Sunday Roundup

This week saw the kickoff of Second Term Scandal Season, though the first entrants fall on very different parts of the manufactured scandal vs. real scandal continuum. On the deeply-contrived end is Benghazi -- with supposedly damning White House emails having been altered by GOP leakers. On the actually scandalous end is the administration's snooping through the AP's phone records, which the New York Times called "an effort to frighten off whistle-blowers." The incident points out the hypocrisy of a White House that praises whistleblowers in the abstract, but then goes after them -- aggressively and often. "Speaking truth to power is now a criminal act," says whistleblower and former NSA executive Thomas Drake, who the DOJ charged under the WW I-era Espionage Act. It's President Obama's war against whistleblowers that is the true scandal.