Hey, everybody! Nice to be — did somebody move my stuff?
President Barack Obama signed the USA Freedom Act into law. Among other things, the USA Freedom Act says the NSA has half a year to wind down its wildly unconstitutional phone spying program. Laws! They're cute. And for people without money or influence. The War on The War on Privacy should go every bit as well as The War on Drugs, The War on Terrorism and every other War against a concept rather than a discrete group of people — that shit's like trying to trap a ghost with a piece of paper labeled "Ghost Food" sitting under a box propped up by a bendy-neck straw.
The Chicago Sun-Times bit about the Stanley Cup bet between Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — which largely consists of ponying up local brews, foods and bragging rights, in addition to a donation to the charity of the winner's choice — mentions that things "just got real." Lucky they organized that whole multibillion-dollar professional sports league in a way that really matters: to provide a couple of dudes in charge of popular cities another soft-news op. "Real," indeed.
A teacher at Pasco County's Fivay High School was suspended for bringing a cell phone jammer into class and using it in an effort to keep his students' attention. Because genius is never appreciated in its own time. I appreciate your genius, Dean Liptak.
And finally, the head of the TSA has been reassigned following a disastrous, humiliating and of course inadvertently hilarious series of covert tests in which agents reportedly failed to catch some 95 percent of prohibited items that went through screening processes. I'm gonna head out on a short, sturdy limb here and assume the secret to smuggling success was "carried by normal-looking white people," because fear and racism go together like terrifying chocolate and job-stealing peanut butter.