Bloomberg,

Julian Assange, founder of the website that published more than 91,000 secret U.S. military reports from Afghanistan, says he’s revealing injustices. President Barack Obama says he’s concerned that disclosure of sensitive information may harm military operations.

Conceived as an electronic dead-drop for confidential documents, WikiLeaks.org receives material that governments and businesses seek to keep secret and publishes them so that they remain in the public domain forever.

“We want to produce positive reform,” Assange, a 39-year- old Australian, said in a telephone interview from London yesterday. “An efficient way to do that is to selectively go after material that organizations are trying to conceal.”

AP,

President Obama says he can relate to the plight of Americans striving in the struggling economy to pay bills while saving for their kids’ education.

He says he and first lady Michelle Obama took a hit like everybody else when the economy nearly collapsed, telling ABC that a college fund for daughters Malia and Sasha has gone “up and down” with the stock market.

Obama says the first couple is “not that far removed from what most Americans are going through.” He tells the network “it was just a few years ago that we had high credit card balances, we had two kids, thinking about college. We had our own retirement accounts, wondering if we were going to be able to get enough assets in there.”

Chicago Sun-Times,

Sneed hears real estate mogul Neil Bluhm is tossing a private birthday party here for President Obama, who turns 49 on Aug. 4.

• The shocker: The dinner invite to the Barack bash at Bluhm’s home requires a $30,000 donation to the Democratic National Committee!

• The stunner: Obama is also scheduled to be in town Aug. 5 for a fund-raiser at the Palmer House for U.S. Senate hopeful Alexi Giannoulias, who is hoping to capture Uncle Rocky’s old seat.

AP,

Reveling over a new milestone in his presidency, a triumphant Barack Obama on Wednesday signed into law the most sweeping overhaul of lending and high-finance rules since the Great Depression, adding safeguards for millions of consumers and aiming to restrain Wall Street excesses that could set off a new recession.

The president’s signing ceremony capped nearly two years of intense debate over how to avoid a recurrence of the 2008 financial meltdown that buckled the U.S. economy and has left sharp, lasting imprints on the nation’s politics and in Americans’ homes.

In a heated midterm election season that has put a dent in his public support, Obama sought to put the complex law in pocketbook terms. Emphasizing provisions that guard borrowers from abusive lenders, he claimed “the strongest financial protections for consumers in the nation’s history.”

View FULL SIZE

Fox News,

A group of liberal journalists in 2008 sought to sweep under the rug the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal that threatened to derail then-Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, according to documents obtained by The Daily Caller, an online publication founded by Tucker Carlson, a conservative contributor for Fox News.

The documents offer evidence to conservative critics who have long held that the mainstream media were in the tank for Obama, and bolsters the argument that reporters with major news outlets are biased in their coverage.

Journalists working for Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic expressed outrage over the tough questioning Obama received from ABC anchors Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos at a debate and some of them plotted to protect Obama from the swirling controversy, according to the Daily Caller.

President Obama plans to press Congress today to pass pay-equity legislation that would make it easier for women to sue employers who pay them less than their male counterparts, the White House said Monday.

“Women deserve equal pay,” White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said in an interview, citing government statistics that show women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn. “It’s a very fundamental right.”

Obama will announce his support for the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that has languished in Congress for several years. In 2007, President Bush warned he would veto the bill, and it has been stalled by opposition from some Republicans and business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Arizona Daily Star,

Most Arizonans no longer think Barack Obama is doing a decent job as president.

A new Behavior Research Poll released Sunday shows that nearly four out of every 10 Arizonans now rate Obama’s performance as poor or very poor. That’s up 5 points from the same survey taken in January.

What’s different is that the number of those who think he’s doing an excellent or good job has plummeted.

Three months after taking office, fully 51 percent of Arizonans gave Obama positive ratings, even though the state went for hometown favorite John McCain in the 2008 election.

A year into office, that had slid to 40 percent. But by the time pollster Earl de Berge conducted this latest survey, between June 30 and July 11, only 28 percent of Arizonans were willing to say they like the job he’s doing.

St. Louis Today,

A wealthy Manhattan investment banker and former top Democratic fundraiser was sentenced Thursday to 12 years in prison for defrauding banks of $292 million, some of which he donated to politicians including Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Al Gore.

Hassan Nemazee, 60, had reached a plea deal in March, admitting that he cheated banks out of the money and pleading guilty to three counts of bank fraud and one count of wire fraud. U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein in Manhattan said he’ll get out of prison in about a decade.

Nemazee was the national finance chairman of Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign; he also raised money for Obama and a long list of other prominent Democrats. He was Sen. John Kerry’s New York finance chairman during his failed 2004 presidential run.

The Washington Post,

Half a year after some predicted he would be booted from the Obama administration, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner stands to inherit vast power to shape bank regulations, oversee financial markets and create a consumer protection agency.

Few Treasury secretaries have had such sweeping influence over such a wide realm as Geithner will wield once President Obama signs the new financial overhaul legislation passed this week by Congress.

The effort to dramatically expand financial regulation bears the stamp of no one more than Geithner. The bill not only hews closely to the initial draft he released last summer but also anoints him — as long as he remains Treasury secretary — as the chief of a new council of senior regulators. The legislation also puts him at the head of the new consumer bureau until a director is confirmed by the Senate, allowing Geithner to mold the watchdog in coming months. And it will be up to him to settle a raft of issues left unresolved by the bill — for instance, which financial derivatives will be subject to the tough new trading rules and which risky activities big banks will be required to spin off.

My Way News,

A sweeping overhaul of the nation’s financial regulations stands on the verge of reaching President Barack Obama’s desk after a year of partisan struggles and delicate cross-party courtships that promised more and delivered less.

Only three Senate Republicans say they will vote for the bill during a key vote Thursday that will set the stage for final passage. But the bill bears the fingerprints of many others in the GOP.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., negotiated several provisions with key committee Republicans such as Richard Shelby and Bob Corker. Neither, though, intends to vote for the bill.

That those bipartisan talks even occurred was remarkable in the highly politicized atmosphere in Congress. That they failed to expand the bill’s base of support illustrates how much things remain the same.

CNSNews,

President Barack Obama never asked the Senate for a hearing on his nominee to run Medicare and Medicaid, Dr. Donald Berwick, as far as White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs knows.

Berwick was nominated on Apr. 19, and with no confirmation hearing scheduled, Obama recess-appointed him on July 7 when Congress was out of town for its July 4 vacation.

Obama made the recess appointment because a public confirmation hearing in the Senate would have made Berwick — who has openly advocated the redistribution of wealth as part of a health care plan — “unconfirmable,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.).

The Washington Post,

House Democrats are lashing out at the White House, venting long-suppressed anger over what they see as President Obama’s lukewarm efforts to help them win reelection — and accusing administration officials of undermining the party’s chances of retaining the majority in November’s midterm elections.

In recent weeks, a widespread belief has taken hold among Democratic House members that they have dutifully gone along with the White House on politically risky issues — including the stimulus plan, the health-care overhaul and climate change — without seeing much, if anything, in return. Many of them are angry that Obama has actively campaigned for Democratic Senate candidates but has done fewer events for House members.

The boiling point came Tuesday night during a closed-door meeting of House Democrats in the Capitol. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) excoriated White House press secretary Robert Gibbs’s public comments over the weekend that the House majority was in doubt and that it would take “strong campaigns by Democrats” to avert dramatic losses.

“What the hell do they think we’ve been doing the last 12 months? We’re the ones who have been taking the tough votes,” Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (N.J.) said in an interview Wednesday.

The Washington Times,

A week after suing Arizona and arguing that the state’s immigration law creates a patchwork of rules, the Obama administration said it will not go after so-called sanctuary cities that refuse to cooperate with the federal government on immigration enforcement, on the grounds that they are not as bad as a state that “actively interferes.”

“There is a big difference between a state or locality saying they are not going to use their resources to enforce a federal law, as so-called sanctuary cities have done, and a state passing its own immigration policy that actively interferes with federal law,” Tracy Schmaler, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., told The Washington Times. “That’s what Arizona did in this case.”

But the author of the 1996 federal law that requires states and localities to cooperate with federal authorities on immigration laws thinks the administration is misreading the statute and that sanctuary cities are in violation of federal law. Drawing a distinction between those localities and Arizona, he said, is “flimsy justification” for suing the state.

The Washington Post,

Burdened by low approval on the economy, President Obama brought former president Bill Clinton and investor Warren Buffett to the White House on Wednesday to talk about job creation.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs denied that Clinton — who oversaw record surpluses and was generally seen as business-friendly — was brought in to mediate between business leaders and Obama, now under fire from corporate leaders for his economic policies.

This week, the US Chamber of Commerce issued a harsh letter complaining that the White House is burdening businesses with too much regulation and hampering job growth.