Lawlessness & Irony

1. Lawlessness: Eavesdropping targets only al Qaeda: US officials — Part of the defense: …the White House could not have sought more explicit permission from Congress without risking spilling intelligence secrets. — Do these briefings take place on CSPAN? Do their texts appear in the congressional record? If it was a legitimate program and secrecy was vital, who in congress would reveal such intelligence secrets?
2. Irony: OFFAL‘s $2.7 trillion budget, while cutting lot’s of stuff like Medicare and increasing defense and homeland security spending, will also …double the government’s commitment to basic scientific research… Is this a case of the left side of the face not knowing what the right side of the face is doing? Because, in the interest of “scientific openness,” the other side of the face has been busy in NASA‘s public-affairs office restricting communication between the press and climate scientists, and …add[ing] the word “theory” after every mention of the Big Bang… on the agency’s website. —