There was another mass shooting here in California last Friday, right in Santa Monica close to where good friends live. It's also close to where Lawrence O'Donnell lives. Did you hear about it?

It didn't seem to splash onto the national radar the way one might expect, given that the deranged young man armed with 1300 rounds of ammunition, an assault-style rifle, and other weapons went to a community college instead of an elementary school. After reporting on Newtown, I guess the national media decided they'd had enough, even though the shooting happened within a few miles of a fundraiser with President Obama in attendance.

Or maybe it's just not newsworthy. After all, college students and older people caught in the crossfire unleashed by a determined, violent young man just doesn't play the same as another angry young man gunning down six-year olds, right?

The suspect, 23-year-old John Zawahri, was known as an angry young man with a “fascination with guns” that worried family friends. Zawahri was born in Lebanon but has lived in the U.S. for at least 10 years. In a press conference on Sunday, police said the troubled young man had planned out the attack and likely hoped to kill hundreds. The spree lasted 10 minutes, ending when police shot and killed Zawahri on the scene.

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Well, this is chivalrous! Days after Krystal Ball gave birth to her second child, a nasty piece of work called a GOP strategist took to his column to call on Social Services to take away her 5-year old daughter, Ella. Why? Because Ball had the temerity to explain that marriage isn't always between a man and a woman. Right Wing Watch:

GOP strategist Raynard Jackson has a new anti-gay column in Charisma today that calls on social services to take MSNBC host Krystal Ball’s daughter away from her for “indoctrinat[ing] her daughter about homosexual marriage.”

“Social services should remove Ella from this house because her mother is without question an unfit parent,” Jackson writes. “What Ball did to her daughter may not be child abuse legally, but morally it is definitely abuse, and I am amazed that even liberals of goodwill have not criticized her for such abuse.”

What terrible thing could Krystal Ball have done? That video at the top, where she talks to her daughter about marriage and that it's not always one mommy and one daddy, but sometimes two mommies or two daddies. Mind you, this happened in April. Back then the winger blogs along with Breitbart and others tried to make a big splash out of it, and then it died out.

But one scumbag strategist thought it would be really cute to wait until she couldn't speak out in her own defense and went on the attack.

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Mark Fuhrman should be in jail somewhere, but instead he's the go-to guy for Fox News when it comes to criminal trials. Not just any criminal trial, either. No, former Detective Mark Fuhrman is the guy Fox News is using for commentary on the high-profile George Zimmerman trial. Zimmerman, you may recall, is on trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin, after a firestorm of protest was unleashed at law enforcement's initial refusal to prosecute Zimmerman due to Florida's ALEC-authored "Stand Your Ground" law.

For those of you reading this who are younger than age 30 or so, Mark Fuhrman was the policeman who blew up the OJ Simpson criminal trial because of his deep, ingrained hatred of black people.

Media Matters:

During the 1995 murder trial of O.J. Simpson, the defense produced a tape of Fuhrman, who collected evidence in the case, using the word n*****more than 40 times over a 10 year period. The person who made the tape said Fuhrman used the slur "in a very casual ordinary pattern of speech. It was nothing extraordinary. It was just conversation." During the O.J. Simpson trial, a number of other witnesses testified that Fuhrman was a racist. Fuhrman, who testified during the trial that he had not used a racial slur in the past 10 years, pled no contest to perjury charges and was sentenced to three years of probation.

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The smear campaign is in high gear against NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and it's coming from all sides of the spectrum. Jeffrey Toobin is on a one man show to discredit him with his appearances on CNN and his piece in the New Yorker entitled: Edward Snowden Is No Hero. He's trying to make the case that Snowden had other avenues to express his displeasure with the system which is pretty preposterous. I've liked some of Toobin's work a lot over the years, but this take is just very naive on his part.

David Brooks writes another pompous article which superimposes his own problems with society onto Snowden so he can psychoanalyze him for his rubes.

Sen. Feinstein brings terror into the mix.

On FOX News with Bret Baier, his All-Star panel kept up the crazy talk with wingnuts like Charles Krauthammer and Jason Riley of the WSJ. Charles makes the case that the police do bad things all the time too, but we still need them, However, Jason Riley went off the deep end with his commentary.

Kudos to Bret Baier, who did a very good job pointing out the issues to Riley, who couldn't care less.

Riley: Until we see an abuse of the information I'm not particularly concerned. (So he wants to take care of the problem after it erupts.)

Baier: ...but Jason, how would we even know? We didn't even know about the program until this guy leaked it.

Riley: How would we know if they're abuses?

Baier: Abuse, yea.

Riley: Well, I guess a whistle blower would come forward and that would be a true whistle blower who pinpointed out such abuses but again this...

Baier: You don't see him as a whistle blower?

Riley: No, not in that sense at all. I see this as a very dangerous man that I hope will be prosecuted, found and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Krauthammer: Until the program has been around for about a decade and we do not have a single case of anybody saying 'my email was abused , but do you think after a decade if there were abuse you wouldn't have had a lawsuit, somebody who would go to the p. Until you show me a single case of course there's a potential for for abuse, but show me abuse and I'll get very worried about it

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Charles, how would anyone know anything or any abuse was going on since we had no idea they were collecting billions of records a day? And because of Edward Snowden we now know what the government is doing. Even Glenn Greenwald is fine about it if America decides this is in our best interests to do, but the idea that they are doing it on the sneak is the BIG problem.

Jason Riley is a clown. he doesn't consider Snowden a whistle blower yet believes that if anyone at the government level abuses the NSA system then magically a new whistle blower will pop up to end the abuse. What a sap. And exactly why is Snowden a dangerous man? Because he's blowing the whistle on a secret government monitoring program and these yokels are defending those responsible like sheep.

And so the smear campaign continues. Soon he won't be a US citizen, but a communist, Chinese spy.

Fascinating interview at Democracy Now! with NSA whistleblower William Binney, who resigned after 9/11 over intrusive and widespread surveillance. The things he has to say are as engrossing as any spy novel, and the implications just as scary.

By the way, he also says we can assume at least 40 internet and telecom companies are complying with the government, and explains how he came to that conclusion:

William Binney describes how his former agency has built a massive system to track, monitor and record phone and Internet communications of U.S. citizens and people around the world. Binney resigned from the National Security Agency in 2001 to protest growing domestic surveillance. He was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. He was one of the two co-founders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center. He resigned after the Sept. 11 attacks. In 2012 he gave his first ever television interview to Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Our guest is William Binney. He served in the National Security Agency for almost 40 years, including a time as director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, a senior NSA crypto-mathematician, largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. He was one of the two co-founders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, resigned after the September 11th attacks, concerned about the increasing surveillance of the American people.

So, if you’re doing something that irritates or is against what the government wants to be expressed to the American public, then you can become a target.

We are getting response to the massive series of releases and exposés from The Guardian newspaper and The Washington Post of information released by a 29-year-old information technician named Edward Snowden, who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a military contractor, within the National Security Agency in Hawaii. In response to these revelations about surveillance, President Obama spoke on Friday and defended the NSA’s surveillance program, suggesting they help defend the country against terrorist attacks.

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I’ve been citing bits of this interview between James Clapper and Andrea Mitchell here and there, but the whole thing needs to be read to be believed.

But the quick version is this. Mitchell asks Clapper whether “trust us” is enough, given that some future President or Director of National Intelligence might decide to abuse all the programs in question. Clapper responds by celebrating our constitutional system’s checks and balances.

ANDREA MITCHELL:

The president and you and the others in this top-secret world, are saying, “Trust us. We have your best interests, we’re not invading your privacy, we’re going after bad guys. We’re not going after your personal lives.” What happens when you’re gone, when this president or others in our government are gone? There could be another White House that breaks the law.

There could be another D.N.I. who does really bad things– we listened during the Watergate years to those tapes. With the President of the United States saying, “Fire bomb the Brookings Institution.” You know, what do you say to the American people about the next regime who has all of these secrets? Do they– do they live forever somewhere in a computer?

JAMES CLAPPER:

No, they don’t live forever. That’s a valid concern, I think. You know, people come and go, presidents come and go, administrations come and go, D.N.I.’s will come and go. But what is, I think– important about our system is our system of laws, our checks and balances.

You know, the– I think the founding fathers would actually be pretty impressed with how– what they wrote and the organizing principles for this country are still valid and are still used even in you– to– to regulate a technology then, they never foresaw. So that’s timeless. That– those are part of our institutions. Are there people that will abuse those institutions? Yes. But we have a system that sooner or later, mostly sooner these days, those misdeeds are found out. [my emphasis]

But when, earlier in the interview, Mitchell asks him about his lie to Ron Wyden, here’s how he answered.

ANDREA MITCHELL:

Senator Wyden made quite a lot out of your exchange with him last March during the hearings. Can you explain what you meant when you said that there was not data collection on millions of Americans?

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In my last installment of the Great Takeover of Chicago Schools, I took some heat for blaming Rahm Emanuel for his part in the school closure debacle. Commenters claimed Rahm had nothing whatsoever to do with the CPS, that it was independent and the mayor wasn't involved at all.

They were wrong.

The video has footage of a paid protester at one of the school closure hearings, who isn't exactly sure what he's protesting, but he's definitely convinced the pay is worth the effort, evidently. Kenzo Shibata at Huffington Post explains who paid him:

The video also features a man admitting to being paid to protest at the 2012 Crane School closing hearing. The Chicago Tribune reported last February that Rahm Emanuel's associate Greg Goldner's firm Resolute Consulting, a firm that worked on Mayor Rahm Emanuel's 2002 Congressional bid, allegedly paid people to protest at these hearings. The paid protesters largely blamed Chicago Teachers Union for problems in Chicago's schools.

There's more, and the partnerships are confusing and ugly.

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The Political Carnival: Virginia Governor Bob “Ultrasound” McDonnell is facing a probe of his own.

Paul Bilbeau: Among the potential abuses of NSA data collection, imagine a future Committee to Re-elect the President.

This is Ashok: Niall Ferguson returns to serve up another heaping pile of derp.

Politics USA: S&P raises U.S. outlook while warning GOP not to destroy the American economy with more debt ceiling hostage-taking.

Speaking of which, your quote of the day: ”That would be a financial disaster, not only for our country but for the worldwide economy.” (House Speaker John Boehner, on the impact of failing to raise the U.S. debt ceiling, January 30, 2011.)

Guest blogging Mike's Blog Round Up this week is Jon Perr from Perrspectives. Send your tips, recommendations, comments and angst to mbru AT crooksandliars DOT com.

Members of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra sure do know how to deal with a flight delay. h/t Susan Madrak.

Open thread below...

Meet Chad Connelly, former director of the South Carolina Republican Party. Before he was a full time political boss, he was a sales director for Amway. What do Republicans do with state directors who are under fire from disgruntled tea party members? They promote them, of course!

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has just announced the hiring of a Tea Party Southern Baptist to strengthen its ties with the Evangelical community, Chad Connelly. Connelly, 49, is a motivational speaker and until his resignation to work for the RNC, was the chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party. The Southern Baptists (SBC) are perhaps among the most anti-gay of all Christian sects, and represent about 16 million Americans, the second-largest group of Christians in the U.S. after Roman Catholics.

Connelly, who has been described by a local South Carolina paper as “a chronic liar,” and reportedly believes America is a Christian nation, there is no separation of church and state, and somehow only one person died on the Mayflower — “a sailor who cursed and mocked the Pilgrims’ efforts” — will be the RNC’s director of evangelical outreach.

Here's the problem, as David Badash notes. Republicans don't have a problem with Southern Baptists. Southern Baptists love Republicans. The 2012 postmortem of the election indicated that the GOP should do everything it could to connect with Latinos:

The RNC’s 2012 “autopsy,” a report meant by RNC chair Reince Priebus to be a blueprint to get the GOP on track, recommends the “RNC should consider hiring a faith-based outreach director to focus on engaging faith-based organizations and communities with the Republican Party.”

All other references to “faith” in the report focus on the Hispanic community:

“The RNC must improve how it markets its core principles and message in Hispanic communities (especially in Hispanic faith-based communities).”

“Engage the Hispanic faith-based community in our efforts.”

Based on that, and the College Republicans' report last week warning the party about their attitudes on gay rights, a conservative Southern Baptist guy who hates gays and promises to recruit even more Southern Baptists while ignoring the Latino community should be exactly what the RNC needs to succeed, don't you think?