Citing the "grim math" of 86 Americans killed by guns every day, Michael Bloomberg has announced a new $50 million, grassroots gun control initiative that hopes to adopt the same strategic tools utilized by the NRA - money, organizing, political pressure and the targeting of single-issue voters - to take it down. While the polarizing Bloomberg may not be the best front man for the umbrella group, called Everytown for Gun Safety, it's already put up a slick website and released a stomach-churningly powerful video. Not a moment too soon. In one of today's 86 shootings, a four-year-old Pennsylvania boy shot his two-year-old brother in the face.

Ever more appalling economic news, with the AFL-CIO's 2014 Executive PayWatch tracking CEO pay - average $11.7 million - now 331 times what the average worker makes, and 774 times that of minimum wage workers, the world's largest pay gap. Using interactive graphics and data on 100 top companies, it contrasts, say, the WalMart CEO's $20,693,545 pay with the $12,000 earned by a full-time worker - who on average earned her company $41,249 in profits. Elsewhere, the news is just as bad: Palo Alto now has a law making it a crime for the homeless to sleep in a parked car, Oklahoma has one banning cities from raising minimum wages or enacting paid sick days, and The Onion says members of al-Qaeda are, thanks to all these morally and practically untenable economic policies, plotting to "sit back and enjoy themselves while America collapses of its own accord."

Surreal: Charging that possible perps "broke the law and should be prosecuted,” aggrieved Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein is investigating, and has called on the DOJ to investigate, the dastardly leak to McClatchy of parts of the 6,600-page report finding the CIA repeatedly lied about a "brutal" torture program “inconsistent with (U.S.) public policy positions regarding human rights" - torture that in fact didn't work. It seems the Senate is scandalized not by the crimes committed in our names, but by journalists telling us about them. With the call for prosecution, the government thus maintains its admirable stance in only making accountable the people who reveal our nation's misdeeds - see John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden - but not those who authorize or commit them. Oh we have arrived at a sorrowful place.