As conservatives bond to pass trickily or overtly more and more anti-women legislation, one very articulate and expressive woman dragged away from the Senate mic for daring to express her views in a cutting manner only 1/10th as vicious as the typical right-wing legislator rant against women.

She's interviewed here.

As the sequester kicks in, the obvious is happening.

For those who say there's nothing new in PRISM, well yeah, there might be new tricks in related programs.

Every letter you send is photographed. One might imagine they also use Optical Character Recognition to have digital searchable records of Date, From & To names + addresses for every one of 160 billion postal items a year.

Quite frankly I'm a bit shocked - where VOIP calls in digital form and emails and other digital content is simple to grab & search, this mail filming operation is huge and fairly manually intensive - every single item.

Pretty interesting letter even if penned by his lawyer instead.

Very focused on what Edward revealed as proving Clapper's lying.

Fatherly pride sounds like, not even a hint of the "Edward's being used by Wikileaks" whine I heard earlier.

Going to be some interesting 4th of July discussions around the BBQ this year.

Yeah, what to do when it's not a hacker or foreigner who does a leak, but actually a 4-star general? Bloody hippies take time off camping & protesting to regret he's working their side of the street. (actually, to be fair, he's retired and not on the street - rather nicely ensconced in a plus home in the suburbs.)

Worse, there's no sign that Assange or Glenn Greenwald were involved, so Washington pundits were abuzz looking for other ways to shoot the messenger. (links to Chick Fil-A are being considered, but so far no luck)

Okay, not really news - what they always do - leak classified stuff they think makes them look good. But don't let anyone leak news that makes them look bad, or even make liars out of them. That's un-American. They'll let you know when they're ready to leak some more secret transparent stuff.

Yep, sure you were worried about those who would do us harm infiltrating the Department of Education

The Department of Education, meanwhile, informs employees that co-workers going through “certain life experiences . . . might turn a trusted user into an insider threat.” Those experiences, the department says in a computer training manual, include “stress, divorce, financial problems” or “frustrations with co-workers or the organization.”

So what did they get on Obama and does it change his behavior?

But no need to worry about the NSA - only trained professionals.

Would be a nice cache of phone calls & emails for his presidential library come 2017. The transparency President, 1st one officially bugged.

Just need to have a Democratic president, and Viola! Democrats are ready to turn the Constitution on its head too!

The good news is that Marx (not Groucho, sadly) is making a comeback - most Americans think his most famous quote is from our Founding Fathers.

And that Education, but not Privacy, is a basic right. Of course that education doesn't extend to knowing what our Constitution or Bill of Rights actually say, and even if we do know, they're just kinda Heloise Hints at this point, not actual legal requirements.

How far we've come in a few short years.

As jobless claims "surprisingly" go up by 32,000 this month (uh, did everyone forget the sequester?), an Atlantic reporter notes the abandonment of workers by both GOP & Democrats.

While he pushes 3 theories how workers ended up under the bus, I'll push a 4th - "social media whatever".

Oh wait, I guess it was some black chick holed up in Cuba for the last 35 years.

"Top terrorist". Guess we need SEAL Team 6 to come out of retirement. Obama once again addresses the "overreach" of the 60's by doubling down.

Could have used this moment to pardon Shakura based on the excesses of COINTELPRO and the doubtfulness of evidence in her conviction.

Might have sought rapprochement with Cuba after 50+ years of embargo and our recent human rights abuses that make us brothers in arms with Fidel's techniques.

So my wife's pressure cooker can now be considered a WMD with the right ingredients - who woulda thunk it?

Bush is vindicated - the US officially sees a WMD in every pot.

Dzhokhar messed with the wrong short-order cook - his life is on the line now.

I wonder if those planes that took down 2 skyscrapers were considered WMDs?

But a bomb that killed 3 is one.

Every IED laid in Afghanistan is now a WMD - we have a whole new set of war criminals to pursue to the end of the earth - Afghanistan 4-evuh.

May be a big shakeup in the region - on paper, could help even Turkish Kurds, but could also embolden Turkey's ruling Muslim government to go more religiously conservative.