11th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that law enforcement can't track cell phone movements without a warrant -- and thus may have taken a bat to the kneecaps of the NSA's legal justification for vacuuming up all your metadata. Long story short: the NSA's legal justification relies on the notion that you have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" when you give data to the phone company (or to any business), but the 11th Circuit maintains that you do, because, really, do you even think about revealing your location every time you use a cell phone? What on Earth is wrong with getting warrants, anyway?
President Obama signs an executive order forbidding federal contractors from discriminating against gay, lesbian, and transgender workers. Mr. Obama would have preferred that Congress pass ENDA (and so would I!), but this will do for the meantime, even if a President Walker or a President Sandoval overturns it. Author Gabriel Arana also points out that even if the Supreme Court decides that corporations have religious beliefs God forbid, no law compels a corporation to seek out federal contracts -- though with a few more Robertses on the Court, perhaps corporations will one day win a "right" to discriminate against people they think Jesus told them not to like and feed at the government trough.
David Corn helpfully provides "7 Talking Points You Need for Discussing the Iraq Crisis. I do wonder if reasoning with Iraq war hawks will do any good -- maybe the best response to any testosterone-addled fool yelling for Mr. Obama to send someone else's kids back to Iraq might be, "you had your shot, but you fouled it up out of abject stupidity and arrogance, so now let the adults give it a go."
David Frum asks "When Will Republican Leaders Fight Back" -- against "Republican radicals," that is, like the ones who toppled Eric Cantor last week. But I doubt Republican leaders want to "fight back," when they can just let teabaggers redefine the center further rightward, allowing leaders to work far less hard to appear "principled." And who in Virginia's 7th District would run through a wall for Eric Cantor anyway?
Finally, Think Progress reminds us how Casey Kasem (who passed on Father's Day) leveraged his power for causes dear to his heart, such as when he quit voicing Shaggy on Scooby-Doo in the mid-'90s after producers wanted him to cut an ad for Burger King, and would only return if they made Shaggy a vegetarian. I'm not necessarily with Mr. Kasem on vegetarianism, but I'm certainly with him on factory farms, and how many folks in his position would risk their cashflow on principle as he did?
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