen.

And what has been missing the most with all this violence has been the pursuit of justice and accountability. And until our president acknowledges that that is a major concern, bringing President Thein Sein here, where he also doesn't acknowledge that that is a concern, it shows that this relationship will move forward regardless of whether there's progress made on justice and accountability.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, given what you just said, why is the United States putting so much capital, so much urgency on pushing this bilateral relationship along? Things have moved very quickly.

JENNIFER QUIGLEY: Yes.

I mean, I think that President Obama in his first inaugural speech said, if you unclench your fist, we will outstretch our hand. And I think that he saw that Burma was the only country willing to engage with the U.S. government and make that sort of change and grow that relationship. Unfortunately for us, it comes at the expense of there not being much progress on issues that the international community has let sort of fall by the wayside, the human rights agenda, the pursuit of holding the military accountable for the atrocities that it continues to create.

RAY SUAREZ: Same question, Priscilla. Why this speeding along of the U.S.-Myanmar relationship?

PRISCILLA CLAPP: They have made tremendous strides in the last two years. And they deserve a lot of credit for that. It is a very poor, backward country that has been isolated for a century, more than 50 years. And they're trying to catch up with the rest of the world right now. They have -- they have a lot of social problems that they must overcome. I doesn't mean that it's being directed by the government. In fact, I believe the government is trying to face the problems.

RAY SUAREZ: Priscilla Clapp, Jennifer Quigley, thank you both.

JENNIFER QUIGLEY: Thank you.

PRISCILLA CLAPP: Thank you.

Yahoo Makes Bid for Reboot With $1.1 Billion Deal for Popular Blog Site Tumblr

Monday, May 20 2013 10:15 PM

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JEFFREY BROWN: And we turn to the blockbuster deal announced today in the tech world: giant, but troubled Yahoo buying the popular blogging site Tumblr. The purchasing price: $1.1 billion dollars. The prize: a fast-growing social media site that features more than 100 million blogs in its network and reaches several hundred million people worldwide.

It was started just six years ago by David Karp, who dropped out of high school to work in the tech field. He will remain as head of Tumblr.

This is the biggest move yet by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who joined the company just 10 months ago from Google. Today, she wrote on a Tumblr post, "We promise not to screw it up."

Rebecca Lieb is research analyst of digital advertising and media for the Altimeter Group and joins us now.

Welcome to you.

So, why does Yahoo want to buy Tumblr? What's the appeal?

REBECCA LIEB, Altimeter Group: There are several appealing things about Tumblr. There's certainly the size of the audience, as you just mentioned, but also, perhaps more than that, the demographics of Tumblr's audience.

Yahoo has been losing users, losing eyeballs for years now. Tumblr represents the millennials, those 20-somethings who didn't abandon Yahoo because they probably never aligned with the platform in the first place.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well ...

REBECCA LIEB: This is a group that is incredibly important to the advertisers Yahoo is trying to attract.

JEFFREY BROWN: Explain for our non-Tumblr users in the audience what it is. How has it been able to rise so fast and appeal to so many people?

REBECCA LIEB: Tumblr is a blogging platform that is very, very image-centric. It's very focused on users uploading photographs.

And this younger demographic is a very, very mobile demographic. These are people who have their smartphones with them at all times. And as anybody with a smartphone knows, it's much easier to update your status with a quick photo of what you're doing or what you're eating or what you're seeing than it is typing with your thumbs.

We saw a very recent move like this when Facebook acquired Instagram last year, also for a billion dollars, which raised some eyebrows at the time. And Facebook has subsequently redesigned its news stream to focus more on these images, as its users migrate to mobile platforms.

I believe that Yahoo is trying to do very much the same thing. And, in fact, since the announcement of the Tumblr acquisition, Yahoo has announced that they will be giving users substantially more free space on Flickr, also a Yahoo property.

So we're seeing a big move towards images and a big move towards mobile on Yahoo's part.

JEFFREY BROWN: In all of these new deals, and this one in particular, the question is still, how do you make money out of it, right? I mean, what would happen in this case? Is it likely we'd see money made through the advertising on Tumblr or what?

REBECCA LIEB: I think that this is a very interesting two-way street.

Yahoo, of course, is a traditional new media company, if you can -- to coin a phrase. In other words, they have very interruptive display advertising, the "click here, buy this now" type. Tumblr has been experimenting with what's called “content marketing” and forms of what's known as “native advertising.”

This is -- these are marketing messages, but they're more subtly integrated into the interface. They don't shout at the user. They don't interrupt the user. They're part of the stream and they're meant to attract, rather than to interrupt.

Yahoo for the time being will leave Tumblr alone. If they slap these interactive ads up on Tumblr, the users will probably abandon the property. At the same time, Yahoo is going to learn from these Tumblr products and try and incorporate them into Yahoo's more traditional properties.

JEFFREY BROWN: When you -- go ahead.

REBECCA LIEB: At the same time, Yahoo can introduce Tumblr to larger brands and more traditional advertisers, the P&Gs of the world, the McDonald's of the world. So, this does have the potential to benefit both parties monetarily.

JEFFREY BROWN: I was thinking, when you were referring to the possibility of users migrating or leaving, apparently, there's reports that already some of that is happening. But that just shows how fragile this whole system is, right, this ecosystem of companies and where users go.

REBECCA LIEB: Absolutely.

You know, we have seen companies like Yahoo stumble and lose their luster, AOL, MySpace, in periods of times that are less than a decade. It took companies like Pan American Airlines or Ford Motor companies perhaps a century to rise to ascendance and then to lose their luster.

Internet companies can do it seemingly overnight. Marissa Mayer is trying to bring Yahoo back from the brink, as her former Google colleague Tim Armstrong is similarly trying over at AOL.

JEFFREY BROWN: And just briefly, when she writes that post, "We won't screw it up," she is writing that because she knows a lot of people remember Yahoo apparently just -- doing just that, right, with other acquisitions.

REBECCA LIEB: Not on Marissa Mayer's watch.

JEFFREY BROWN: Right.

REBECCA LIEB: She is relatively new at the company. She's been there less than a year.

But, indeed, Yahoo has made acquisitions and screwed them up. So did News Corp. when it acquired MySpace. One of Yahoo's real challenges is going to be how to keep Tumblr cool when it's owned by what is very easily perceived by its very young, very hip user base to be a corporate overlord.

JEFFREY BROWN: Rebecca Lieb, thanks so much.

Assad Forces Try to Retake Border Town With Help From Hezbollah

Monday, May 20 2013 10:12 PM

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JUDY WOODRUFF: And now to Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad's army has been trying to retake a strategically critical town near the Lebanon border from rebels.

The sounds of an unrelenting battle in the Syrian border town of Qusayr could be heard for miles around. After a lengthy siege, government troops, joined by Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon, pushed into the town, home to an estimated 40,000 civilians. Warplanes and artillery joined the assault, and opposition activists said shells were dropping at a rate of 50 a minute.

MAN: Al-Qusayr is being destroyed by the Assad forces and Hezbollah militias. May God help us.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Opposition activists reported nearly 30 Hezbollah fighters were killed and another 70 wounded. The rebels also claimed they destroyed four Syrian army tanks and five Hezbollah vehicles. Qusayr is important to both sides. For the regime, it lies along a corridor linking Damascus to the coast and the heartland of President Assad's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

For the rebels, the overwhelmingly Sunni town is a route for arms smuggling. The fighting underscored how Hezbollah's involvement in Syria has steadily grown. The Shiite militant group and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, have long supported Assad.

HASSAN NASRALLAH, Hezbollah Leader: There are true friends of Syria around the world, and they will not allow Syria to fall in the hands of Americans, Israel and Sunni extremists.

JUDY WOODRUFF: In Washington today, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell condemned Hezbollah's intervention in the Qusayr fight.

PATRICK VENTRELL, State Department Deputy Spokesman: Hezbollah's occupation of villages along the Lebanese-Syrian border and its support for the regime and pro-Assad militias exacerbate and inflame regional sectarian tensions and perpetuate the regime's campaign of terror against the Syrian people.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, with Hezbollah's help, Assad's forces have made gains of late, and this weekend, he told an Argentine newspaper he will not step down before elections.

PRESIDENT BASHAR AL-ASSAD, Syria: Any decisions having to do with reforms in Syria or any political action are local Syrian decisions. Neither the U.S. nor any other state is allowed to intervene in it. This issue is dealt with in Syria. You don't go to a conference to decide on an issue that has not been determined by the people.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Today, the U.N. envoy's representative arrived in Damascus, hoping to get the Syrians to attend an international conference brokered by the U.S. and Russia. It's planned for some time next month in Geneva.

News Wrap: Sectarian Violence Continues in Iraq With Car Bombs in Baghdad, Basra

Monday, May 20 2013 10:07 PM

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HARI SREENIVASAN: A wave of sectarian killing across Iraq left at least 95 people dead today. It was the worst single day of violence there in more than a year-and-a-half. Ten car bombs went off across Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad. At least 48 people were killed and more than 150 wounded in those attacks.

Car bombs also targeted Shiites in the southern city of Basra. Elsewhere, Sunnis came under attack in areas north and west of Baghdad. In all, more than 240 people have been killed in Iraq since last Wednesday.

There's word today that computer hackers in the Chinese military have resumed attacks on U.S. companies and government agencies. The New York Times reported that today. There had been a lull of three months after industry and Pentagon investigations identified the Chinese unit involved. The report cited security experts who said the hacking is back up to 60 percent to 70 percent of the rate it was previously.

There was more today on the IRS targeting of conservative groups and what and when White House officials learned of it. Presidential aides confirmed that White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was told April 24^th about a special audit into IRS activities. She, in turn, notified the president's chief of staff, Denis McDonough, among others.

But White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says Ruemmler advised against telling President Obama because the investigation was still under way.

JAY CARNEY, White House Press Secretary: That was the -- her opinion that she expressed to other members of the senior staff, that this is not the kind of thing, when you have an ongoing investigation or an ongoing audit, that requires notification to the president, because what is important is that we wait until that kind of process is completed before we take action.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Carney said again the president was not informed of what the investigation found until news reports surfaced 10 days ago.

A congressional investigation has found that Apple Incorporated avoid billions in taxes through a web of offshore subsidiary companies. A Senate committee reported today that between 2009 and 2012, the tech giant shifted at least $74 billion dollars out of the reach of the IRS by incorporating in Ireland. Apple says it is the largest taxpayer in the U.S. at six billion dollars and its strategies are legal. Its CEO, Tim Cook, is expected to testify at a Senate hearing tomorrow.

Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner is airborne again in the U.S., four months after being grounded over battery issues. United Airlines flew one of the new jets on a Houston-to-Chicago route this morning. The company said its Dreamliners will resume international flights next month. In January, the worldwide fleet of 787s was grounded after incidents of the lithium ion batteries overheating and smoldering. Boeing ultimately redesigned the battery and its charger.

Wall Street had trouble getting off the ground today. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 19 points to close at 15,335. The Nasdaq fell two points to close at 3,496.

Those are some of the day's major stories -- now back to Judy.

Massive, Mile-Wide Tornado Leaves Wake of Destruction Outside Oklahoma City

Monday, May 20 2013 10:02 PM

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JEFFREY BROWN: Disaster struck the Oklahoma City area this afternoon for the second time in two days. An enormous tornado blasted whole neighborhoods in the suburb of Moore and left little but shredded wreckage in its wake. There was no immediate word on casualties.

NewsHour correspondent Kwame Holman begins our report.

KWAME HOLMAN: The image of the huge twister filled the TV screen, as it bulldozed farmland and subdivisions and flashes from exploding transformers dotted the blue-black horizon.

MAN: Oh, there's a huge flash right there. It is just ripping up everything in its path.

KWAME HOLMAN: In Oklahoma City, state lawmakers and employees alike quickly made their way to a basement shelter. Some 35 to 40 minutes later, the great cloud finally spent its fury and disintegrated.

In its wake, mile after mile of devastation south and southwest of Oklahoma City proper -- scores of homes and other buildings had been leveled, including an elementary school. Cars and trucks were smashed together on highways.

MAN: Oh, my gosh. I don't know if people lived in that one.

KWAME HOLMAN: And fires burned out of control. Part of a major interstate highway was shut down.

The suburb of Moore also was hit hard by a tornado in 1999, and today's storm came less than 24 hours after another tornado struck in the Oklahoma City area.

MAN: I had to stop because the winds were pushing my truck, and I had to slow down to about 10 miles an hour. And I was texting actually the lady I work with, and I told her, man, these are the craziest winds I have ever seen.

KWAME HOLMAN: Sunday's twister touched down outside Shawnee, killing two elderly men and injuring more than 30 people. Other twisters touched down Sunday in Kansas and Iowa.

WOMAN: We jumped up and ran into the shed. And once we got the door shut, we heard the roof take off.

KWAME HOLMAN: All of this came less than a week after twisters pummeled Texas, killing six people in the small city of Granbury, southwest of Fort Worth.

JEFFREY BROWN: Moments ago, I spoke by phone with Sgt. Gary Knight of the Oklahoma City Police Department.

Sgt. Knight, welcome.

What can you tell us at this point about the extent of the damage?

MASTER SGT. GARY KNIGHT, Oklahoma City Police Department: Well, there's areas of south Oklahoma City and Moore that have suffered total destruction or extreme devastation.

Moore sits on the south end of Oklahoma City. They sit adjacent to each other. And the tornado traveled through Moore and then moved northeasterly into southern Oklahoma City. There's a two- or three-mile area where there was just utter devastation. I don't have any numbers on injured people or if there are fatalities involved in this.

Our workers are still trying to get to many people who are trapped in those areas. Really, our message for the public is, for anybody in that area, please stay off the roadways. Stay out of the areas to let emergency workers in. I know they're having difficulty getting around everybody, plus getting around all of the debris that's in the roadway. JEFFREY BROWN: I understand you don't have any sense of fatalities or injuries at this point, but do you have a sense of how many people -- were there a lot of people in the path of the tornado?

GARY KNIGHT: There were numerous neighborhoods in the path of the tornado that were just completely leveled. So that's certainly something that we're trying to address and get into those places, just as the Moore police and all the first-responders in that area are trying to get in there and do everything they can to assist anyone who is trapped or injured.

JEFFREY BROWN: Do you know how much warning people had?

GARY KNIGHT: There was a good amount of warning. The local television stations here -- I mean, obviously, they're very good at tornado forecasting, being in this part of the country.

But they were covering the tornado as it came down out of the sky, and were letting people know as soon as possible. I know the tornado sirens were sounding, but it was a very fast-developing storm, a fast-developing tornado. And, unfortunately, it moved through a heavily populated area.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, that's what I was going to ask you, just to describe the area a little bit more, heavily populated. You referred to various neighborhoods. So this is a suburban area where -- homes, schools, everything, right?

GARY KNIGHT: Well, it would have been a suburban area.

There are some businesses that were struck. It crossed I-35 and it's to the areas just east of Interstate 35 that would have been hardest-hit. There are some businesses along I-35 that were struck. And then you move into neighborhoods where there was at least one school, one elementary school that was struck and suffered severe damage to it.

I don't have any numbers again on injured, but mostly neighborhoods. There were some businesses, but mostly neighborhoods that were just flat-out leveled.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right. So most important for you right now is, as you said, get people -- people stay off the street. What else?

GARY KNIGHT: Let the emergency workers in to do what they need to do to help get these people -- help get these people some help.

JEFFREY BROWN: And one more question. Was there a medical center also? There are some reports that a medical center was hit as well.

GARY KNIGHT: I don't have any information on a medical center being hit, although there is one very close to that area.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right.

Sgt. Gary Knight in Oklahoma City, thanks so much.

GARY KNIGHT: You bet. Thank you.

JEFFREY BROWN: And more now from Bill Bunting of NOAA's National Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. He's a meteorologist and the operations chief there.

Well, thanks for joining us.

I'm not sure if you could hear that last interview. What can you add to the extent of the damage now? What are you seeing?

BILL BUNTING, Storm Prediction Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: Well, I haven't seen the most recent damage images, although, just from what I have heard, it sounds absolutely catastrophic.

I think the message I would want to get out is for folks that are in the path of storms that are still ongoing, take these warnings extremely seriously. Folks in this part of the country typically know that severe weather season is here and that they need to have a plan. Now is the time to put that plan into action.

If you're in the path of these storms, the seconds that you take now to put your tornado readiness plan into action could very well make the difference between life and death.

JEFFREY BROWN: What about the enormous size of this tornado? How unusual is that, and what would cause it?

BILL BUNTING: Most tornadoes typically are much smaller than this.

This is obviously towards the upper end of the enhanced Fujita scale that we use to rate them. When conditions come together just right, the change in wind speed and direction, with height, the amount of instability in the atmosphere, you can get these tremendous concentrations of energy, unfortunately, seeing tornadoes that are the size of what we have seen today. And, unfortunately, our worst fears have become realized, hitting highly populated areas.

And we just hope that folks heeded the warnings and were in a safe place when the storms hit.

JEFFREY BROWN: And because you have had so many tornadoes in the area in the last couple of days, do you know, in this case, one huge tornado, or do we even know if there were other tornadoes along with it or going along at the same time?

BILL BUNTING: We don't know for sure.

Typically, the local and National Weather Service offices will go out tomorrow or as soon as they can get into the area. Obviously, rescue and recovery operations takes precedence, but they will be out as soon as they can and do an accurate assessment of just how many storms, the path, length and width and the intensities involved, but, at this point, way soon to speculate.

JEFFREY BROWN: And, as to the warning, is it your sense that people did have fair warning, at least for this very large one that came through?

BILL BUNTING: Well, the Storm Prediction Center, the National Weather Service offices and the areas affected have been talking about the risk for tornadoes now for several days.

We mentioned that it was going to be a multi-day threat. And today, of course, was another one of those days. And it's not over after today. The threat will shift a bit eastward tomorrow. And so I just hope and pray that they heard the warnings and that folks were in the safest place they could be, and they're OK.

JEFFREY BROWN: Just give us a sense of how this works, because people there are quite used to tornadoes. How much planning goes into something like this? How much preparation is for an event like this?

BILL BUNTING: Well, we have been talking about the threat of tornadoes at the Storm Prediction Center, the local National Weather Service offices that really interface with the communities and the local broadcast media.

Everyone knew this was going to be an active weekend and into the first part of this week. The day-after-day threat of severe weather I think has made everyone aware that the danger is high. Most events, often, at least, the tornado threat exists, and then things are quieter the next day. This is not unheard of, but it's a bit unusual that we would have consecutive days of very intense tornadoes in the same metropolitan area.

And that is, of course, just going to make it more difficult for the rescue and recovery operations that are now under way in several areas.

JEFFREY BROWN: And we're seeing reports of 200-mile-an-hour winds. How about -- how unusual is that?

BILL BUNTING: Well, that's certainly extremely rare. And, again, the actual assessments will take place in the days ahead.

But it's a very small percentage of all tornadoes with wind speeds in that range. So this is a very rare event and, unfortunately, in a very populated area.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Bill Bunting of NOAA, thank you very much.

BILL BUNTING: Thank you.

Weekly Poem: 'Things the Doctor Asks'

Monday, May 20 2013 08:17 PM

By Charles Hood

That is an interesting scar, were you an especially clumsy child? Count backwards from one hundred in multiples of pi. Hold out both hands. If you die, may we cremate you? Why does my stethoscope transmit a dim hum like a hive of bees? Now get dressed. You mean you are not dressed yet even after all this time? Shut up and stop counting. Open the door. You will need Diamox, for the Pole. You will need to shave those parts. Do you know that you walk around like a hut with legs?

Charles Hood is the author of "South x South" (Ohio University Press), winner of the 2012 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. His previous books include "Bombing Ploesti" and "Rio de Dios" (Red Hen Press). He has been the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, an Artist in Residency with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and an Artists and Writers grant from the National Science Foundation. He teaches photography and writing at Antelope Valley College, Calif.

A High Tech Solution for a Neighborhood Problem

Monday, May 20 2013 07:04 PM

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Spencer Michels sat down with Alex Pandel and Eddie Tejeda, two of the co-founders of an app called BlightStatus, as part of Code for America's fellowship program.

"Government is supposed to be about how we do things together and we can do that much more together if we use technology smartly right now." Those are the words, and guiding philosophy, of Jennifer Pahlka, founder of the San Francisco nonprofit startup Code for America. Code as in computer code. The organization connects technology professionals, like web programmers, to cities around the country that are looking for innovative ways to address specific problems in their communities.

Tech experts embedded in the cities are part of Code for America's one-year paid fellowship program, which has been dubbed "Peace Corps for geeks." In just its third year, Code for America is gaining attention; more than 500 people applied for 27 fellowship spots this year. Some come from well-known Silicon Valley companies like Apple, Yahoo and Google. Those who are chosen receive $35,000 for the year, a sizable pay cut for many applicants.

Teams of fellows spend a month in the city they are assigned to work with, listening to officials and residents explain their specific challenge -- like improving food distribution to low-income residents, or improving municipal transportation information. The teams then return to Code for America's headquarters to develop a web-based program they think will help.

A number of small-scale but interesting apps have come out of the collaborations so far, like Adopt a Fire Hydrant in Boston and BlightStatus in New Orleans. You can see a list of other Code for America projects here.

During an interview with NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels, founder Jennifer Pahlka pointed to BlightStatus as an example of how Code for America is trying to keep projects "alive" after the one-year city partnership ends. BlightStatus tracks how the city of New Orleans is dealing with abandoned and rundown buildings, which has become a huge problem for the community since Hurricane Katrina.

Three of the four Code for America fellows who last year created BlightStatus decided to turn it into a for-profit business they now call Civic Insight. The founders hope to sell their technology and support services to other cities around the country. The three are getting a big boost from Code for America, which is providing them with free office space and a $25,000 grant as part of its "Accelerator Program."

Spencer Michels sat down with co-founders Alex Pandel and Eddie Tejeda to learn more about their project. Amir Reavis-Bey, another co-founder, wasn't present for the interview.

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In Further Firming of Relations, Myanmar President Visits White House

Monday, May 20 2013 05:39 PM

President Obama and Myanmar's President Thein Sein in Yangon on Nov. 19, 2012. Photo by Jason Reed/Reuters.

Myanmar President Thein Sein becomes the first leader of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, to visit the White House in 47 years on Monday. Their meeting is viewed as an affirmation of the Southeast Asian nation's democratic transition.

The last White House visit was by the late Burmese dictator Ne Win in 1966 during the Vietnam War.

Thein Sein's visit comes after President Barack Obama traveled to Myanmar in November, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to do so, in a further sign of warming relations. "We've reached a point in our relationship where (Thein Sein) is received in Washington. That's a big deal," said Priscilla Clapp, who headed the U.S. Embassy in Burma between 1999 and 2002.

A statement from the White House referred to the country as "Myanmar" -- the current government's preference -- rather than Burma, and described U.S. support:

"The president looks forward to discussing with President Thein Sein the many remaining challenges to efforts to develop democracy, address communal and ethnic tensions, and bring economic opportunity to the people of his country, and to exploring how the United States can help."

But some advocacy groups are concerned that the Obama administration is rewarding Myanmar with a White House visit before Thein Sein has followed through on all of his promises for reforms, including releasing political prisoners and allowing humanitarian aid access to conflict areas in the North.

In particular, Human Rights Watch called the government's lack of response to the violence and restrictions placed on Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar "ethnic cleansing" in a report issued last month. The country's internal ethnic violence is on the agenda for Monday's meeting.

Thein Sein called it "pure fabrication" that the Myanmar army would condone or participate in mob violence against the Muslim minority in a recent interview with the Washington Post.

Along with rewarding Myanmar with a White House visit, the United States has lifted many sanctions and allowed U.S. companies to do business with oil, gas and extractive resource industries before waiting for the reforms to go further, said John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. Other sanctions, such as military assistance, are still in place but those were never intended to be rewarded, he said.

In terms of economic development, Thein Sein plans to meet with the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council and U.S. Chamber of Commerce in an effort to broaden U.S. investments to help balance the country's current Asian investors, including China and Japan, said Clapp.

To encourage business investment, Myanmar needs to make some basic improvements, including a dependable electricity supply and an independent judiciary so businesses know they have some legal recourse, said Maureen Aung-Thwin, director of the Burma Project/Southeast Asia Initiative at the Open Society Foundations.

Myanmar has said it wants to become more transparent in terms of business dealings, and has started making public its budget and revenue streams, said Aung-Thwin. "They're aspiring to [greater transparency]," but their actions will show "whether they can actually do it," she said.

After decades of military rule, Myanmar has been in a state of "suspended animation" and there are some "dark corners" in society that have come to light that the government will have to address, said Clapp. "It's good (for the United States) to keep the pressure on them to bring them into the 21st century."

Reuters plots the Myanmar government's talks with the country's various ethnic minority rebel groups.

Thein Sein was last in the United States in September, when he spoke at the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York City.

Democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi visited the United States in September when she spoke about the advancements in her country and the challenges ahead.

Retired Foreign Service officer Priscilla Clapp and Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, discussed the president's visit in November:

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What About Social Security Benefits for Singles and the Divorced?

Monday, May 20 2013 04:47 PM

By Larry Kotlikoff

Fifty-two percent of women over 60 aren't married and nearly 70 percent of those over 75. What Social Security benefits are they entitled to? And what about single or divorced men? Photo by Jim McGuire via Getty Images.

Larry Kotlikoff's Social Security original 34 "secrets", his additional secrets, his Social Security "mistakes" and his Social Security gotchas have prompted so many of you to write in that we now feature "Ask Larry" every Monday.

We are determined to continue it until the queries stop or we run through the particular problems of all 78 million Baby Boomers, whichever comes first. Kotlikoff's state-of-the-art retirement software is available, for free, in its "basic" version. His considerable and often very useful output is available on his website.

A. Price: One or two of us Americans are single or divorced [and we are also] eligible for Social Security benefits now or in the near future. Are you ever going to address the questions of this "fringe" population?

Larry Kotlikoff: Glad you asked. I've addressed Social Security's treatment of singles, but you're right. Questions about married couples have taken up most of the space.

Older America's single population is, in fact, anything but "fringe." Some 30 percent of males and 52 percent of females over 60 aren't married. Past age 75, the number increases to almost 70 percent of females not married, the majority of them widowed.

These figures also tell us that many currently "non-fringe" married people, particularly women, are likely to end up on the fringe. Hence, it's important for almost everyone to understand Social Security's treatment of single people and how single people can take Social Security's best deal.

If you were never married, the way to maximize your lifetime benefits is simple: Just wait until 70 to start taking benefits at their highest possible value. They will be as much as 76 percent higher than if you start taking benefits at age 62.

But most of you on the fringe were married at some point. It is to you that the rest of this answer is addressed.

If you are single and divorced and were married for 10 years, both you and your ex are entitled to a pair of benefits: survivor benefits and spousal benefits. Both are based on the other's covered earnings record. For example, you can both wait until 70 to take your own retirement benefits, but each of you, upon reaching full retirement age, can apply just for a spousal benefit and thereby receive half of your ex's full retirement benefit. If your ex is a high earner, this spousal benefit could amount to $15,000 per year for the four years you wait to take your own retirement.

Indeed, it's this Get-a-Free-Spousal-Benefit strategy that led to the "Ask Larry" column not long after I explained it to this page's supposedly sophisticated proprietor several years ago. Paul Solman was eligible, but amazed that he knew nothing about this benefit. He realized that his audience would be similarly in the dark.

Turning next to survivor benefits, you can start collecting as early as age 60. The amount of the benefits will be based on your deceased ex's earnings record. When to start? The decision hinges on how long you think your ex will live, with the qualification that you could be wrong and your ex could survive even a hospice stay.

The point is, if your ex is the much higher earner, and is highly unlikely to survive until you turn 70, it may be best to take your retirement benefit as early as possible. That's because you're going to end up with your ex's survivor benefit instead of your own retirement benefit, because your ex earned so much more that your own retirement benefit will be wiped out by it. You get the higher of the two benefits, but not both.

But for you divorcees, here's the rub. You need to get your ex's past and projected future covered earnings record to make a proper decision about when to take your own retirement and spousal benefit and then when to plan to collect your survivor benefit.

Unfortunately, Social Security doesn't give divorcees access to the earnings records of their ex's. This is really unfair, since the knowledge is so important in making a sound decision. Perhaps the males who no doubt made up this no-access-to-the-ex's-earnings-records-rule were worried that revealing this information would affect alimony payments. But well it should! So, I hereby urge all readers of this column to push their members of Congress to make this information available to divorcees so they can make informed choices.

But let's move on. Suppose you are widowed. You then have to decide when to take your own retirement benefit and when to take your survivor benefit. The path to maximizing your lifetime total is simple in theory, more difficult in practice: take one benefit before the other, based on which will ultimately be the highest.

For example, if you take your survivor benefit at age 60 (assuming you're already a widow or widower at 60), you'll get a reduced survivor benefit, but your own retirement benefit will grow by up to 76 percent, assuming you wait until 70 to take it. But once you start taking both benefits, you'll only get the larger of the two. So if your survivor benefit, even at its reduced level, exceeds your largest possible retirement benefit (what you can collect if you wait until 70), waiting to collect your retirement benefit will be pointless.

Instead, you'll be stuck for the rest of your life with a maximally reduced survivor benefit. In this case, it would likely be better to take your retirement benefit early and wait until full retirement age to take your survivor benefit, when it will be at its largest possible value.

Two final thoughts. First, if you are married, waiting as long as possible to collect your retirement benefit will materially raise your future widow/widower's survivor benefit.

The second thought is offered in jest -- and to make a point about the unintentional perversities of the Social Security system. If you're older and single, you could theoretically arrange a Social Security marriage of convenience. That is, you would get married to someone in a similar situation and within just one year, you would both become eligible for spousal benefits on the other's earnings record, though given Social Security's benefit formulas, you can't both collect spousal benefits at the same time.

Moreover, once you have been married for only nine months, you could collect survivor benefits on your new spouse's earnings record as well, which raises the macabre possibility of the ultimate Social Security "gold digger" strategy: marry someone on their last legs. Like I say, I'm not actually recommending this. But it does reveal one of the many loopholes in the system

MORE SOCIAL SECURITY ANSWERS: Will Social Security Benefits Increase This Year? By How Much?

Kathleen Nicolai -- Centennial, Colo.: I am 61, my husband is 63. I am retired; he plans to work at least four more years (until I can start receiving Medicare). There's longevity in my family, not so much in his. I've been planning to take my Social Security when I turn 62, assuming (sadly) that he will die before I do, at which time I will start receiving his, which is higher. Do you think this is a wise move? What other things should we consider in our decision? My payment at 62 will be $1,430 a month; at 70, it would be $2,504 a month. His at 66 will be $2,135 a month; at 70 $2,825. I would really appreciate your input.

Larry Kotlikoff: Time for another of my mantras: We can't count on dying on time. A corollary: Nor can we count on our spouses dying on time (not to suggest that you are hoping for that). Also, you really need to focus not on your husband's life expectancy, but on his maximum age of life. Unfortunately, the downside scenario, economically speaking, is that you both live to 100. If that happens, you'd be cursing me were I to have advised you not to wait to collect much higher Social Security retirement as well as spousal and survivor benefits.

So, your path to getting the most lifetime benefits from Social Security is to A., wait to collect, B., make sure you collect all available benefits, and C., make sure doing A. doesn't undermine doing B. and doing B. doesn't undermine doing A.

And trust me, Social Security's rules can lead to mistakes -- not that they're intentionally designed to do so, mind you; rather, it's due to the system's truly crazy complexity.

But back to your situation. I think that if your husband could live to a very ripe old age, you should A., have your husband file for his retirement benefit at 68 and suspend its collection, B., have your husband activate his retirement benefit at 70, C., wait until full retirement age -- 66 in your case -- to take just your full spousal benefit, and D., wait until 70 to collect your own retirement benefit.

This is my guess of what might be optimal. But to know for sure, you should run yourself through a software program that calculates your lifetime benefits for different maximum ages of life for both yourself and your husband.

By the way, by having your husband wait until 70 to collect, your survivor benefit will be as large as possible if he does pass away before you. The reason is that your survivor benefit will equal 100 percent of what he was collecting when he died or, if he dies between full retirement age and age 70, what he would have collected had he applied at the time he died. If he were to die before full retirement age, without having collected his retirement benefit, the survivor benefit will equal his full retirement benefit.

This entry is cross-posted on the Rundown -- NewsHour's blog of news and insight. Follow @paulsolman

Life of Sally Ride Honored at Kennedy Center Tribute

Monday, May 20 2013 04:18 PM

American astronaut Sally Ride monitors control panels from the pilot's chair on the flight deck in 1983. Photo by Apic/Getty Images.

*Editor's note: On Monday, PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien will serve as master of ceremonies at an event honoring the legacy of astronaut Sally Ride at Washington, D.C.'s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Monday's tribute will highlight both her impact on the space program as well as her lifelong commitment to promoting science literacy among young people. Through the organization she founded, Sally Ride Science, she reached out to young girls, encouraging them to enter careers in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields, where there is a noticeable gap.

NewsHour correspondent Jeff Brown spoke with O'Brien on Monday about Ride and her legacy:

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And this is the column that O'Brien wrote immediately following Ride's death in July 2012, after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer.*

On Jan. 28, 2003, I was sitting on top of the world -- and hoping that would soon be literally the case -- when Sally Ride knocked on my door in Atlanta. She was one of the guests of honor at my home that night to celebrate the opening of a new Challenger Learning Center.

It was no coincidence that this happened to be the 17th anniversary of the loss of OV-099 and the crew of STS-51-L. The surviving family members of that crew like to honor the last Challenger crew by cutting the ribbon on a new Challenger Center every year on January 28, if possible.

Sally was there to keynote the event at a museum (now defunct) called SciTrek, and I was hosting all the players involved in that noble cause.

Cheryl McNair, June Scobee Rodgers, Sally Ride and Miles O'Brien pictured at the opening of the Challenger Learning Center in Atlanta on Jan. 28, 2003. Photo by Ted Pio-roda/CNN.

When Sally arrived among this august crowd, she clearly owned the room. We all lined up for our photo with her, and she showed no impatience with what must have been for her a familiar ritual.

I had known her for some time already. She reached out to me at CNN whenever she had news to share about her efforts to reach out to young girls with her Sally Ride Science Festivals and Camps, and her amazing EarthKAM program that allows middle school students to take pictures with a digital camera mounted on the International Space Station.

She was relentless in her drive to get girls into the STEM fields. And she succeeded; no small feat in a culture that gives girls the message that working in a lab coat does not flatter their figure.

Sally was not one for small talk, and so it went at the party. But if the subject of conversation orbited close to her domain, she lit up like a solid rocket booster. And that is what happened when I confided in her that I had come to an agreement with NASA that would allow me to become the first journalist to fly on the space shuttle.

Three days before launch, Ride takes a last look at Houston before taking off in a T-38 jet, bound for NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Photo by NASA.

We spoke at length about ways she and I could work together to reach as many young people as possible before, during and after my flight. She had committed her life to changing the face of the scientific fields, and was not one to let pass an opportunity to make a difference.

Sally understood what it meant to engage and inspire others. It requires imagination, hard work and tenacity. She had healthy doses of all of those admirable qualities, and more.

But she was less interested in talking about much of anything else. She built a wall of privacy around her intimate life, and allowed very few inside.

Perhaps all of this is why the only memoir that she wrote, To Space and Back (1986), was written for young readers and was focused on her two shuttle missions.

I normally do not ask people for autographs or inscriptions, but on this night I made an exception. I handed her my copy of the book, and she wrote: "Hope you're the first journalist in space!"

Sally Ride's inscription to Miles O'Brien in her book "To Space and Back." Photo by Miles O'Brien

Nice words from someone who knows what it means to be first.

While she was signing, and we were celebrating, the STS-107 crew was orbiting a few hundred miles over our head -- unaware of the fatal breach in the reinforced carbon heat shield on the leading edge of Columbia's wing.

In four days, everything would change for the people in my house that night. Columbia, of course, did not make it home. Sally Ride would soon be serving on her second commission investigating the loss of a space shuttle and its crew.

In the forward to her book, she writes that it was ready to go to the printer when Challenger exploded one minute after lift-off. She wrote that she thought about whether to change anything, and decided to leave it as is, adding a dedication to the lost crew.

"All adventures -- especially into new territory -- are scary, and there has always been an element of danger in space flight," she wrote. "I wanted to be an astronaut because I thought it would a challenging opportunity. It was; it was also an experience that I shall never forget."

She knew the risks well, but still embraced the great adventure. That's a life lesson worth remembering.

Watch Video Watch PBS NewsHour's report from July 24, 2012, on the life and legacy of Sally Ride.

This column was originally published on July 24, 2012.

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The Daily Frame

Monday, May 20 2013 03:12 PM

Click to enlarge.

A contortionist performs as a lizard at the Chelsea Flower Show at Royal Hospital Chelsea in London.

Republicans Still Fired Up Over IRS Scandal Following Hearing

Monday, May 20 2013 01:10 PM

Photo by Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images

At this point, there appears to be more heat than light when it comes to discussion of the Internal Revenue Service's singling out of conservative groups for extra scrutiny when applying for tax-exempt status.

After a week of public statements of outrage, the release of a Treasury Department inspector general's report, the resignation of two IRS officials and the first congressional hearing on the matter, some guests on the Sunday talk shows still had much to say about it.

On NBC News' "Meet the Press," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., charged that the IRS scandal reflected "a culture of intimidation throughout the administration."

Host David Gregory pressed McConnell for proof of his assertion: "You can you talk about a culture. Do you have any evidence that the President of the United States directed what you call a culture of intimidation at the IRS to target political opponents?"

"I don't think we know what the facts are," McConnell responded. "The investigation has just begun. So I'm not going to reach a conclusion about what we may find, but what we do know happened is they were targeting Tea Party groups. We know that."

Some GOP lawmakers have called for criminal charges to be leveled against those responsible for implementing the practices. White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said Sunday that questions about whether the actions broke the law were "irrelevant" because they were simply wrong on their face.

"The law is irrelevant. The activity was outrageous and inexcusable, and it was stopped," Pfeiffer said on ABC News' "This Week." "We need it to be fixed, so we can ensure it never happens again."

At which point host George Stephanopoulos responded: "You don't really mean the law is irrelevant, do you?"

"What I mean is that whether it's legal, or illegal is -- is not important to the fact that it -- that, the conduct as a matter. The Department of Justice said they're looking into the legality of this. The president is not going to wait for that. We have to make sure it doesn't happen again regardless of how that turns out," Pfeiffer said.

A CNN/Opinion Research poll released Sunday found that the IRS controversy had not harmed President Barack Obama's approval rating. According to the survey 53 percent of Americans said they approved of the president's job performance, while 45 percent disapproved.

More than seven in 10 Americans responded that targeting of conservative groups by the IRS was unacceptable, but 55 percent said they believed the agency acted on its own. Fewer than four in 10 said they believed the White House ordered the targeting of conservative groups.

With 55 percent of the public saying the IRS matter was "very important," which means the it will remain a focal point for both the administration and members of Congress in the weeks to come. There will be two more congressional hearings this week looking into the agency's practices, beginning with the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday.

The House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee will hold a session Wednesday that will include former IRS commissioner Doug Shulman, who testified last year that there was "absolutely no targeting" of conservative groups.

BuzzFeed reported over the weekend that the chair of that panel, California Republican Darrell Issa, first learned about the Treasury Department's audit in July 2012.

And the Wall Street' Journal's Peter Nicholas reported Sunday on new information about when the White House first learned of the Treasury Department's audit of IRS activities:

The White House's chief lawyer learned weeks ago that an audit of the Internal Revenue Service likely would show that agency employees inappropriately targeted conservative groups, a senior White House official said Sunday. That disclosure has prompted a debate over whether the president should have been notified at that time.

In the week of April 22, the Office of the White House Counsel and its head, Kathryn Ruemmler, were told by Treasury Department attorneys that an inspector general's report was nearing completion, the White House official said. In that conversation, Ms. Ruemmler learned that "a small number of line IRS employees had improperly scrutinized certain...organizations by using words like 'tea party' and 'patriot,' " the official said.

The New York Times outlined in great detail exactly what happened in the Cincinnati office. Among the tidbits in the Sunday front-page piece:

Overseen by a revolving cast of midlevel managers, stalled by miscommunication with I.R.S. lawyers and executives in Washington and confused about the rules they were enforcing, the Cincinnati specialists flagged virtually every application with Tea Party in its name. But their review went beyond conservative groups: more than 400 organizations came under scrutiny, including at least two dozen liberal-leaning ones and some that were seemingly apolitical.

The American Center for Law and Justice is representing 27 tea party groups touched by the IRS scandal and likely will press lawsuits on behalf of some of those groups against the government, ABC News reported.

The NewsHour's Kwame Holman rounded up Friday's House Ways and Means hearing, which featured testimony from the outgoing acting IRS commissioner, Steven Miller, and J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration who conducted the audit released last week. Watch the report here or below:

Watch Video

REFLECTIONS ON WATERGATE

The NewsHour's special report looking back at the 40-year anniversary of the Senate Watergate hearings, which launched the birth of a new type of journalism and a partnership between Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil, aired on Friday.

Jeffrey Brown explored the surprising and game-changing moments from the hearings with Lehrer and MacNeil in a piece produced by Elizabeth Summers.

Watch the special report here or below:

Watch Video

And check out our special Watergate page, which include's Meena Ganesan's look at where major figures from the Watergate era are today, Justin Scuiletti's supercut of the hearings boiled down into 16-and-a-half minutes and viewers sharing what they remember from the summer of 1973.

LINE ITEMS

Associated Press president and CEO Gary Pruitt said the organization can't say yet whether it will take legal action against the Justice Department for secretly seizing its reporters' phone records. He called the action "unconstitutional."

Ann Marimow of the Washington Post reveals another Justice Department leaks investigation, this one regarding North Korea and the department tracing a reporter's movements and emails, that may shed light on how the government conducts similar probes.

Mr. Obama delivered the commencement speech at Morehouse University, an all-male and historically black school in Atlanta. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has the speech's full text.

NPR's Ari Shapiro surveyed a collection of Mr. Obama's commencement addresses since 2009 and notes how they've reflected the state of the nation and the president's vision.

Two FBI agents died Friday in a training accident off the coast of Virginia Beach.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner on Friday indicating the government won't hit the debt ceiling until after Labor Day. In the letter Lew also wrote that raising the country's borrowing limit should not be treated as a "bargaining chip to be used for partisan political ends."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is still considering using the "nuclear option" on judicial and executive branch nominations, the Washington Post reports.

Virginia Republicans held their annual convention in Richmond on Saturday to choose their ticket for the fall elections. As expected, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli won the party's gubernatorial nomination and will face Democrat Terry McAuliffe in November. But there was a surprise in the seven-way race for lieutenant governor, with minister and lawyer E.W. Jackson taking the nomination. Jackson is the first black Republican nominee for statewide office in Virginia since 1988. The GOP activists in attendance selected state Sen. Mark Obenshain as the party's nominee for attorney general.

Jackson's nomination didn't go unnoticed outside Virginia. Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski rounded up anti-gay statements Jackson has made. Salon highlights a few other quotes.

Cuccinelli has altered his interpretation of whether his office has to comply with Freedom of Information Act Requests, using a state supreme court decision to argue that since the AG's office derives its authority from the state constitution instead of the legislature, it's exempt from the FOIA law.

Don't expect open seats for Sen. Rand Paul's speech at a New Hampshire GOP dinner Monday. The event is sold out.

Waiting for their candidate, Georgia Democrats may take it as positive sign that Michelle Nunn attended a DSCC fundraiser with Mr. Obama this weekend. Not to mention that DSCC chair Michael Bennet, D-Colo., called the Peach State "the greatest opportunity for a pickup."

The Philadelphia Inquirer highlights the surprising amount of money -- almost $300,000 -- coming from California's technology industry to support New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie's reelection effort.

More than 1,000 Harvard students are urging the university to investigate how former Heritage Foundation staffer (and immigraiton study co-author) Jason Richwine's now-controversial thesis was approved.

The Washington Post caught up with four big alumni of Hillary Clinton's 2008 "Team of Rivals." They won't be returning if she runs in 2016.

Arkansas Treasurer Martha Shoffner is in jail awaiting a federal court appearance after her arrest for extortion charges.

Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez looks into why so few Los Angelenos vote in local elections. (Short answer: "L.A.'s too cool to vote.") Lopez is hoping for 25 percent turnout in Tuesday's mayoral election, and wrote a poem to entice readers.

The company owned by the conservative activist Koch brothers keeps a growing "black mountain" of petroleum coke in Detroit, which has angered residents.

Immigrating to America may bring opportunity, but it causes shortened lifespans, especially among U.S.-born Hispanics compared with those who are foreign born.

It's not too surprising AP photographer Charles Dharapak caught the shot of Mr. Obama and a Marine holding an umbrella at last week's Rose Garden press conference. Dharapak spots the best president-meets-umbrella moments from three administrations.

Fifty-three million people have witnessed its jousting dinner. But did you know Medieval Times is headed to a movie screen near you?

Political Editor Christina Bellantoni was on Diane Rehm's Friday News Roundup. Listen here. She also participated in a HuffPostLive roundtable.

Also, Monday is Christina's birthday, so don't forget to send her your best wishes!

NEWSHOUR ROUNDUP

Mark Shields and David Brooks agree that the IRS's improper targeting of conservative groups has a bigger bearing on trust in government than on Mr. Obama's presidency. But compared to the erosion of public confidence in government caused by Watergate, Mark said, "we're talking about the Boston massacre vs. double parking, I mean, this week." Watch: Watch Video

On our Making Sense page, Paul Solman shows there's a reason there's so much talk about income inequality: the disparity in concentration of wealth is more stark than it was 100 years ago.

NewsHour science blogger Jenny Marder went cicada hunting.

TOP TWEETS

Living in NH, sitting on 1st Cir. RT @colleen_souter: @jeffreytoobin random question: What is David Souter doing these days?
— Jeffrey Toobin (@JeffreyToobin) May 20, 2013

Rabbitgate: Iowa Mayor won't resign despite criminal charges for chasing rabbits. Story for @stephenathome #iapol twitter.com/bnuckels/statu...
— Ben Nuckels (@bnuckels) May 20, 2013

Obama's embargoed speech included: "I see some good looking hats on the moms & grandmas here today." That's good advance work!
— Christina Bellantoni (@cbellantoni) May 19, 2013

Tom Reed: "I'll give this situation a name: It's IRS-targeting-gate." Catchy.
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) May 17, 2013

.@anndromney and I had a great time on the #TonightShow. Thanks @jayleno for the lift home! twitter.com/MittRomney/sta...
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) May 18, 2013

It was very tasty
— Scott P. Brown (@ScottBrownMA) May 17, 2013

Dudes running shirtless in DC: It is a privilege not a right. I can't emphasize this strongly enough.
— The Fix (@TheFix) May 17, 2013

Venezuela claims it's short 40 million rolls of toilet paper. Hopefully it can reach under the stall and borrow some from Colombia.
— Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) May 17, 2013

A new study from Carnegie Mellon says our digital devices are making us all dumber. LOLZ!
— Tim Siedell (@badbanana) May 17, 2013

make sure you check out bigpapi.com to help raise money for the boston marathon victims #PapiLovesBoston twitter.com/davidortiz/sta...
— David Ortiz (@davidortiz) May 16, 2013

Just heard on #rockcenter @galifianakisz favorite TV is @frontlinepbs. Thank you for watching @pbs.
— hari sreenivasan (@hari) May 18, 2013

Christina Bellantoni and Desk Assistant Simone Pathe contributed to this report.

For more political coverage, visit our politics page.

Questions or comments? Email Christina Bellantoni at cbellantoni-at-newshour-dot-org.

Follow the politics team on Twitter:

Follow @cbellantoni

Follow @burliji Follow @kpolantz Follow @elizsummers Follow @tiffanymullon Follow @meenaganesan Follow @ljspbs

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Covering Watergate: 40 Years Later With MacNeil And Lehrer

Friday, May 17 2013 10:35 PM

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ROBERT MACNEIL, 1973: Good evening from Washington. In a few moments, we’re going to bring you the entire proceedings in the first day of the Senate Watergate hearings -- hearings to bear the truth about the wide range of illegal, unethical or improper activities established or still merely alleged, surrounding the reelection of President Nixon last year.

JEFFREY BROWN: May 17, 1973. Day one of the historic Senate hearings that would a year later lead to the resignation of an American president.

It was also the start of something quite new for public broadcasting, led by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer.

JIM LEHRER, 1973: We are running it all each day because we think these hearings are the important and because we think it is important that you get a chance to see the whole thing and make your own judgments. Some nights, we may be in competition with a late, late movie. We are doing this as an experiment, temporarily abandoning our ability to edit, to give you the whole story, however many hours it may take.

JEFFREY BROWN: The botched break-in at Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington D.C. had happened one year earlier.

The special Senate committee was set to build on reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post and reporters at other news organizations.

One key question was famously put by committee vice-chairman Republican Howard Baker.

SEN. HOWARD BAKER, R-TENN., 1973: What did the president know, and when did he know it?

JEFFREY BROWN: Forty years after Democratic Committee Chair Sam Ervin, the self-described "old country lawyer" from North Carolina, first gaveled the hearings into session.

MacNeil and Lehrer -- Robin and Jim to us -- returned to the same studio from which they'd broadcast in the summer of 1973 -- for more than 250 hours.

Did you have any idea what you were getting into at that moment, either for the nation or for your own futures?

JIM LEHRER: I think we did.

Remember, we broadcast live during the daytime as it happened. And then we completely repeated it, gavel to gavel. So it was a double-hit there. And that was a huge commitment for public broadcasting to make. And the reason they made it was because of this premise that the presidency of the United States was at stake. Now, not necessarily that it was going to end in the result of the impeachment of Richard Nixon. But it was going to be a rough time ahead for the whole country.

JEFFREY BROWN: They were, in some ways, an unlikely duo. Robin, born in Canada, began his journalism career with Reuters, before joining NBC and later the BBC.

Jim, born in Wichita, Kan., had worked for newspapers in Dallas before hosting a local public affairs program.

They were brought together in Washington to work for the National Public Affairs Center for Television, or NPACT.

ROBERT MACNEIL: It turned out, we were living quite close to each other in Bethesda. We each had little daughters in the same kindergarten there. We became very good friends.

JIM LEHRER: We sure did, we had no choice. We had to be friends. We spent all day and all night together.

ROBERT MACNEIL: We became very good friends. And colleagues. And as the public perceived it, a team.

JEFFREY BROWN: Robin began each day's broadcast with a reading of the committee's 64-word opening resolution.

JIM LEHRER: I thought that was a terrific thing. The first few, maybe the first 30 nights, I even teared up when I heard you. It was just -- it set the tone.

ROBIN MACNEIL: Also, it took it out of our hands to characterize what the hearings were about. That would all follow. But it gave the way the Congress characterized it.

ROBIN MACNEIL, 1973: What you're going to be able to watch this evening is a rare glimpse given by real adventurers into the world of mystery and intrigue we normally hear about in spy novels.

The hearings had gripping moments right from the start. On day two, Watergate burglar James McCord, the former security director for the Committee to Re-Elect President Nixon demonstrated how to bug a telephone.

But the first real game-changer came in late June, from John Dean -- former counsel to President Nixon.

Reading aloud a 245-page statement, Dean dropped a bombshell, alleging that the president had direct knowledge about the cover-up.

JOHN DEAN, 1973: I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and if the cancer was not removed, the president himself would be killed by it. I also told him that it was important that this cancer be removed immediately because it was growing more deadly every day.

JIM LEHRER, 1973: Alright, the question of course is what more is there to say. Regardless of the time zone where you live, it's very late. And the testimony of John W. Dean III has been very hot, despite the several gallons of water he consumed while reading that lengthy and very historical document of his.

JEFFREY BROWN: You’re watching things unfold. A lot of it is droning on, let’s face it, right? And then something like that happens.

JIM LEHRER: And he talked for a very long time. You could hear a pin drop in that room the whole time he was talking. And my guess is, that throughout America it was the same. He was the showstopper. There was no question about it.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Some of these things came out quite unexpectedly. In a very casual, almost off-hand manner. Everything is underlined nowadays. Everything has arrows pointing at it. This is going to be a great day today and we’re likely to--. We didn’t have any of that kind of buildup. The hearings spoke for themselves.

JEFFREY BROWN: When the committee took breaks, guests would join Robin and Jim in the studio for analysis.

STEPHEN HESS: Mr. Nixon has to do something i would think now in response to very serious charges that Mr. Dean made.

JEFFREY BROWN: Testimony continued, but by mid-july, there was still no proof that John Dean had been telling the truth. That is, until Fred Thompson, the chief Republican counsel and a friend of Sen. Baker’s from Tennessee, put questions to a little-known former White House aide named Alexander Butterfield.

JEFFREY BROWN: And at day's end, the team put their own questions to committee members outside the hearing room.

ROBERT MACNEIL, 1973: You may have noticed that tempers are getting shorter and the arguments are longer as the committee tries to wrap up this phase of the investigation. After today’s hearing, NPACT's Peter Kaye asked Lowell Weicker if the long hours were getting to him.

FRED THOMPSON, 1973: Mr Butterfield, are you aware of any listening devices in the office of the president?

FRED THOMPSON, 1973: Were you aware of any devices installed in the executive office building office of the president?

ALEXANDER BUTTERFIELD, 1973: Yes sir.

FRED THOMPSON, 1973: Were they installed at the same time?

ALEXANDER BUTTERFIELD, 1973: Yes sir, they were installed the same time.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Well that was a bombshell. Also, it became the bomb that eventually did destroy the presidency.

ROBERT MACNEIL, 1973: Butterfield revealed that all of President Nixon's conversations in his two White House offices had been tape-recorded for the past two years, and so have his office phone conversations. The stunned Ervin Committee, which discovered this fact only last Friday, immediately began planning to demand the tapes of the crucial Watergate-related conversations. Those tapes could settle once and for all how much the president knew and when.

JEFFREY BROWN: After the Butterfield revelation, the committee issued a subpoena for the tapes. But President Nixon refused to release them.

ROBERT MACNEIL: A lot of station managers in particular at that time of the public television community, that had grown out of educational television, didn’t think that PBS should be in the news business at all. They thought we should be in culture and education. And the networks do news and current -- public affairs.

JEFFREY BROWN: And not only that, but of course the political context of the administration, the Nixon Administration also thinking that public broadcasting shouldn’t be in public affairs.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Not perhaps, very definitely they thought so.

So you were very aware of this?

ROBERT MACNEIL: We were very aware and we were trying, and I think succeeding in being very even-handed about the Nixon presidency. And I’d covered the president, I’d covered Nixon for NBC and BBC for several years before all this came about. And I had done my best to be as evenhanded and fair-minded as I think we have gone on to make it an essential attribute of our program since.

JIM LEHRER: Absolutely. And I think that’s where it all started. Is with Watergate.

ROBERT MACNEIL: I think we knew immediately that public-- we and public television was doing something that commercial networks for all their brilliance in news wouldn’t and couldn’t do. Couldn’t destroy their evening programming for the Watergate hearings.

JIM LEHRER: That was before there were things like C-SPAN. Going gavel-to-gavel, the way we were going, in the daytime -- and in particular repeating it at night. This had never happened before.

JEFFREY BROWN: Was there a point somewhere along the way where you realized ‘hey this can work?’ I mean this being your partnership and what’s happening on the picture.

ROBERT MACNEIL: I think we realized that right away.

JIM LEHRER: We felt that right away. We felt two things.

We felt that -- and we talked about it -- that there was role for public broadcasting. A serious, needed role within public broadcasting to do news and public affairs type programming.

And that we felt that we worked. In other words, that you and I ‘cause -- even though he’s a very sophisticated and I’m very unsophisticated, we were, I was the country boy and he was the urban boy. But we were absolutely in sync about journalism.

JEFFREY BROWN: The viewers agreed. Mail started pouring in by the bagful -- some 70,000 letters expressing support for public television's coverage.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Suddenly this new public television, which very few people knew anything about --

JEFFREY BROWN: Right.

ROBERT MACNEIL: Suddenly the whole nation seemed to know about it. And, for many, many stations who carried it both in the daytime and again in the evening, their audiences doubled, tripled, quadrupled. And people spontaneously began to send money to the public television, taking up memberships in the stations.

JEFFREY BROWN: Did you feel that the future in some sense of public television was riding on this? Was it that strong?

ROBERT MACNEIL: Well ...

JIM LEHRER: We were so busy doing it that --

ROBERT MACNEIL: And we were so enthralled by the hearings. As were everybody I’ve spoken to.

JIM LEHRER: It was a peanut, just like eating peanuts.

JEFFREY BROWN: Meanwhile, on July 31, the Senate hearings took another sharp turn.

ROBERT MACNEIL, 1973: Good evening. H.R. Haldeman, often described as once the most powerful man next to President Nixon, today politely and modestly denied a long catalog of charges by others, witnesses implicating him in Watergate.

H.R. HALDEMAN, 1973: President Nixon had no knowledge of, or involvement in either the Watergate affair itself or the subsequent efforts of a coverup of the Watergate. It will be equally clear despite all the unfounded allegations to the contrary, that I had no such knowledge or involvement.

JIM LEHRER, 1973: Unless the tapes are made public or some other revelation should come, the senators as well as the rest of us who are following are going to have to eventually make a choice of believing John Dean or Bob Haldeman. That's the way it looks to me, at least at 3 or so in the morning. Feel free to disagree.

JEFFREY BROWN: Three or so in the morning

JIM LEHRER: Oh boy.

We’re working day and night and that explains why I have not gotten a haircut.

JEFFREY BROWN: That’s what you most notice now, 40 years later.

JIM LEHRER: How could I have let my hair go that way, as they say.

What’s so interesting here, just as a matter of history, we laid it out. I mean unless those tapes become public, that argument could continue to flow. But the tapes did become public and then suddenly boom, it was all over with.

JEFFREY BROWN: By the end of the summer, the fight over the tapes had shifted to the courts.

The following July, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered President Nixon to turn over 64 Watergate-related tapes and documents, and the House Judiciary Committee began its formal public debate on articles of impeachment against the president.

Once it became clear he would not survive an impeachment vote on the House floor, President Nixon announced his resignation.

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES RICHARD NIXON: I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

JEFFREY BROWN: Many years later, what do you think the impact that Watergate was on this nation? How do you -- can you sum it up?

JIM LEHRER: The way I would sum it up is that it’s good news, bad news situation. It showed the government of the United States at its absolute worst and then it showed it at its absolute best.

It corrected a wrongdoing, a series of wrongdoings that was unprecedented. But the way it corrected was also a series of unprecedented doings.

JEFFREY BROWN: What about the impact it had on you personally, and professionally?

ROBERT MACNEIL: Well it made us a team. People perceived us as a team and suggested we do a nightly program. What happened 40 years ago, made possible what we’ve done for the last 40 years, professional journalists. No question about it.

JEFFREY BROWN: What have they done?

Well, the Robert MacNeil Report -- soon to become the MacNeil/Lehrer report -- was launched in 1975. A partnership, a format, an approach that has seen some changes over time, yes, but led directly to the program you’re watching today -- 40 years after Robin and Jim first teamed up to cover the Watergate hearings.

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Shields and Brooks on Government Scandals, Remembering Watergate

Friday, May 17 2013 10:23 PM

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JUDY WOODRUFF: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That is syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

So, gentlemen, it's only been one week, but it's been three giant headaches for the Obama administration, for the president.

David, let's take them one by one. The IRS, this hearing today, two completely different points of view on what happened. Whom are we to believe?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think we just don't know.

One of the things we don't know is who all instigated this. Was there lobbying from Capitol Hill on instigating this? Second, who knew it when? In the Treasury Department, did they know it? Did anybody in the White House know it? How up in the IRS did they know it? Did they give maybe not completely false testimony, but non-forthcoming testimony?

And then the final thing, which we may know a little more about after today and after the report, is, was it political thuggery or was it obliviousness? And I think the evidence on the latter issue is probably, it was a little more toward oblivious. You had a group of technocrats who had become so abstracted and so removed from political reality, it didn't -- it wasn't blindingly obvious to them that, if you target tea party groups, that is going to look a lot like political thuggery.

And it looks like that was more the explanation, rather than they ideologically went after these anti-tax groups.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Mark, a little more like obliviousness than something deliberately political targeting?

MARK SHIELDS: As of now, I would say that, Judy.

If the words, instead of tea party and 9/12, were, in fact, “choice,” “reproductive freedom,” “peace,” “feminist,” and they were scrutinizing those, I think you would hear a cry, an understandable outcry from those on the left-hand side of the political equation.

And this plays right in to this whole story, plays right into the Republican wheelhouse, that -- what the conservatives have long argued, that the government is too big, the government is too intrusive, the government cannot be trusted, the government can even be evil.

And I think that represents the greatest threat to this administration right now. And I think that's what the administration has failed to get on top of so far.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What do you mean failed to get on top of?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I think -- I just compare the president's passive approach. He was detached at the outset. He did grow more active and involved as the week went on. He learned about this in the news reports last Friday, even though we found out ...

JUDY WOODRUFF: From the inspector general.

MARK SHIELDS: The inspector general -- that two weeks earlier that the White House counsel had had at least an outline of a report on the very thing.

What we're looking for, quite honestly, is a president who steps up and says, “This is on my watch. This is my responsibility,” not unlike what President Kennedy did at the time of the Bay of Pigs, when he said simply that defeat is an orphan and victory has a hundred fathers.

It was good politics and it's good policy to take that kind of leadership and that responsibility. I think he should have appointed an independent counsel. And I think -- because, Judy, when confidence is government is eroded, it hurts not simply government. It hurts not only the country. It hurts the Democratic Party, which believes that government is an instrument of social justice and economic progress.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, David, how much is it the president's responsibility? Because people keep looking for direct connection with the White House, and there's a question so far about where that is or what that is.

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

Well, I think Mark makes the right distinction. This is not so far about the White House. It's not about the political fortunes of President Obama. It's not even about the political fortunes of Attorney General Eric Holder, these three scandals. It is about government and trust in government.

And I think it's more a management issue, a management values issue. President Obama can't control the millions of people who work for the government. But leaders of agencies can say, listen, we're in government to do good, but we have to understand that power corrupts and those of us who go into government tend to like to control other people. We tend to like to run other people's lives. And we have to be extremely restrained about how we use our power. And we have to be extremely sensitive that we're going to not be disinterested in the use of that power.

And so there has to be a culture of self-restraint. And I don't think there was a culture of self-restraint at the IRS. I certainly don't think there was a culture of self-restraint at the Department of Justice, where they went hog wild with this investigation into the Associated Press.

And so I think it's more -- as Mark says, it's about government and how government operates. And if government's going to act in an unrestrained fashion that doesn't discipline itself, then people are going to turn off from it. And that's the core threat here.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So you're saying that -- it sounds like that two of you are saying, Mark, you can't really separate these three problems for the administration. They have all kind of come together to represent one symbolic failure.

MARK SHIELDS: No, I think they're easily distinct.

I think Benghazi is essentially over. I mean, I think Benghazi was trumped up. There are those who want this to be some great conspiracy. I think that has been basically -- I would be surprised if Benghazi is still being discussed, other than by Darrell Issa's committee in the House, as tries to ...

JUDY WOODRUFF: Because the White House issued all the hundreds of e-mails.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, issued it, and I just think -- I think that there's no there there. There really isn't.

I think that -- I think David's absolutely right about the Associated Press and the overreach of the Justice Department, the failure to consult, the failure to have a conversation, the failure to even approach, 20 phones, home phones, cell phones, chilling effect on -- anybody who wants to be a whistle-blower, who's got information of wrongdoing is going to think twice, three times whether, in fact, they're going to be visited by somebody from the Justice Department and the FBI.

But I think the IRS goes to the very trust. It's the health care act. That's -- it's the central agency in collecting all the information on the Affordable Care Act when it comes into force. And if there's no confidence there in its integrity and its competence, that's a real problem for this country, let alone for the administration.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, David, you agree this spills over into just about everything else, including health care and everything else the government does?

DAVID BROOKS: Oh, absolutely.

You know, if you go through the 20th century and if you ask people, do you trust government to do the right thing most of the time, typically, the numbers would be about 70 percent we're trusting government to do the right thing. In the last 10 years, maybe it's 19 percent, 25 percent, somewhere down there.

And that fundamental shift in the country, distrust of government, changes politics in all sorts of ways. To me, one of the -- it explains why the health care law remains unpopular, because people don't trust government to do something complicated for them. And this is a cynical country about government right now, and this plays into that and underlines that and will reinforce that.

And to be fair, the tea party people and a lot of Republicans have been saying they have been targeting us, they have been targeting us, and nobody's believed them. But it turns out, for whatever motivation, they were more or less right.

And if I could make one point about Benghazi, where -- I agree with Mark about the talking points of Benghazi. I think that's a non-scandal. Basically, it was a turf war between the CIA and the State Department, and the CIA began to walk back some of their allegations.

I still think there's a Benghazi issue on why we didn't send support troops when Ambassador Stevens and others were in trouble. That early issue, when no action was taken that possibly could have averted some oft catastrophe, I think that part remains an issue.

MARK SHIELDS: No, I think that's a legitimate area of inquiry.

But I think the real problem, Judy, that faces -- Judy, the federal government, if you're going to make a case for it, it abolished slavery in this country. It ended segregation. It built the land grant colleges that have produced more Nobel Prize winners than all the universities of Europe combined. It saved the Great Lakes. It took 99 percent of the lead out of the air.

That's -- that's what you -- it took want and terror out of old age through Social Security. There's a case to be made for government. And when government -- confidence in government and its integrity and its competence is undermined, and I -- and I just think it's up to the president to rise to its defense and to say, anybody who does this and threatens that positive confidence -- I will just add one thing to David's point.

And that is, we're going to see Jim and Robin coming up on the piece on Watergate. That's really -- Watergate and Vietnam is when confidence in government, which had been 75 percent, 80 percent that I trust government to do what is right most or all of the time, that's when it really started to slide. And, sadly, it's never come back.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Yes. And I was going to ask the two of you about that.

But just so that I understand, so, the two of you are saying, even if it turns out, which is what Mr. Miller at the IRS was arguing today, that this was -- this was foolish mistakes on the part of civil servants, you're saying that it could do this much damage?

MARK SHIELDS: I think it's up to the president to restore that confidence, to make sure that doesn't happen.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And you're saying he hasn't done that?

MARK SHIELDS: I don't think -- I think he's started to act, but I don't think he's stepped up and said, this is on my watch, I'm going to get answers, and I take responsibility.

JUDY WOODRUFF: David, how much has the president been harmed? How much has his agenda been harmed by this?

DAVID BROOKS: What agenda would that be?

I do think he has a problem where there's a vacuum. He tried to get in front of it today by talking about speeding up some infrastructure projects, but that's really not much of an agenda. I think the scandals are occupying so much space because the agenda, such as it is, is really down to immigration, and that's being handled on Capitol Hill.

So there's not that much of an agenda, in part because of this distrust of government. And if I could say one thing about the obliviousness of the IRS, this is not a small matter. Governments get really dangerous when the people in governments lose the human context in which they are acting, when they reduce everything to abstract bureaucratic categories, which I think is what actually happened in the IRS.

That's when governments begin to overstep. And on Mark's point about the good and the bad of government, the way I would put it is that government is like fire. If you can marshal it, it's tremendously useful, but if it's out of control, it can be tremendously harmful.

And so I would hope the president would remind people of the two-edged sword of government, that it can do us wonderful good, but if unrestrained, it can do us incredible tyranny.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Mark, as you said, we are going to go from this to a retrospective from Jim Lehrer, Robin MacNeil on how this program came together. They covered the Watergate hearings back in the early 1970s, 40 years ago.

What are the lessons for you of Watergate? I mean, a connection to what's going on this week, but in a larger sense, the -- you know, the sense that that was the scandal of all scandals.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes. I mean, if we're going to compare it, I mean, we're talking about the Boston massacre vs. double parking, I mean, this week.

This is not a -- I have heard this compared, this president -- in fact, Sen. Inhofe talked about impeachment of the president, which is just beyond ludicrous, because there's nothing that rises to any even criminal or negative effect here.

I would say this, Judy, that the trust and confidence in the federal government began to end and erode and diminish when that happened. We had a president resign. We had 25 of his closest friends and allies and colleagues go to jail. And it was just -- it was a shock for this country's system, from which it's never really recovered.

We're still to a great degree running against Washington because of Vietnam and Watergate, to a great degree.

JUDY WOODRUFF: David, what about Watergate?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. I have a perverse relationship to Watergate, because it made me interested in politics. It was those hearings, watching those hearings on TV that really lit the fire for me that this was really important, that what happened in Washington tremendously important, for good and evil, a test of character and a test of virtue.

And it should be pointed out that, in Watergate, we saw acts of cowardice. We also saw some incredible acts of courage from some of the people chasing it down and reacting with integrity. To me, the aftershocks have been negative mostly, in part, as Mark described, with loss of trust in government, in part the rise of a scandal culture.

Watergate really was a scandal, but we now have a lot of people who try to use scandal to settle policy differences by other means, who take mini-scandals and try to use them to got some policy edge or a political edge. And I actually think we as a country have become over-addicted to scandal as a way to destroy other people.

And that was in the Supreme Court hearings, and that's in a lot of the scandals. So, I think it's bred a politics of cynicism which kind of reverberates, without the actual substance of a major act of corruption.

MARK SHIELDS: Just one thing to add, Judy.

And that is the three patriots who went to the president, President Nixon, and told him he had to leave happen to be Republicans, Barry Goldwater of Arizona, John Rhodes, the Republican House leader, and Hugh Scott, the Republican Senate leader. It was a different time.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, this is the time we are in now.

And we thank you both, Mark Shields, David Brooks.

As Outrage Grows, Military Makes Addressing Sexual Assault Top Priority

Friday, May 17 2013 10:13 PM

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JEFFREY BROWN: The issue of sexual assault in the military was back in the spotlight today at the Pentagon.

Margaret Warner reports.

MARGARET WARNER: Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey offered no new solutions to the military's sexual assault crisis at today's much-anticipated Pentagon briefing. Hagel did vow once again to do everything necessary to address the problem.

DEFENSE SECRETARY CHUCK HAGEL, United States: The problem will be solved here in this institution, and we will fix it and we will do everything we need to do to fix it. There's not a military leader that was in that room that's not completely committed to that.

MARGARET WARNER: The press conference comes on the heels of a recent Pentagon survey indicating that 26,000 military members were sexually assaulted last year, a significant jump from 2011. Yet only 3,400 of those assaults were actually reported by the victims.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: There is no silver bullet to solving this problem.

MARGARET WARNER: President Obama had some stern words yesterday after summoning Hagel, Dempsey and other senior military leaders to the White House.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: They care about this. And they're angry about it, and I heard directly from all of them that they're ashamed by some of what's happened.

MARGARET WARNER: Some in Congress say the solution lies partly outside the command ranks. A bipartisan group of senators, led by New York Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, introduced legislation this week removing commanders from deciding whether to prosecute all serious crimes, including sexual assault.

SEN. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND, D-N.Y.: Today, we're standing in a united front to take on these this issues with new legislation that will fundamentally remove the decision-making from the chain of command and gives that discretion to an experienced military prosecutor, where it belongs.

MARGARET WARNER: In two recent high-profile cases, Air Force generals threw out convictions of sexual misconduct.

Today, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dempsey said that a decade of war may have undermined accountability on sexual assault.

GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman: You might argue that we have become a little too forgiving because, if a perpetrator shows up at a court-martial with a rack of ribbons and has four deployments and a Purple Heart, there is certainly the risk that we might be a little too forgiving of that particular crime.

MARGARET WARNER: But he appeared to push back against the Gillibrand proposal, saying:

MARTIN DEMPSEY: In our system, we give a commander life-and-death decision-making authority. I can't imagine going forward to solve this issue without commanders involved.

MARGARET WARNER: Hagel suggested more openness on the question.

CHUCK HAGEL: We're looking at everything. And we're listening to victims carefully, closely.

MARGARET WARNER: Other proposed bills in the Senate would improve record-keeping of sexual misconduct complaints and create new standards for filling sexual assault prevention positions in the military. That second point has come into sharp relief lately with the removal of two of those officials.

The first, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, headed the Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention Program until he was arrested on charges of sexual battery. And this week, it was disclosed that an Army sergeant who was a sexual assault prevention officer at Fort Hood, Texas, is being criminally investigated on sex crime allegations.

And for more on this, I'm joined by Wall Street Journal Pentagon reporter Julian Barnes.

Julian, welcome.

OK. You were at that press conference today. Parse this for us. How did you read their response to this growing pressure on the Hill?

JULIAN BARNES, The Wall Street Journal: Well, they are clearly open to some of these reforms.

You saw just a few weeks ago they were pushing back much more firmly on Sen. Gillibrand's proposal, saying that military commanders needed to retain this authority. Secretary Hagel said today that open to options where they're reviewing the proposals. We also heard from the Air Force chief of staff today, who said he personally supported it, and that's been a shift in the military. They see the writing on the wall.

MARGARET WARNER: Especially coming from the Air Force.

But did you detect any difference between Joint Chiefs Chairman Dempsey and Secretary Hagel on this question?

JULIAN BARNES: Well, your piece pointed out just so, and there is a little bit of a difference there.

The military has wanted to preserve their justice system as it is, which gives an enormous amount of power to commanders. They can decide whether cases go forward. They can vacate sentences and convictions afterwards. Now, there's been a series of high-profile cases where those convictions have been vacated, and there's been a huge backlash from Congress. There's no way the system is going to stay the way it is.

MARGARET WARNER: Do you think, though, that Secretary Hagel and the president could be caught between the military brass and sort of the demands from the public and the Hill?

JULIAN BARNES: There's a possibility of that, but we have seen over the last few weeks, as this scandal has continued, that the military is slowly shifting.

There was two months ago resistance to any change in the military justice system. Week by week, they are coming on board to the congressional ...

MARGARET WARNER: Now , tell us what's behind -- not what's behind, but Secretary Hagel did today issue the written directive for what he had said two days ago, which is, we're going to rescreen all these sexual assault prevention, not just officers, but everybody involved, and all the recruiters.

How rigorous -- first of all, what are they looking for there and how rigorous is it going to be?

JULIAN BARNES: Well, I think now it's going to be quite rigorous. I mean, I think if you look back in the past, this wasn't an issue that the military put the highest priority on.

Things have changed now. The military is making this their top priority. You heard Gen. Odierno talk about it. You heard Secretary Hagel talk about it and, most importantly, the president. So where you might have had maybe not your top-notch people in these jobs, I think more and more, we're going to see the best and brightest get assigned these duties.

MARGARET WARNER: Which hasn't been the case up until now, you mean. If you had a superstar or a budding superstar, you weren't going to make him or her the sexual abuse prevention officer.

JULIAN BARNES: That's right. That's right. And now they're going to take the top noncommissioned officers and say, hey, in addition to this duty, you are going to do this, because it's the Army's top priority.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, these -- that proposal of Gillibrand's, some of the others on the Hill, what they're talking about today, all deal with what to do after some assault has occurred. But is there concern in the Pentagon that there's a deeper problem with the basic military climate and culture? What are you hearing about that?

JULIAN BARNES: Very much so.

And the military officers are acknowledging that, that there is a cultural shift that needs to be made. And you have heard them talk about this. But this is a difficult thing to change. It's a difficult thing to ferret out. Where is there a locker room mentality and attitude that may sort of signal to some people that it's OK to do some of this stuff, which, in fact, is a crime?

And, you know, it's war-fighting culture, and sometimes that crosses the line in other ways, and so changing it is difficult. You want to keep people's -- hone their edges, as in combat, but still make sure that they are, you know, following the law, being respectful, and not, you know, objectifying any group of people.

MARGARET WARNER: Including women.

You heard I guess it was -- it was Joint Chiefs Chairman Dempsey respond to the question about both alcohol as a factor and a sort of decade of war. What do the -- what's he really talking about there, and what do the reported cases at least say about the involvement of those two factors?

JULIAN BARNES: Well, they're -- they're important in two ways here.

We -- you know, there are no easy answers in sexual assault, what causes it, why we have seen a spike. It's very similar to the military's suicide issue in that respect. These are complex issues. They have roots both in the military and in the wider culture.

A decade of war has led to soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors, coming back strained and, some cases, isolated. Some of those things can lead to the abuse of drugs or alcohol. That has been shown to make incidents of sexual abuse/assault more prevalent. So that's issue one. Does it increase the incident?

And then there's also the issue of when these get prosecuted. Does a commander say, hey, look, this guy's been through a lot, this guy has been blown up in Iraq, blown up in Afghanistan, we're going to cut him some slack? It certainly happens on non-sexual assault cases, a shoplifting, a bar fight.

MARGARET WARNER: Really?

JULIAN BARNES: And -- but now they're saying, we're not going to let this happen when it comes to sexual assault. We're going to have a zero tolerance policy.

MARGARET WARNER: Well, Julian Barnes, Wall Street Journal, thank you.

JULIAN BARNES: Thank you.

News Wrap: Series of Explosions in Iraq Stokes Fears of Sectarian Violence

Friday, May 17 2013 10:11 PM

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Wall Street finished this Friday with its fourth straight week of gains, after new signs of hope about the economy. One was a report that found consumer confidence is higher than expected. The Dow Jones industrial average added 121 points today to close at 15,354. The Nasdaq rose more than 33 points to close at nearly 3,499. For the week, both the Dow and the Nasdaq gained more than 1.5 percent.

This was the deadliest day in Iraq in more than eight months. At least 76 people died in a series of explosions that struck Sunni Muslim areas, stoking fears that sectarian violence will spiral out of control. The worst was in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad. Ambulances sped through blood-stained streets after twin explosions ripped through a crowd of Sunni worshipers, killing more than 40. Today's attacks followed violence that killed more than 50 Shiites earlier this week.

Two Sunni mosques were targeted in Pakistan today, as worshipers gathered for Friday prayers. Twin bombings in a village in the northwest killed at least 15 people and wounded more than 70 others. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

It was widely reported today that Russia has sent the Syrian government advanced anti-ship missiles. They're said to be outfitted with advanced radar to make them more effective. The sale came despite U.S. pleas to Moscow to stop giving military aid to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

But, in Russia today, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said his country is merely fulfilling contracts.

FOREIGN MINISTER SERGEI LAVROV, Russia: I don't understand why the media are trying to make this look like a sensation. We have never hidden the fact that we are supplying Syria with arms, in line with earlier signed contracts which do not breach any international treaties or Russian law, which are some of the strictest in the world in terms of export controls.

HARI SREENIVASAN: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had raised the issue of arms transfers to Syria during his visit in Moscow earlier this month. At the State Department today, Spokeswoman Jen Psaki said what he said then holds true today.

JENNIFER PSAKI, State Department Spokeswoman: And the secretary himself said this just two weeks ago. We remain concerned about any aid that is being provided to help the Syrian regime by the Russians or anyone else, including any form of missiles. That's a concern we have expressed publicly and that the secretary and others have expressed privately as well.

HARI SREENIVASAN: In another development, Human Rights Watch researchers have found physical evidence of torture in Syrian government prisons. The group said one device stretched or bent victims' arms and legs. It was found in Raqqa in eastern Syria, a city now under rebel control. The researchers also found documents showing people were detained for demonstrating or helping injured people.

Those are some of the day's major stories -- now back to Jeff.

Outgoing IRS Chief Admits Mistakes, but Dismisses Notion Scrutiny Was Political

Friday, May 17 2013 10:03 PM

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Congress today formally launched the first of its investigations into the furor swirling around the Internal Revenue Service. The star witness was the official who had been running the agency until Wednesday.

NewsHour correspondent Kwame Holman has our report.

MAN: What you are about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God.

KWAME HOLMAN: Steven Miller, the man forced out as acting head of the IRS, began by acknowledging failures.

STEVEN MILLER, Former Internal Revenue Service Commissioner: I want to apologize on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service for the mistakes that we made and the poor service we provided.

The affected organizations and the American public deserve better. Partisanship or even the perception of partisanship has no place at the IRS. It cannot even appear to be a consideration in determining the tax exemption of an organization.

KWAME HOLMAN: But, at the same time, Miller asserted IRS staffers didn't act out of political motivation when they gave special scrutiny to tea party and other groups on the political right.

STEVEN MILLER: I think that what happened here was that foolish mistakes were made by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selection.

The listing described in the report, while intolerable, was a mistake, and not an act of partisanship.

KWAME HOLMAN: Miller resigned Wednesday, at the behest of Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. Joseph Grant, who oversees requests for tax-exempt status, also will step down. He's retiring next month.

But it was clear today that neither the personnel shakeup nor apologies have calmed the storm for many, especially Republicans. Michigan Republican Dave Camp chaired the House Ways and Means hearing.

REP. DAVE CAMP, R-Mich.: The reality is, this is not a personnel problem. This is a problem of the IRS being too large, too powerful, too intrusive, and too abusive of honest, hardworking taxpayers.

KWAME HOLMAN: Camp and other Republicans also argued that what happened at the IRS is part of a culture of cover-ups by the Obama administration.

DAVE CAMP: It seems like the truth is hidden from the American people just long enough to make it through an election. The American people have a right to the truth, to a government that delivers the facts, good or bad, no matter what.

KWAME HOLMAN: The committee's top Democrat, Sander Levin of Michigan, fired back, saying that goes too far.

REP. SANDER LEVIN, D-Mich.: I totally, totally disagree. If this hearing becomes essentially a bootstrap to continue the campaign of 2012 and to prepare for 2014, we will be making a very, very serious mistake and, indeed, not meeting our obligation of trust to the American people.

KWAME HOLMAN: Today's hearing is just the beginning of Congress' examination of IRS scrutiny of the tea party and other conservative groups. So far, three congressional committees have announced plans to investigate.

And, on Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the Justice Department was looking into whether any criminal violations have taken place. So far, the main source of information about what happened is J. Russell George, a Treasury Department inspector general. His report, released this week, singled out the IRS office in Cincinnati that screens applications of groups for tax exemptions.

J. RUSSELL GEORGE, Treasury Department Inspector General: IRS employees actually began selecting tea party and other organizations for review in early 2010.

KWAME HOLMAN: George said the practice lasted about 18 months, and he blamed ineffective management. He said IRS officials told him they were not under any political pressure to act.

Washington Democrat Jim McDermott pursued that conclusion.

REP. JIM MCDERMOTT, D-Wash.: The inspector general's report says that no one acted out of malice or political motivation.

Mr. George, I want to know, do you still stand by that?

J. RUSSELL GEORGE: We have no evidence at this time to contradict that assertion, sir.

KWAME HOLMAN: In fact, Steven Miller argued that even the term targeting is unfair. He said the Cincinnati office simply was overwhelmed when applications from tea party groups exploded.

STEVEN MILLER: What happened here is that someone saw some tea party cases come through. They were acknowledging that they were going to be engaged in politics.

People in Cincinnati decided, let's start grouping these cases. Let's centralize these cases. We have a limited number of people, 140 to 200, that work on the 70,000 applications that come in for tax-exempt status.

KWAME HOLMAN: Republican Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania complained the IRS would never accept that kind of explanation from any business.

REP. MIKE KELLY, R-Pa.: You're not allowed to be shoddy, you're not allowed to be run horribly, you're not allowed to make mistakes. You're not allowed to do one damn thing that doesn't come in compliance. If you do, you're held responsible right then.

I just think the American people have seen what is going on right now in their government. This is absolutely an overreach and this is an outrage for all America.

KWAME HOLMAN: Republicans also demanded to know why Miller and others at the IRS didn't inform Congress after they learned what was going on in May of 2012.

Louisiana Congressman Charles Boustany:

REP. CHARLES BOUSTANY JR., R-La.: You sent letters to Congress acknowledging our investigation of these allegations, but consistently omitted that such discriminatory practices that are alleged were actually, in fact, taking place. Why -- why did you mislead Congress and the American people on this?

STEVEN MILLER: Mr. Chairman, I didn't mislead Congress nor the American people. I answered the questions as they were asked.

KWAME HOLMAN: And California Congressman Devin Nunes wanted to know why Miller didn't fight to keep his job, if he feels that way.

REP. DEVIN NUNES, R-Calif.: You have said that numerous times on the record today, that you did nothing wrong. So I find it hard to believe, why did you resign? Or why are you resigning?

STEVEN MILLER: I never said I didn't do anything wrong, Mr. Nunes. What I said is contained in the questions. I resigned because, as the acting commissioner, what happens in the IRS, whether I was personally involved or not, stops at my desk. And so I should be held accountable for what happens.

Whether I was personally involved or not are very different questions, sir.

KWAME HOLMAN: Democrats at the hearing rejected claims of wide corruption in the Obama administration, but they agreed that political neutrality at the IRS must be beyond question.

REP. JOE CROWLEY, D-N.Y.: So, we're all outraged. We're all upset about this. I don't believe, nor do any of my colleagues believe that any organization, political organization, should be targeted solely because of their thought. That's on both sides of the spectrum.

REP. XAVIER BECERRA, D-Calif.: Let me key off of something, Mr. Miller, you said. You said, “Foolish mistakes were made.” I think the president actually said it better. He said that the handling of those tax-exempt applications in that process at the IRS was outrageous and intolerable. No excuse.

KWAME HOLMAN: And as the four-hour hearing drew to a close, there came a pledge from the chairman.

DAVE CAMP: But I promise the American people, this investigation has just begun. Hearing adjourned.

KWAME HOLMAN: The Senate Finance Committee formally begins its investigation with a hearing next Tuesday.

Conversation: The Jazzed Up 'Gatsby'

Friday, May 17 2013 06:37 PM

Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in "The Great Gatsby."

It is—again—a Gatsby/Fitzgerald moment. "The Great Gatsby" is on the big screen now in Baz Luhrmann's new film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel. There are also several new books about the lives of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Earlier Friday, I talked about the phenomenon with Kirk Curnutt, vice president of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society. He's also a professor of English at Troy University in Montgomery, Ala.

A transcript is after the jump.

JEFFREY BROWN: First I want to ask you, does any of this surprise you? Or what do you say to yourself? You're in this world all the time; now the rest of the world is with you. What's going on?

KIRK CURNUTT: Well, I kind of feel like Nick Carraway. I'm both within it and without it, watching it from the outside. So it's a very neat thing to see. I do think this cycle comes around a little bit. Forty years ago the same sort of hype surrounded the Robert Redford version, and it inspired the same interest in fashion and home decor and stuff. I do think it tends to come around. It just gets bigger and bigger because the media gets bigger and bigger.

JEFFREY BROWN: I'm glad you mentioned fashion. Even at home I'm getting mailings for advertising with Gatsby-type clothing. That's everywhere.

KIRK CURNUTT: Well, I tell you, one of my reactions to seeing the movie was to immediately regret my wardrobe choices in life. It's something that I wish I had paid more attention to. It's interesting how we sort of conform to the work environment around us. One of the things I loved seeing in the movie was the character walking right up the borderline of being gaudy or flashy, and that's very much a Gatsby theme right there.

JEFFREY BROWN: I have not seen the film, but I've just read about it. I'm familiar with Baz Luhrmann's work from other things, which often divides people. "Moulin Rouge," I loved; my wife hated. That's kind of normal from what I've heard from people. What was your reaction to the film?

KIRK CURNUTT: I think the people that have been negative about it are expressing their resistance to Luhrmann's techniques. I mean, he is kind of a two Excedrin filmmaker. There is a certain point where you just get overloaded and your eyes start spinning. But I will be honest, I think that's kind of what Gatsby needed at this moment in time. I think the book has been treated as such a holy relic for so long that it's nice to see it juiced up and jazzed up and given some energy. It reminded me of something that I often forget, that the 1920s were loud and obnoxious and dangerous. And this is a movie that dramatizes that.

JEFFREY BROWN: The book, as you say, is treated as a holy relic, the very top of the pantheon of great American literature. It wasn't always the case right?

KIRK CURNUTT: No, in fact for a good 20 years after its publication, it was really -- I'm not even sure it was cult hit -- there was a circle of writers who admired it. But when Fitzgerald died in 1940, he was famous for his first novel "This Side of Paradise," and that was mainly famous because it was associated with the flapper movement. He was really in his own time considered a fad writer, and that's why he fell out of fame so quickly.

JEFFREY BROWN: I mentioned the novels that are out and more coming, I gather. What is it about these two -- Scott and Zelda -- that seems to resonate to our day, has other writers and artists interested in returning to them.

KIRK CURNUTT: Well, I think there are a lot of cultural myths that get worked out in their biography. In the case of Fitzgerald, there is a fascination with what I call the Icarus figure, the type of artist who rises early and has a great aspirations and comes falling to earth out of hubris. With Zelda, a lot of it is tied up with issues of feminism and concerns about women's role in society. A lot of the books that are expressly dealing with her are dealing with what it means to be the muse of a man.

JEFFREY BROWN: I'm wondering from your view, for the general public, when you watch the interest, what is it that we perhaps don't understand or get wrong about the Fitzgeralds?

KIRK CURNUTT: I think the thing that we get wrong is the thing that we want the story to be about. We want it to be a love story, we want Gatsby to be a love story. If you read it at a deeper level, it's really not. We want the Fitzgeralds to be one of the greatest love affairs of all time, and really it's a train wreck of a marriage. In terms of the Fitzgeralds, I think that the things that people value the most about them as a couple are those wonderful love letters that she wrote him that really capture a kind of responsiveness to joy and to love that is kind of taboo for a lot of us to express.

JEFFREY BROWN: When you say we want "The Great Gatsby" to be a love story, but it's really not, what is it?

KIRK CURNUTT: It's really more a meditation on American identity, on the limits of overcoming what Fitzgerald calls the barbed wire of class. It's really a critique of the idea that we could be anything we want to be in America if we just work hard enough. And Gatsby has done all the right things by doing all the wrong things, and you discover that he's, in the eyes of the people he's trying to win over, he's still mister nobody from nowhere.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right. "The Great Gatsby" on the big screen and in books, and I guess in advertisements at home and on billboards everywhere.

KIRK CURNUTT: And everywhere else.

JEFFREY BROWN: Exactly. Kirk Curnutt, nice to talk to you. Thanks so much.

KIRK CURNUTT: Thank you again for having me.

JEFFREY BROWN: And thanks for joining us again on Art Beat. I'm Jeffrey Brown.

Cicada Sighting! Bug-Eyed Critters Emerging in Northern Virginia

Friday, May 17 2013 06:03 PM

A cicada perches on a leaf of grass at Virginia’s Bull Run Regional Park. The full brood of cicadas is expected to emerge en masse in late May or June. Photos by Jenny Marder.

After an afternoon hunting for cicadas on Thursday, I finally discovered a nice crop of them in a nest of poison ivy in Virgina’s Bull Run Regional Park. It took some scouring, but then there they were, with their veiny golden wings and bright beady red eyes, clinging to grass and leaves and tree bark.

And the signs of them were probably more visible than the creatures themselves. Their exoskeletons, which they shed after molting from nymphs into winged adults, littered the ground and tree trunks.

Their tunnels, especially, were everywhere you looked. A sign perhaps of many more to come?

The brood II cicadas are expected to emerge en masse in late May or June through these tunnels they’ve dug from under the earth to its surface. The nymphs have been living quietly underground for 17 years, sucking on plant roots.

I suspect this is only a preview to the possibly million cicadas per acre that science and history have promised us. The ones I found were docile and quiet — no sign yet of the hundred-decibel mating shrieks for which the U.S. East Coast is bracing.

QUICK BITES

Kepler, the planet-hunting space telescope, has experienced a mechanical failure that may end its life. It is in “safe mode,” which means its no longer taking data. More from Astronomy Magazine.

Wired has this great graphic that charts how far extraterrestrial space vehicles have trekked. The frontrunner is the Russian Lunokhod 2 lunar rover, which landed on the moon in 1973 and covered 23 miles unmanned.

An invasive ant species from South America has the potential to wipe out the fire ant, this CNN post reports.

From the Los Angeles Times: “It’s 1.7 miles long. Its surface is covered in a sticky black substance similar to the gunk at the bottom of a barbecue. If it impacted Earth it would probably result in global extinction. Good thing it is just making a flyby.”

NOT SAFE FOR LUNCH

The bad news is that the Gabon Viper, already carrier of the most deadly venom in the world, is also among the hardest to see. Super black patches make the snake almost undetectable as it slithers on the forest floor in sub-Saharan Africa, Ed Yong reports for his National Geographic blog. Its 2.2-inch long fangs are the longest of any snake, and “connected to such huge glands that they deliver more venom than any other snake — a cocktail of toxins that thin the blood, trigger massive internal bleeding, and can stop hearts.” * Rebecca Jacobson, Patti Parson and David Pelcyger contributed to this report.*

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The Daily Frame

Friday, May 17 2013 06:01 PM

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A visitor passes the sculpture "1st Body" prior to the opening of the "Kapoor in Berlin," an exhibition by Anish Kapoor, at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images.

Military Sexual Assault Crisis Prompts Congress to Act

Friday, May 17 2013 02:32 PM

President Barack Obama met with U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, left, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, right, and other Pentagon leaders at the White House Thursday to discuss sexual assault in the military. The U.S. military vowed May 15 to address a wave of sexual assault cases after a soldier who worked in a rape prevention program was accused of forcing a subordinate into prostitution. Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images.

Over the last several days, the phrase "sexual assaults in the military" could be found within the top stories of almost every news organization.

First came a Defense Department report estimating that the crimes have risen sharply, that most victims are unwilling to report them, and that commanders summarily dismiss cases that had apparent merit. Then in rapid succession came charges two military officers responsible for stopping sexual misconduct had themselves committed it.

On Thursday, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey -- summoned along with other military leaders by President Barack Obama to the White House to talk about the problem -- called sexual assault in the military a "crisis."

Members of Congress have wrestled with the long-standing problem for years. Now, as a result of the hyper-attention to the issue this week, they were in legislative high gear.

What's emerged is two sides to a central question: should military commanders be stripped of their sole authority to decide whether complaints of sexual assault go forward?

Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio -- a member of the Armed Services Committee -- says he's not yet ready to take that authority away from the military chain of command.

On Wednesday he told PBS NewsHour that responsibility for investigating alleged sexual assaults should however be taken away from lower-level commanders who have been known to not act on complaints for fear that acknowledging such a problem could hurt the commander's chances of promotion.

"A lower-level chain of command decision can result in extreme bias and extreme pressure," Turner said in an interview in his Capitol Hill office.

Turner favors legislation that would move the adjudication decision on sexual assault to higher-ranking military officers then hold them to account if the cases are not handled properly.

"As we elevate up the chain of command and institute an accountability for the person that has that responsibility, their performance, their review, their promotions, should be decided based on their handling of these cases, instead of the silence these cases had before," Turner said.

"Making it a professional objective and a higher-level command, we think will make a difference."

On the other side of the question is New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

She's lost faith in the chain of command's ability to handle effectively sexual assault cases.

"If you judged all our commanders of today based on the occurrence of sexual assault and rape in the military, they would all be receiving a failing grade," Gillibrand said in an interview Thursday.

"Listen, this problem is nothing new. It's been going on for decades. And the military has tried to fix this problem for decades, and they're still failing. To go from 19,000 unwanted sexual advances, assaults and rapes the year before last to the 26,000 last year, its unacceptable."

"What we have heard from the victims themselves is that they don't report often because they believe they will be either retaliated against, marginalized, or blamed for the incident themselves. You don't want a commander who may be biased, who may know the victim, who may know the perpetrator, who's maybe being judged based on whether there's been sexual assault in the ranks," she said.

Under legislation Gillibrand unveiled Thursday, a separate prosecutorial body would be created in the military to handle sexual assault and other serious crimes.

"If you have an independent review by a trained prosecutor and professional who understands sexual assault, who has legal training ... you have to take it out of the chain of command. Give it to trained military prosecutors to do the review, the investigation, and then decide. This way, I think, the huge gap between the number of incident rates and the reporting will narrow. We have to get to a place where it's not just zero tolerance for this kind of behavior, we have to a place where its zero occurrence. And I don't think that's ever going to happen if victims are too afraid to report these crimes."

Turner acknowledges an independent set of military prosecutors may be needed. But not yet.

"Ultimately, we may need to turn to that sort of a structure, if we're not able to -- within the military structure -- increase the prosecution and prevention aspect," he said.

"[The] military justice system is ingrained and connected to our whole military structure. And to carve something out ... is probably a knife too strong to wield. At this point, I think we can address those issues, and then hold the Department of Defense accountable to what we actually see in the data and the numbers. Ultimately, if DoD cannot rise to this occasion, then we will have to go in and take it away from them."

If the spotlight on sexual assault in the military remains nearly as intense as it was this week, lawmakers soon are likely to be voting on reform bills, not just talking about them.

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