President Obama tells some Irish primary school children his darkest secret.

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Lyndon Johnson singing with his dog. Epic.

Lyndon B. Johnson sings with his grandson and his dog Yuki:

Lyndon B. Johnson, his grandson, and Yuki swim in the White House swimming pool:

Richard Nixon's dogs King Timahoe, Vicky, and Pasha look out of a White House window:

Bill Clinton takes his cat Socks for a walk:

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It’s “transparent,” the president tells Charlie Rose in an interview. Here’s a portion of that transcript, from PBS.

Via: Matt Dunham / AP

Barack Obama: Well, in the end, and what I've said, and I continue to believe, is that we don't have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security. That's a false choice. That doesn't mean that there are not tradeoffs involved in any given program, in any given action that we take. So all of us make a decision that we go through a whole bunch of security at airports, which when we were growing up that wasn't the case.... And so that's a tradeoff we make, the same way we make a tradeoff about drunk driving. We say, "Occasionally there are going to be checkpoints. They may be intrusive." To say there's a tradeoff doesn't mean somehow that we've abandoned freedom. I don't think anybody says we're no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports.

Charlie Rose: But there is a balance here.

Barack Obama: But there is a balance, so I'm going to get to your — get to your question. The way I view it, my job is both to protect the American people and to protect the American way of life, which includes our privacy. And so every program that we engage in, what I've said is "Let's examine and make sure that we're making the right tradeoffs." Now, with respect to the NSA, a government agency that has been in the intelligence gathering business for a very long time —

Charlie Rose: Bigger and better than everybody else.

Barack Obama: Bigger and better than everybody else, and we should take pride in that because they're extraordinary professionals; they are dedicated to keeping the American people safe. What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails ... and have not. They cannot and have not, by law and by rule, and unless they — and usually it wouldn't be "they," it'd be the FBI — go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it's always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause....

So point number one, if you're a U.S. person, then NSA is not listening to your phone calls and it's not targeting your emails unless it's getting an individualized court order. That's the existing rule. There are two programs that were revealed by Mr. Snowden, allegedly, since there's a criminal investigation taking place, and they caused all the ruckus. Program number one, called the 2015 Program, what that does is it gets data from the service providers like a Verizon in bulk, and basically you have call pairs. You have my telephone number connecting with your telephone number. There are no names. There is no content in that database. All it is, is the number pairs, when those calls took place, how long they took place. So that database is sitting there. Now, if the NSA through some other sources, maybe through the FBI, maybe through a tip that went to the CIA, maybe through the NYPD. Get a number that where there's a reasonable, articulable suspicion that this might involve foreign terrorist activity related to Al-Qaeda and some other international terrorist actors. Then, what the NSA can do is it can query that database to see did any of the — did this number pop up? Did they make any other calls? And if they did, those calls will be spit out. A report will be produced. It will be turned over to the FBI. At no point is any content revealed because there's no content that —

Charlie Rose: So I hear you saying, I have no problem with what NSA has been doing.

Barack Obama: Well, let me — let me finish, because I don't. So, what happens is that the FBI — if, in fact, it now wants to get content; if, in fact, it wants to start tapping that phone — it's got to go to the FISA court with probable cause and ask for a warrant.

Charlie Rose: But has FISA court turned down any request?

Barack Obama: The — because — the — first of all, Charlie, the number of requests are surprisingly small... number one. Number two, folks don't go with a query unless they've got a pretty good suspicion.

Charlie Rose: Should this be transparent in some way?

Barack Obama: It is transparent. That's why we set up the FISA court.... The whole point of my concern, before I was president — because some people say, "Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he's, you know, Dick Cheney." Dick Cheney sometimes says, "Yeah, you know? He took it all lock, stock, and barrel." My concern has always been not that we shouldn't do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances? So, on this telephone program, you've got a federal court with independent federal judges overseeing the entire program. And you've got Congress overseeing the program, not just the intelligence committee and not just the judiciary committee — but all of Congress had available to it before the last reauthorization exactly how this program works.

Now, one last point I want to make, because what you'll hear is people say, "Okay, we have no evidence that it has been abused so far." And they say, "Let's even grant that Obama's not abusing it, that all these processes — DOJ is examining it. It's being renewed periodically, et cetera — the very fact that there is all this data in bulk, it has the enormous potential for abuse," because they'll say, you know, "You can — when you start looking at metadata, even if you don't know the names, you can match it up, if there's a call to an oncologist, and there's a call to a lawyer, and — you can pair that up and figure out maybe this person's dying, and they're writing their will, and you can yield all this information." All of that is true. Except for the fact that for the government, under the program right now, to do that, it would be illegal. We would not be allowed to do that.

Charlie Rose: So, what are you going to change? Are you going to issue any kind of instructions to the Director of National Intelligence, Mr. Clapper, and say, "I want you to change it at least in this way"?

Barack Obama: Here's what we need to do. But before I say that — and I know that we're running out of time, but I want to make sure I get very clear on this. Because there has been a lot of mis-information out there. There is a second program called the 702 program. And what that does is that does not apply to any U.S. person. Has to be a foreign entity. It can only be narrowly related to counter-terrorism, weapons proliferation, cyber hacking or attacks, and a select number of identifiers — phone numbers, emails, et cetera. Those — and the process has all been approved by the courts — you can send to providers — the Yahoos or the Googles, what have you. And in the same way that you present essentially a warrant. And what will happen then is that you there can obtain content. But again, that does not apply to U.S. persons. And it's only in these very narrow bands. So, you asked, what should we do? …What I've said is — is that what is a legitimate concern — a legitimate critique — is that because these are classified programs — even though we have all these systems of checks and balances, Congress is overseeing it, federal courts are overseeing it — despite all that, the public may not fully know. And that can make the public kind of nervous, right? Because they say, "Well, Obama says it's okay — or Congress says it's okay. I don't know who this judge is. I'm nervous about it." What I've asked the intelligence community to do is see how much of this we can declassify without further compromising the program, number one. And they are in that process of doing so now so that everything that I'm describing to you today, people, the public, newspapers, etc., can look at because frankly, if people are making judgments just based on these slides that have been leaked, they're not getting the complete story.

Number two. I've stood up a privacy and civil liberties oversight board, made up of independent citizens including some fierce civil libertarians. I'll be meeting with them. And what I want to do is to set up and structure a national conversation, not only about these two programs, but also the general problem of data, big data sets, because this is not going to be restricted to government entities.

Charlie Rose: Let me just ask you this. If someone leaks all this information about NSA surveillance, as Mr. Snowden did.... Did it cause national security damage to the United States, and therefore, should he be prosecuted?

Barack Obama: I'm not going to comment on prosecution.... The case has been referred to the DOJ for criminal investigation... and possible extradition. I will leave it up to them to answer those questions.

This defense has been widely dismissed:

The one thing people should understand about all these programs though is they have disrupted plots, not just here in the United States but overseas as well. And, you know, you've got a guy like Najibullah Zazi, who was driving cross country trying to blow up a New York subway system. Now, we might have caught him some other way. We might have disrupted it because a New York cop saw he was suspicious. Maybe he turned out to be incompetent and the bomb didn't go off. But at the margins we are increasing our chances of preventing a catastrophe like that through these programs. And then the question becomes, "Can we trust all the systems government enough as long as they're checking each other that our privacy is not being abused, that we are able to prevent some of the tragedies that unfortunately there are people out there who are going to continue to try to — try to strike against us.

You can’t look away!

Bill Clinton sincerely LOVED to jog in tiny shorts when he was president.

Via: Robert Giroux / Getty Images

He seriously did not care who was watching.

Via: ROBERT GIROUX / Getty Images

Or how cold it was.

Via: Ron Sachs / Getty Images

He would bust out those Washington White jogging legs anywhere.

Via: LUKE FRAZZA / Getty Images

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“The truth is the truth.”

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Via:

In an interview Monday, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia, E. W. Jackson, defended controversial comments he has made about gays and comparisons he drew between the Klu Klux Klan and Planned Parenthood.

"The main similarity, which I will continue to propound is that the moral dilema that both pose is very similar," Jackson told conservative talk radio host Bryan Fischer. "The justification for slavery is in a sense the same as the justification for unfettered abortion, which is, the victim is not a real person, he's not a human being and therefore has no rights that we are bound to respect."

Later, Jackson declined to back off his views of what Fischer said was "the normalization of homosexuality."

"Part of this is really an attempt to deny us our First Amendment rights of freedom of religion," Jackson said.

"Look, sure, people could debate about whether I've always said things as artfully as I might have. As a minister I say things to have an impact on people. To have them confront the truth which doesn't always work unfortunately in the political sphere but the truth is the truth," Jackson said.

So very, very sad.

Via: Evan Vucci / AP

Via: KEVIN LAMARQUE / Reuters

Via: KEVIN LAMARQUE / Reuters

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The Gabbard Center, where Weiner checked in for three days, provides psychiatric evaluations, not treatment. “No one gets treatment in three days,” Weiss says.

Via: Brendan Mcdermid / Reuters

Anthony Weiner stepped down from Congress two years ago with a promise to "heal from the damage" of his sexual Twitter scandal. But sex therapy and addiction experts say the program he enrolled in shortly after his resignation wouldn't have done much to address the root causes behind his behavior.

Shortly after announcing his comeback bid for mayor of New York City, Weiner told reporters he spent three days in July 2011 at the Gabbard Center, a psychiatric evaluation center in Houston, Texas. The program "wasn't an addiction thing," Weiner told the Daily News last month. "I mean, it was just a place to get away and to meet people ... who might be able to help."

Weiner added that his stay at Gabbard was central to his start as a "new man."

But the center only provides evaluations, not treatment — and with a patient like Weiner, sex therapists said, there is a big difference. Weiner's case — an extended period of communication, involving illicit texts and tweets, with multiple strangers — would require not just a three-day evaluation, but an extended treatment program, they told BuzzFeed.

"No one gets treatment in three days," said Robert Weiss, a sexual addiction therapist with more than 20 years of experience treating high-profile clients. "Three days is an evaluation, but an evaluation isn't treatment."

"Somebody who's crashed and burned at that level needs very intensive short-term treatment, followed by long-term less intensive treatment," Weiss said. "You get them in residential treatment for 30 to 40 days, then follow through with more therapy."

The Gabbard Center, according to its website, provides a three-day "outpatient psychiatric evaluation." When reached Monday by BuzzFeed, the office declined to comment on Weiner's stay because of physician-patient privilege, but did say that their program is wide in scope and not tailored to evaluating sexual behavior.

Catered to "professionals who are in personal or professional crises," Gabbard sends off each patient with "a comprehensive written report specifically tailored to reflect the team findings and recommendations about the evaluee," according to the website, which does list "sexual disorders" as one of its 10 "major diagnostic groups."

The clinicians at the center would have "tried to rule in or out why he would have taken a risk like that," said Dr. Joe Kort, who specializes in sex therapy. "Was he abused as a child? Did he have personality issues? Was there something going on in the marriage? They would have looked at all types of assessments to get him clear about why he did what he did."

Weiner, for his part, has consistently declined to self-identify as a "sex-addict." In an interview with WNYC's Brian Lehrer last month, he said, "Maybe it would be an easier answer to say, 'Well, I've got some addiction or I was abused as a child or something else.' It's none of those things. It was simply a blind spot."

He also told the New York Times Magazine, in an extended interview to test the waters for his mayoral bid, that he does have a therapist who has worked with him. "It's none of the easy stuff," he said in the interview. "She didn't tell me: 'You have a sex addiction! You were abused as a child!' None of that stuff, which in a lot of ways, I'd kind of prefer."

But the very fact that Weiner can't identify the root cause for his behavior, Weiss said, raises concerns.

"I've never worked with a client yet who got through treatment and couldn't say, 'I know exactly why I did that.' If you don't know why you did something, why wouldn't you do it again?" Weiss said.

Weiner has also given voters the impression that his 2011 scandal was merely an aberration — "It is behind me," he has told reporters on more than one occasion. But if Weiner's sexual misconduct was in fact a symptom of addiction, psychotherapist Zelik Mintz said, Weiner would need indefinite continued treatment.

"Addiction runs deep. It takes a lot of time and work," said Mintz, who specializes in sex therapy. "I get the impression that he sees this as an anomaly, that he's fine and fixed now. It doesn't read to me that he is dealing with the issue and problem — he's just presenting it as a mistake."

"Three days seems really ridiculous," he added.

A typical patient seeking intensive care for sexual disorder, experts said, would check into a gender-separate residential treatment center, where psychiatrists would "go through your whole sexual history, and what you've done from beginning to end," Kort said.

A sexual addiction center would be "very different" from a general evaluation program like Gabbard, Brad Salzman of the New York Sexual Addiction Center said. "The treatment has to be tailored. There are still professionals now who don't realize that sexual addiction is a legitimate disorder. It needs to be addressed as a chronic disease."

"I don't know how politically savvy it would be to announce that he was a sex addict," Salzman added. "It's an interesting choice to go to a center that's not specifically for sex or sex addiction."

"But even if you take the sex out of it and look at it as a maladaptive behavior, three days of anything is just not gonna do," Weiss said. "But I understand that someone political might want to be coming out of this with the ability to say, 'Yeah, I went to some three-day thing and I have some things to work on, but it's fine.'"

Months after Obama’s gun control push went down in flames, opponents and supporters of the effort agree that it reframed the conversation. Vice President Joe Biden will give a speech Tuesday celebrating the White House’s efforts.

Via: Yuri Gripas / Reuters

WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, Vice President Biden will celebrate the Obama administration's efforts to reduce gun violence with a speech at the White House. The event is not meant to be sarcastic in nature.

Three months and a day after Senate fractures defeated the White House efforts to create new gun control legislation, Obama administration officials insist guns are still at the top of their agenda — and that they've made real progress in paving the way to eventual gun control by changing the political conversation.

Biden is scheduled to announce that all but two of the 23 executive actions the president announced in the wake of the Newtown shooting are now in place. The two outstanding actions include putting a head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in place (Obama has sent a nominee to the Senate for confirmation) and expanding access to mental health care, which will be addressed in federal regulations due out from the Department of Health and Human Services later this year. To coincide with the speech, Biden will release a "progress report" on the executive actions already in place.

Thanks to opponents of gun control in Congress, supporters of new gun legislation are unlikely to get anything better than Obama's executive actions until after 2014: Advocates and observers on all sides reached by BuzzFeed agreed that the vote tally hasn't changed since the Senate voted down universal background checks. Biden will call for a new vote on gun control in Congress, but few believe the White House will succeed in getting it — and that they are unlikely to win if they do.

But weeks after the defeat of background checks, which saw Obama fail in his most involved legislative push since winning re-election, the White House and its allies say they've succeeded in making Democrats comfortable talking about gun control again, which they believe will mean eventual victory for gun control legislation.

"What was on display in April, despite the fact that the outcome was not what we had supported, there was an indication both in that vote and the immediate aftermath of that vote, that the dynamics of that political conversation are changing," a senior Obama administration official said Monday. "And they're doing so rather rapidly. The backlash that we saw, politically speaking, at the grassroots level [after the April vote] was not against Democrats who supported a common sense compromise measure to strengthen background checks. Instead, we saw a pretty intense backlash against some Democrats and some Republicans who voted against expanding those background checks."

"That is a pretty significant change," the official said.

An NRA spokesman told BuzzFeed he agreed the potential for about gun control remains on the table thanks to Obama and allies like New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg — who has pledged to spend heavily to promote gun control and has already made good on that promise with millions in advertising — but the gun rights proponents say that while it may be fashionable to talk about gun control, it's still politically dangerous.

"We know that Michael Bloomberg is determined, as is President Obama, and we have billions of reasons to take Michael Bloomberg at his word, and we have every reason to take President Obama seriously when he says he's determined to pass gun control while he's president," NRA spokesperson Andrew Arulanandam said. "What they've done is they've heightened the profile of the issue," he added. "What they're still striving to do is to try and win the hearts and minds of the American people. They're having a tough time doing that because the American people believe in what the National Rifle Association stands for."

Arulanandam questioned the timing of Biden's event, suggesting that after weeks of Washington scandals enveloping the national conversation, the White House may want to change the subject back to something it likes discussing.

"I think any number of people would have any number of theories given the headlines that we've seen over the past two weeks," he said.

Arulanandam said the NRA was reserving judgment about what impact the executive actions might have on the rights of gun owners.

"I think the effects remain to be seen," he said. "The executive actions were a means to circumvent Congress and go over the will of the American people. The whole issue in and by itself is pretty clear issue: If someone is breaking the law, arrest them, prosecute them and punish them. If they're not, leave them alone."

The NRA has already shown it is ready to push back against a new White House drive for gun control, leveraging its considerable grassroots resources to stop gun control advocates in their tracks. Arulanandam said they're ready to keep it up, casting the powerful group as the underdog against Bloomberg's fortune.

The issue returned to Capitol Hill last week, as members marked the six-month anniversary of the Newtown shooting. Gun control advocates say the amount of activity around the date proves the gun control fight is here to stay.

"Just days after the six-month anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting, we're glad to see a continued effort at the state and federal level to enact common-sense solutions to the gun violence that is plaguing our country," Pia Carusone, the executive director of Americans for Responsible Solutions, the group founded by Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly, said. "Despite some lawmakers' best wishes, this issue is not going away."

For now, the gun control fight is more likely to be waged on the campaign trail instead of in the halls of Congress. The NRA and Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who turned on his old allies in the gun rights movement to sponsor background check legislation, are fighting an ad war on the airwaves of Manchin's home state. Bloomberg's group is targeting Democrats who voted against background checks in the Senate, running ads against Arkansas' Mark Pryor, and calling on wealthy donors to abandon Pryor and others up for re-election next year.

Republicans watching the fight seem just as happy to see the gun control battle continue, if it means more attacks on Democrats from Bloomberg and others.

"Every time the White House re-engages this debate, life gets that much more uncomfortable for [Alaska Sen.] Mark Begich and Mark Pryor," said Brian Walsh, a former top official at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. "It may be good politically for the White House to show their base that they're still fighting, but it's certainly not helpful as Senate Democrats fight to hold onto these two key Senate seats."

For the foreseeable future, advocates and observers say, gun control is here to stay despite the collapse of background checks in April and even as public pressure for congressional action on guns has softened since its highs after Newtown. How continued focus on guns shakes out is still anybody's guess, but the fact that gun control is under discussion at all proves that Obama has succeeded in making the topic a centerpiece of the political conversation, his allies say.

"For a decade, guns were seen as a losing political issue for a lot of Democrats and it was avoided whenever possible. Sandy Hook changed that, and the Manchin-Toomey bill solidified the view that it was possible to be pro-gun rights and support reasonable restrictions," said Glenn Kessler, a veteran of the gun control fight of the 1990s and the current senior VP for policy at the moderate think tank Third Way. "The White House and Democrats are unified about wanting to get this issue back in play."

An old Clinton foe is the first member of Congress to support the early Hillary effort. “We can all agree today that there is nobody better equipped to be our next President than Hillary Clinton,” says Claire McCaskill.

Via: Scott Eisen / AP

Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill has endorsed "Ready for Hillary," the political action committee fundraising and organizing for Hillary Clinton's possible presidential campaign in 2016, the group announced Tuesday morning.

"Hillary Clinton had to give up her political operation while she was making us proud, representing us around the world as an incredible Secretary of State, and that's why Ready for Hillary is so critical," McCaskill said in a statement released by the PAC.

"It's important that we start early, building a grassroots army from the ground up, and effectively using the tools of the Internet — all things that President Obama did so successfully — so that if Hillary does decide to run, we'll be ready to help her win," added the Missouri Democrat, who won her reelection fight last year.

The PAC already has support from Clinton loyalists, like longtime aides James Carville and Harold Ickes, and more more recently, fundraiser Susie Tompkins Buell. But it has also been the subject of controversy within the Clinton orbit among former aides who have watched the early effort's methods with skepticism.

McCaskill is the first member of Congress to endorse the PAC.

In January 2008, at the start of the presidential primary, McCaskill endorsed then-Sen. Barack Obama over Clinton. She was also one of his most combative campaign surrogates, infuriating the Clinton camp when she said she wouldn't want her daughter near Bill Clinton.

But earlier this year, just after Clinton stepped down from the State Department, McCaskill said she hoped the former secretary would run again in 2016.

"They aren't only reaching out to folks who supported Hillary in 2008," McCaskill said. "They're helping to show that regardless of who you supported for President back then, we can all agree today that there is nobody better equipped to be our next President than Hillary Clinton."

The PAC was founded in January by Clinton supporters Allida Black, a 2008 volunteer, and Adam Parkhomenko, a former Clinton staffer.

Is the Iranian presidency suddenly important, or less important than ever?

Via: Ebrahim Noroozi / AP

WASHINGTON — The election of relatively moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani to the presidency of Iran has scrambled the talking points in Washington's fraught Iran debate, which had centered for years on whether the man Rouhani will replace, the deliberately provocative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, mattered.

Ahmadinejad made global headlines for denying the Holocaust, calling for Israel to be eradicated, and claiming there are no gays or lesbians in Iran, and American hawks made him the poster child for their campaign for military action against the Islamic Republic. Washington's Iran doves, by contrast, dismissed Ahmadinejad and argued that the real power lies with the Iran's mullahs. Now, with a low-key new president, the roles have flipped, and those who once argued that the presidency of Iran is meaningless when it belonged to Ahmadinejad are now pointing to Rouhani as a sign of change.

"People in DC looking for black and white, sound bite-y stuff to say about other countries' politics: always a thing," said Heather Hurlburt, who heads the National Security Network, a Democratic group, in an email. "People who used to argue that Ahmadinejad was the problem and now say it doesn't matter who the president is are definitely a thing."

"The way I would square the circle is that competition in Iranian politics and policy is managed by the Supreme Leader," Hurlburt said. "It is interesting and hopeful that someone with the views was allowed to emerge, got so much popular support, and followed up his election by conciliatory rhetoric."

After the brutal crackdown following the fraudulent 2009 elections that installed Ahmadinejad, Western observers aren't sure how to react to an election in which the Ayatollah Khamenei has allowed someone who isn't his own hand-picked candidate to become the president. But those making the case for diplomacy cast it as a hopeful sign.

"The Iranians are so good at surprising us and doing things what few people expected," said Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council, a group that has argued for greater diplomacy with Iran. "People were saying that even if [Rouhani] wins, Khamenei won't permit it. But most of the tampering occured prior to the election" when the mullahs prevented several candidates from running in the first place.

This line of argument has drawn a swift response from conservatives who had focused for years on publicizing Ahmadinejad's threats and bluster.

"Because of Ahmadinejad's confrontational approach, the pro-engagement camp had no option but to downplay the significance of the Iranian presidency itself. Now that the president is a 'moderate', now that they have someone who's probably not going to make the same kind of statements about confronting Israel and the West that Ahmadinejad did, the pro-engagement faction has instantly forgotten that they just spent the last eight years arguing that the Iranian presidency has no power," said the executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel, Noah Pollak.

And the conservative scholar Max Boot wrote in Commentary that the hopes inspired by Rouhani fly "in the face of all the evidence that the real decision-maker in Iran is not the figurehead president but the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei."

Though Rouhani occupies a centrist space in terms of Iranian politics, that is a relative measure, as only stalwarts of the revolutionary regime were permitted on the ballot. And he is certainly no outsider; he's been a member of the Supreme National Security Council since 1989 and was the head of it for 16 years, indicating that Khamenei at least trusts him enough to keep a high-ranking national security post. Brookings Iran expert Suzanne Maloney argued that though Khamenei may not have seen Rouhani's election coming, he allowed it to happen because he saw Rouhani could be useful to him: "Perhaps allowing Rouhani's victory is his way of empowering a conciliator to repair Iran's frayed relations with the world and find some resolution to the nuclear dispute that enables the country to revive oil exports and resume normal trade."

"People who were talking about Ahmadinejad as if he ran the entire show are now very dismissive of the importance of Rouhani," said Parsi. The Western perception of the Iranian president's role "has never been black and white," Parsi said.

"You can go back and even look at what people were saying about Ahmadinejad — people were criticizing idea that he'd become so important," Parsi said. The same people who said he was important were saying that the previous president was not important. It's a more nuanced picture. There aren't good sound bites."

They include plots on the New York Stock Exchange and the New York City subway system.

Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole, NSA Deputy Director John Inglis, NSA Director U.S. Army General Keith Alexander, FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce and ODNI General Counsel Robert Litt testifying on Tuesday.

Via: Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

WASHINGTON — Top intelligence and law enforcement officials told Congress in a public hearing on Tuesday about a few of the terrorist plots that they say were foiled by the National Security Agency's controversial domestic surveillance programs.

NSA Director General Keith B. Alexander also said that more 50 plots had been thwarted by the new powers afforded the NSA by the PATRIOT Act, and that the details of all of them would be brought to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. They will not be declassified for public consumption.

The foiled terrorist plots cited by Alexander and by FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce, testifying at a hearing convened by the House Intelligence Committee, include the planned Najibullah Zazi 2009 New York City subway bombing, the example that's been most cited by officials as a NSA success story in the wake of leaks that have harmed the agency's reputation. Zazi, Alexander said, would not have been caught without PRISM.

Publicly available documents have raised questions about officials' claim that PRISM was central to catching Zazi.

Other examples given by the witnesses were a plan to attack the offices of the newspaper in Denmark that published a cartoon of Mohammed in 2006, as well as the Khalid Ouazzani New York Stock Exchange bombing plot. The officials said that the powers granted to them under section 702 of the PATRIOT Act, which allows the government to collect data on people "reasonably believed" to be outside the United States, were essential in catching the would-be terrorists before they acted.

"These tools have helped us," Joyce said.

Alexander stressed that the number of attacks that the programs thwarted was "over 50."

Asked how crucial the NSA's abilities were in these cases, Alexander said "in 90 percent of these cases, 702 contributed, and in 50 percent it was critical."

Just over 10 of the plots, Alexander said, had a "domestic nexus" and required a FISA court order.

"Going back to 9/11, we didn't have the ability to connect the dots," Alexander said. "This adds one more ability to help us do that."

Lawmakers and other officials have alluded to the plots that NSA data mining programs prevented, but have not gone into this much detail about the number of attacks and the specifics before this.

“No, ma’am.”

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Via:

Much better.

Before:

Via: thisistwitchy.files.wordpress.com

After:

Via: @USTreasury

From Truman to Obama, so much bro.

Harry Truman sunbathing on the presidential yacht during his vacation in Bermuda:

Harry Truman sightseeing while on his yacht during his Bermuda vacation:

Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower sharing a moment at Camp David:

John F. Kennedy chilling on a boat off Cape Cod:

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An internal handout focuses on young Americans — and on people who “distrust government.”

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is ramping up a plan to use the federal government's social media accounts and websites to help convince millions of Americans, including those who "mistrust government," to sign up for health insurance through Obamacare, according to a confidential administration presentation obtained by BuzzFeed.

The White House last Tuesday hosted government agency social media directors and chief technology officers in a summit aimed at coordinating communications around a central administration goal of President Obama's second term: persuading people without health insurance to sign up for it. The meeting was led by Tara McGuinness, the White House communications point person on Obamacare implementation. The document obtained by BuzzFeed is a handout authored by the Department of Health and Human Service's Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and its authenticity was confirmed by the White House.

Leveraging the government's hundreds of social media accounts is part of a massive campaign-like operation to put Obamacare front and center in the minds of millions of Americans the White House needs to sign up for insurance in order to make the health-care law work. The White House bristles at the comparison to a political campaign, saying that similar efforts were mounted when the government rolled out Medicare Part D under George W. Bush. The White House also stresses that a main online focus will be on placing information about Obamacare on websites frequented by targeted groups.

Nevertheless, the CMS handout reads like a memo from the vaunted Obama campaign operation, with an emphasis on collecting email and mobile numbers from prospective enrollees and sketching out surrogate travel by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (listed as KGS on the document) to a list of 15 cities mostly in red states with large Latino populations. HHS has created an online repository for widgets and other items to add to government websites during this summer's push for enrollees.

The official said the document is meant to help spread the word on HealthCare.gov, an insurance portal that will be key to registering new people for insurance under Obamacare.

There are three groups central to the White House effort, according to the handout: the "Healthy and Young," who the document states "feel invulnerable" and are "unlikely to see value" of insurance; the "Active, Sick and Worried," who "need and want coverage but don't know how to choose," and the "Passive & Unengaged," who are "uninterested in coverage" and "mistrust government."

The presentation document says 26% of the young people the government hopes to convince to sign up for coverage are Latino, and the presentation calls for "cross promotion in Spanish" on government "social media channels." A White House "digital tool kit" for government social media communicators includes "Spanish Materials."

Other tactics to sell people on health insurance include tying coverage advertising to "motivational posts" revolving around "special events." An example of this tactic in action came around Mother's Day, when Obama used the holiday to tout the health-care law at the White House surrounded by moms. At the time, White House officials said research shows mothers can motivate their children to buy health insurance coverage, and the administration hopes getting moms on board will help get more young people to sign up. Observers have said getting young people, specifically young men, to buy insurance coverage — even at the discounted rates created by the health reform law — will be a challenge.

Less clear from the document is how the White House intends to reach out to the "Passive & Unengaged," the people who don't trust the government. The document does not detail how large the administration estimates this group to be or what tactics they suggest for connecting with them.

A senior White House official said participation in the online effort is not required of all cabinet agencies.

Here is the administration handout obtained by BuzzFeed:

The first page outlines the "target audience" for Obamacare advertising.

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The Congressional Budget Office released a report saying the immigration reform bill could reduce the federal deficit by $200 billion over the next decade, but the Heritage Foundation has challenged that estimate, citing its own embattled report.

Via: Evan Vucci / AP

The conservative Heritage Foundation continues to cite its controversial study on the proposed "Gang of Eight" immigration reform bill, this time to challenge the findings of the Congressional Budget Office's estimate that the bill would decrease the federal deficit by about $200 billion over the next decade. The study claims the immigration reform bill would cost $6.3 trillion even though it only takes into account the amnesty portion of the bill.

When contacted by BuzzFeed, Heritage spokesman Daniel Woltornist said Heritage had no immediate comment about the CBO estimates, but recommended a preemptive post published June 10 that said the CBO's estimates would likely only report the economic effect of the bill over the next 10 years. The post refers to the study near the top, claiming it looked at the "fiscal costs of unlawful immigration and amnesty detailed fiscal costs during four phases: (1) Current law, (2) The interim period, (3) What Heritage calls the "full amnesty" period, and (4) Retirement."

A graph directly below that information highlights the $6.38 trillion in fiscal deficits Heritage argues granting amnesty would cost. The majority of the costs from legal immigrants as a result of amnesty would come in their retirement years which, according to the post, would likely be beyond the estimates of the CBO.

The study — co-authored by Jason Richwine, who resigned after the study was published when it was revealed he wrote a Harvard doctoral dissertation that claimed the "average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population" — has been referenced in various blog posts on the foundations website and in mailers sent out by its 501(c)(4) arm, Heritage Action For America, numerous times to discredit the legislation.

"The danger of putting too many things in one bill is that you end up having to pass it to see what's in it. But we know one thing: Amnesty for illegal immigrants is the first order of business," the foundation wrote in its "Morning Bell" email on June 12. "This is the wrong way to address a serious issue with trillions in taxpayer dollars at stake."

But the foundation's top leadership has said in the past the authors only looked at the amnesty portion of the bill and it was meant as a fiscal study, not a broader economic analysis.

"There are parts of immigration reform, undoubtedly, perhaps not in this bill but we could conceive of some reforms in our immigration policy, that would lead to economic growth," Heritage Foundation Vice President Derrick Morgan told C-SPAN in May. "But this study is looking at amnesty, which we oppose and which we don't think is necessary to get the bulk of economic benefits that we could get from a properly structured, merit-based immigration system."

A June 9 blog post read: "This week, the Senate will begin extensive debate on the Gang of Eight's comprehensive immigration reform bill. The bill would almost immediately grant amnesty to individuals who entered the country illegally, allowing them to live and work in the United States. As a result, they would jump to the head of the line, in front of millions who are waiting to enter the country legally. Heritage Foundation analyst Robert Rector estimates the long-term cost of this legislation would be in the trillions."

The CBO's report, however, extends beyond the 10-year window that Heritage assumed it would cover. According to the CBO report, the bill would decrease the federal budget deficit by "roughly $700 billion" from 2024 to 2033.

One of the great reporters of his generation died Tuesday at 33. The stories he wrote, and the ones he didn’t live to write.

Via: Blue Rider Press

Michael Hastings was really only interested in writing stories someone didn't want him to write — often his subjects; occasionally his editor. While there is no template for a great reporter, he was one for reasons that were intrinsic to who he was: ambitious, skeptical of power and conventional wisdom, and incredibly brave. And he was warm and honest in a way that left him many unlikely friends among people you'd expect to hate him.

Michael, who died at the age of 33 in a high-speed wreck in Los Angeles early Tuesday morning, wasn't like any reporter I've ever worked with. He found conflict constantly, but never by accident. We fought, first, over the adjectives in his stories — "discredited" was a favorite — and then over his theories, which were typically the opposite of whatever I was hearing from my Washington sources. In the meantime I marveled at his talent and at the thing I hadn't particularly expected: his generosity.

The talent first. That is the reason Michael's death was news to so many people who didn't know him personally, the reason his stories hit a nerve almost without fail.

Michael's journalistic roots were in the 1970s, in gonzo writers like Hunter S. Thompson who flung their bodies at the story, and often got hurt. He had been badly hurt once: His fiancée was killed in Baghdad in January 2007, when he was a Newsweek reporter there, and her death was still utterly raw to him when he published his first book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad.

And then the other part: He knew how to tell it. He knew that there are certain truths that nobody has an interest in speaking, ones that will make both your subjects and their enemies uncomfortable. They're stories that don't get told because nobody in power has much of an interest in telling them — the story, for instance, of how a president is getting rolled by his generals.

There is perpetual handwringing in journalism about how to make Worthy topics interesting to a broad audience. The simple fact is that Michael had discovered the answer: Make it about power and sex and personality and conflict (because, by the way, it usually is) and — and here's the real trick — draw a straight and clear line between the vibrant reporting and the point. His most vivid scenes, set in the carnage of Baghdad at its worst days, or in the grim light of pay-per-view in an Iowa hotel room, were never gratuitous. Michael's most famous story, the one that got General Stanley McChrystal fired, was a great yarn, but it was also about something: a military leadership that had turned its tactical sophistication inward, and trapped a president it disdained into a war he didn't want to fight. The story helped push the American government to pull out of Afghanistan, not because a general said some bad words, but because those words conveyed the general's sense of superiority to his civilian masters.

Michael found those stories because he never forgot his job. It is so easy, and so basically human, for journalists to want the people around them — including their sources — to be their friends. Michael cared about friends and was good at making them; it visibly pained him when, late in the 2012 campaign, the reporters around him made little secret of their distrust for him. But he also knew what he was there — in Denver, or Paris, or Hollywood — for. He was there to tell his readers what was going on.

Michael made people nervous — he made me nervous — with his jittery energy and what Tim Dickinson, in his obituary of Michael, called his "enthusiastic breaches of the conventions of access journalism." (He also knew this about himself: When we started emailing, in January 2012, about his coming to work for BuzzFeed, he included this codicil: "I'd need a clause somewhere in the contract that says if BuzzFeed fires me for saying or writing something controversial or offensive on BuzzFeed or on Twitter or elsewhere, there will have to be some kind of severance payment. I have a demonstrated ability to really piss powerful people off, and I would need some kind of assurance that BuzzFeed has my back, 120 percent.") That intense sense of responsibility was to his readers — "friends," he typically began his tweets — not to his sources, and so he had no time for implied off-the-record agreements or of the clubbiness of the traveling press corps. It takes an enormous level of tolerance for awkward social situations to infuriate the small group of people with whom you are traveling, eating, and sleeping for weeks on end. He did that, mostly for good reasons, with the protection only of a pair of giant headphones.

Michael had made no secret of his lacerating views of much of the political press — his 2010 GQ article on the experience was filled with self-loathing, too, for having been part of the machine. ("Jacking off in a hotel room was not unlike the larger experience of campaign reporting.") But he also couldn't control his curiosity. When we began talking that January, he wrote that while "I have a pretty good gig … the pull of the campaign trail is always very real," he had an instinct that we were doing something "fairly unique/hot/exciting." And so he somehow persuaded his Rolling Stone editors to let him dive into the campaign for BuzzFeed, while persuading me to let him, somehow, amid the 96 pieces he wrote for us, to complete a powerful story about "America's Last Prisoner of War" for Rolling Stone.

And this time out on the trail, he ran in the other direction. He infuriated his peers by breaking unwritten rules: He wrote about events that were presumed, though not stipulated, to be off the record; he wrote about what reporters said and did; and he wrote that the president had joined a cocktail hour with the press, though he respected his agreement not to report on the substance of the conversation. He knew his role was to tell his readers what he knew — not to hold things back. He liked to quote an old Newsweek colleague, Peter Goldman: "Journalists' behavior is always on the record."

His own certainly was. He is the anti-hero of his campaign book, Panic 2012, and included a scene of his own intemperate, drunken rage at another reporter, as well as a familiarity with "my cooler than thou persona," which backfired when he found himself about to meet Obama, "dressed like a beachcomber" in shorts and a pink T-shirt. He scrambled to put on a suit.

Great journalists take themselves and their work seriously because it is serious; they know the power they wield. Michael knew how good he was, how much damage he could do. He was shy of playing gotcha games with junior staffers — his target was always the principal.

He cared about his image — he worked out hard, looked good in clothes and in pictures, and enjoyed it — but he always cared more about the story. One day last fall, he had a furious exchange with a spokesman for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. His impulse, and mine, was to print the back-and-forth, the crucial exchange of which was:

Reines: Why do you bother to ask questions you've already decided you know the answers to?

Hastings: Why don't you give answers that aren't bullshit for a change?

But there was a problem: Michael had not exactly conducted himself as well-mannered professional in the exchange. "You will look," I pointed out to him, "like an asshole."

"Everyone knows I'm an asshole," he said. "The point is that they're assholes."

Michael had a great nose for conventional wisdom and conventional taste, and a visceral, irresistible urge to run the other way. If every reporter in Washington knew that Valerie Jarrett, President Barack Obama's close aide and friend, is a disaster — the view of her internal enemies, who happen to be closer to the press — Michael's impulse was to find the other narrative: The "Revolt of the White Male Ego" (capital letters Michael's). If the problem with reporting on an Afghan hospital scandal was that the images were simply too horrifying to print, Michael wanted to use a new medium to display them all.

Michael's curiosity took him to Hollywood, his last beat. There, he saw the same thing he had seen in Washington and Afghanistan: power and its abuse and its devastating effect on a man's life.

Michael's large sense of himself and of his abilities could, and perhaps should, have made him into that feared caricature, the egomaniacal bigfoot magazine writer. But unlike most ambitious and successful reporters in their thirties, Michael was also intensely interested in the younger people around him. I didn't particularly expect him to show up to work at BuzzFeed — he was one of those magazine writers who did their own thing — but during the spring and summer of 2012, before he encased himself in giant headphones for the mortal combat of the Obama campaign charter — he was there most days. He gaped at the exotica an editor sitting beside him collected from dark corners of the internet. He invited the whole office to his apartment after our holiday party. He was obsessed with online animal culture and with the corgi, Bobby Sneakers, he shared with his wife, Elise Jordan. He was more obsessed, only, with Elise, whose thoughts, plans, and prospects he couldn't stop talking about when I last saw him in New York two weeks ago.

Michael always had time for advice to young reporters, many of whom really got to learn from him. He handed out scoops to the kids around him — sometimes based on complicated calculations about his own byline, sometimes out of pure generosity. He gave great, sensible advice: "Go to D.C. for a couple of years, it's money in the bank, source-wise, even if you hate it." A half-dozen young reporters walked away with a bit of his fairy dust.

Perhaps most to Michael's credit, though, is the esteem of his enemies. I asked Michael's advice not long ago for who to call for a story about David Petraeus' comeback, expecting a list of haters. Michael's definitive story on the former general and CIA director had, after all, begun, "The fraud that General David Petraeus perpetrated on America started many years before the general seduced Paula Broadwell…"

Instead, Michael gave me the emails of some of Petraeus' closest friends and allies. "I shouldn't mention your name, right?" I asked. "Actually," he said, "I should"; and his name, of all things, prompted people devoted to Petraeus to talk openly and freely to me. I still haven't quite figured that one out.

Tuesday night, one prominent defense intellectual whose views on counterinsurgency operations, among other factors, had meant Michael never much liked him, messaged me.

"I was struggling to explain to my wife why the death of Michael Hastings made me sad. He didn't much like me, and I didn't much like him," he wrote. "But I respected his pluck and his courage, even when I disagreed with him."

Some of that was Michael's warmth, charm, and charisma. Some of it, I think, was the opposite: His anger and fearlessness made working with him, or against him, something more than the usual journalistic transaction. There's a relief in dealing with someone and knowing where he stands.

In a way, Michael was born too late: He wrote with the sort of commitment of the generation of reporters shaped by the government's lies about Vietnam, not by the triumphalism of the 1990s or the reflexive patriotism of the years after 9/11. He was surer than most of us that power is, presumptively, not to be trusted. Writers of his courage and talent are so rare, and he was taken way too soon. There are few like him. We will miss him terribly.

LINK: Journalists Remember Michael Hastings

LINK: BuzzFeed Staff Pays Tribute to Hastings

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Well that was different.

Rep. Eric Swalwell took some time off from etching self portraits to vote on the House floor Tuesday.

But it was not just ANY old vote... it was the FIRST EVER VINE VOTE!

This was also his first Vine ever!

The House has no set rules for Vine-ing specifically:

Plus, a little Vine never hurt nobody!

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“I recognize that it is an area that, as a Republican, I will be criticized for,” Murkowski says.

Via: J. Scott Applewhite / AP

WASHINGTON — Sen. Lisa Murkowski became the third sitting Republican senator to endorse marriage equality in an interview with KTUU, Anchorage's NBC affiliate, Wednesday morning.

"This is a hard issue ... because marriage is such a deeply personal issue. There may be some that when they hear the position that I hold that are deeply disappointed. There may be some who embrace the decision that I have made. I recognize that it is an area that, as a Republican, I will be criticized for," she said in the KTUU interview.

As recently as March, Murkowski said her views on the issue were "evolving." Her fellow Alaska senator, Sen. Mark Begich, is a Democrat and had previously announced his support for marriage equality.

The Human Rights Campaign was promoting the news early Wednesday morning in D.C., as the group — and the country — wait for news from the Supreme Court on two marriage cases before it.

"Senator Murkowski's courageous and principled announcement today sends a clear message that marriage equality must come to all 50 states in this country. As the Supreme Court prepares to rule in two landmark marriage cases this month, a growing bipartisan coalition is standing up for the right of all couples to marry — and there is no turning back that tide," HRC President Chad Griffin said. "We hope other fair-minded conservatives like Senator Murkowski stand up and join her. Alaska may be nicknamed 'the Last Frontier,' but we've got to make sure that LGBT Alaskans don't have to wait to find justice."

Murkowski joins Republican Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio and Mark Kirk of Illinois in supporting marriage equality.

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Via: ktuu.com

Update: Murkowski's office posted a lengthy statement from the senator about her support:

Not too long ago, I had the honor of nominating an Alaskan family as "Angels in Adoption," a celebration of the selflessness shown by foster care families and those who adopt children. They arrived in Washington, DC, a military family who had opened their doors to not one child but four siblings to make sure that these sisters and brother had the simplest gift you can give a child: a home together. We had lunch together, and they shared their stories with me. All the while, the children politely ate lunch and giggled as content youngsters do. Given my daily hectic Senate schedule, it's not often that I get to sit down with such a happy family during a workday – and I think of them often, as everything our nation should encourage.

I bring them up because the partners were two women who had first made the decision to open their home to provide foster care to the eldest child in 2007. Years later – and after a deployment abroad with the Alaska National Guard for one of them – they embraced the joy and sacrifice of four adopted children living under the same roof, with smiles, laughter, movie nights, parent-teacher conferences and runny noses.

Yet despite signing up and volunteering to give themselves fully to these four adorable children, our government does not meet this family halfway and allow them to be legally recognized as spouses. After their years of sleepless nights, after-school pickups and birthday cakes, if one of them gets sick or injured and needs critical care, the other would not be allowed to visit them in the emergency room – and the children could possibly be taken away from the healthy partner. They do not get considered for household health care benefit coverage like spouses nationwide. This first-class Alaskan family still lives a second-class existence.

The Supreme Court is set to make a pair of decisions on the topic of marriage equality shortly, and the national conversation on this issue is picking back up. This is a significant moment for our nation when it comes to rethinking our society's priorities and the role of government in Americans' private lives and decisions, so I want to be absolutely clear with Alaskans. I am a life-long Republican because I believe in promoting freedom and limiting the reach of government. When government does act, I believe it should encourage family values. I support the right of all Americans to marry the person they love and choose because I believe doing so promotes both values: it keeps politicians out of the most private and personal aspects of peoples' lives – while also encouraging more families to form and more adults to make a lifetime commitment to one another. While my support for same sex civil marriage is something I believe in, I am equally committed to guaranteeing that religious freedoms remain inviolate, so that churches and other religious institutions can continue to determine and practice their own definition of marriage.

With the notion of marriage – an exclusive, emotional, binding 'til death do you part' tie – becoming more and more an exception to the rule given a rise in cohabitation and high rates of divorce, why should the federal government be telling adults who love one another that they cannot get married, simply because they happen to be gay? I believe when there are so many forces pulling our society apart, we need more commitment to marriage, not less.

This thinking is consistent with what I hear from more and more Alaskans especially our younger generations. Like the majority of Alaskans, I supported a constitutional amendment in 1998 defining marriage as only between a man and a woman, but my thinking has evolved as America has witnessed a clear cultural shift. Fifteen years after that vote, I find that when one looks closer at the issue, you quickly realize that same sex unions or civil marriages are consistent with the independent mindset of our state – and they deserve a hands-off approach from our federal policies.

First, this is a personal liberty issue and has to do with the most important personal decision that any human makes. I believe that, as Americans, our freedoms come from God and not government, and include the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What could be more important to the pursuit of happiness than the right to choose your spouse without asking a Washington politician for permission? If there is one belief that unifies most Alaskans – our true north – it is less government and more freedom. We don't want the government in our pockets or our bedrooms; we certainly don't need it in our families.

Secondly, civil marriage also touches the foundation of our national culture: safe, healthy families and robust community life. In so many ways, sound families are the foundation of our society. Any efforts or opportunity to expand the civil bonds and rights to anyone that wants to build a stable, happy household should be promoted.

Thirdly, by focusing on civil marriage -- but also reserving to religious institutions the right to define marriage as they see fit -- this approach respects religious liberty by stopping at the church door. As a Catholic, I see marriage as a valued sacrament that exists exclusively between a man and a woman. Other faiths and belief systems feel differently about this issue – and they have every right to. Churches must be allowed to define marriage and conduct ceremonies according to their rules, but the government should not tell people who they have a right to marry through a civil ceremony.

I recently read an interview where Ronald Reagan's daughter said that she believes he would have supported same-sex marriage, that he would think "What difference does it make to anybody else's life? I also think because he wanted government out of peoples' lives, he would not understand the intrusion of government banning such a thing. This is not what he would have thought government should be doing."

Like Reagan, Alaskans believe that government works best when it gets out of the way. Countless Alaskans and Americans want to give themselves to one another and create a home together. I support marriage equality and support the government getting out of the way to let that happen.

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At the Brandenburg Gate, Obama calls for changes in America’s nuclear posture and calls for action on climate change.

Via: Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

WASHINGTON — President Obama told a crowd in Germany Wednesday that they're the ones leading the fight against climate change. In the midst of his big speech at the Brandenburg Gate, Obama took a moment to give a shoutout to his hosts for their efforts in an area that's still extremely politically controversial in America.

"The efforts to slow climate change requires bold action, and on this, Germany and Europe have led," Obama said. He called climate change "the global threat of our time" and said, "for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late. That is our job. That is our task."

Obama noted his own administration's efforts to boost green energy and reduce carbon emissions — tasks largely completed without the help of Republicans in Congress, who remain skeptical of climate change as a concept — but he also made it clear that he doesn't think enough has been done in the U.S.

"We know we have to do more," Obama said, "and we will do more."

Failing to act on climate change, Obama said, hearkening back to his previous statements on the topic, means "more severe storms, more famine and floods, new waves of refugees, coastlines that vanish, oceans that rise." He called on nations to join him in "refusing to condemn our children to a harsher, less hospitable planet."

The crowd may have been smaller than the last time Barack Obama gave a big speech in Berlin, but the president sketched out a similarly sweeping vision to the one he did before a couple hundred thousand Germans in 2008.

Obama used the speech to call for a change in the country's relationship with nuclear arms, previewing a strategy to "[reduce] the role of nuclear weapons in our security strategy," according to a White House fact sheet. That includes "recognizing that the potential for a surprise, disarming nuclear attack is exceedingly remote" decades after the end of Cold War, according to the fact sheet.

Obama called for the U.S. and Russia to enter negotiations that Obama hopes will lead to steep reductions in the world's two largest nuclear arms stockpiles.

"After a comprehensive review, I've determined that we can ensure the security of America and our allies -- and maintain a strong and credible strategic deterrent -- while reducing our deployed strategic nuclear weapons by up to one-third," Obama said. "And I intend to seek negotiated cuts with Russia to move beyond Cold War nuclear postures."

The nuclear weapons focus was the White House headline from the speech. But Obama also called for big moves on climate change, giving a shoutout to his hosts for their efforts in an area that's still extremely politically controversial in America.

The efforts to slow climate change requires bold action, and on this, Germany and Europe have led," Obama said. He called climate change "the global threat of our time" and said, "for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late. That is our job. That is our task."

Though he remains extremely popular in Germany, Obama has taken criticism in the country over the NSA programs recently revealed by Edward Snowden. At a press conference earlier in the day, Obama tried to reassure his hosts, but also push the big idea that the world has changed in the digital age.

"When it comes to the Internet and email, as [German] Chancellor Merkel said, we're now in an Internet age and we have to make sure that our administrative rules and our protections catch up with this new cyber world," Obama said. "What I can say to everybody in Germany and everybody around the world is this applies very narrowly to leads that we have obtained on issues related to terrorism or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

Fifty years after President John F. Kennedy defined the Berlin presidential speech with his "ich bin ein Berliner" line, Obama tried to use the city's unique history to create his own call for the spread of democracy and freedom through the world.

"Today people often come together in places like this to remember history, not to make it. After all, we face no concrete walls, no barbed wire. There are no tanks poised across the border. There are no visits to fallout shelters," Obama said. "And so sometimes there can be a sense that the great challenges have somehow passed. And that brings with it a temptation to turn inward, to think of our own pursuits and not the sweep of history, to believe that we've settled history's accounts, that we can simply enjoy the fruits won by our forebears."

The president said people should reject that urge.

"But I come here today, Berlin, to say complacency is not the character of great nations," he said. "Today's threats are not as stark as they were half a century ago. But the struggle for freedom and security and human dignity, that struggle goes on."