Justice Elena Kagan first went hunting with Justice Antonin Scalia when she needed to get some Second Amendment credibility. First they shot birds but now Kagan has graduated to killing bigger, hairier animals.

“He said, ‘It’s time for big-game hunting,’” she recalled in an on-stage interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “We went out to Wyoming this past fall to shoot deer and antelope, and we did. . . I shot myself a deer.” Look at that syntax; soon she'll be droppin' the g's in her opinions.

Another delicious detail: She flies commercial.

Here's the video of her appearance:

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According to Wikileaks.org, Snowden has also submitted asylum requests to Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Cuba, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Venezuela Ecuador and Iceland. 

CBS News reports on some of his rejections:

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[He] offers a blueprint for his laptop computer and provides YouTube links to a commercial for a laughing doll from the 1970s and for The Rock-afire Explosion, an animatronics band that played in ShowBiz Pizza locations in the 1980s.

In one thread on the website thehighroad.org in October 2009 at 1 a.m., the poster believed to be Lanza asks whether a ban on a certain semiautomatic pistol might extend to other weapons.

Another poster suggests that he ask the Connecticut State Police.

"I always prefer asking through proxy when I can avoid speaking to someone directly. I was just wondering if anyone knew because I have a fetish for .32 ACP," the poster suspected to be Lanza responds, referring to ammunition.

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If Snowden wants to stay in Russia he "must stop his work aimed at harming our American partners".

Snowden "is not a Russian agent", Putin said, repeating that Russian intelligence services were not working with the fugitive American, who is believed to remain in the transit area at a Moscow airport eight days after arriving from Hong Kong.

He said Snowden should choose his final destination and go there.

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Stars general manager Buck Rogers said today there will be no guns given away at the game, only the raffle tickets redeemable at Larry's Pistol and Pawn. Guns are prohibited at all Huntsville Stars games.

Rogers said several organizations routinely raffle off guns.

"And since everybody's buying guns hand over fist and Larry's Pistol and Pawn wants to get involved in some sponsorships and they had a line out there a mile long (to buy guns)," Rogers said. "We're having a Second Amendment night to talk about things anyway. It's an educational night. No guns coming to the game. Nobody is giving away guns."

Rogers said the timing of the promotion -- the day before Independence Day -- is the ideal time to hold a Second Amendment celebration.

After some in the media decried a gun giveaway, the team clarified the nature of the promotion:

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The campaign, which is now all over the LGBT blogosphere, encourages the faithful to get "on our knees for America" and the logo, as AmericaBlog puts it "appears to be a man performing oral sex."

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under the program, launched in 2001, a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata "every 90 days". A senior administration official confirmed the program, stating that it ended in 2011.

The collection of these records began under the Bush administration's wide-ranging warrantless surveillance program, collectively known by theNSA codename Stellar Wind.

According to a top-secret draft report by the NSA's inspector general – published for the first time today by the Guardian – the agency began "collection of bulk internet metadata" involving "communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States".

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"I'm in favor of ending the possibility of offering both free delivery and a five percent discount," she told BFM news television on Friday. "We need a law, so we're going to find a legislative window to introduce one."

Amazon in France declined to comment.

Filippetti's remark underscored tensions between the French government and U.S. online firms such as Amazon and Google, which have been criticized for paying too little to the creators of cultural or news content.

France, like other European countries, bans retailers from discounting books more than 5 percent from a sale price set by the publisher. This is to prevent small sellers from being crushed by giant retailers that can absorb bigger discounts.

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Thordarson was long time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct access to Assange and a key position as an organizer in the group. With his cold war-style embassy walk-in, he became something else: the first known FBI informant inside WikiLeaks. For the next three months, Thordarson served two masters, working for the secret-spilling website and simultaneously spilling its secrets to the U.S. government in exchange, he says, for a total of about $5,000. The FBI flew him internationally four times for debriefings, including one trip to Washington D.C., and on the last meeting obtained from Thordarson eight hard drives packed with chat logs, video and other data from WikiLeaks.

The relationship provides a rare window into the U.S. law enforcement investigation into WikiLeaks, the transparency group newly thrust back into international prominence with its assistance to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Thordarson’s double-life illustrates the lengths to which the government was willing to go in its pursuit of Julian Assange, approaching WikiLeaks with the tactics honed during the FBI’s work against organized crime and computer hacking — or, more darkly, the bureau’s Hoover-era infiltration of civil rights groups.

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During a January 2009 chat, on a " public Internet Relay Chat" run by the site Ars Technica, which first reported it, the screen name Snowden used, TheTrueHOOHA, was discussing a New York Times article about classified U.S. dealings with Iran with an unidentified user:

< TheTrueHOOHA> HOLY SHIT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/washington/11iran.html?_r=1&hp
< TheTrueHOOHA> WTF NYTIMES
< TheTrueHOOHA> Are they TRYING to start a war?
Jesus christ
they're like wikileaks
< User19> they're just reporting, dude.
< TheTrueHOOHA> They're reporting classified shit
< User19> shrugs
< TheTrueHOOHA> about an unpopular country surrounded by enemies already engaged in a war
and about our interactions with said country regarding planning sovereignity violations of another country
you don't put that shit in the NEWSPAPER
< User19> meh
< TheTrueHOOHA> moreover, who the fuck are the anonymous sources telling them this?
< TheTrueHOOHA> those people should be shot in the balls.

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She said she was on the phone with Trayvon when someone - presumed to be Zimmerman - started following him.

Trayvon described the man as a "creepy ass cracker" Jeantel said.

Jeantel said she told Trayvon she was worries that the man was a rapist. Trayvon said to "stop playing with him like that."

While being questioned about what was happening, Trayvon said that N-word "is now following him."

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In the immediate wake of the Supreme Court's rulings striking down the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 in California, the right-wing media remained relatively silent. At around 11 this morning, National Review led with a piece on President Obama's "radical climate agenda." Over at the Weekly Standard Bill Kristol was on the news with "Comprehensive immigration reform? Just say no."

The National Organization for Marriage didn't appear to have updated its site, focusing instead on suing the IRS and a "major victory" for marriage supporters" in Illinois, a comparably minor incident that happened last month. The professional homophobes over at the Family Research Council were similarly mum. [Ed.: They've now responded. See below.]

It's almost as if the right collectively realized that fighting marriage equality is not a winning issue in the 21st century. If so we wouldn't have anything to post. But they didn't completely disappoint.

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According to the Texas Tribune, Governor Rick Perry has overseen the executions of 261 people since he assumed office in 2000. "Perry has rarely used his power to grant clemency, granting 31 death row commutations, most of them — 28 — the result of a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning capital punishment for minors."

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To be fair, Politico noted that only the Weather Channel ran the speech in full.

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Goldberg tells this story about when he and his daughter met Booker while she was studying for her bat mitzvah:

Booker turned his attention to her. “What’s your parasha?” he asked, using the Hebrew word for portion, a reference to the section of the Torah she would soon be reading. I could see, across my daughter’s then almost-13-year-old-face, a bit of confusion and a trace of panic, but she answered: “Vayera,” which is the action-packed chapter in the Book of Genesis that includes, among other things, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

“Amazing parasha!” Booker said. He then quoted -- in Hebrew -- one of its more famous lines. And he shared his expert exegesis on the portion’s broader meaning -- notably, the lessons that any troublemaker worth her salt could derive from Abraham’s audacious decision to negotiate with God about the future of these two sinful towns.

My daughter didn’t know quite what to make of Booker’s erudite and enthusiastic performance. “Is he Jewish?” she asked later. No, I said. He’s a Protestant. “He knows a lot about my parasha,” she said.

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Galant is thinking of something even better, or at least more quantifiable: social media pickup.

It's hard to understate [Ed.: Um, overstate?] how much this is changing the game of online content. Publishers no longer control some of the most important analytic data. Writers know how well their work is performing in realtime. Competitors can analyze which articles are successful or duds in rival publications. As I wrote in a prior column, public relations executives can gauge the impact of a story about their clients. Even governments can monitor (without a FISA request) the resonance a muckraking story has.

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The critter, which like giant pandas is native to China, was spotted:

... crossing 20th Street NW near the Duke Ellington Memorial Bridge, she says in a phone interview, and saw him scurry to a rowhouse at 20th and Biltmore streets. [A bystander]  then called in the sighting to the National Zoo—and tweeted a couple of photos for good measure. "We’re hoping he stays there until they make it,” she says. (That location is a little less than a mile from the zoo's main entrance if you stick to city streets, but it's not clear what route Rusty might have taken.)

Rusty was apprehended in the neighborhood of Adams Morgan, previously known as the stomping grounds of drunk interns and Washington's skinny jeans contingent.

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“My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked,” he told the Post on June 12. “That is why I accepted that position about three months ago.”

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