BIRTHDAYS – MONDAY: Caitlin Hayden, of the U.S. embassy in Kabul (hat tip: Hammer). BIRTHWEEK: Nina Rees (hat tip: Matt)

POPPING ONLINE – HuffPost and The Daily Caller both have the same lead – President Bill Clinton’s admission to ABC’s Jake Tapper, in an interview taped for “This Week,” that he was “wrong” to take advisers’ advice against regulating derivatives. Tapper added this “UPDATE”: “Clinton's office called to say the former president sees former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan as the one who mainly led the charge against regulating derivatives.” The exchange:

TAPPER: “One of the things that President Obama is pushing for is regulation of derivatives, and also with a thing called the Volcker rule, he's trying to separate commercial banking interests from investment banking interests. These were things that were the opposite policies of Treasury Secretary Rubin and Summers at that time, do you think in retrospect they gave you bad advice on these issues?” 

CLINTON: “…I think what happened was the SEC and the whole regulatory apparatus after I left office was just let go. I think if Arthur Levitt had been on the job at the SEC, my last SEC commissioner, an enormous percentage of what we've been through in the last eight or nine years would not have happened. I feel very strongly about it. I think it's important to have vigorous oversight. Now, on derivatives, yeah I think they were wrong and I think I was wrong to take it, because the argument on derivatives was that these things are expensive and sophisticated and only a handful of investors will buy them.”

GOLDMAN FALLOUT – EXCLUSIVE: When you typed “Goldman Sachs SEC” into Google beginning around 4 p.m. Friday, the results included an ad for Wall Street reform, paid for by the Democratic National Committee. With the White House amping up its push for tighter regulations of banks, a financial-services industry lobbyist called the ad buy “the Chicagoland equivalent of a horse head in your bed.” With Google AdWords, advertisers can bid to have a message displayed next to the search results for specific queries, then pay based on the number of times the ad is clicked. “Fight Wall Street Greed: Help Pres. Obama Reform Wall Street and Create Jobs. Families First!” says the DNC ad. That’s followed by a link to www.BarackObama.com, now run by Organizing for America. The DNC’s Brad Woodhouse says the ad is part of an online campaign that began about two weeks ago , and has included such Google search terms as “AIG,” “Lehman Brothers,” “Goldman” and “Bank of America.” More Woodhouse: “We have all kinds of online advertising up to allow folks who are searching and reading online to get involved with Organizing for American and the president and make a difference on his agenda. We've been running online ads since early last year. We watch closely what terms folks are searching and set up our ads accordingly.” Screengrab

--Questions about timing continued to bubble in the financial-services community yesterday. The SEC filing came during trading hours and before the close, Goldman shares had lost some $12.4 billion in market value.

--Barclays Capital analysts wrote in a research report Friday: “Today's SEC announcement and conference call (which did not allow analysts or investors to ask questions) was a well-timed, and perhaps not coincidental, effort to sway some on-the-fence Republicans to support a tougher financials bill that the White House has been lobbying for. Targeting GS, given the flurry of anti-Wall Street press hat has centered around that firm offers the publicity that the administration needs at this critical juncture.” The full report

--Paul S. Atkins, a former SEC commissioner who was appointed by President George W. Bush, said these sorts of cases are usually settled in advance rather than being announced. “It’s unusual, with a large broker-deal, to have a case like this go to litigation,” said Atkins, a visiting scholar at American Enterprise Institute and partner in a consulting firm. “It’s so dangerous: This could shut a firm down.”

--Conspiracy or coincidence? The industry notes that the DNC sent a blast e-mail about “Wall Street Reform” from “Barack Obama” shortly after the Goldman news broke on Friday. The DNC says the e-mail was long in the works: “It takes several days and sometimes more than a week to write, design and get signoff on such e-mails.” The industry’s creative young minds came up with this flier

SPEED READ:

--THE BIG IDEA – “War of words over Obama's soft tone,” by Josh Gerstein: “‘Rogue states’ is being pushed aside in favor of the less confrontational ‘outliers.’ ‘Islamic radicalism’ is being converted to the less religiously freighted ‘violent extremism.’ And in one of the most important speeches of his presidency, Barack Obama omitted a term that was the Bush administration’s obsession: terrorism – part of a larger effort to de-emphasize the problem in Obama's relations with Muslim states. Diplomats, academics and foreign leaders are hotly debating whether Obama, who won the White House promising dramatic change in U.S. foreign policy, has actually changed much substantively. But there’s little question that he's made a pronounced shift in how the U.S. talks about the rest of the world – and in a way that has opened him up to charges of being soft in the face of America’s enemies. … The administration defends the moves, saying that by needlessly antagonizing or alienating nations and groups, it can make it harder for the U.S. to build alliances against them. … White House aides said the de-emphasis of ‘rogue states’ was deliberate. They were less clear about whether the replacement term [‘outliers’] was set in stone.”  

--INTERVIEW -- “Iraq's Maliki makes case for holding on to post,” by L.A. Times’ Ned Parker in Baghdad: “Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, in his first interview with a Western media outlet since last month's bitterly fought elections, vowed Saturday that Iraq's Sunni Arabs would be major players in the next government, as he cast himself both as peacemaker and front-runner to lead the country. The Shiite prime minister, who appeared confident and jovial during an hourlong interview at his palace office, also invited a secular bloc led by rival Iyad Allawi to join him in governing, despite an acrimonious postelection period that saw Maliki's supporters label the Iraqiya slate a front for the late Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. … ‘We rejected the concept of sectarianism and built the state based on nationalism,’ Maliki said. ‘For this reason, I make the invitation for the Iraqiya bloc to participate in the government.’ … His confidence Saturday may have sprung from his belief that he is close to sealing a deal with the other main Shiite bloc to form a new government. … Maliki emphasized that he wanted to reconcile Iraq's religious and ethnic communities, scarred by decades of war. … The prime minister portrayed himself as a referee among the different sects and ethnicities, still traumatized by Hussein's rule.” Alas, the word “Obama” doesn’t appear in the story.

--WASHINGTON, INC. – WP lead story, “W.Va. mine disaster calls attention to revolving door between industry, government,” by Kimberly Kindy and Dan Eggen: “More than 200 former congressional staff members, federal regulators and lawmakers are employed by the mining industry as lobbyists, consultants or senior executives, including dozens who work for coal companies with the worst safety records in the nation, a Washington Post analysis shows. The revolving door has also brought industry officials into government as policy aides in Congress or officials of the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), which enforces safety standards. The movement between industry and government allows both to benefit from crucial expertise, but mining safety experts say it often has led to a regulatory system tilted toward coal company interests. That, they say, has put miners at risk and left behind a flawed enforcement system that probably contributed to this month's Massey Energy mine explosion in West Virginia. … The Post's examination identified nearly a dozen former MSHA district directors who recently took jobs as executives and consultants with Massey or Murray Energy, the two U.S. mining companies with the worst safety records. … The incentives for such job moves are significant, with industry typically paying double or triple the salary of district directors, who average about $85,000 a year.”

--WEEK IN REVIEW – Kate Zernike on the Tea Party supporters: “In the results of the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, they are better educated and wealthier than the general public. They are just as likely to be employed, and more likely to describe their economic situation as very or fairly good. Yet they are disproportionately pessimistic about the economy and the nation. A breathtaking 92 percent said the country is on the wrong track. … ‘The story they’re telling is that somehow the authentic, real America is being polluted,’ said Rick Perlstein, the author of books about the Goldwater and Nixon years. Liberal regimes tend to bring out these resentments, Mr. Perlstein said, because conservatives have equated liberalism in the popular mind with the expansion of government power, something that has always stirred distrust among Americans. The Tea Party supporters recycle their language from the conservative movements of the early 1960s in response to the Kennedy presidency, the resistance to busing, gay rights and the Carter administration in the mid 1970s, and the opposition to the Clinton health care plan in the early 1990s.”

MEDIAWATCH – N.Y. Times Public Editor, “Squandered Trust,” by Clark Hoyt: “THE Times continues to hurt itself with readers by misusing anonymous sources. … Despite written ground rules to the contrary and promises by top editors to do better, The Times continues to use anonymous sources for information available elsewhere on the record. It allows unnamed people to provide quotes of marginal news value and to remain hidden with little real explanation of their motives, their reliability, or the reasons why they must be anonymous…. Anonymous sources can be invaluable. Notably, they recently helped The Times break a scandal involving Gov. David Paterson of New York. But used casually or routinely, they stir readers’ skepticism. … Now, here is why all of this matters: … Joe Sexton, the metro editor, said anonymous sources were the only way The Times could get the vital story of [the N.Y. Gov. Paterson] scandal. The paper’s reporting has proved true at every turn — prompting high-level resignations, the end of Paterson’s election campaign and a criminal investigation. Sexton said he realized it ‘can take something of a leap of faith for some readers to be comfortable’ with anonymous sources in such articles. That leap would be easier if The Times did not squander readers’ trust by using unnamed sources so often and so casually in far less compelling cases.”

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