The surest sign of the failure of the latest ‘scandal’ narrative is the quick jump to another one. Of course, ‘Benghazi!’ is a recycled narrative and has already flopped badly but I’m betting the right wing is counting on the stupidity of their base.

• Republicans allege Benghazi ‘cover up,’ but of what exactly? Republicans have set the stage for another round of congressional hearings about Benghazi on Wednesday and, this time, they’re promising explosive new testimony from a series of self-described “whistle blowers.” “The dam is about to break on Benghazi,” South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Fox News Monday. According to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the “cover up” involving the deaths of four Americans is “more serious than Watergate” and will likely drive the president to an early exit from the Oval Office.

IRS

• IRS ‘scandal’: Issa’s case crumbles after release of transcripts. Rep. Elijah Cummings–ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee–made good on his promise to release more transcripts from the committee’s interviews with workers at the Cincinnati IRS. Despite protests from chairman Darrell Issa, Cummings made available Tuesday the full interview of the IRS Screening Group Manager, who handled groups applying for tax-exempt status. “This interview transcript…debunks conspiracy theories about how the IRS first started reviewing these cases,” Cummings wrote in a letter to Issa. “Answering questions from Committee staff for more than five hours, this official—who identified himself as a ‘conservative Republican’—denied that he or anyone on his team was directed by the White House to take these actions or that they were politically motivated.”

• Full Transcript Reveals That Darrell Issa Lied About Obama Involvement In IRS Scandal. By releasing the full transcript of interview with the IRS Screening Group manager, Rep. Elijah Cummings has proven that Rep. Darrell Issa lied about Obama’s involvement in the IRS scandal.

Rights

• Congress voted Tuesday, 228-196, to pass a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy—a bill that the White House has already promised to veto.

• MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Tuesday night noted that Representative Michael Burgess (R-TX) was a leading member of a House subcommittee focused on public health and biomedical issues.

• House Republicans Do Their Part to Elect Hillary Clinton in 2016 By Passing Abortion Ban. House Republicans continued to blaze a path for their party to lose the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton by passing a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks. Today’s vote was an obvious political move to fire up the Republican base ahead of 2014, but that motivation could cut both ways. For men and women who truly care about liberty, and don’t want big government conservatism making our medical decisions for us, this vote should serve as motivation to get to the polls in 2014. House Republicans are setting the table for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but the message can be sent in 2014 that this sort of blatant contempt for women will not go unpunished.

• Republican mentions suffering of Jesus amid anti-abortion speech on House floor. Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) on Tuesday assured those effected by abortion that they could be healed by the power of Jesus Christ.

• As Idaho Republicans push resolutions to get the state Legislature to overturn city ordinances that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, one local GOP official argued that though he would hire a gay man as an employee, he shouldn’t have to keep him on if he comes “into work in a tutu.” “I’d hire a gay guy if I thought he was a good worker. But if he comes into work in a tutu … he’s not producing what I want in my office,” said Cornel Rasor, the current chairman of the resolutions committee of the Idaho GOP, according to the Spokesman-Review. “If a guy has a particular predilection and keeps it to himself, that’s fine,” Rasor continued. “But if he wants to use my business as a platform for his lifestyle, why should I have to subsidize that? And that’s what these anti-discrimination laws do.”

US

• US deploys 1,500 Marines to Yemen: Yemeni official. The United States has deployed 1,500 Marines with advanced arms and military equipment to Yemen, says a Yemeni military official. Some 1,500 Marines were deployed to al-Anad military base in the country’s southern province of Lahij, al-Sharea daily quoted the official as saying on Monday.

• Bank of America’s mortgage servicing unit systematically lied to homeowners, fraudulently denied loan modifications, and paid their staff bonuses for deliberately pushing people into foreclosure: Yes, these allegations were suspected by any homeowner who ever had to deal with the bank to try to get a loan modification – but now they come from six former employees and one contractor, whose  sworn statements were added last week to a civil lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts.

• How Republicans Who Took Millions In Farm Subsidies Justify Cutting Food Stamps. The House plans to vote this week on a farm bill that cuts nearly $21 billion from food stamps, and several members who support the cuts have benefited significantly from the various forms of farm subsidies provided by the same legislation.

Canada

• Gunfire, victims on stretchers – all part of a training exercise at UBC today. RCMP say students and staff at UBC should not be alarmed if they hear gunfire from some buildings today because it’s part of a large-scale training exercise for emergency responders. Sgt. Peter Thiessen, a spokesman for the RCMP, said the training will take place from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., and will involve members of BC Ambulance, various RCMP detachments and the Vancouver police. He said about 150 to 200 responders, mock victims and witnesses are expected to take part. Several buildings have been closed off to the public around Agronomy and Main Mall roads, and there will be simulated gunfire in that area, he said.

• Stephen Harper dodges question on why his office spearheaded attacks on Justin Trudeau. Prime Minister Stephen Harper sidestepped a question Tuesday over whether it was appropriate for his taxpayer-funded office to be distributing documents to media about paid speeches Justin Trudeau made before he was elected to Parliament.

• CNET Reporter Posts Wildly Inaccurate Yet Totally Viral ‘Bombshell’ About NSA Eavesdropping. As I read the article, the headline became less and less accurate — a trend we’ve witnessed several times recently. In fact, McCullagh’s reporting almost entirely disintegrated under just cursory scrutiny… but not before it went viral. Nadler appeared to be confused between the notion of “listening” to calls and acquiring “information” from a phone, which are two very different things with varying layers of oversight. But the details and word usages were vague and scrambled and the meaning was lost. Somehow, though, McCullagh took a super-colossal leap from this perplexing back-and-forth to the bombshell conclusion that the NSA admitted to listening to phone calls at any time without a warrant. The “admits” language in the headline obviously led readers to believe that the NSA perhaps issued a statement or offered testimony confirming claims made by Edward Snowden to Glenn Greenwald. However, the NSA admitted no such thing, and there was nothing from the NSA in McCullagh’s article confirming such an admission. Nadler didn’t even say the acronym “NSA” during the exchange. Upon further investigation, it turns out McCullagh is a vocal Ron Paul supporter, which is fine, but exposes perhaps why his article is loaded with so much anti-surveillance confirmation bias.

• The president argued that oversight through the federal court system and Congress safeguards Americans against any abuses of privacy, even referring to the National Security Agency programs as “transparent.” “You’ve got a federal court with independent federal judges overseeing the entire program, and you’ve got Congress overseeing the program—not just the intelligence committee and not just the judiciary committee,” he said. Obama continued, “there has been a lot of misinformation out there.” He acknowledged the public’s uneasiness over the secret collection of phone and Internet data, yet maintained that some information must stay classified. “Even though we have all these systems of checks and balances, Congress is overseeing it, federal courts are overseeing it–despite all that, the public may not fully know. And that can make the public kind of nervous, right?” But he said, “What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails … and have not. They cannot and have not, by law and by rule, and unless they–and usually it wouldn’t be ‘they,’ it’d be the FBI–go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it’s always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies: you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause.” Still in order to address “legitimate concerns” over the use of private citizens’ information, the president said he “asked the intelligence community to do is see how much of this we can declassify without further compromising the program.”

• Snowden: You don’t go and help the Russians if your goal is fighting for the American people, unless you have a darn good reason, and Snowden has so far given none for today’s new leaks. I just can’t accept the argument that it’s okay to leak classified information simply because the leaker thinks it’s justified, especially when he’s being set up as some kind of role model for future national security whistleblowers. You’d better have a darn good reason if you’re going to leak national security secrets, and break some major laws, while running the risk of endangering our national security. And at this point, with these new revelations, it’s no longer clear what is motivating Edward Snowden, other than animus. And that’s not good enough to justify the actions of a man who’s starting to look less and less like Daniel Ellsberg with each new revelation.

Reproductive Rights

• Rep. Trent Franks’ (R-Ariz.) proposal to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy reaches the House floor. Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), widely seen as a top Democratic target in 2014, said last week, “I discouraged our leadership from bringing this to a vote on the floor. Clearly the economy is on everyone’s minds, we’re seeing very stagnant job numbers, confidence in the institution of government is eroding and now we’re going to have a debate on rape and abortion. The stupidity is simply staggering.” The stupidity looked even worse when the bill advanced after Franks inexplicably and falsely claimed, “The incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.” It led House GOP leaders to give the bill a little touch-up: Rep. Trent Franks’s (R-Ariz.) bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks nationwide now includes an exception for rape and incest after his remarks about rape and pregnancy created an uproar. And it’s not Franks’s bill anymore — or more precisely, he won’t be managing his own bill when it goes to the House floor Tuesday. He’s being replaced with a high-profile House GOP woman.

• Facepalm: Republican cites masturbating fetuses to support new abortion restrictions. Representative Michael Burgess (R-TX) on Monday asserted that he witnessed male fetuses pleasuring themselves as early as 15-weeks after conception, RH Reality Check reported. His comments came during a House Rules committee debate on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would ban abortions nationwide after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Middle East

• Russia, a veto-wielding member of the U.N. Security Council, will not permit no-fly zones to be imposed over Syria, Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said on Monday. “I think we fundamentally will not allow this scenario,” Lukashevich told a news briefing, adding that calls for a no-fly zone showed disrespect for international law.

• Afghanistan: The Pentagon said on Monday it will spend $572 million to buy 30 Russian-built military helicopters that will be used by Afghan security forces. The Mi-17 helicopters will be used by Afghanistan’s National Security Forces Special Mission Wing, which supports counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics and special operations missions. The contract with Rosoboronexport, the Russian arms company, covers spare parts, test equipment and engineering support. The Pentagon said the work would be performed in Russia. It is expected to be completed by the end of 2014.

• Iran’s outgoing president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been summoned to a criminal court in Tehran to answer unspecified charges following the victory of the moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani in Friday’s presidential election. “Appear in court following the complaint lodged against you by the head of parliament’s Article 90 committee as well as Ali Larijani, the head of the parliament and Mr Yaghoub Khalilnejad,” read the summons published by the semi-official Fars news agency. The government’s website said the charges were not specified. Rouhani himself has nothing to do with the lawsuit but the timing showed Ahmadinejad’s parliamentary rivals had waited until the election was over before making their complaint public. Ahmadinejad is scheduled to hand over Iran’s presidency to Rouhani in early August, when the president-elect will be sworn in.

Canada

• Montreal awaits word on whether mayor will address charges. Mayor Michael Applebaum faces 14 charges, including fraud, amid calls to resign.

• Star seeks unsealing of warrants, arguing links to Mayor Rob Ford are in the public interest. The Star filed an application in a Scarborough court on Monday to have the warrants made public, arguing the public has a right to know what connections those warrants may reveal an ongoing crack cocaine scandal surrounding Mayor Rob Ford.

• Toronto police raids: List of names and 224 charges released in Project Traveller gang sweep. Released the names of 35 people charged in gang raid, while 10 suspects remain outstanding. The star’s sources say at some point during the year long police probe, investigators became aware of the existence of a video appearing to show the mayor smoking crack cocaine and making homophobic and racially charged statements.

US

• Supreme Court strikes down Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship to vote. The Supreme Court on Monday struck down an Arizona law that requires people to submit proof of citizenship when they register to vote. The vote was 7-2. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, said that a 1993 federal law known as the Motor Voter Act takes precedence over the Arizona law because of its requirement that states “accept and use” the federal voter registration form. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, two members of the court’s conservative wing, dissented.

• Obama, Putin to sign new deal on reducing nuclear threat. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin said they would sign an agreement on securing and destroying nuclear material to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, replacing a 1992 deal that expired on Monday.

• NORAD Exercise Planned for National Capital Region. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and its geographical component, the Continental United States NORAD Region (CONR), will conduct exercise Falcon Virgo 13-09, between 11:30 p.m., Tuesday, June 18 and 5:30 a.m. EDT Wednesday, June 19, in the National Capital Region, Washington, D.C.. The exercise is comprised of a series of training flights held in coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Capital Region Coordination Center, the Joint Air Defense Operations Center (JADOC), Civil Air Patrol, U.S. Coast Guard and CONR’s Eastern Air Defense Sector.

• Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ may need a new nickname after two fatal blasts. Not that there should be tighter oversight of the Louisiana chemical industry or anything, but there were fatal blasts at two different Louisiana chemical plants last week. Thursday’s explosion at the Williams Olefin plant killed two and injured more than 100, while Friday’s rupture (not an explosion, executives insist) at a CF Industries plant killed one and injured eight. So, what kind of safety records did these plants have leading up to last week?

• OSHA Investigating Second Chemical Plant Explosion In Louisiana. One day after a petrochemical plant exploded in Geismar, Louisiana on Thursday, killing two people and injuring 73, another chemical plant exploded in the state, killing one person and injuring seven. The CF Industries Holdings plant in Donaldsonville manufactures nitrogen, and the company is the largest producer of nitrogen in the country. This is the worst accident at the plant in 13 years.

• McCain Claims ‘Secret’ Email Accounts Fuel Distrust, Uses Secret Email Address. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) criticized the Obama administration in a letter Monday, accusing officials of undermining public distrust in government by using “secret e-mail addresses.” But McCain himself uses a secret e-mail address — as have previous Republican administration officials since the federal government began using email.

• Congressman Calls For New Birther Investigation, Questions ‘The President’s Validity’. Another Republican is accusing President Obama of secretly being a Kenyan man who forged his birth certificate in order to get elected President of the United States. This time the theorist is Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC), chairman of the House Homeland Security Oversight Subcommittee. Duncan appeared on the radio program TruNews with Rick Wiles on Friday where the host asked the South Carolina congressman whether the House would go after Obama’s “phony identification papers.” Duncan initially demurred, but then agreed with Wiles that Obama could be lying about his birth certificate, calling for Congress to “revisit” the issue of “the president’s validity.”

• Joe Biden To Make Another Gun Control Push To Congress. Working to maintain gun policy reform’s place in the political conversation, Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday will urge Congress to act on the White House slate of proposals. It’s unclear whether Biden will explicitly call for a vote on expanded background checks, the centerpiece of those proposals. But a senior administration official told reporters that Biden “will make that push” when it came to arguing for the president’s policy prescriptions, which were filibustered in the Senate in April.

From my morning Facebook post:

Think Snowden is some sort of hero? How about now? How far is he going to have to go before people start seeing that he isn’t some heroic whistleblower? That maybe he never was? What makes Snowden any different than any of the other spies that have gone before him? If he had stayed in the US, and had the courage to stand right out in the open and make these claims, testify, maybe the people wanting to turn him into aome kind of hero would have a point, but you’ve got this guy giving state secrets – not to the US public – but to foreign countries. Countries that – not all that long ago in the scope of things – would certainly would have made Snowden a traitor, without a doubt.

• Why is NSA-leaker Edward Snowden now helping the Russians?: Former NSA employee, and famed PRISM whistleblower, Edward Snowden is now leaking top secret documents that appear to have nothing to do with the NSA eavesdropping on Americans, and everything to do with hurting the United States’ national security position vis-a-vis Russia before a key Obama-Putin summit. According to a new story in the Guardian, Snowden is now leaking documents showing that in 2009 the United States intercepted communications from then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who was attending the G20 Summit in London. The leak from Snowden comes only one day before President Obama is to meet with Russian President Putin at the G8 summit. The Guardian is reporting in a second story, also leaked by Snowden, that during the same summit, British intelligence was surreptitiously monitoring foreign politicians as well. But Snowden didn’t stop there.  He also leaked documents showing that British intelligence planned to spy on delegates to the Commonwealth summit. A few journalists are already questioning Snowden’s motivation for the leaks.

• CNET walking back their NSA story: Claims came from Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, not the NSA. The NSA may be able to get “specific information” from a call, but that doesn’t mean they are LISTENING to a call. Metadata isn’t listening in. It’s more like seeing a photograph and being able to know what type of camera too it. What Nadler was saying was in response to a denial from FBI director Robert Mueller that NSA can listen to a call at will. The CNET article was later altered, and retitled “NSA Spying Flap Extends to Contents of U.S. Phone Calls.” And then after that, CNET’s sister site ZDNET walked back the story:

Update at 2:50 p.m. ET on June 16: We’re pulling the plug on this story … following Rep. Nadler’s latest comments casting doubt on CNET’s story. In a statement to our sister site, Nadler said: “I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant.” …

Update at 10:20 p.m. ET on June 16: The U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a statement, debunking the claims. “The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress,” the statement read….

• CNET Says NSA “Admits” Listening to US Phone Calls – But That’s Not What the Video Shows. Uh, wait a minute. The latest fear-mongering story about the NSA appears to be bogus. Here’s the story at CNET: . If you read this carefully, you’ll notice that the source for this “admission” is not the NSA at all — it’s second-hand information from Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY).

• Hong Kong Wants to Keep Edward Snowden as a Symbol of “China’s Growing Power”. Tonight, Chinese state newspaper Global Times is calling for Edward Snowden to remain in China: Snowden Extradition Would ‘Tarnish Hong Kong’s Image’, Says China State Media | South China Morning Post.

• American spies based in the UK intercepted the top-secret communications of the then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, during his visit to Britain for the G20 summit in London, leaked documents reveal. The details of the intercept were set out in a briefing prepared by the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s biggest surveillance and eavesdropping organisation, and shared with high-ranking officials from Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The document, leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and seen by the Guardian, shows the agency believed it might have discovered “a change in the way Russian leadership signals have been normally transmitted”. The disclosure underlines the importance of the US spy hub at RAF Menwith Hill in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, where hundreds of NSA analysts are based, working alongside liaison officers from GCHQ.

• Snowden reveals British spies set up fake Internet cafes to monitor G20. Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic. The revelation comes as Britain prepares to host another summit on Monday – for the G8 nations, all of whom attended the 2009 meetings which were the object of the systematic spying.

• Director of National Intelligence’s Statement on CNET’s Bogus Story. “The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress. Members have been briefed on the implementation of Section 702, that it targets foreigners located overseas for a valid foreign intelligence purpose, and that it cannot be used to target Americans anywhere in the world.”

• Edward Snowden’s a Hero, All Right – to China and Russia. Well now. I’m at a loss to understand how Edward Snowden’s latest disclosures could possibly have been inspired by his much-vaunted concerns about civil liberties, since he’s now revealing details about US espionage against Russia. [That countries spy on each other should come as no surprise, but going out of your way to leak information to those countries specifically? That sure as hell doesn't make you a hero.]

Syria

• PROPAGANDA ALERT?: Iran will send 4,000 troops to aid Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria. The Independent on Sunday has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran – even before last week’s presidential election – to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost almost 100,000 lives in just over two years. Iran is now fully committed to preserving Assad’s regime, according to pro-Iranian sources which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic’s security, even to the extent of proposing to open up a new ‘Syrian’ front on the Golan Heights against Israel.

• Syria/G8: Syria’s raging civil war was set to top the agenda at the Group of Eight summit in Northern Ireland starting on Monday, with President Barack Obama trying to get Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Syria’s most powerful ally, to help bring Bashar Assad to the negotiating table. The leaders’ first private face-to-face meeting in about a year comes after Obama angered Moscow by authorizing American military support for the Syrian rebels. Putin criticized the West’s position during talks with Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron on the eve of the summit, saying the rebels were cannibals. “I think you will not deny that one does not really need to support the people who not only kill their enemies, but open up their bodies, eat their intestines, in front of the public and cameras,” Putin said at a tense joint news conference with Cameron on Sunday.

• White House vows no ‘rush to war’ in Syria: The White House on Sunday defended its approach to the Syrian conflict as Republicans launched fresh accusations that the Obama administration is doing too little and has moved too slowly to aid rebels battling President Bashar al-Assad. “We have to be very discerning about what’s in our interest and what outcome is best for us, and the prices that we’re willing to pay to get to that place,” White House chief of staff Denis McDonough said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “We’ve rushed to war in this region in the past. We’re not going to do it here,” he added, an apparent reference to the war in Iraq launched by the George W. Bush administration.

• Harper rules out arming Syrian rebels, blasts Putin for supporting ‘thugs of Assad regime’

• Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi, in severing ties with Damascus, aims to show solidarity with Western and fellow Arab states opposed to Syria’s regime and also boost his under-fire image at home, analysts said.

• The Syrian government has condemned Egypt’s decision to cut ties with Damascus and back the armed uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s government, terming it an “irresponsible” move.

• Violence continues in Syria’s civil war, as Syrian state television and residents report that an explosion has shaken a Damascus neighbourhood that is home to several embassies and a military airport. The explosion took place on Sunday night, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), an anti-government rights watchdog, reported, citing residents and activists on the ground in Damascus. The UK-based SOHR said a car bomb detonated at a checkpoint near the military airport in the western neighbourhood of Mezzeh. There were reports of casualties, but no confirmation on the number of those affected.

Iran

• The moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani has won the Iranian election and will succeed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, Iran’s interior minister announced on national television on Saturday. Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar said Rouhani had secured just over the 50% of the vote needed to avoid a runoff, after a turnout of 72%. Rouhani’s win is a welcome surprise for many reformists, who are desperate to break back into mainstream Iranian politics after eight years of Ahmadinejad’s hardline presidency.

• Iran: Victory of the cleric Hassan Rowhani in presidential elections. Seen as a realist. His political life has been spent at the center of Iran’s conservative establishment, from well before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led the Islamic Revolution in the 1970s. And analysts say that Mr. Rowhani’s first priority will be mediating the disturbed relationship between that leadership and Iran’s citizens, not carrying out major change.

US

• Holly Paz/IRS: An Internal Revenue Service supervisor in Washington says she was personally involved in scrutinizing some of the earliest applications from tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status, including some requests that languished for more than a year without action. Holly Paz, who until recently was a top deputy in the division that handles applications for tax-exempt status, told congressional investigators she reviewed 20 to 30 applications. Her assertion contradicts initial claims by the agency that a small group of agents working in an office in Cincinnati were solely responsible for mishandling the applications. Paz, however, provided no evidence that senior IRS officials ordered agents to target conservative groups or that anyone in the Obama administration outside the IRS was involved. Instead, Paz described an agency in which IRS supervisors in Washington worked closely with agents in the field but didn’t fully understand what those agents were doing.

• Obama Selects Guantanamo Closure Envoy. President Barack Obama has chosen a high-powered Washington lawyer with extensive experience in all three branches of the government to be the State Department’s special envoy for closing down the military-run prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Clifford Sloan is the pick to reopen the State Department’s Office of Guantanamo Closure, shuttered since January and folded into the department’s legal adviser’s office when the administration, in the face of congressional obstacles, effectively gave up its attempt to close the prison. A formal announcement of Sloan’s appointment was expected Monday, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Canada

• Harper government wants to extend blanket of permanent secrecy over 11 new agencies.

• Montreal mayor Michael Applebaum arrested – Mayor Michael Applebaum was arrested early Monday at his home, Quebec’s anti-corruption squad (UPAC) confirmed. Two other people were also arrested. In February and May, UPAC conducted raids on the offices of Cote-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grace, the Montreal borough where Applebaum served as borough mayor from Jan. 2002 until Nov. 2012, when he became acting mayor of the city. According to QMI Agency’s sources, the police were looking for documents connected to projects Applebaum was involved with in the past.

Turkey

• The army could be deployed by the Turkish government to end nearly three weeks of protests that have swept the nation, says Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc.

• Massive police raids make Toronto mayor sweat. More than 40 people were arrested in dramatic early-morning police raids in Toronto. Chris Hayes examines the details and finds out how bad they are for Toronto’s embattled right-wing mayor Rob Ford.

• Rightwing crackhead Toronto mayor Rob Ford also enjoys turfing seniors out into the street: Rob Ford got TCHC facts wrong while angrily defending evictions. Ford, who skipped Wednesday’s debate, says he disagrees with “many things” in Fiona Crean’s damning report on how public housing treats seniors. Gesticulating and shouting, he defended the TCHC for eviction practices the TCHC has already conceded were improper in the wake of an investigation by ombudsman Fiona Crean. “I don’t care if you’re 2 years old, 20 years old or 200 years old, you’re not going to live for free,” Ford said. Of TCHC chief executive Gene Jones, he said, “Obviously he has fixed the problem. Is it perfect? No.” Turning to a left-leaning critic, he yelled, “You! You’re the problem!” TCHC failings led to the eviction of a senior, Julio Fernandez, who died of a heart attack three weeks later. But he did not appear to have read the report in detail. Ford said Crean had made “50, 100” recommendations, though she made 30. He said he is certain TCHC employees try to make face-to-face contact with seniors before evicting them, though Crean found such contact has often been forgotten. And he claimed that there were a mere 13 seniors evicted in 2011, compared with 32 in 2008 — though Crean says there were 25 seniors evicted for unpaid rent in 2011, and 50 in 2012. Ford missed most of the debate on the report on Wednesday. He participated Thursday but skipped the vote. The report was endorsed 34-2, with Councillor Doug Ford and Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday against. Councillor Gord Perks, a Ford opponent, said Ford was “confused, uninformed, angry, and quite frankly hurtful to the individuals who have lost their homes and their families.: “It breaks my heart that our housing company is throwing people who can’t look after themselves out on the street and the mayor of Toronto denies the problem, clearly hasn’t read the report, and thinks the only thing that matters is whether he gets a personal phone call,” Perks said.

• Project Traveller raids connected to nightclub murder: Toronto police. Police say raids carried out in Toronto and Windsor on Thursday are connected to the murder of a man associated with an alleged video of Mayor Rob Ford smoking drugs. A related photo shows Ford with his arm around Anthony Smith, 21, who was shot dead outside a downtown nightclub in March. Police haven’t said if Ford was in any way part of their year-long investigation but they did say that one of the 28 suspects arrested in Thursday’s raids faces a previous murder charge in Smith’s death.

NSA

• Sensenbrenner, “author of the Patriot Act”, furious that he wasn’t briefed on NSA programs, skipped the briefings. In a letter to Attorney-General Eric Holder last week, Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin asked: “How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation as required by the Act?” In a separate newspaper column, Sensenbrenner went further, claiming the administration was abusing the law. Maybe Sensenbrenner wouldn’t have been as surprised had he attended classified briefings on the National Security Agency’s program over the last three years. Two letters from the leadership of Senate intelligence committee in 2010 and 2011 obtained by MSNBC show that a series of closed-door briefings and reports on the Patriot Act were made available to lawmakers from both houses. A senior Obama administration sent MSNBC a list showing at least six classified briefings or meetings on the Patriot Act between 2009 and 2011. And a former Justice department official who participated in briefings said they offered specifics on the exact issues that Sensenbrenner claims were withheld. Since details of the NSA surveillance program came to light in newspaper articles in The Guardian and The Washington Post, a number of members of Congress have complained that they were not briefed. Some, it turns out, left briefings early or never showed up. Sensenbrenner, who has been among the most insistent and aggressive in his claims that he was not informed, didn’t attend at all. “While some members of Congress were briefed, particularly those on the intelligence committees, most, including myself, were not,” Sensenbrenner wrote in a column for The Guardian newspaper. Sensenbrenner did not disclose, as his spokesperson did for this story, that he chooses not to attend the briefings.

• Senators skip classified briefing on NSA snooping to catch flights home. A recent briefing by senior intelligence officials on surveillance programs failed to attract even half of the Senate, showing the lack of enthusiasm in Congress for learning about classified security programs. Many senators elected to leave Washington early Thursday afternoon instead of attending a briefing with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency (NSA), and other officials. The exodus of colleagues exasperated Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who spent a grueling week answering colleagues’ and media questions about the program. “It’s hard to get this story out. Even now we have this big briefing — we’ve got Alexander, we’ve got the FBI, we’ve got the Justice Department, we have the FISA Court there, we have Clapper there — and people are leaving,” she said. Lawmakers have been quick to call for increased congressional oversight of the phone and Internet monitoring programs, but many have been unwilling to skip flights or make other scheduling sacrifices to learn more of the secret details.

• Glenn Greenwald, in trying to duck the fact that he lied about “direct access” in his Guardian claims, just lies and says he never claimed “direct access” was true, even though “direct access” was some of the more explosive claims from those articles.

Now: The Guardian has not revised any of our articles and, to my knowledge, has no intention to do so. That’s because we did not claim that the NSA document alleging direct collection from the servers was true

Then: The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. …Companies are legally obliged to comply with requests for users’ communications under US law, but the Prism program allows the intelligence services direct access to the companies’ servers. …the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies’ servers. …The Prism program allows the NSA, the world’s largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders. With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users.

• A popular Communist Party-backed newspaper is urging China’s leadership to get more information from former defense contractor Edward Snowden rather than send him back to the U.S., because his revelations about secret U.S. surveillance programs concern China’s national interest.

• And then hand them over to the Chinese?: It seems that the whole PRISM “scandal” rests on more than a few lies and misunderstandings. By the way, if Greenwald was accurate last night on MSNBC, and if the Booz Allen Hamilton claim that Snowden worked for them only a few months, where did he find the time to get “outraged” over the not-secret program and then download the documents? Could it be he walked into the job specifically to steal secrets?

• PROPAGANDA ALERT?: Naomi Wolf: My Creeping Concern That The NSA Leaker Is Not Who He Purports To Be

• Snowden: “The decision by a former National Security Agency contractor to divulge classified data about the U.S. government’s surveillance of computers in mainland China and Hong Kong has complicated his legal position, but may also make China’s security apparatus more interested in helping him stay here, law and security experts said on Friday.”

• PRISM Isn’t Data Mining and Other Falsehoods in the N.S.A. “Scandal”. First, the much-ballyhooed PRISM program is not a program and not a secret, and anyone who says it is should not be trusted because they don’t know what they’re talking about. PRISM is the name for the government computer system that is used to handle the foreign-intelligence data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Military

• Man, the Chief of Staff of the Australian Army is not kidding around when it comes to sexual harassment. AustralianArmyHQ – Message from the Chief of Army, Lieutenant General David Morrison, AO, to the Australian Army following the announcement on Thursday, 13 June 2013 of civilian police and Defence investigations into allegations of unacceptable behaviour by Army members.

• Seventy-one officers, including six generals, have defected from the Syrian army to Turkey, a Turkish official said on Saturday, the biggest single mass desertion of senior soldiers from President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces in months. It was not immediately clear why the group had deserted.

• Troops In Bin Laden Raid Revealed, Defense Report Says. U.S. special operations forces who participated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden were in uniform and wearing nametags during a CIA award ceremony attended by the writer of the film “Zero Dark Thirty,” a Pentagon inspector general’s report said Friday. The report, however, omits a number of revelations disclosed in an early draft that was made public more than a week ago, including that then-CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed the name of the raid commander during his speech at the agency’s June 2011 event. It also no longer includes revelations that the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, Michael Vickers, divulged the name of an individual involved in the bin Laden raid to the filmmakers.

US

• Ohio abortion bill would require women to share income data with doctors. Women’s health advocates in Ohio are furious over a new bill that would require a 48-hour waiting period before abortions and for women seeking the procedure to go over their financial situation with their doctors. According to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, the bill would mandate that women looking to undergo an abortion tell their doctor how much they make and how much income carrying the pregnancy to term would cost them. Patients would also be required to undergo an ultrasound and hear a verbal description of the fetus from their doctor during that waiting period. “There’s no health implication of that for the woman and for the fetus,” Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio president Stephanie Kight told WSYX-TV on Friday. “It’s just another way of shaming her.” Physicians would be required to tell their patients that their risk of breast cancer would increase after an abortion, and that fetuses and embryos can feel pain. If it becomes law, abortion providers would face first-degree felony charges and a $1 million fine if they did not fulfill those requirements.

• Democrats in the Texas legislature accused Gov. Rick Perry (R) on Friday of vetoing a bill that would have given women more chances to fight pay discrimination. The measure, HB 950, would have allowed women to sue their employers in state court beyond the current 180-day period after receiving a paycheck they claim was unfair and sue for two years of discriminatory payments. It passed in the state House in April 2013 and the state Senate in May 2013. But a spokesperson for state Rep. Senfronia Thompson, who wrote the House version of the bill, said she was told by Perry’s office that he struck it down.

• Threatening IRS officials isn’t likely to help teabaggers with the IRS. A current and a former top tax official have been physically threatened in recent weeks as the scandal over Internal Revenue Service targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups has gathered steam, people familiar with their situation say. Ousted IRS acting commissioner, Steven Miller, has received such threats, according to a source familiar with his situation. The source declined to elaborate on the nature or the source of the threats.

• Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is touted as a top GOP presidential prospect in 2016, thinks it should be legal to fire someone for their sexual orientation.

• Joe Scarborough: New NRA ad is ‘race bait’. Is the National Rifle Association’s new attack ad on Sen. Joe Manchin racially charged? “Listen, I have been critical of those on the left when they have used race. And it’s happened—it happens every election, to race bait,” Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough said. “I’m going to be critical when people on my side do the same thing. This is an example. Look at the hands. Look at the side of the face.” The NRA’s latest ad targets the West Virginia Democrat for co-sponsoring legislation expanding background checks. “It’s so obvious,” Scarborough said. “Look at his hands. It looks like he is a coal miner from West Virginia. Look how dark they made his hands.” Scarborough accused the makers of the 30-second ad of shading the president to make him look darker in color on-screen.

• Gallup reported yesterday, “Americans’ confidence in Congress as an institution is down to 10%, ranking the legislative body last on a list of 16 societal institutions for the fourth straight year. This is the lowest level of confidence Gallup has found, not only for Congress, but for any institution on record.”

• Williams Olefins plant: A petrochemical plant in Geismar, Louisiana that exploded on Thursday, killing one person and injuring 73, has not been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the past two decades.

Canada

• Brad Wall accused of smearing Justin Trudeau. Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall’s comments about speaking fees given to Justin Trudeau have upset the federal Liberal party, and it’s calling for an apology. Wall, however, said Friday he stands behind his comments, insisting he is merely seeking accountability from Trudeau over a $20,000 fee collected for a speaking engagement in Saskatoon in 2012. In a news release issued Friday, an official from the Liberals characterized Wall’s comments as a smear against Trudeau. “Premier Wall needs to immediately apologize for this smear,” the release said, and suggested Wall was keen to enter federal politics as a Conservative. “It looks like the race for Mr. Harper’s job is on.”

• Conservative double billing: Auditors probing Sen. Pamela Wallin’s expense claims are trying to determine whether the former Conservative senator billed both the Senate and any of the boards she sat on for trips that had nothing to do with Senate business. Questions about potential, allegations of which helped get Sen. Mike Duffy pushed out of the Conservative caucus, were left unanswered Friday, one day after Wallin broke her silence in a broadcast interview.

Latin America

• Guatemalan authorities expressed concern about the power of organized drug gangs Friday after eight police officers were shot dead inside their station. On Thursday night, gunmen shot eight officers dead and kidnapped the chief of police in Salcaja, about 200 km (125 miles) from Guatemala City. According to national police chief Gerson Olivia, investigators believe the officers were disarmed and could have been positioned face down on the ground before being riddled with bullets.

• Guantanamo: Last week, House Republicans once again barred the Obama administration from transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay. Today, against a backdrop of a terrible hunger strike, a Democratic effort to do the right thing was easily defeated in the face of mindless, reactionary conservative opposition.

Middle East

• Iran: “Iran’s electoral authorities reported heavy turnout in presidential voting on Friday, extending polling hours three times to accommodate what appeared to be a late surge of interest.”

• Getting it right: Iran Interior Ministry has extended the voting deadline for the country’s 11th presidential as well as the fourth city and village councils elections for a third time by one more hour to 2200 local time (1730 GMT).

I can’t stand it.

A few days ago, I wrote in some detail about the National Security Agency’s data-mining program in hopes of calming the hysteria that has been whipped up in the last number of days by incorrect and misleading reports, as well as by plenty of ill-informed commentary based on those errors. At this point, I’ve decided that I need to tell a little bit more.

Some explanation up front: I spent seven years investigating the national-security systems and policies established in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks for my book 500 Days.I learned a fair amount about the data-mining programs of the N.S.A. and wrote about it. I summarized those findings in my last post. However, now it has become obvious to me that I need to go further than I did in my book, at least in hopes of calming things down. When discussing errors, I’m going to mention “reports” regarding news articles, but I’m not going to identify them—the last thing I want is for this to become a back-and-forth between reporters.

First, the much-ballyhooed PRISM program is not a program and not a secret, and anyone who says it is should not be trusted because they don’t know what they’re talking about. PRISM is the name for the government computer system that is used to handle the foreign-intelligence data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Those rules are very specific. The targeting can only be of foreign nationals outside the United States. These are the restrictions:

[The N.S.A.] (1) may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States; (2) may not intentionally target a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States if the purpose of such acquisition is to target a particular, known person reasonably believed to be in the United States;? (3) may not intentionally target a United States person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States; (4) may not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States; and? (5) shall be conducted in a manner consistent with the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

There are many other restrictions and requirements on how data can be properly obtained and used in the PRISM system. But since this doesn’t require some secret, confidential source to understand, I invite you to click on the link I provided above and read through the law.

However, targeting is not done willy-nilly. The system is subject to review by the judiciary, the Congress, and the executive branch. Both the attorney general and the director of the N.S.A. must make a determination that they “reasonably believe” a person they wish to target is, in fact, a foreign national outside the country whose activities raise national-security concerns for the United States. That standard, of course, is lower than probable cause, which is a small part of why any information obtained can’t be used in a criminal case.

Courts established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act review these determinations and must approve the targeting. (Much has been made of the fact that these approvals appear to be given frequently, with some saying the F.I.S.A. courts are just rubber stamps. I disagree; given the requirements for prior review and assessment at the top of the executive branch, a high approval rate for subpoenas would be expected. I’d be more concerned if they were frequently rejected, because that would signal the executive branch was probably attempting to abuse the system.)

Now, anyone who discusses this process without also mentioning minimization procedures is also either very uninformed or intentionally hyping the story. Minimization is a term of art in the world of NSA intercepts which essentially means “stay out of American citizen’s business.” If information about specific Americans (or even foreigners inside the United States) is captured, those details must be removed from all records and cannot be shared with any other entity in the government unless it is necessary to understand and interpret related foreign intelligence or to protect lives from criminal threats. But passing intelligence information to criminal investigators requires several layers of review and is not easily approved; minimization procedures are meant to insure that information collected by the NSA isn’t used in routine criminal investigations.

In other words, the NSA doesn’t give a damn about you swapping recipes with your Aunt Edith—or even your decision to email your drug dealer (foolish as that might be.) And the NSA doesn’t get to establish the minimization procedures on its own—those, too, have to be approved by the FISA courts.

In the past, some minimization procedures bordered on the absurd: for example, pre–9/11, the rules said that the name of companies based in the United States could not be used in communications transmitted from the N.S.A. to other intelligence or law-enforcement bodies. So, suppose the N.S.A. learned through signals intel that a known terrorist was flying at noon on June 20 from Frankfurt to New York on Delta flight no. 2012. Any communication could identify the terrorist, locations, date, and time; however, the C.I.A. and F.B.I. couldn’t be told they were flying in on Delta. Based in Atlanta, you see.

As for the purported secrecy of this program—folks haven’t been listening. Section 702 was widely debated and parsed through by the Congress before its adoption in 2008 (under the Bush administration). It was widely debated and parsed through by Congress before its re-authorization in December 2012 (under the Obama administration). Any supposed expert who feigns surprise here is, once again, either uninformed or hyping.

Getting deeper into the weeds: some news reports have said that companies like Google, Facebook, and the like allowed the government to have “direct access” to their servers through the actually-not-a-program “PRISM program.” That’s false.

The reality is that these companies have been, at times, compelled to turn over data after the receipt of a subpoena. (And remember, that subpoena was issued by a F.I.S.A. court, after the Justice Department and the N.S.A. were able to establish that the information being sought related solely to a foreign national overseas about whom the government had probable cause to believe was involved in activities threatening the national security of the United States.)

In an attempt to get reporters off the “the government has direct access to your accounts through direct server access” falsehood, Google put out a statement about how it did provide information. It utilized what is known as an FTP—a common, secure network protocol for transferring encrypted files from one entity to another. This was portrayed in one news report as Google turning over whatever the government wants whenever it is asked, but last I checked, all companies are required to comply with a valid subpoena—whether approved by a F.I.S.A. court or some other court—or face charges. (And before someone launches into the “F.I.S.A. is secret” wail, remember this: so are grand-jury investigations that result in subpoenas being issued in criminal cases.)

What kind of information is needed? Sometime after 9/11, al-Qaeda members figured out that a great way to transmit information over the Internet was by not transmitting it at all. Instead, a terrorist would open an account with a free service like Hotmail or Google, write an e-mail, and rather than sending it or even writing in the address of a recipient, would store it in a “draft” folder. Then, through other means such as a satellite phone or another e-mail account, a coded message would be sent to the planned recipient telling him the account name and the password. The recipient would know to open the account, check the draft file, and then delete the account. Once the N.S.A. knew through other means of the existence of the message, it would gain access to the temporary account through a court-issued subpoena to the company, read the secret message, and watch what happened. By 2010, though, the terrorists figured out this wasn’t working anymore and changed tactics.

So, if the information the government is obtaining isn’t from direct access to the servers, and the subpoenas are issued only after a foreign national has been targeted, where does the data come from? There is data scooping, but not like you think.

A quick technical explanation is needed. Data going across the Internet does not follow a set path—if you send an e-mail from New York to Boston, it doesn’t hop Amtrak and make a beeline to Massachusetts. Instead, it is broken up into data packets, which can go through switches anywhere in the world. In other words, if the N.S.A. was monitoring Internet servers in Pakistan, it very well could pick up information from that recipe e-mail to Aunt Edith, and under the rules as they existed pre–9/11, that was a huge no-no.

And so the rules were changed to deal with the realities of modern technology. As their authority expanded, intelligence folks recognized that al-Qaeda was utilizing what are known as “international gateway switches,” which are simply technological junctions between overseas telecommunications grids and those in the United States. Because the terrorists were using those switches in their communications, the N.S.A. was able to identify them as “facilities” under the F.I.S.A. rules The requirements under the law can be quite technical, but if the F.I.S.A. courts accept an N.S.A. designation of a particular entity under the term “facility,” it streamlines the continued review and approval process for warrants. It streamlines the continued review and approval process for warrants. (To make it simple: if I wanted to monitor the Mafia, I could either conduct surveillance of Joey the Knife’s phones or have a facility such as the Mob Social Club identified as the facility being monitored. In one case, I would only hear what Joey says, and if I wanted to know more, I would have to apply for another warrant on another individual. With the facility warrant, I would be able to hear all of the criminal activities discussed, regardless of who did the talking. In this instance, the international switches are the Mob Social Club.) So, with just a few court orders, the N.S.A. was able to obtain almost all Internet and telecommunications traffic data traveling in and out of the United States through the international switches.

Of course, it’s impossible to stop a packet of data, interview it, and determine whether it is from a foreign national. So, information to and from Americans was also collected by the court-authorized surveillance of the gateway switches (this is the closest thing that exists to “direct access to servers,” and it has nothing to do with the Googles of the world). But, without additional authority granted by the court (through a showing of probable cause about a particular suspect), no one can listen to or read the private information flowing through the switches. Metadata is collected, but the N.S.A. can only target foreign nationals overseas for more detailed analysis.

I’m not comfortable getting into too much detail (some sources I interviewed during my reporting for the book placed limits on what I could publicly reveal about active programs as part of their agreement to speak with me). But I can say for a fact that this data-mining and telecommunications program has had significant successes. For example, a network of terrorists at least twice attempted to spirit strontium 90 from Uzbekistan into Kazakhstan; both of those times the smuggling was stopped, once through traditional intelligence activities, and once through the use of the data-mining program. Specific cyber-attacks have been stopped, and strategic plans of terrorist groups obtained. However, it has to be understood that data mining is not a single tool—rather, it is part of a broad array of intelligence-gathering activities, and is rarely used alone to prove a national-security risk.

So, that is the truth about what everyone is mistakenly calling PRISM. There is, of course, more information about these programs, and I summarized some of it in my last piece. Feel free to read it, too.

My hope is that these explanations will make it clear why even I, as a civil libertarian, have no problem with data-mining programs. The information being obtained by the government entails far fewer privacy issues and danger of abuse than exists in your taxes or the census. Sure, people could make the argument that this could be the slippery slope to some sort of effort by the government to monitor your porn subscriptions, but . . . really? The N.S.A. is downloading petabytes of data every day with so many anonymizers and protections in place, it is incomprehensible to imagine (and illegal and technologically problematic) that someone would just somehow start surfing through private records. To me, the slippery-slope argument makes as much sense as the N.R.A.’s position that, if we use background checks to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, the United States is on the way to the seizure of weapons. And they make the same silly argument—they think that the government invades their privacy by running those checks.

As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson said in a 1949 dissent, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Creating absurd hurdles to protect against imaginary threats that instead open the door to real threats is self-defeating. We all need to calm down, recognize that no one is listening to our phone calls or reading our e-mails or hiding under our beds. These are programs that have been adopted very carefully, for a specific purpose. And for all those hypocrites who first wail that the Boston bombing wasn’t stopped, and now wail about a working program that has successfully impeded real terror attacks, I have this to say: shut up, Mr. Hannity. And you too, those of you critics hoping to turn a Bush program into an Obama scandal. Or, as Republicans were wont to say during the Bush administration: Why do you hate America? And why do you support the terrorists? (I’m being sarcastic.)

Enough. Let’s start getting real.