Thanks to what I've previously called the No Money Rule, however, there have only been indirect references to how cash undoubtedly tilts the debate against those who challenge the national security state.

Those indirect references have come in the form of stories about the business model of Booz Allen Hamilton, the security contractor that employed Edward Snowden.

CNN/Money notes that 99 percent of the firm's multibillion-dollar annual revenues now come from the federal government. Those revenues are part of a larger and growing economic sector within the military-industrial complex -- a sector that, according to author Tim Shorrock, is "a $56 billion-a-year industry."

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First, and solely because it starts a half-hour earlier than the other shows, we'll check out "This Week," where Jonathan Karl is substituting for George Stephanopoulos. "Is the U.S. going to get involved in another war in the Middle East?" Always, Jonathan Karl, always. Let's see what Marco Rubio has to say.

Rubio, a war-friendly Republican, says that President Obama blew it by waiting so long to get involved in Syria. (Assuming this really is the broad change in strategy it's been billed as.) Now who are we giving arms to? Al-Qaida "elements." What would President Rubio have done? Karl asks. Well, Rubio never would have allowed it to get to this point, of course. If Rubio were president, Syria would be a sunny democratic Utopia already, because he would have managed it so perfectly, you just have no idea how perfectly President Rubio would have done things.

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Writing in Reason, Ronald Bailey cites the spread of particular liberties since the eighteenth century as evidence that the entire world is becoming libertarian. But he ignores the fact that the welfare state and business regulation have grown up together with democracy and civil liberties. The citizens of democracies prefer to vote themselves generous social insurance benefits. They also insist on using government to police business firms while benefiting from a market economy.

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Snowden’s actions, Brooks says, are a betrayal of virtually every commitment and connection Snowden has ever made: his oath to his country, his promise to his employer, his loyalty to his friends, and more.

But in one of those precious pirouettes of paradox that only he can perform, Brooks sees those betrayals as a symptom of a deeper pathology: Snowden’s inability to make commitments and connections.

According to The Washington Post, he has not been a regular presence around his mother’s house for years. When a neighbor in Hawaii tried to introduce himself, Snowden cut him off and made it clear he wanted no neighborly relationships. He went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton and the C.I.A., but he has separated himself from them, too.

Though thoughtful, morally engaged and deeply committed to his beliefs, he appears to be a product of one of the more unfortunate trends of the age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

This lens makes you more likely to share the distinct strands of libertarianism that are blossoming in this fragmenting age: the deep suspicion of authority, the strong belief that hierarchies and organizations are suspect, the fervent devotion to transparency, the assumption that individual preference should be supreme.

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From that view flows the reaction that anyone can see on television right now as the media discusses Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistle-blower whose disclosures on top-secret surveillance programs were published by the Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald.

Jeffrey Toobin, a senior CNN legal analyst and contributor to the New Yorker, was leading the charge against Snowden in the media by characterizing him as a “grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.” He appeared on Piers Morgan’s program later in the evening and said, “I think there are right ways to do it and there are wrong ways to do it, and by a 29-year-old kid, just throwing open the safe and giving away documents that people have devoted years of their lives to creating and protecting. That’s the wrong way to protest.”

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There is the (interesting but only marginally consequential) media debate over the terminology to use when referring to Snowden: Leaker, whistle-blower, source? And then there is the much sillier public wrangling over whether Snowden is a "hero" or a "traitor," as if those maddeningly reductive (and not exclusive) terms expressed anything other than the speakers' tribal allegiances and predispositions. He's a man who did a remarkable and newsworthy thing. The thing he did is what people should probably still be talking about.

The New Yorker on Sunday and Monday ran three different pieces, by three different authors, examining Snowden the man. The first, and best, was by Amy Davidson, who sketched his biography and quoted his justifications, but largely held off on casting moral judgment in favor of raising useful questions: "How many people with a private contractors’ job and a password have the privilege of knowing the names of our spies?" And:

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"This Week" promises to be a grand old time, as some producer has let civil liberties reporter and commentator Glenn"zilla" Greenwald on national television again to scorch the earth. Greenwald, of course, has been the lead reporter behind a number of top-secret leak reports this week.

"You are really on a roll," George Stephanopoulos congratulates Greenwald, of "the Guardian newspaper." (Full disclosure: I am a contributor to the Guardian U.S.) What are the key findings of your stories this week? Greenwald, talking super-fast to get it all in, has two. From the transcript:

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Military sexual assault presents a terrible conundrum for an elected Republican. One has to agree that rape is bad, especially after what happened to Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. One has to concede that we should work toward the safety of our service members. And mostly, Republicans in Congress managed this incredible feat, even while generally rejecting the remedy that advocates for service member survivors recommend, taking serious crimes out of the chain of command. But there were eruptions: Saxby Chambliss became instantly notorious (again) for blurting out, “Gee whiz, the hormone level created by nature sets in place the possibility for these types of things to occur.”

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They already failed that test once when they put up little to no opposition to the reauthorization of the controversial FISA Amendment Act in December. And while Democrats wanted to attach to that bill some modest safeguards against government overreach, Senate Republicans pushed for approving the bill with no debate and no changes.

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I found the lady in the red dress a problematic icon for the unfolding events in Gezi Park. Not because she was doing anything wrong. Nor was the scene unrepresentative. With the benefit of hindsight her unresisting pose, arms by her side against an ostensibly unprovoked attack by a policeman seems perfectly to have foretold the waves of violence visited on unarmed protesters on the streets of Turkey’s cities in the days since. What troubled me was not the photograph itself but the caption beneath it, which would have its readers believe this was a fight all about trees. This compelling image seemed to be having much success in disseminating the tree narrative. By the 29th of May, the photo was everywhere. In the best tradition of Turkish churnalism, those few who reported the incident reprinted Reuters’ incidental analysis wholesale, even after the protests had plainly grown beyond the issue of the park’s redevelopment.

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“This fiction that somehow [the IRS is] totally an independent agency is absurd,” Woodward, who broke the Watergate scandal, said. "You say they aren't answering this question about the 157 visits by the IRS commissioner. They should."

"President Obama could easily come out through his spokesperson and say this is where Mr. Schulman was. And here are the dates. Here is who he met with," O'Reilly said. "The fact that the President doesn't do it, should raise the curiosity of every reporter, Mr. Woodward, every reporter. Yet, as I said, the major network news on television ignored the story last week in its totality. It's amazing."

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And I would always tell them the message isn’t so much pushed as it is pulled, gravitationally, with Roger Ailes as the sun at the center of the solar system; his vice presidents were the forces of gravity that kept the planet-size anchors and executive producers in a tight orbit; then all the lesser producers and PAs were moons and satellites and debris of varying sizes.

An organizational flow chart at Fox would be tough to draw up, as title alone was not the ultimate signifier of status. Sometimes the anchors outranked their executive producers, as was the case with "The O’Reilly Factor." (In fact, Bill had procured an EP title for himself, but he outranked the two other EPs on the show, both Stan, who oversaw TV, radio, and the website, and Gayle, who focused on television and also served as a fact-checker.) Sometimes the anchors were relatively weak — as was the case with a lot of weekend shows, and maybe some of the newswheel hours — and a strong senior producer or producer outranked, or at least pretended to outrank, the host. (For example, Lizzie from "The Lineup," who was only a producer but was tough enough that she probably could have bossed around Ailes himself had she been left alone in a room with him for more than five minutes.)

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We knew from the beginning of the IRS mess that the only group actually denied tax-exempt status was the Maine chapter of a Democratic women’s group, Emerge America. Now we’re learning about some of the right-wing organizations that came in for extra scrutiny, as reported by the New York Times Monday: a conservative veterans’ group that only backed one candidate, a Republican, for Congress; an Alabama Tea Party group that took part in a “defeat Barack Obama” voter-turnout drive, and the “Ohio Liberty Coalition” led by a Republican activist who sent his members information on Mitt Romney campaign events and recruited them to volunteer for the GOP nominee.

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We should maybe state at the outset the "fourth place" thing isn't quite as bad as it sounds, because HLN has been doing insane ratings lately thanks mostly to Jodi Arias (and the channel's stunning shamelessness in general). HLN is regularly kicking CNN's ass, too. But it is still pretty bad, considering that last year MSNBC was challenging Fox for ratings dominance some nights. Now, it's once again far behind the conservative cable news leader. And worse, CNN has finally, apparently, caught up.

One theory, from Deadline Hollywood, is that MSNBC is suffering because Obama is suffering. The crazy scandals we all love hearing about so much are making liberals too dispirited and depressed to tune into their favorite liberal shows, I guess.

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The controversial former baseball all-star set the tone with a bizarre series of tweets in which he announced the charge, named his accuser and said the woman "told the police that I druged her and then raped her.hmmmmm.lets find out what really happened." [sic] He subsequently deleted the tweets, but he did leave up the cryptic message, "Sometimes your mind says yes and your body doesn't. Hate that."

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For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

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As part of 92Y’s partnership with Salon, Pareene discussed which stories are the real scandals he would have his hypothetical news station cover.

Pareene’s first scandal is the Obama administration's “war on leaks and whistleblowers,” which he sees as an unprecedented example of targeting by a presidential administration toward journalists. To see four other scandals that PNN (Pareene News Network, of course!) would focus on, watch this clip below:

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Speaking live to a survivor of the deadly tornado in Moore, Okla., Blitzer declared the woman "blessed," her husband "blessed," and her son "blessed." He then asked, "You've gotta thank the Lord, right? Do you thank the Lord for that split-second decision?"

But as she held her 18-month-old son, Rebecca Vitsmun politely replied, "I'm actually an atheist." A flummoxed Blitzer quickly lobbed back, "You are. All right. But you made the right call," and Vitsmun graciously offered him a lifeline. "We are here," she said, "and I don't blame anyone for thanking the Lord." Nicely done, Rebecca Vitsmun.

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Watching the Woodward of today pimp his personal brand on cable TV — call it innuendo with gravitas — is something like seeing a former Hall of Famer dispense motivational tips at a business seminar in Topeka.

And yet no event is more emblematic of our historical moment than Woodward’s appearance last week on Morning Joe, an MSNBC program devoted to the promotion of overpriced coffee, with a side dish of political hype.

Asked about the various “scandals” confronting the Obama administration, Woodward dutifully hit his mark. “I know there have been these comparisons to Watergate,” he told host Joe Scarborough. “I would say not yet, Joe … You’ve got to investigate all of these things.”

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