Nerd News: Race-Based Admissions at UCLA

Professor Whistleblower.

Fill In That Scandal-a-Palooza Wildcard Bracket, People

This scandal bracket was supposed to be a wry joke.  Well, nobody's laughing now as we know that we can definitely fill in that last wild card bracket with the news about the NSA and Verizon.  

People are furious, and they should be.  Don't give us that stupid argument that if we've done nothing wrong, then we've nothing to fear from government agencies snooping around.  Secret blanket surveillance is not OK.  This isn't even targeted.  This isn't about people suspected of wrongdoing.  The NSA's just indiscriminately scooping up everything on everybody.  Anyway, see this and this, which pithily snarks, "from the Verizon: home-to-nearly-100-million-terrorism-suspects! dept."

Oh, by the way, am I the only one starting to get a case of "scandal fatigue"?  Another day, another mess in the news ... Hey, government overreach?  Must be Thursday.

Also, Rand Paul.

UPDATE: But wait, there's more!

Quote of the Day: On Obama and Journalism

From the guys at TechDirt:

The Obama administration has used the Espionage Act against more cases of whistleblowing to the press than all other Presidents combined. 

... Obama said that "journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs," but that the "focus must be on those who break the law." Oh really? Then why did your own DOJ claim that a journalist was an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator for reporting on a leak -- just like tons of other reporters?  

President Obama sounds like someone campaigning against his own policies. Either Eric Holder and the DOJ have "gone rogue" or the President is hastily pretending that his administration is not doing what it clearly has been doing for years.

Scandal-a-Palooza!

It's getting to the point where it's hard to keep track of all these exploding government scandals (wow, the snarky guys at Ace of Spades totally called it today).  There's too much fresh hell going on (need a scorecard?).  Here's your quote of the day, complete with awesome Arrested Development reference:

pissing off the tea party, natsec hawks, the press AND russia in a week's time is a Gob Bluth level of difficulty feat.
— john r stanton (@dcbigjohn) May 14, 2013

Mark Steyn on the Benghazi Debacle

Pretty much what I want to say, only with far more flair. A bon mot: 

"The government dispatched more firepower to arrest Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in Los Angeles than it did to protect its mission in Benghazi."

Watching the Benghazi Hearings

So far, this is pretty much indicative of the behavior of the witnesses versus the behavior of some of the politicians:

Holy @#%, we've got testimony about people being mortarted to death and Maloney's prattling on about "e-mail etiquette."
— jimgeraghty (@jimgeraghty) May 8, 2013

*Headdesk*

Oh, and FYI, here's some live-blogging.

Benghazi Debacle: Hicks' Testimony

Breaking from Sharyl Attkisson at CBS News:

The deputy of slain U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens has told congressional investigators that a team of Special Forces prepared to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi during the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks was forbidden from doing so by U.S. Special Operations Command South Africa. 

The account from Gregory Hicks is in stark contrast to assertions from the Obama administration, which insisted that nobody was ever told to stand down and that all available resources were utilized.