AL HUNT: You’re on the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Obama administration has granted Hollywood filmmakers unprecedented access to information about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden to help them make a movie. Is this appropriate?

MARCO RUBIO: I think it’s part of a troubling trend of chest-thumping, showing how smart and good our intelligence services are–and they certainly are. But in the process of trying to impress people of what this administration was able to do, whether it was in that raid or–

HUNT: So, you think it was wrong to give that kind of access?

RUBIO: Not only was it wrong, but we had leaks about the new bomb technology that’s very troubling; we have a recent book by a former CIA official that has things in there that perhaps shouldn’t be in that book. I think there’s a growing trend of leaks that threaten America’s operational capacity in the intelligence world and I think–if you look at some of the things that have found their way onto the screen, not just in the movie, but some of the specials around the anniversary of the bin Laden raid, I think one has to be concerned that that’s going to impact the ability to carry out similar operations in the future.

Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin reports:

The U.S. government considers the descendants of Palestinian refugees to be refugees, a State Department official told The Cable, and another top State Department official wrote in a letter to Congress that there are now 5 million Palestinian refugees.

Rogin’s revelation comes on the heels of a hotly contested Senate amendment aimed at finding exactly how many Palestinian refugees are benefiting from U.S. tax dollars. It would require the State Department to report on how many Palestinian refugees actually lived in Palestine from 1946-1948 and were displaced by the regional conflict and how many are descendants of these persons.

Rogin highlights a letter from Deputy Secretary of State Tom Nides opposing the amendment:

But later down in the letter, Nides states, “UNRWA provides essential services for approximatelyfive million refugees, including education for over 485,000 school children, primary health care in 138 clinics, and social services for the most Vulnerable, particularly in Lebanon and Gaza.” (Emphasis added.)

To experts and congressional officials following the issue, that declaration was remarkable because it was the first time the State Department had placed a number — 5 million — on the number of Palestinian refugees.

“The Nides letter could be considered a change in U.S. policy with consideration to refugees because it states clearly that 5 million people served by UNRWA are refugees,” one senior GOP Senate aide told The Cable. “For the Obama administration to stake out a position emphatically endorsing the rights of 5 million Palestinian refugees is by itself prejudging the outcome of final- status issues.”

Cause of Action, a non-profit organization that promotes government transparency, filed an injunction for relief Friday in the United States District Court of the District of Columbia, requesting the court to force the agency to disclose records it has so far withheld.

Cause of Action filed the complaint after filing three separate Freedom of Information Act requests and sparring with the agency for nearly nine months.

“For an administration that has publicly committed itself to transparency, the Federal Trade Commission’s refusal to produce documents in response to Cause of Action’s several month-long FOIA investigation reeks of arbitrariness,” Cause of Action executive director Dan Epstein said in a statement to the Free Beacon. “As we state in our complaint, the FTC has wrongfully withheld requested agency records and has repeatedly denied our appeals.”

The organization filed its first FOIA request in August 2011, requesting information on the FTC’s new guidelines concerning endorsements and testimonials in advertising. The goal was “to shine light into the FTC’s potentially biased enforcement decisions towards individuals who make product endorsements on their blogs,” Epstein said.

Cause of Action also requested a fee-waiver. Groups and individuals qualify for FOIA fee-waivers if they can prove they are representatives of the news media, their interests are primarily non-commercial, or that disclosure of information would contribute to public understanding of government operations.

The FTC denied Cause of Action’s fee-waver request by saying the group had “failed to demonstrate that disclosure of the requested records will be likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations and activities of government.”

After its fee-waiver was denied, Cause of Action requested information from the FTC on other groups who had received fee-waivers with their request.

The FTC continued to deny Cause of Action’s requests by saying the group did not meet the requirements for non-commercial status.

The documents Cause of Action did obtain—after months of appeals—revealed the FTC had granted fee-waivers to other groups that used language almost identical to that used by Cause of Action.

“What is most alarming to us is that while our requests are strikingly similar to other organizations who have been granted documents, ours continues to be denied in a repeated cycle of denials that obfuscate the FOIA’s spirit of openness,” Epstein said.

Eighteen organizations have received fee-waivers with their FOIA requests, according to FTC documents provided to Cause of Action on March 19. Some of them are media outlets such as Politico, USA Today, and ProPublica.

However, the FTC also granted fee-waivers to liberal organizations such as the AFL-CIO, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Marin Institute, finding their requests were non-commercial in nature and would contribute to public understanding.

Cause of Action believes the documents show a pattern of bias in the FTC’s application of FOIA rules.

“If the public cannot be educated as to what sort of endorsement subjects them to the FTC’s crosshairs, then every American is a moving target for FTC abuse,” Epstein said. “Cause of Action seeks to know what our government is up to and we have been told, repeatedly, to shut up.”

Neither the Federal Trade Commission’s public affairs office nor its general counsel responded to requests for comment.

The claim was drawn from a MarketWatch post by Rex Nutting titled “Obama spending binge never happened,” which has been resoundingly debunked and discredited by a number of experts.

White House press secretary Jay Carney cited the same report on Wednesday when he told reporters that Obama “has demonstrated significant fiscal restraint” and urged members of the media not to “buy into the BS that you hear about spending and fiscal constraint with regard to this administration.”

Carney said any reporting to the contrary could only be the result of “sloth and laziness.”

Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s in-house fact checker, joined the list of critics calling “BS” on Carney’s comments, in a Friday post titled “The facts about the growth of spending under Obama.”

“First of all, there are a few methodological problems with Nutting’s analysis,” Kessler writes. “Especially the beginning and the end point.”

Using more accurate data from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, Kessler calculates that the actual growth rate of federal spending under Obama (5.2 percent) is nearly four times larger than Nutting’s estimate (1.4 percent). And that’s based on the amount the federal government actually spent since 2009, not what Obama proposed to spend.

[I]n every case, the president wanted to spend more money than he ended up getting. Nutting suggests that federal spending flattened under Obama, but another way to look at it is that it flattened at a much higher, post-emergency level — thanks in part to the efforts of lawmakers, not Obama.

Like a host of others who have criticized Nutting’s post, Kessler points out that Obama has presided over some of the highest federal spending levels in history:

In the post-war era, federal spending as a percentage of the U.S. economy has hovered around 20 percent, give or take a couple of percentage points. Under Obama, it has hit highs not seen since the end of World War II — completely the opposite of the point asserted by Carney. Part of this, of course, is a consequence of the recession, but it is also the result of a sustained higher level of spending. …

Carney suggested the media were guilty of ‘sloth and laziness,’ but he might do better next time than cite an article he plucked off the Web, no matter how much it might advance his political interests. The data in the article are flawed, and the analysis lacks context — context that could easily could be found in the budget documents released by the White House.

West New York Mayor Felix Roque and his 22-year-old son, Joseph, each face more than 10 years in prison if convicted on charges of gaining unauthorized access to computers, conspiracy and causing damage to protected computers.

Both were arrested Thursday morning by FBI agents.

Bail for both men was set at $100,000 during an afternoon court hearing, and they were ordered to surrender their passports. They also may only travel between New York and New Jersey, and cannot contact the alleged victims or possible witnesses.

When federal investigators told Roque that he could go to jail, he expressed no issues with that, saying he had ”lived the dream.”

Several paragraphs down, we learn more about these protestors:

Romney highlighted his record of education as governor of Massachusetts, when the state’s schools were among the best in the nation in some areas. …

Outside, meanwhile, some brick row houses across from the school were boarded up. Police had cordoned off a full city block to protect Romney and his entourage. Residents, some of them organized by Obama’s campaign, stood on their porches and gathered at a sidewalk corner to shout angrily at Romney. Some held signs saying, “We are the 99%.” One man’s placard trumpeted an often-referenced Romney gaffe: “I am not concerned about the very poor.”

Obama, meanwhile, attended a number of campaign events on Thursday, including one at a wind turbine manufacturing plant in Iowa, where he urged Congress to continue to subsidize an industry notorious for decapitating endangered birds like the bald eagle.

MADDOW: You know it’s the same thing with the unemployment rate, right? So, earlier this month, Mitt Romney said that having the unemployment rate down to 8.1 was not something he was happy about–there’d be no cause for celebration until it was down to 4 percent. He also said, with Mark Halperin, that by the end of his first term, he’d like to have it at 6 percent–which is where the CBO predicts it’s going to go anyway, if we keep just doing what our current policies are. So it would be a failure for President Obama not to hit 4 percent, but Mitt Romney’s going to do 6 percent.

Maddow took heat Wednesday for misrepresenting statements Romney had made about the unemployment rate. Dylan Byers of Politico noted:

Then, speaking for herself, Maddow said: “Mitt Romney says anything over 4 percent is a failure of the Obama administration, then two-and-a-half weeks later says his own goal is 6 percent unemployment.”

That is incorrect — which is to say, false. Mitt Romney did not say that unemployment over 4 percent is a failure of the Obama administration. He said it was not cause for celebration. Furthermore, in his interview with Halperin, Romney did not say that his own goal of 6 percent unemployment would be cause for celebration either. He merely said that that was his own goal… Maddow did not get the facts right. Instead, she invented her own facts — specifically, she invented a statement and attributed it to Mitt Romney, despite the fact that he never made it.

Warren strongly supported the auto bailout in Obama’s re-election campaign film The Road We’ve Traveled, saying that “blood” would have been on the president’s hands had he not bailed out auto manufacturers GM and Chrysler.

But Warren previously suggested that bankruptcy of auto manufacturers would not matter and that the auto bailout would be a bad idea.

Warren said that companies should build cars people want during a December 2008 roundtable discussion with newly elected members of Congress at the Harvard University Institute of Politics.

“Spending money to prop up markets, at least in my view, is a losers game,” Warren said.

Government cannot be the “softest chump” when it comes to lending money, Warren said. She also criticized the ideas behind Obama’s stimulus package, saying that stimulus in the form of cash to people is mostly spent to pay off debt and not create jobs.

“Warren, as a smart politician, probably knew that the path of least resistance was for her to change her tune,” said elections expert Jay Cost.

“In all likelihood, this is what happened: the pro-bailout position is what the Dem establishment has indicated it supports; Warren wants to tap into its money and resources, so she flipped with little to no arm-twisting,” Cost said.

A February 2012 Gallup poll showed that 63 percent of Democrats continue to support the auto bailout, while only 44 percent of registered voters approve.

“The auto bailout was marked by obvious pay-to-play with the United Auto Workers Union,” said Marc Scribner, transportation policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The UAW is a stalwart Democratic ally. The union has spent more than $26 million since the 2008 election cycle. Almost all of that money has gone to Democrats.

The UAW received an ownership stake in Chrysler and became one of General Motors’ largest shareholders as a result of the auto bailout.

Obama’s bailout of Detroit automakers GM and Chrysler cost taxpayers $81.8 billion in addition to “many other costs,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Obama administration gave more than $50 billion to GM during the auto bailout, as well as a special tax break that allowed GM to pay no taxes in 2011.

GM stockholders have complained that they received “absolutely nothing” for their shares of GM stock due to the auto bailout.

The union endorsed Warren in February 2012.

Warren’s flip on the auto bailout may become an issue in the Senate campaign.

“Warren became a figurehead of the left-wing anti-crony capitalist movement and distinguished herself with that narrative, so I think this policy reversal really hurts her image,” Scribner said.

Warren had already begun to change her position on the auto bailout by September 2009. Then chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP, she asked why banks bailed out by the federal government were apparently treated better during the bailout process than automakers.

“I think the problem has been all the way throughout this crisis, that the banks have been treated gently and everyone else has been treated really pretty tough,” Warren said at the time.

“This just shows that Elizabeth Warren is not some kind of ‘Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington’ type. Massachusetts voters would be deluding themselves if they think Elizabeth Warren is going to be some kind of game-changer in Washington and represent transparency and honesty. Her position on the auto bailout has been molded by the White House and the DNC,” Scribner said. “I wish we could see more of 2008 Elizabeth Warren.”

The Warren campaign did not return a request for comment.