Former Sen. Russ Feingold was blunt in his assessment of the Obama administration's just-revealed intelligence gathering program: "I believe it's illegal":

Former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001. (Brendan Hoffman/Bloomberg via Getty Images)After the Guardian revealed that the National Security Agency seized millions of Verizon customers' phone records through a secret court order, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), one of the authors of the legislation that opened the door to this practice, said he was stunned.

"I do not believe the released FISA order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act," Sensenbrenner wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. "How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation as required by the Act?"

But this sort of data collection -- along with what the NSA is doing through itsPRISM program -- is exactly what then-Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) warned about when he was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001.

From his speech:

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The Twins

Arya and Sandor Clegane are riding away from the carnage of the Red Wedding massacre when they see a body with a wolf's head attached to it on a horse and the soldiers all around it are yelling, "It's the 'King of the North!'" Robb Stark's body is mounted on that horse and Arya is crushed by this gruesome display of yet another family member being beheaded. Even The Hound was affected by the carnage and he whisks her away.

Later they come upon four soldiers telling stories about the wedding and how they were the ones to mount the wolf head on Robb's body when Arya coldly walks up to them and asks for food because she's hungry. They tell her to f*&k off, but she says she has money and drops the coin that Jaqen H'ghar gave her on the ground. As they look at the unusual currency, Arya takes out a knife and calmly and repeatedly stabs the man who bragged the most until he's a bloody corpse. Clegane then takes care of the other man and asks if this was the first man she killed. She replies with a simple "The first man...." She has a very big hit list.

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If only politicians would stop blathering about the middle class and do something for those who are now poorer than ever. If only people could get full-time jobs. Feel all that freedom trickling down:

The economic "recovery" just keeps getting worse for the average worker: U.S. employers squeezed their employees even harder than usual in the first quarter, leading to the biggest drop in hourly pay on record.

Hourly pay for nonfarm workers fell at a 3.8 percent annualized rate in the first quarter, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Wednesday. This was the biggest quarterly decline since the BLS started keeping track in 1947. Some of the drop was payback for a 9.9 percent surge in hourly pay in the fourth quarter of 2012, as employers shoveled money out the door to avoid tax changes they expected to take place in 2013.

But there have been plenty of such quarterly pay increases in the past. Many were even bigger. Some went on for several quarters at a time. And never has there been such a steep pay drop in response as there was in the first quarter of this year.

Smoothing out the quarterly ups and downs doesn't make the picture look any better. Hourly worker pay rose just 1.9 percent in 2012, a pitiful increase that barely kept up with the 1.8 percent gain in the consumer price index. That was the third-weakest annual increase in hourly pay since 1947, topping only the 1.4 percent gain in 2009 and a 1.8-percent gain in 1994.

Hourly pay has grown by just 2 percent per year, on average, for the past four years, the weakest four-year stretch on record. At the same time, corporate profits are at record highs, and until a recent swoon, the stock market was setting records, too. Workers haven't been reaping the rewards, but their employers have been.

Mad Kane: An ode to Chuck Grassley.

Plunderbund: A black and white portrait of Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s on-going vote suppression effort.

Health Affairs Blog: A new state-by-state analysis shows how many more people will be left uninsured thanks to Republican rejection of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

The Reaction: The Wall Street Journal and friends take on out-of-control domestic surveillance by the NSA? No pat down, no problem!

Speaking of which, your quote of the day: “None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead.” (Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), on NSA warrantless wiretapping, December 20, 2005)

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.

Courtesy of Team Coco, George R.R. Martin provides "spoilers" (No, not really) for Game of Thrones. My prediction for tonight's episode? "You don't know nothin bout nobuddy, Jon Snow."

Open Thread below....

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Darrell Issa has gone so far over the edge in his Ahab-esque quest to take down this administration that even members of his own party have said publicly that he needs to cool it.

But that doesn't make for good television, does it? On the early airing on State of the Union, Elijah Cummings, Ranking Democrat of the Oversight Committee, threw down the gauntlet, daring Issa to come forward with what he has (which Cummings knows exonerates Obama) or be prepared for Cummings to do it. This apparently made Issa very, very angry and he fired off an angry statement. Then, for the re-airing of the show, Candy Crowley did something I haven't seen done on a Sunday show before: read the statement by Issa, thus giving him the last word.

"His [Cummings'] extreme and reckless assertions are a signal that his true motivation is stopping needed Congressional oversight and he has no genuine interest in working, on a bipartisan basis, to expose the full truth. The American public wants to know why targeting occurred and who was involved."

Did your irony meter redline at the laughably self-aggrandizing Issa? He's so cutely hypocritical when he realizes he's up against a wall and no one from either party is taking him seriously any more.

Oh look! There's the bipartisan agreement Issa said he wanted.

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This Week with George Stephanopoulos notes the deaths of seven service members, killed in Afghanistan.

US Army SPC Ray A Ramirez, 20, Sacramento, CA
US Army SPC Kyle P Stoeckli, 21, Moseley, VA
US Army PFC Mariano M Raymundo, 21, Houston, TX
US Army WO Sean W Mullen, 39, Dover, DE
US Army SSG Job M Reigoux, 30, Austin, TX
US Army 2LT Justin L Sisson, 23, Phoenix, AZ
US Army SPC Robert A Pierce, 20, Panama, OK

According to iCasualties, the total number of allied service members killed in Afghanistan is now 3,333.

In addition, the following notable names lost their lives this week:

Musician Rob Morsberger, 53
NJ Senator Frank Lautenberg, 89
Football Hall of Famer Deacon Jones, 74
Musician Joey Covington, 67
IN politician Rudolph M. Clay, 77
Actress/swimmer Esther Williams, 91
Pro wrestler Mark Starr, 50
Serial killer Richard Ramirez, 53
Graphic designer Arturo Vega, 65
GA politician Nathan Dean, 79
Politician Paul Cellucci, 65

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry was in Raleigh, NC this week covering the largest Moral Monday protest to date against the GOP-led legislature’s radical rightward tilt. State NAACP president Reverend William Barber leads the protests that grew to well over 1,000 last week, with 150 arrests for civil disobedience. Meanwhile, the state legislature continues its Sherman-like march across North Carolina.

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Allen West and Fox News are a match made in heaven, but that certainly doesn't stop West from bringing it straight to the airwaves as well. If you thought Rush Limbaugh was crazy, wait till you hear West and Michael Savage fret over militant feminists trying to undermine the military chain of command. But before that, Savage began by calling Senator Kirsten Gillibrand someone who "sounds like a college chick at a dorm."

Then they launched the frontal assault:

Savage told guest West: "When I watch these Khmer Rouge feminists try to take over the military, this looked like an attempted coup to me, Colonel West."

West replied: "Nah, you're absolutely right and that's a big concern that I have because when you start to get -- you know, I understand civilian oversight of the military. We all understand that as all officers who served in uniform. But when you start to have this interjection of, you know, political, you know, will against, you know, the military, good order and discipline, where you start to try to usurp the commanders' authority and I guess replace it with some type of political, legal officers, and things of that nature. Then the next thing you know, it goes from just dealing with this, you know, sexual assault thing to, you know, making decisions on the battlefield."

Savage and West went on to discuss whether sexual assaults in the military are actually a problem. When West said that "there may be a problem, without a doubt, with sexual assault," Savage interrupted by claiming that sexual assault claims can include men asking women out for "a beer." He then asked West, "how many of them are fraudulent claims? We don't know, do we?"

Why yes, of course, Mr. Savage. Women in the military make false complaints all the time in order to be ignored and humiliated. How militant of them. Seriously? I wish some Khmer Rouge militant woman would pants that jerk and parade him in front of her fellow guerrilla compatriots so he can feel just a small, tiny fraction of what it feels like when a male superior officer blows off a legitimate complaint of sexual assault as being "fraudulent" in order to protect the good old boys.

Really, it's all the fault of teh gays in the military, right?

"No we don't," West answered. "And furthermore, Dr. Savage, we don't know how many of them are female against male, you know, sexual assaults, or same-sex sexual assaults. So we don't have those numbers either."

The Department of Defense recently released its "Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military" and found that up to 26,000 service members may have been the victim of some form of sexual assault. The Army Sexual Assault Prevention & Response Program has stated that "[s]exual assault is defined as intentional sexual contact, characterized by use of force, physical threat or abuse of authority, or when the victim does not or cannot consent."

Allen West's nonsense is to be expected. After all, this is the guy who brags about torturing an Iraqi policeman like it's something to be proud of, even though it ended his military career. Michael Savage, on the other hand, must have taken some strong hallucinogens before starting his show that day, because he was just on Planet Stupid.

Laura Clawson at Daily Kos is so right about this:

First off, "you're absolutely right"? Someone talks about "Khmer Rouge feminists" and, never mind straight-up disagreeing with him, you don't even say "WTF is a Khmer Rouge feminist?" I mean, really, in what way does trying to reduce sexual assault = genocidal dictatorship? That is a question I would like to see answered, in all seriousness.

Laura, don't even try to understand this. We don't live on Planet Stupid and they do. That's all you need to know.

Let's be clear: Not running for office is Michele Bachmann's best bet at avoiding a criminal conviction. Once a candidate announces they're resigning, or not running for reelection, that's when the FBI usually (but not always) puts pending indictments of public officials on ice. It frustrated me as a reporter when they didn't follow through on those cases, but an FBI agent explained to me how much more efficient it was to let those investigations die. "We get a bad guy out of office and save the cost of going to trial, that's a win/win," he told me. (I didn't agree.)

So unless the FBI culture has changed, Bachmann won't go anywhere near a nominating petition:

In her first interview since announcing she will not seek reelection in 2014, Rep. Michele Bachmann said that decision doesn’t mean she’s going anywhere.

Speaking with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Thursday night, Bachmann said she may even run for public office again.

“There’s just a time when you’ve served, and then it’s time to move on,” Bachmann said. “I’m not retiring, I’m not going silent, I’m not quitting my public involvement. In fact, I may run for another public office, that may happen, but for right now, I think I’m going to find another perch to weigh in on these matters.”

The Minnesota Republican also left open the possibility for another presidential bid in 2016.

“I’m not taking anything off the table, but … that’s not my No. 1 item that I’m looking at right now, either. I’m in the game for the long haul,” Bachmann said.

Michele, honey? You're even more full of hot air than usual. As David Shuster reported:

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