Wiretap: TSA bombs competency test

A pilot salutes before her airplane takes off.

Epic fail

The TSA doesn’t work. It never has. But this time was your basic epic fail: Undercover agents snuck weapons and mock bombs through security 95 percent of the time, as in 19 times out of 20. An acting administrator has been fired for administering over a worse failure than the 2013 epic failure when the General Accounting Office found that the $900 million screening program didn’t work. So, the question is, will it ever work? Or maybe it’s this: If it doesn’t work, does it really matter? Via The Atlantic.

Free at last?

The Senate finally passed the USA Freedom Act, which renews the Patriot Act and reins in domestic phone surveillance. So, we know the TSA doesn’t work. Will this new law make the NSA work better? Via Vox.

More is more

Jennifer Senior writes in a must-read (for political junkies, anyway) profile of Jeb Bush in New York magazine: “Jeb Bush is more ruthless than he looks, more conservative than moderates like to believe, and possibly more appealing to Latinos than Marco Rubio.”

Baby girl

“Welcome to the world Caitlyn.” That’s how Caitlyn Jenner introduced her new self on Twitter. It was no match for her debut on the cover of Vanity Fair. Via The New Yorker.

Billion dollar brainstorm

How the Clinton Foundation grew from a small non-profit into a $2 billion global empire: Just the way you’d expect. It happened with a series of brainstorms from its namesake founder. Via The Washington Post.

Counting heads

Sean Trende says it’s the most important redistricting case to hit the Supreme Court in 50 years. The question is whether legislative districts need to have a relatively equal number of people or an equal number of citizens. Via Real Clear Politics.

New owners

Conservative Verizon now owns the very liberal Huffington Post. What happens next nobody knows, but it might be a billion dollar question. Via The New York Times.

Red-state model

Katrina vanden Heuvel writes in the Washington Post of the dangerous “red-state model” that doesn’t work — and especially doesn’t work for the nation’s poor.

 

Photo credit: Condor.com, Creative Commons, Flickr.

 

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