As attentive readers may have observed I rarely provide explanations for unexpected absences or temporary unavailability, or even much notice for that matter.

Nor am I doing so now.

So I’m off feeding kittens and puppies (really cute ones too) to alligators out of pure spite merely to maliciously deprive you of my photonic presence.

Deal.

Extending a Hand Abroad, Obama Often Finds a Cold Shoulder

By MARK LANDLER and PETER BAKER, The New York Times

Published: June 18, 2013

Even his friends are not always so friendly. On Wednesday, for example, the president is to meet in Berlin with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who has invited him to deliver a speech at the Brandenburg Gate. But Ms. Merkel is also expected to press Mr. Obama about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, which offend privacy-minded Germans.

For all of his effort to cultivate personal ties with foreign counterparts over the last four and a half years – the informal “shirt-sleeves summit” with Mr. Xi was supposed to nurture a friendly rapport that White House aides acknowledge did not materialize – Mr. Obama has complicated relationships with some, and has bet on others who came to disappoint him.

“In Europe, especially, Obama was welcomed with open arms, and some people had unrealistic expectations about him,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a longtime senior American diplomat. Noting that Mr. Obama continued some unpopular policies like the use of drones, he said, “People don’t appreciate that American interests continue from administration to administration.”

White House officials said Mr. Obama’s meetings with Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin were productive, regardless of the atmospherics. One of the president’s most problematic relationships, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, has improved since he visited Jerusalem in March, with their differences over Iran’s nuclear program narrowing.

Still, for a naturally reserved president who has assiduously cultivated a handful of leaders, it has been a dispiriting stretch.

Gee, why do you think that is?

Could it be spying?

No Foreign Policy accomplishments for this president in his second term.

Insurers Inflating Books, New York Regulator Says

By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH, The New York Times

June 11, 2013, 8:50 pm

Benjamin M. Lawsky, New York’s superintendent of financial services, said that life insurers based in New York had alone burnished their books by $48 billion, using what he called “shadow insurance,” according to an investigation conducted by his department. He issued a report about the investigation late Tuesday.

…

Insurance is regulated by the states, and Mr. Lawsky said his investigators found that life insurers in New York were seeking out states with looser regulations and setting up shell companies there for the deals. They then used those states’ tight secrecy laws to avoid scrutiny by the New York State regulators.

Insurance regulation is based squarely on the concept of solvency – the idea that future claims can be predicted fairly accurately and that each insurer should track them and keep enough reserves on hand to pay all of them. The states have detailed rules for what types of assets reserves can be invested in. Companies are also expected to keep a little more than they really expect to need – called their surplus – as a buffer against unexpected events. State regulators monitor the reserves and surpluses of companies and make sure none fall short.

…

The transactions at issue are modeled after reinsurance, a business in which an insurance company pays another company, a reinsurer, to take over some of its obligations to pay claims. Reinsurance is widely used and is considered beneficial because it allows insurers to spread their risks and remain stable as they grow. Conventional reinsurance deals are negotiated at arm’s length by independent companies; both sides understand the risk and can agree on a fair price for covering it. The obligations drop off the original insurer’s books because the reinsurer has picked them up.

Mr. Lawsky’s investigators found, though, that life insurance groups, including some of the best known, were creating their own shell companies in other states or countries – outside the regulators’ view – and saying that these so-called captives were selling them reinsurance. The value of policies reinsured through all affiliates, including captives, rose to $5.46 trillion in 2012, from $2.82 trillion in 2007.

The chief problem with captive reinsurance, Mr. Lawsky said, is that the risk is not being transferred to an independent reinsurer. Also, the deal is not at arm’s length. And confidentiality rules make it difficult to see what secures the obligations.

The New York State investigators subpoenaed this information and discovered that some states were approving deals backed by assets that would not be allowed in New York; Mr. Lawsky referred to “hollow assets,” “naked parental guarantees” and “conditional letters of credit.”

…

Insurers, unlike banks, have no prepaid fund like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to make customers whole in the event of a collapse. That’s why Mr. Lawsky said he feared that taxpayers might have to be called to the rescue again.

The Next Crash And The Next Bailout Now

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

at 11:15AM Jun 13, 2013

Give them a suit with rubber pockets and they’d steal soup.

Learning from the sweet — and largely unprosecuted — techniques of their pals in the financial-services industry, it appears that the moguls, poobahs, and panjandrums in the insurance industry are finding their own special ways to game the entire system into the poorhouse.

…

You think any of these guys looked at what happened in 2008 and thought, “Boy, those guys really were crooks and bought the country a helluva catastrophe. We should learn from them and not do that ourselves.” Nope, I guarantee you the first thoughts among the people who thought up this scam for the insurance companies was, “Holy crap, look at the dough those guys made!” And I guarantee you those same people all got raises. The upper levels of American capitalism is so rotten with amorality, so utterly devoid of any conventional sense of ethics, let alone social responsibility, that it hardly seems worth pointing it out any more. Congratulations to America’s graduate schools of business. You have bred three generations of vampires to feed on the rest of us. It’s as though every medical school in the country adopted the basic approach to thoracic surgery of Sweeney Todd and married it to the economic philosophy of Bialystock And Bloom.

NSA Scandal Seems to Have Done Serious Damage to Obama’s Image

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Monday June 17, 2013 7:40 am

It appears the recent revelations about the NSA surveillance programs and President Obama’s less than honest defense of them has done some real damage to his standing with the American people.

According to a new CNN poll, Obama’s job approval rating is now negative. Only 45 percent approve of how he is handling his job while 54 percent disapprove. This is the lowest it has been in CNN’s poll since 2011.

Even more concerning for Obama is that for the first time a majority of the country doesn’t see him as honest and trustworthy. The poll found 49 percent view him as trustworthy while 50 percent do not. This may not seem terrible, but this is a nine point drop in the number who see him as honest in less than a month. Back in May, 58 percent said Obama was honest.

Once you lose the public’s trust it becomes much harder to defend your actions going forward because you will no longer be given the benefit of the doubt.

Obama doubles down on NSA defense as poll numbers slip

By Justin Sink, The Hill

06/17/13 05:57 PM ET

The interview underscored the defensive posture the White House has adopted in recent weeks, with the president arguing that the NSA spying is “transparent” despite Rose noting that the independent court created to monitor the program served essentially as a rubber stamp.

…

(A) new poll released Monday by CNN found significant damage to the president’s brand.

Half of those surveyed said they do not believe the president to be trustworthy, the first time a majority has held that opinion. Moreover, the president lost 10 points among independents and 17 points among those under 30, suggesting widespread unease about the programs.

Phil Singer, a veteran of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, said Obama’s task is complicated by other controversies, including the Internal Revenue Service’s admitted targeting of conservative political action groups and the Justice Department’s investigations into reporters.

…

Obama has come under fire from the left for attacking Bush’s policies as a candidate but then employing similar policies as president. Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old contractor who leaked the programs to the press, said he did so in part from disappointment with Obama.

Democratic strategist Chris Lehane said public perceptions that Obama has somehow shifted on the use of surveillance programs since entering the White House is a problem.

“The issue is especially challenging given that there had been an expectation going back to the 2008 campaign that the choice between civil liberties and national security was a false choice,” said Lehane. “He has the double burden of both trying to justify the policies and make clear how they are in fact consistent with the political brand he established as far back as 2008.”

…

Strategists say the White House needs to regain control of the news cycle to prevent the slip in the polls from becoming a permanent downward spiral.

“Over the last several months, events have dictated this president instead of this president dictating events,” Singer said.

Surveillance programs divide Democrats

By MAGGIE HABERMAN, Politico

6/17/13 4:29 PM EDT

And in a politically peculiar moment – in which liberal icons like Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, up for reelection next year in a purple state, have loudly endorsed the National Security Agency tactics – the issue creates a vacuum into which a candidate on the left end of the spectrum could step into the 2016 fight.

…

Indeed, the darling of the progressive left, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), may be the only person who could easily thread the needle on this issue, having come to Congress just this year (her aides insist she is not running for president). But she – like most prominent Democratic elected officials – has had a muted response to the NSA, suggesting she’s waiting to see how it plays out.

Still, the atmosphere created by the NSA’s tactics could be ripe for a new figure on the left – if not Warren, then perhaps a Democratic primary challenger to a sitting senator. The goal wouldn’t necessarily have to be winning an election but using the campaign as a launchpad to become a progressive icon.

…

“I think Democrats are ultimately going to have a hard time jumping on the side of the progressive left” on national security, said foreign policy blogger Steve Clemons. “Democrats have tried so much to rid themselves of the Vietnam taint that they couldn’t be trusted … to make national security decisions.”

…

The prospective Democratic field includes governors who have had little to do with such national security decisions (Andrew Cuomo, John Hickenlooper, the fairly hawkish Martin O’Malley), but also senators who voted to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, for instance).

Voting to renew FISA may be a potential negative for senators eyeing higher office. But Clinton and Biden have an inside-the-tent perspective on the Obama White House that other prospective nominees don’t.

…

When the initial NSA disclosures were made in news outlets in the past few weeks, a 2006 interview in which Biden told CBS News that the Bush-era snooping was “very intrusive” got new traction. “I was talking about a different program then,” Biden told a pool reporter following him last weekend about then versus now. “It was a different program.”

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the liberal blog Daily Kos, said he doesn’t “anticipate anything” being said by either Biden or Clinton on this front in the foreseeable future – unless issues like old interviews force the matter, and even then, only rhetorically.

“Both have presidential designs, and no president (or wannabe president) willingly gives up executive power,” Moulitsas, who has been deeply critical of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for defending the NSA programs, said in an email.

In a signal of the difficulties facing any presidential hopeful who isn’t a governor, Moulitsas added, “Rather than be outraged by this gross violation of our constitutional freedoms, Congress has, in mostly bipartisan fashion, decided to lecture us on how they are only lying to the public for its own good. I just wish we had more whistleblowers, and more U.S. companies talking about what the government is trying to make them do.”

You see, things are getting a little hot on the domestic front what with IRS-gate (probably no there there),  AP/Fox-Gate (it’s bad to spy on reporters), NSA-gate (Hey, no big.  We’re spying on everybody!), and the various policy failures (No Grand Bargain for YOU!  Mr. Deficit- he dead).

So we need a distraction.  Something that will revive that good old mindless U-S-A! U-S-A! chanting spirit.

I’ve got it!  How about another Middle Eastern war?

U.S. Confirms Syrian Government’s Use Of Chemical Weapons

By Hayes Brown, ThinkProgress

Jun 13, 2013 at 5:54 pm

The United States on Thursday confirmed that the Syrian government used chemical weapons on its own people, ending weeks of uncertainty over precisely who had unleashed the deadly agents.

…

That uncertainty apparently no longer exists within the U.S. intelligence community. According to a statement from the White House, the intelligence community now with a high-degree of confidence “estimates that 100 to 150 people have died from detected chemical weapons attacks.” The White House also indicated that the United States is “going to make decisions about further action on our own timeline.”

…

President Obama has long called the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime a “red-line,” one that would be met with unspecified consequences if it were to be crossed. The determination that the line has been crossed has led to the Obama administration finally deciding to provide more and greater types of support to the Syrian rebels in their attempts to overthrow Assad.

On a call with reporters, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said Obama has decided to give the rebels “military support,” but refused to directly say whether the U.S. had decided to arm Syria’s rebels, saying he was unable to detail every type of support the Syrian rebels will be receiving. Rhodes stressed, however, that this aid would be “responsive” to the requests of the Syrian Military Council and that it would be “substantively different” in “both scope and scale than what we have provided before.” The Obama administration has mulled arming the rebels for months now without pulling the trigger, instead insisting on only providing non-lethal aid.

Gee, didn’t we arm Osama Bin Ladin and Saddam Hussein?

What could possibly go wrong?