Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has a status update for Facebook co-founderEduardo Saverin: Stop attempting to dodge your taxes by renouncing your U.S. citizenship or never come to back to the U.S. again.

In September 2011, Saverin relinquished his U.S. citizenship before the company announced its planned initial public offering of stock, which will debut this week. The move was likely a financial one, as he owns an estimated 4 percent of Facebook and stands to make $4 billion when the company goes public. Saverin would reap the benefit of tax savings by becoming a permanent resident of Singapore, which levies no capital gains taxes.

At a news conference this morning, Sens. Schumer and Bob Casey, D-Pa., will unveil the “Ex-PATRIOT” – “Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy” – Act to respond directly to Saverin’s move, which they dub a “scheme” that would “help him duck up to $67 million in taxes.”

The senators will call Saverin’s move an “outrage” and will outline their plan to re-impose taxes on expatriates like Saverin even after they flee the United States and take up residence in a foreign country. Their proposal would also impose a mandatory 30 percent tax on the capital gains of anybody who renounces their U.S. citizenship.

The plan would bar individuals like Saverin from ever reentering the United States again.

“Eduardo recently found it more practical to become a resident of Singapore since he plans to live there for an indefinite period of time,” Tom Goodman, Saverin’s spokesman, told Bloomberg News in an email.

Last year 1,700 people renounced their U.S. citizenship.

Source: ABC News.

STORY 1: Obama worth as much as $10 million

Three things are apparent from President Obama’s annual financial disclosure statement, released today:

He is a wealthy man, with assets of as much as $10 million.

He has a hefty stake in JPMorgan Chase, the megabank that just made a bad $2 billion bet. Obama has an account worth between $500,000 and $1 million.

Despite the nation’s $15.6 trillion debt, he is a believer in government paper. More than half of his assets are in Treasury bills and notes.

The disclosure statement lists assets and liabilities in dollar ranges, so pinpointing the president’s net worth is difficult. His assets appear to tally between $2.6 million and $9.9 million. He holds a mortgage on his Chicago home of $500,000 to $1 million.

As was clear from Obama’s income tax filing, much of his income continues to roll in from book royalties. The disclosure form lists $100,000 to $1 million in royalties from Dreams From My Father, $100,000 to $1 million from Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, and $50,000 to $100,000 from The Audacity of Hope.

Vice President Biden, on the other hand, isn’t all that wealthy. His financial disclosure statement includes less than $1 million in assets — and as much as $1.5 million in liabilities, including between $500,000 and $1 million on his Wilmington home.

Source: USA Today.

STORY 2: Obama has up to $1 million with JPMorgan Chase

US President Barack Obama has up to $1 million in a JPMorgan Chase checking account, the White House said Tuesday as a controversy deepened over the bank’s $2 billion dollar losses.

Public figures in the United States are required by law to publish their assets and investments to avoid conflicts of interest, and the White House releases disclosures for Obama and Vice President Joe Biden each year.

As well as the between $500,000 and $1 million in the JPMorgan Chase Private Client Asset Management checking account, Obama also has millions of dollars in a variety of other accounts and funds, bonds and treasuries.

The largest holding, according to the disclosures, is between one and five million dollars in US Treasury notes.

Most of Obama’s wealth comes from book royalties, including from his best selling autobiography “Dreams From My Father.”

Obama said during a television interview with ABC’s “The View” broadcast Tuesday that the $2 billion in derivatives losses suffered by JPMorgan proved the need for tighter banking regulation.

He also said that JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon was “one of the smartest bankers we got and they still lost money.”

“They still lost $2 billion dollars and counting precisely because they were making bets in these derivative markets. This is why we passed Wall Street reform.”

The US Justice Department has opened an FBI probe into JPMorgan Chase’s more than $2 billion trading loss, a person familiar with the matter told AFP Tuesday.

News of the investigation came as Dimon, JPMorgan’s embattled chief executive, faced criticism at the company’s annual shareholders meeting in Tampa, Florida, over the shock loss.

Source: Yahoo News.

Spinners and Winners

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., became the most powerful woman in American history when she was sworn in as Speaker of the House in 2007. She lost that power four years later and is now hell-bent on winning it back. Spinners and Winners caught up with Pelosi on her early morning power walk by the Potomac River.

The 72-year-old grandmother shows no signs of slowing down as she briskly walks along the paved paths of Georgetown’s waterfront park and sums up her goal for the year with these words: “Just win, baby.”

“They have endless money, secret, undisclosed, special interest money that they pour into elections,” a slightly out-of-breath Pelosi said of Republican opponents. “But I think we can offset it. We have out-raised them, out-redistricted them, out-recruited them.”

Pelosi has been a veritable fundraising machine, raising more than $43 million for Democrats in this election cycle and attending nearly 500 fundraisers. The Democratic leader has put her heart and soul into winning back the house for Democrats, but she insists she is motivated by more than winning back the Speaker’s gavel.

“It isn’t about me, it is about what is at stake in this election and quite frankly I wish that so much were not at stake in this election.”

Pelosi also had some harsh words for fellow progressive Russ Feingold, who recently accused her of not doing enough to protect Social Security and Medicare. Check it out on this week’s Spinners and Winners.

Source: Yahoo News. Video at link.

On at least four occasions, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews mocked Sarah Palin for how he felt she’d do if she were ever on the hit television game show Jeopardy!.

In a delicious example of instant karma, the self-proclaimed brainiac got his chance to show America how smart he was in a special “Power Players” version of the show Monday, but came up quite short finishing dead last with the paltry sum of only $2,300 (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

CONTINUED at News Busters. Video at link.

MSNBC’s Al Sharpton in JEFFERSON CITY, MO: It’s war on black people, it’s war on women, it’s war on immigrants. … We have got to turn this around and start targeting in Missouri those legislators that want to roll back our right to vote!”

President Barack Obama has compiled a handy to-do list for Congress that, “if acted upon quickly, will create jobs and help restore middle class security,” according to the White House’s blog. And it’s about time. This is most certainly not, as cynics might suggest, another transparent political scheme. After all, these initiatives, the White House claims, enjoy bipartisan support—which, I gather, is meant to impress you, even if it’s not exactly true.

Regrettably, the sentiment of the to-do list does garner bipartisan support and illustrates how cheap populism leads to bad policy and why Washington shouldn’t be in the business of “creating jobs” in the first place.

Obama says passing his to-do list would help create “an economy built to last—one that creates the jobs of the future and makes things the rest of the world buys—not one built on outsourcing, loopholes, and risky financial deals.” History tells us that when government “creates” an economy, it won’t be much of an economy to speak of—but here’s the new plan:

“Reward American Jobs, Not Outsourcing.” Hey, let’s play on the genuine frustration of struggling Americans. Most politicians will latch on to this protectionist notion to some extent. But need it really be repeated that outsourcing, by generating more productivity, creates more wealth and more jobs? On this point, most economists actually agree.

CONTINUED at Reason. Written by David Harsanyi.

ABC News has only released one brief clip of Obama’s conversation about gay marriage today, but it seems fairly clear from the network’s coverage that his announcement amounts to much less than meets the eye. He now believes that gay couples should be able to marry. He doesn’t believe they have a right to do so. This is like saying that black children and white children ought to attend the same schools, but if the people of Alabama reject that notion—what are you gonna do?

The key language in the ABC News write-up is this:

The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on their own.

On this afternoon’s special broadcast, Jake Tapper echoed that point: “The president said he thought this was a state-by-state issue.”

Well, before Roe v. Wade, abortion was a state-by-state issue, too. So was slavery. There are 44 states in which gay men and women are currently barred from marrying one another. Obama’s position is that, while he would have voted the other way, those 44 states are perfectly within their rights to arbitrarily restrict the access of certain individuals to marriage rights based solely on their sexual orientation.

That is a half-assed, cowardly cop-out. There are currently at least three cases winding their way toward federal courts that address the issue of whether (among other things) the equal protection clause of the constitution guarantees gay men and women the same access to marriage rights as heterosexual men and women—the Proposition 8 case, in which David Boies and Ted Olson challenged California’s ban on gay marriage, and several challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act, which bars gay men and woman from receiving federal marriage benefits and allows states to refuse to recognize valid gay marriages. Obama’s Justice Department has admirably declined to defend the constitutionality of DOMA. But the position he enunciated today is in opposition to Boies and Olson: Obama is saying that if he were a judge, he would have rejected Boies and Olson’s constitutional arguments and affirmed the right of Californians to enshrine bigotry in their state constitution.

Equality is not a state-by-state issue. There is no reason other than ignorance and hatred that two men can get married in New York and not North Carolina. At a time when vindictive hucksters are rolling out anti-gay marriage amendments across the nation, and when conflicting state and federal laws portend an insoluble morass of divorce, custody, and estate issues, and when gay Americans are turning to the U.S. Constitution and the courts to seek an affirmation of their humanity, “it’s a state-by-state issue” is a shameful dodge.

Is it a politically wise dodge? Maybe. This was obviously a hastily arranged interview—we’re told that ABC News’ Robin Roberts, who is close to Michelle Obama, was only tapped in the last 48 hours by the White House to come down—designed to clean up the mess left by Biden’s pro-gay marriage comments in as advantageous way as possible. And for Obama to declare that he considers North Carolina and other states’ bans on gay marriage to be unconstitutional would probably energize the GOP base. But those bans are unconstitutional. And anyone who supports their legitimacy—as Obama just did, in no uncertain terms—even if they oppose the policy, is adopting the retrograde position in the contemporary gay marriage debate. Obama is moving backward, not forward.

Source: Gawker. Written by John Cook.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has announced it will introduce legislation designed to strip Americans of the right to defend themselves. Called “Stop Shoot First Laws,” the amendment to the Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill under consideration in the House would deny states federal funding allocated under section 505 of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 if they continue to allow citizens to defend themselves.

“Shoot first laws have already cost too many lives,” said Progressive Caucus co-chairs Keith Ellison and Raul Grijalva upon introducing their amendment. “In Florida alone, deaths due to self-defense have tripled since the law was enacted. Federal money shouldn’t be spent supporting states with laws that endanger their own people. This is no different than withholding transportation funds from states that don’t enforce seatbelt laws.”

“The message here is if you have this kind of law that your federal funding is going to take a hit because they make states less safe,” Adam Sarvana, communications director for Grijalva, toldPolitico.

In other words, the Democrats will force states to choose between putting their citizens at the mercy of violent criminals or taking federal largess.

Because the House does not have an open amendment process, the amendment will likely not see a vote on the floor. Ellison and Grijalva introduced the amendment in and effort to further politicize the Trayvon Martin case and increase pressure on the Second Amendment.

Democrats are using “Shoot First” instead of “Stand Your Ground” in an effort to portray self defense as homicide.

“Stand Your Ground” is a legal extension of the Castle doctrine stating that a person has a right to defend himself against an intruder. “Stand Your Ground” laws state that one can use deadly force in any location one is legally allowed to be and removes the requirement that the threat must occur on one’s own property.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus is the largest caucus within the Democratic caucus in Congress. It is supported by the Institute for Policy Studies, MoveOn.org, the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, Hip Hop Caucus, and other liberal and so-called “progressive” organizations.

Source: Infowars. Written by Kurt Nimmo.

President Barack Obama is staying in the gay marriage closet because he doesn’t want to alienate black voters or gay donors.

He’s refusing to confirm or deny that he would use a second term to champion new marriage rules that would allow same-sex couples to get marriage licenses.

“We respect the right of all people to have a personal opinion,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said on May 7 — a day after Vice President Joe Biden endorsed marriage for gays and lesbians.

“The president is the right person to describe his personal views. He said his views on this were evolving, and I don’t have an update on that,” Carney added.

Marriage is a tough dilemma for Obama because his base is deeply split: Strong majorities of black Americans oppose changing marriage rules to endorse same-sex couples. Like many other social conservatives, that community sees marriage as an institution to bind parents together and to their children.

That’s a popular position. Voters in more than 30 states — including liberal California — have used state-wide votes to solidify state support for the traditional view of marriage.

But many gays want to see White House endorsement of same-sex marriage because it would provide additional social validation of their relationships.

CONTINUED at The Daily Caller.

Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, fending off questions about whether she used her Native American heritage to advance her career, said today she enrolled herself as a minority in law school directories for nearly a decade because she hoped to meet other people with tribal roots.

“I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off,” said Warren.

The Harvard Law professor argued she didn’t use her minority status to get her teaching jobs, and slammed her Republican rival U.S. Sen.Scott Brown for suggesting otherwise.

CONTINUED at the Boston Herald.