"The Senate opened a rare Sunday night session in a desperate attempt to extend a national security surveillance program... that was on the verge of expiring at midnight."

"Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, criticizing Mr. McConnell on the Senate floor, said, 'The majority leader had five months' to fix the problem through committee work. 'Everyone saw this coming,' Mr. Reid, the Senate minority leader, said."

The session quickly became contentious when Senator Rand Paul, the other Kentucky Republican, whom Mr. McConnell has endorsed for president, fought for the right to speak. After being rebuked by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, for not understanding the Senate rules, Mr. Paul railed against the surveillance program. �We should be upset, we should be marching in the streets,� he said.

Mr. Paul seemed determined to use his procedural weapon � the words �I object�...

"Hours after the Senate balked at reauthorizing the bulk collection of U.S. telephone records, the National Security Agency began shutting down..."

"... a controversial program Saturday that senior intelligence and law enforcement officials say is vital to track terrorists in the United States."

That's the Senate, working according to plan � balking at bulk � acting through inaction.

Rand Paul on ending the bulk collection of phone records but keeping the NSA.

He impressed me in this section of an interview this morning on "Meet the Press."



From the transcript:

... I would have the NSA target their activities more and more towards our enemies. I think if you are not spending so much time and money collecting the information of innocent Americans, maybe could have have spent more time knowing one of the Tsarnaev boys, one of the Boston bombers, had gone back to Chechnya. We didn't know that even though we had been tipped off by the Russians, we had communicated, we had interviewed him and still didn't know that. Same with the recent jihadist from Phoenix that traveled to Texas and the shooting in Garland. We knew him. We had investigated him, we had put him in jail. I want to spend more time on people we have suspicion of and we have probable cause and less time on innocent Americans. It distracts us from the job of getting terrorists.

"The Second Circuit Court of Appeals held in the case, which was brought by the ACLU, that the telephone metadata collection program 'exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized.'"

"The Court did not rule on a larger Constitutional issue and sent the case back down to a lower court for further proceedings."

A three judge panel held that the text of the Patriot Act "cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it and that it does not authorize the telephone meta date program."

The Court said, "We do so comfortably in the full understanding that if Congress [chooses] to authorize such a far-reaching and unprecedented program, it has every [opportunity] to do so, unambiguously. Until such times as it does so, however, we decline to deviate from widely accepted interpretations of well-established legal standards."

"New York City cabs are one-night stands. What happens during the encounter doesn�t really matter because I�ll never see that driver again."

"I wouldn�t have back-seat crazy fests in Uber because, hypothetically, the voyeur driver would have my name, address and a system that lets them rate me...Getting naked in an Uber has occurred to me about as often as I�ve considered doing a striptease in public, which is never."

AND: From the comments at the link (which goes to a NYT article titled "Taxi Flings Take a Back Seat to Uber"):

I drove a NY yellow cab at night back in the mid-1980's. Many comments today fail to appreciate the wild heady atmosphere that prevailed in the city back then - especially in certain parts of the city at certain times. "Dehumanizing to the driver"? Hell no... the driver was often part of the action - or at least invited or acknowledged. Drugs, sex, alcohol, run-ins with celebrities, impromptu parties, out-of-the-ordinary conversations, tawdry confessions, scoring smack in flaming alphabet city, "ghetto tourism", invites to chat with unsavory (yet often sweet) characters... this was not fiction, despite sworn testimony by a few straight-laced cabbies' that it never happened in their cabs. I'm not saying it was all pretty, just that when life is lived to the fullest with no screens attached - and when alternative lifestyles have not yet been snuffed out by $5,000 monthly rents - wild things can happen. At least they did on my watch.