Wall Street fatcats, beware! The Senate Finance and Banking Committees are watching you, and they're sick and tired of your greedy, cheatin' ways. Seriously. They each called hearings today on executive compensation.

Yesterday's LA Times had a good op-ed on tax privatization, as follows. ONCE UPON a time, the Internal Revenue Service proclaimed that its mission was "to collect the proper amount of tax revenue at the least cost, serve the public by continually improving the quality of our products and services and perform in a manner warranting the highest degree of public confidence in our integrity, efficiency and fairness."

Today's New York Times reports that critics say the IRS' private tax collection program, slated to start on September 7, "has so many pitfalls that they were urging debtors to insist on negotiating directly with the agency." This strategy, the story reveals, has been adopted by the NTEU: The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents employees of the agency and opposes the program, has drafted a sample letter that taxpayers can send to leave the private collection program and demand that the agency handle their cases. .

We noted earlier today how horrendously misleading and downright incorrect Sen. Grassley's statement about the CBO August Update report was in great detail, but thought it might be appropriate to compile a list of summer reading materials Grassley - or perhaps more importantly his staff - could read to get themselves up to speed on the issue.