The U.S. government "quietly" agreed not to collect billions of dollars in potential taxes from Citigroup as part of its deal to allow the bank to repay its taxpayer bailout, The Washington Post reported.

The Internal Revenue Service issued a notice on Friday that extends the benefit to Citi and other companies in which the government owns a stake, the Post reported.

Palin also took to Facebook to allege that concerns over global warming are "doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood." Gore said Wednesday that the scientific community has worked intensively on the issue for twenty years. "It's a principle in physics," he told Mitchell. "It's like gravity, it exists."

MITCHELL: Well, one of the things that she has written recently on Facebook is that this is doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that makes the public feel like owning an SUV is a sin against the planet.

GORE: Well, the scientific community has worked very intensively for 20 years within this international process, and they now say the evidence is unequivocal. A hundred and fifty years ago this year was the discovery that CO-2 traps heat. That is a -- a principle in physics.

It's not a question of debate. It's like gravity; it exists.

These effects are taking place all over the world exactly as predicted by the scientists....

MITCHELL: If it's so unequivocal, I've got to ask you about the -- the leak of those e-mails. Even today, Tom Friedman talked about them massaging the evidence. Why would they feel the need to hype the evidence if it's so unequivocal, some scientists, I should say?

GORE: Yeah, I don't think they did. I haven't read all the e-mails that were stolen. They're from -- the most recent one was like 10 years ago.

And what they've done is they've snatched a few phrases completely out of context, and I'll give you an example.

One of the oft-quoted phrases has to do with the scientist saying that a particular study isn't good science and shouldn't be included in the -- international report. Well, that was their view. They exchanged it privately.

The study was included, fully aired, discussed. The weak points were -- were analyzed. The other points were analyzed. So it's an example of how these private exchanges have been blown out of proportion, taken out of context, misrepresented.

It is often said that no one should see the ugly reality of how politics or sausages are made. But that's not true in the world of scientific research. Transparency is the goal, and in my experience it is also the norm. With regard to sharing data, my view is that data gathered by public monitoring organizations (e.g., the National Weather Service) should be made available to anyone as soon as technically feasible. Data gathered as part of government-funded research grants to research scientists should probably be available within two to four years even if nothing is published, and should definitely be available upon request as soon as work is published that relies on these data.... In one case, in which someone apparently advised deleting e-mails that might be subject to a Freedom of Information Act request in the U.K., it looks as though scientists may have broken the law, or at least seriously considered doing so. If so, this is not "normal" in scientific circles and it certainly is not acceptable.

The day after Bush spoke, the Washington Post published a front-page story suggesting the speech was carefully staged for the president's political benefit. "The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props," the Post reported.

With the Post article in hand, Democrats pounced. "The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students," said Richard Gephardt, then the House Majority Leader. "And the president should be doing more about education than saying, 'Lights, camera, action.'"

The nation would be forced to borrow more than $9 trillion over the next decade under President Obama's policies, the White House acknowledged late Friday, bringing their long-term budget forecast in line with independent estimates.

—Greg Mankiw, via gregmankiw in this entry.