But the attack does reveal a key weakness in today's Democratic Party that could haunt it for the next decade or more -- it has a relatively barren farm system of young up-and-comers. The party could easily survive 2016 with Clinton at the top of the ticket, but what about subsequent cycles?

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Few outside Zimmerman's defense team have done more to help him than Sean Hannity, who on Friday declared that Zimmerman had already won the trial. "As far as I'm concerned, this case is over," the Fox host said after playing testimony from a witness who said he saw Trayvon Martin beating Zimmerman "MMA style." The day before that, Hannity said on his radio show that the judge should dismiss manslaughter, let alone the second-degree murder charges.

"So the question is why are we here? And the answer to that question is purely political. Politics influenced the decision, the media influenced the decision," Hannity said, succinctly revealing why the conservative media has found itself vocally defending someone who admitted to killing teenager Trayvon Martin. It goes like this: Liberals and the media made hay out of the fact that Zimmerman was initially not charged in the killing of Martin. Liberals and the media are bad. Therefore, Zimmerman must be good.

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But when speaking to a more conservative audience in an interview with Glenn Beck, Paul warned that changing marriage laws could lead to bestiality: “It is difficult, because if we have no laws on this, people will take it to one extension further -- does it have to be humans?”

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"It will merely make them free speech martyrs, despite their abhorrent views," Jillian York, the Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in an email.

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But today, Treasury Department Inspector General Russell George explained in a letter to lawmakers that while some liberal groups got extra scrutiny, they weren't systematically targeted like conservative ones were. "We found no indication in any of these other materials that 'Progressives' was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention," the IG wrote. While 100 percent of applications for groups with "Tea Party," "Patriot" or "9/12" in their name were processed as "potential political cases," just 30 percent of progressive ones were.

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In this way, Snowden is a quintessential American outlaw hero, albeit updated for the modern era. With many Americans cheering him on as he evades the law -- moving from Hong Kong to Moscow and possibly some other nation, seemingly outwitting the U.S. government all the while --  it echoes the reception many other fugitives like Whitey Bulger, O.J. Simpson (during the famous Bronco chase), and Bucky Phillips all received.

All of which raises a key question: Why do Americans so often root for outlaws on the run?

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"The reason there are so many gay people now is because it's a chemical warfare operation," Jones said in a June 2010 clip that has gained renewed attention since the DOMA ruling. "I have the government documents where they said they're going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so people don't have children."

Cutting open a juice box to reveal the nefarious plastic lining laced with "estrogen mimickers," Jones continued, "After you're done drinking your little juices, you're ready to go out and have a baby. You're ready to put makeup on, you're ready to wear a short skirt." While there is some research that suggests plastics leach hormone-like chemicals, there's no evidence that they're harmful to one's health or that the government is involved in a secret plot to turn the country gay.

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The fight will continue in the states, and conservative Republicans may even keep up the fight in Congress, but leadership is ready to throw in the towel. "While I am obviously disappointed in the ruling, it is always critical that we protect our system of checks and balances," Boehner told reporters today after the Supreme Court struck down DOMA. "A robust national debate over marriage will continue in the public square, and it is my hope that states will define marriage as the union between one man and one woman." States, not Congress.

“It sounds to me that that battle will be moving to the states,” John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said. Eric Cantor hit the same tone, adding, "the marriage debate will continue in the states." "Congressional Republican leaders are speaking with resounding unity: the same-sex marriage fight is ending on Capitol Hill," Politico's Jake Sherman and Ginger Gibson reported today.

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“If Bill Clinton was ‘the first black president,’ Anthony Kennedy has now firmly secured his place in history as ‘the first gay justice,'" said former Kennedy clerk Michael Dorf, who now teaches law at Cornell.

Kennedy has often confounded liberals and conservatives alike with his unpredictable decision-making. "On most cases of great moment, the intellectual battlefield of the Supreme Court has shrunk to the space between this one man's ears," Time magazine's Massimo Calabresi and David Von Drehle wrote in their 2010 profile of the justice.

But on gay rights, Kennedy is atypically consistent. "As the author of Romer v. Evans, Lawrence v. Texas and now United States v. Windsor, Justice Kennedy makes clear that he not only accepts, but welcomes the task of writing majestic opinions affirming the dignity of gay persons and couples," Dorf added.

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Shortly after midnight on June 28, 1969, police in New York raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, arresting and harassing the gay clientele. It was like countless previous police raids on gay clubs until a series of escalating events led to open rebellion in the Village, and sparked the beginning of the gay equality movement. A year later, June 28 marked the first Gay Pride protests in a handful of major cities. To this day, most Pride rallies, including those in other countries, are still held at the end of June in honor of Stonewall, and this weekend's festivities in San Francisco, New York and other cities promise to be all the more buoyant, given the Supreme Court's rulings.

Coincidentally, today also marks the 10-year anniversary of the day the Supreme Court handed down its landmark ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down anti-sodomy laws. It was an early victory in a string of legal advances for LGBT equality, leading to today's.

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Geller replied in a typically flamboyant fashion:

In a striking blow against freedom, the British government has banned us from entering the country. Muhammad al-Arifi, who has advocated Jew-hatred, wife-beating, and jihad violence, entered the U.K. recently with no difficulty. In not allowing us into the country solely because of our true and accurate statements about Islam, the British government is behaving like a de facto Islamic state. The nation that gave the world the Magna Carta is dead.

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"We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society," Obama said. "Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it's not going to protect you from the coming storm."

As it turns out, there is a real Flat Earth Society and its president thinks that anthropogenic climate change is real. In an email to Salon, president Daniel Shenton said that while he "can't speak for the Society as a whole regarding climate change," he personally thinks the evidence suggests fossil fuel usage is contributing to global warming.

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So is this the end of Keystone? Stein says the "policy somewhat splits the difference -- not killing the project outright, but ensuring that it meets a basic environmental standard."

Environmentalists are thrilled, but reserving a healthy skepticism because there's still a big "if" here.

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How wrong we were. Now it's clear Issa played us this whole time, thanks to new documents that show the IRS also targeted "progressive" and "Occupy" groups, in addition to Tea Party ones. And if it targeted groups on both sides, it wasn't really singling anyone out (the only group actually denied tax-exempt status was a progressive one, after all) and the whole scandal falls apart.

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It's a welcome and overdue move, but those who believe in science should probably keep their optimism guarded and praise conditional for the moment, considering Obama's habit of promising big and delivering smaller when it comes to climate.

"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal," he famously (or infamously) said when accepting the Democratic nomination five years ago.

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Well, as it turns out, that whole scandal is entirely bogus. False. A fiction. The entire notion that the agency singled out groups with "Tea Party" in their name in simply wrong, we learn today, thanks to new documents revealed by the Associated Press. The documents, and confirmation from officials, show the IRS targeted groups with other keywords in their names, including "Progressive” and “Occupy.”

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The two say they are motivated by a desire to expose human rights and civil liberties violations by the American government, but allying with Correa is like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Many have cursorily noted that Ecuador has a poor record when it comes to freedom of the press, but a closer inspection is even more troubling.

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The WikiLeaks founder said Snowden is "safe and healthy," but would not reveal his location, saying only that the leaker left Hong Kong on refugee travel documents issued by the Ecuadorian government after the U.S. revoked his passport. WikiLeaks paid for his travel.

Snowden was expected to make the move, but slipped past reporters who expected him on a flight from Moscow to Havana, Cuba, which may have been a ruse intended to evade the media or American intelligence agencies.

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Not surprisingly, Fox has often come in for a drubbing from media watchdogs for its often conservative, narrative-driven news coverage. But Kurtz, while occasionally willing to call foul on Fox, is generally pretty credulous of the cable news channel, defending it during controversies, favorably profiling its personalities, and seemingly overlooking its lapses.

John Cook at Gawker pointed this out, suggesting that Kurtz may have scooped him in 2004 at the behest of a News Corp. PR agent, and pointing to some other examples:

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If you've never heard of the PCLOB, you're not alone. We hadn't either, and that's probably because the Bush and Obama administrations have done everything they can to keep it that way. As the Hill's Justin Sink reports, the board was created eight years ago on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, but has "remained largely powerless" thanks to White House obstruction. Indeed, this is one of the board's first meetings, as Sink reports:

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