Shows what the government spends our tax money on.

Wiretaps cost hundreds of dollars per target every month, generally paid at daily or monthly rates. To wiretap a customer’s phone, T-Mobile charges law enforcement a flat fee of $500 per target. Sprint’s wireless carrier Sprint Nextel requires police pay $400 per “market area” and per “technology” as well as a $10 per day fee, capped at $2,000. AT&T charges a $325 activation fee, plus $5 per day for data and $10 for audio. Verizon charges a $50 administrative fee plus $700 per month, per target.

Oh, and one more thing, since we’re talking about avoiding bills: Bank of America didn’t pay a dime in federal taxes last year. Or the year before. In fact, they got a $1 billion refund last year. They claimed it was because they had pretax losses of $5.4 billion in 2010. They paid out $35 billion in bonuses and compensation that year. You do the math.

Come 2014, the Affordable Care Act will prevent insurers from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions: cancer victims and stroke survivors will be able to buy insurance at the same price as otherwise similar applicants. Insurance companies may take a hit to profits, but part of the cost will surely be passed on to the lower-cost counterparts to this high-cost pool. Healthy people might be tempted to opt out, but under the new law, they’ll be required to have insurance. This individual mandate is a natural fix to the problem of adverse selection in health insurance: It keeps the lowest-cost participants from opting out, and as a result the market doesn’t unravel.

If Barack Obama loses this fall, he will forever seem a disappointment: a symbolically important but accidental figure who raised hopes he could not fulfill and met difficulties he did not know how to surmount. He meant to show the unity of America but only underscored its division. As a candidate, he symbolized transformation; in office, he applied incrementalism and demonstrated the limits of change.

What Republican operatives quickly realized was that they needed a way around those pesky contribution limits. And the way around them was to form political action committees, PACs, that were officially unaffiliated with campaigns, but worked on their behalf.

The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall Street, and independents think he's a wimp. Andrew Sullivan on how the president may just end up outsmarting them all.

Congress renewed Patriot Act provisions on enhanced surveillance powers until 2015, and the F.B.I. expanded agents’ authority to comb databases, follow people and rummage through their trash even if they are not suspected of a crime.

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

German group latest to volunteer for higher contributions, saying country could raise €100bn in two years with a 5% wealth tax

As you stand in endless lines this holiday season, here’s a comforting thought: all those security measures accomplish nothing, at enormous cost. That’s the conclusion of Charles C. Mann, who put the T.S.A. to the test with the help of one of America’s top security experts.

Both the foolish and the manipulative are quick to thrust the words "socialism" and "communism" at those who disagree with them, usually with no regard for what these terms actually mean. This resource attempts to improve the heat to light ratio by providing some overlysimple definitions of terms we hear misused every day.

Meredith Attwell Baker, one of the two Republican Commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission, plans to step down—and right into a top lobbying job at Comcast-NBC.

Eric Schmidt talks about his testimony

It looks like Fox is trying to mislead its viewers on the unemployment rate. Again.