Hello NSA

I'm always looking for the thing that'll bring the Tea Party people together with the Occupy people. I say that often and it elicits groans, eye-rolls and an occasional "Good luck with that." But now we've got an issue that has brought together Rand Paul and Michael Moore, as unlikely a Vaudeville team as, well, Glenn Beck and Bernie Sanders. It's the NSA surveillance issue -- the revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting data on EVERY PHONE CALL IN AMERICA.

Leaders in House and Senate Intelligence Committees have defended the program, saying it's nothing new. To my mind, "Of course we're spying on you!" constitutes a new definition for government transparency.

And to be fair, they're only collecting what they call "metadata," ie. data about data. They don't know what kind of pizza you ordered, they only know that at a given time on a given day, you spent a given number of minutes and seconds ordering a pizza. Metadata is like a metaphor for data... like Metaphor Records is a metaphor for a record company.

Here's a new video of a song I wish I didn't have to resurrect from the Bush years.