First, on "This Week": "TRAITOR OR HERO?" This is, what, a month into the Snowden saga, and these are still the first words to appear on a news show? "TRAITOR OR HERO?" You're on a troll, Stephanopoulos.

And here is Julian Assange, from his safe room in London, tie knot loosened. An ABC News correspondent gives us some background: "Who is Julian Assange?" Is he destroying the world? Or is he just a dude in the Ecuadorian Embassy.

What can you tell us about Edward Snowden, Assange? For example: where is the little shit hiding? "I wish I could answer your question in more detail." Red eyes and a cough, he sounds like he has a nasty cold, the poor guy. Now he is making Edward Snowden's story all about himself. The two face very similar investigations, he says, both from the same court in Alexandria, Virginia, where you've got a low chance of receiving "justice."

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Kaiser Health's story also notes that during the media push for Massachusetts' similar healthcare law, "the campaign was advertised during Red Sox games at Fenway Park. That marketing is widely credited with helping build public acceptance." Once again in the healthcare field, the federal government is just following Mitt Romney's lead.

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Another NBC News story on precisely the same topic comes away with a similar conclusion: "progressives are ready to give her another shot."

Progressives are basically fine with Hillary Clinton taking the 2016 nomination. There! Settled.

And why shouldn't they be? As Markos Moulitsas puts it, “The fact that she makes 2016 uninteresting makes that attractive." Yeah, that's about all you need, too. She would win. And you know who's a good nominee to go with, in general, in politics? The one who would win the election. Progressives overall might prefer, say, an Elizabeth Warren or Martin O'Malley for the nominee, but they likely won't run if Hillary Clinton runs, so whatever.

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First up, "This Week": Fast Eddie Snowden is hot on the move. How does he keep "bedeviling" US officials like this? It's a "cat-and-mouse game," and the U.S. "lost this round," says the breaking news correspondent.

Host George Stephanopoulos is now talking to Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the NSA. Mister General, Stephanopoulos asks, how did you let this guy out of Hawaii in the first place? Alexander is mentioning 9/11 and how Edward Snowden is making us vulnerable. "We are now putting in place systems" to track those with high-level security clearances. For example: "We've changed our passwords." Good luck, hackers.

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Now then, what's the problem? Oh right, it's the House of Representatives, which is terrible at everything, and offers no indication of being any other way until at least 2023. Let's give some credit: They're adept at passing go-nowhere bills to repeal Obamacare or ban abortion or tattoo the words "Under God" to every baby's forehead. Great work there from the House Republican Party. On issues that might appeal to an even slightly broader cross-section of the country, though, they've got nothing. You know this. You've seen the same routine in nearly every important vote since 2009. Remember that time the government considered arbitrarily defaulting on the public debt and destroying the global economy forever? That was a head-scratcher for the House; took some real "working out" before they concluded it would best be averted, for now.

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For the current coalition of mostly-Democratic-but-some-Republican backers as a whole, this is mixed news: The cost estimate checks out -- better than expected, even -- but the relatively small decrease in future illegal immigration raises some concerns about their claims that this will resolve the border issue conclusively, forever.

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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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"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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"SUNDAY SHOWDOWN!" George Stephanopoulos greets us, to open This Week. It's a political consultant versus another political consultant! Whose talking points will win? "Let's get right to it" with David Plouffe versus Karl Rove, before you even have time to run to the bathroom. Arianna Huffington, Gwen Ifill and the WSJ editorial page's Paul Gigot watch from the other side of the table.

Stephanopoulos shows poll numbers that indicate the public doesn't especially care about any of The Scandals, today's hot lead. Forty-four percent find the IRS targeting scandal the most important, however. And Karl Rove says if you look "inside the numbers," the public is still very unhappy with the economy. And the IRS collects taxes from the economy, so there you go: biggest scandal ever, searingly pertinent to all.

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But it's his other side, the deeply ambitious one, that clouds our ability to predict where the fiscal saga ends. This is the Boehner who clawed his way to the House speakership for over 20 years, a position that his conference may force him out of if he "surrenders" to President Obama in private negotiations.

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We're onto you. We know that in our shattered political system, the more often "children and grandchildren" are invoked, the more likely those same doe-eyed youths are to get the shaft. You're jinxing it so badly, right now. Stop! Take your full benefits, exert your demographic voting prowess, whatever. But please, for the love of God, spare your children and grandchildren the audacious explanation that this is done for their sake. They are not so stupid as to believe that self-sacrifice is your true motivating force in electoral politics.

How the invocation of a nation's "children and grandchildren" isn't already an obvious, cacophonous laugh line that speechwriters dodge at every temptation is one of the greater mysteries of contemporary political rhetoric. But it survives, presumably because it scores quite well in focus groups.

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He's not the only Bush to figure prominently in the news. In fact, after a year-plus Republican primary season in which the name of the Republican president who ran the country for two-thirds of this millennium somehow went unspoken, all three of the major Bush boys are back. Former President George H. W. "Poppy" Bush, a committed Romney man, will babble aimlessly about his life and presidency in an HBO documentary set to debut tonight. And Jeb Bush, the long-rumored "smart" Bush child (he'd gut the welfare state for fun, but hey, he speaks Spanish), continues to find himself disparaged by the Republican base after suggesting, scandalously, that the American system of government requires compromise to function.

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Tragic! For now we know that Gingrich won't even reach that steppingstone, the presidency of the United States, to his predetermined world-historical greatness. And yet he came so close: He was briefly viable at three separate points in this race, before, predictably, tossing it all away -- or having Mitt Romney's super PAC attack snatch it away from him. Let's recall these three Rises and Falls of Would-Be President Gingrich and share in our despair that the funniest possible presidential nominee, Newt Gingrich in 2012, was not selected in a national primary of his peers.

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Which is why compiling this list of the worst, or most memorably bad, pundit predictions from this Republican primary cycle has been the toughest assignment of my career. How is one to cull a list of the dozen or two most egregious episodes of bad punditry from every political article, blog post or tweet from the past two years?

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Like any old friend of a publication's founder who considers it his right to contribute lazy nonsense only when it pleases him, John Derbyshire seemed to pop off from his National Review perch for weeks or months at a time. He would eventually resurface on National Review Online, perhaps touting a playful new book on the apocalypse, to share his oddball musings on various affairs while his more dependable, hawkish colleagues busied themselves with outrage at the Democratic Party. A latter-year blog post from Derbyshire -- "Derb" or "The Derb" to colleagues and critics alike -- would usually go something like, "My flowers have just come in, looking a bit limp I must say. Did you hear about this latest fashion preoccupation among teenage girls? Nor did I. Watch out for the blacks." These blasts of Derbitry had become the only reason to visit National Review Online, reliably providing rich material to satisfy the daily fixes of outrage and mockery.

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