The AP spying scandal must be contextualized (as Kevin Gosztola pointed out): This administration is waging a war on whistle-blowers and First Amendment protections. A creeping surveillance state is being codified, under which the Fourth Amendment is also desecrated and journalists hardly stand alone as objects of surveillance.

As NSA whistle-blower Thomas Drake -- one of a record six individuals to be indicted under the Espionage Act during Obama's presidency -- told me recently, this government's approach to security resembles a "hoarding complex." His point was borne out by comments from CIA’s chief technical officer, Gus Hunt, who recently explained the spy agency’s strategy for a broad surveillance dragnet in a New York speech:

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But if you're not an ESPN addict, you might do well to look askance at the news. That's the take of Public Knowledge, a consumer-interest Washington-based public advocacy organization that quickly decried the possible ESPN deal as an obvious violation of the principle of "net neutrality."

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On Wednesday, AT&T announced that it was dropping the price of the HTC First smartphone, which comes with Facebook Home built in, from $99 to 99 cents. Think about that: a new smartphone, priced to jump off the shelves at Dollar General. It's a great deal, but it is also hugely embarrassing for Zuckerberg.

A little over a month ago, I wrote that the only way I could see a Facebook phone making sense was if Facebook planned to cut deals with the phone carriers to give the phone away for free. But such a strategy doesn't seem to be what's in play here. Best guess, no one wants to buy a Facebook phone.

For confirmation we need only look at the Google Play store, where the Facebook Home app, which can be installed on select Android phones, has now fallen to the No. 338 ranking in the category of free apps. That's 200 spots lower than it ranked just two weeks ago.

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Now, almost a week after the Tsarnaev brothers fought a rolling street battle with dozens of heavily armed police officers, we learned Wednesday night that they had only a single handgun, according to sources who spoke with ABC News and the AP, something that directly contradicts what officials had previously said.

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We, by the way, are your teachers and employers and future employers and law enforcement officers. But don't take my word for it. Instead, learn from the shining examples of very dumb and very public behavior in just the last few days, and then henceforth, I beg you, pause for just a moment before opening your mouth or hitting the "send" button.

The most recent unfortunate victim of a yawning gap in internal filtering devices is the newly unemployed A.J. Clemente. For about five minutes this weekend, Clemente was a news anchor at KFYR-TV in North Dakota. But in an apparent case of nerves not seen since Albert Brooks perspired his way through the headlines in "Broadcast News," Clemente obliviously kicked off his debut performance by looking downcast and muttering a short string of obscenities. He would later chalk up the mini-meltdown to fear of flubbing the name of London marathon winner Tsegaye Kebede.

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Korean children get a lot of fuss made over them, I guess because life was tough in the old country, and it was a big deal if you survived. There’s a big party thrown when you are 100 days old, followed by another when you make it to one whole year. My parents took a lot of pictures of me at these parties, although I don’t remember a thing as I was really drunk at both. From the pictures I see the cake, though — all these big multicolored rice cakes, each pastel stripe a steamed layer of pounded and steamed rice flour, not sweet like birthday cake but a delicious treat all the same. It looks like a chewy Neapolitan ice cream, or a gay pride flag made of carbs. It’s the best and I want it, but I think wanting that cake isn’t enough reason to have a baby.

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The term “gifted children” dates back to the 1920s, to the unsavory, sometimes racist world of early IQ tests, but it took fifty years to find its niche: “gifted and talented” summer camps became widespread and self-sustaining during the 1970s. The Center for Talented Youth (CTY), sponsored by Johns Hopkins University, opened its doors in 1979: about 9,000 students, aged twelve to sixteen, now attend CTY on six campuses each summer. According to its official website, those students discover “challenging educational opportunities,” in Latin, mathematics, neuroscience, and so on. According to realcty.org, maintained by alumni, they learn an argot (“flying squirrel,” “CTY-S”) and a set of diversions found nowhere else, such as “Silent Football,” “a complex game involving an invisible football, hallucinations, and tattling.… One CTY-er solved a Rubik’s Cube on stage while reciting the first 200 digits of pi.”

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And the next day, the faculty shepherded the entire student body into the gym to cheer for the students to "Do your best" and sing, to the tune of "Ghostbusters," that they were "test crushers."

The rally may have been a well-intentioned attempt to defuse students' pre-test jitters. A school administrator later told me, "It wasn't to further promote testing. It was just about increasing confidence." Our principal echoed the sentiment, saying, "We did a very intense test prep this year. We recognize that our kids were saturated and starting to feel overload. The kids seemed like they needed the let loose." And, she noted, "The idea of bringing a group together to garner enthusiasm is something we do all the time."

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This scoop was credited to CNN reporter John King, who, as of this writing, is not on air. Less than an hour later, CNN declared there had been an arrest.

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Other news outlets chased CNN, with the Associated Press and Fox News reporting a similar story shortly after 1 p.m. in each case.

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But by 1:43, CNN had cited the Department of Justice and Boston Police Department in their claim that no arrest was made.

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CNN's tweets about the events in Boston today link to a liveblog whose URL ends "source-arrest-made-in-boston-bombing/." King's reporting for CNN, preserved in the liveblog, indicates that the police "identified a suspect based on an analysis of video from a Lord & Taylor department store near the site of the second blast, and that video from a Boston TV station also helped."

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Jane Monheit: Good. Really busy. I’m in Georgia right now, in Savannah. We’ve been touring a lot.

How much time do you usually spend in each place?

Well, it depends. If it’s a club, a couple days; if it’s a theater, usually one day. This is a festival, which is a weird situation because we’re playing a venue that’s been created just for the purpose of the festival. I meant to tell you, I’m so sorry I missed you at 54 Below. I was not in town and I couldn’t make it.

I’m playing the Iridium in New York May 8 and 9, but you’re probably not going be there then, either.

I might, actually. I’m not sure, but I’ll come if I’m in town.

But don’t tell me if you’re there, it’ll make me way too nervous. (laughs)

I was nervous when you were at the gig in L.A. Whenever there are other singers in the room you really want to sound good.

It’s funny, I don’t get nervous onstage when I’m acting. It kind of gives me fire and I very often think about the people I know in the house, but there’s something different about singing, in terms of confidence because I haven’t been doing it as steadily as acting. But you’ve been pretty steady just singing your little heart out for how long now?

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Jeb Bush

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush made a full-fledged assault on the Sunday shows today attempting to clarify his position on immigration. Last week he said there should not be a “path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants, a view he expressed in his new book, “Immigration Wars,” which was written before Mitt Romney got thumped in November and the Republican Party immediately decided that its hard-line immigration stance was not going to fly given current demographic trends. On "Face the Nation," Bush calibrated his stance to bring it more in line with mainstream GOP opinion or what mainstream GOP opinion could become:

I haven't changed. The book was written to try to create a blueprint for conservatives that were reluctant to embrace comprehensive reform, to give them perhaps a set of views that they could embrace. I support a path to legalization or citizenship so long as the path for people that have been waiting patiently is easier and costs less, the legal entrance to our country, than illegal entrance.

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Take the misogyny and bigotry on display at the Oscars Sunday, and everything that followed. Salon's Andrew Leonard may be right when he says that "in our pre-Twitter past, we might have simply turned off the TV or switched channels once MacFarlane started singing his dumb song about boobs. But now we stay watching to share our hate!" (Wait, how can we know what people did before Twitter? Maybe I can put a call out on Twitter.) Sharing that "hate" en masse happens to be a communal experience, something that has its own virtues in this atomized, time-shifted age. But it also exorcises demons that without something specific on which to fix righteous rage, are suppressed or implicitly accepted by society. Everyday slights and institutional discrimination are hard to point out on your own. Watching them on a screen or finding them in a tweet helps make them visible.

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No officers who authorized and directed the torture and detainee abuse, either in that prison, at Guantanamo Bay or anywhere around the world, ever faced trial. But Lynndie England became a symbol for the sorry state of the rule of law in America, where a few small “bad apples” get held to account, and the higher-ups who devised and directed the criminal activity get off scot-free.

There’s a Lynndie England for the financial crisis, too.

Meet Lorraine O. Brown, an individual singled out for actual jail time for her role in the massive mortgage document fraud that plagued this nation. Like England, she stands alone among the multitudes of fraudsters, including those at the highest reaches of the financial industry.

Brown was the President of DocX, a company that created and processed mortgage-related documents, first as a stand-alone unit, and later as a subsidiary of the document processing giant Lender Processing Solutions (LPS). And like Lynndie England, Brown committed a series of legitimate crimes. From 2003 until 2009, DocX routinely forged mortgage documents.

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Friedan's book was a wallop of a tome, a peek behind the placid façade of the happy homemaker and into the dark heart of a seemingly enviable segment of American womanhood. Educated women, with their nice families and pretty homes, Friedan revealed, weren't fulfilled by staying at home and waxing their floors. They needed more. And by starting the conversation about that need, by making it OK for women to want something else, Friedan helped start a revolution.

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This, no doubt, is a good way to understand what is almost certainly fueling much of the opposition to the nomination of former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel as the next secretary of defense.

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Let’s start by making clear that the odds favor Hagel’s confirmation. The vast majority of Cabinet nominees sail through the process and only the occasional few are confronted with pockets of resistance that complicate their journey. Even rarer are nominees from the latter group who are ultimately rejected by the Senate, something that last happened in 1989 with John Tower, George H.W. Bush’s first choice to run the Pentagon. The most recent rejected Cabinet nominee before that? Admiral Lewis Strauss, who was nominated for Commerce secretary by Dwight Eisenhower, only to be turned down in 1959 on a 49-46 Senate vote. Also in Hagel’s favor: the party of the president nominating him controls the Senate 55-45.

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The first ran for 16 years, from early 1992, when her husband survived a wave of scandals and emerged as the Democratic nominee for president, and early 2008, when Hillary fell hopelessly behind Barack Obama in their delegate race. For all of that time, Hillary and Bill were the faces of their party and, consequently, faced a relentless, daily, over-the-top assault from the GOP. The precise nature of the attacks differed, but broadly speaking, the Clintons were treated by the right exactly how Barack Obama has been for the past four years.

Which is no coincidence, because the turning point in the right’s relationship with Bill and Hillary came at the precise moment when it became clear there’d be no Clinton restoration in ’08. Suddenly, there was no day-to-day incentive for conservatives to portray them as The Worst Thing Ever To Happen To American Politics. But there was real incentive for the right to begin giving Obama the Clinton treatment, which it's been doing ever since. In the revised right-wing narrative, Bill and Hillary became symbols of a bygone era of Democratic pragmatism and cooperation – “good” Democrats whose legacy Obama was routinely tarnishing with his radical partisan warfare.

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"Aesthetically pleasing" is very subjective.

I was deep into the fifth page of the reader comments of the first installment of Ars Technica's excellent "The State of Smartphones in 2012," when I encountered this observation, which is simultaneously the most illuminating and worthless Internet comment of all time. It was a response to the declaration by Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham that the "Live Tiles" user interface in the brand-spanking-new Windows Phone 8 operating system was more "aesthetically striking" than the icons of Apple's iOS or the widgets of Google's Android.

(With Live Tiles, the restless smartphone user can expand or shrink the on-screen real estate devoted to a particular app or function, providing a level of configurability alien to the straitlaced universe that iPhone lovers, in particular, are accustomed to. Remember this, for future reference: Windows: freedom! Apple: tyranny!)

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The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence filed a lawsuit in Illinois this morning against Armslist.com -- a Craigslist style listing site for firearms on behalf of the family of Jitka Vesel, a 36-year-old Czech immigrant who was murdered by a jilted lover. Vesel was fatally shot with .40-calliber handgun purchased illegally on the site. According to the Guardian, Armslist is among 4,000 websites which engage in gun-selling in the U.S.

The suit comes a day after a high profile shooting at an Oregon mall killed three including the gunman.

It is currently totally legal for individual, unlicensed gun dealers --  classified as "private sellers" -- to sell weapons online or at gun shows without carrying out background checks on customers. It's a loophole that "has been widely denounced by gun control advocates," noted the Guardian's Ed Pilkington. However, in the case of Vesel's murder, the killer was a Russian immigrant and lived out-of-state therefore did not qualify to legally buy the firearm from the seller who posted it on Armslist.

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