In a brilliant if unholy juxtaposition of messaging and marketing, Pope Francis celebrated a Mass by both blessing thousands of Harley-Davidson riders thunderously marking the bike's 110th anniversary - 2013 slogan: “Live life on your own terms" - and hosting an anti-abortion rally by warning believers that "power and pleasure" lead to God being "replaced by fleeting human idols which offer the intoxication of a flash of freedom." Oddly, nobody seemed to sense any discrepancy between the two sound-and-fury talking points.

With little debate, the GOP/ Scott Walker fiefdom formerly known as Wisconsin has fast-tracked three anti-abortion bills - including one mandating an ultrasound, with the results given the pregnant woman - even though doctors' groups oppose them. The votes came as citizens sat in a gallery lined with police who ejected many and told those with duct tape on their mouths to take it off or face arrest; debate was cut off by a feverish Speaker pounding his gavel so hard he broke it, a pretty good metaphor for the democratic process in Wisconsin.

"Many of these laws are dangerous to patients’ health and safety... Government should stay out of imposing its political agenda on medical practice.” - ob-gyns' Congress

Dismissing the hero-or-traitor debate swirling around Edward Snowden in "the court of public opinion," the ever-cogent Bernie Sanders insists our focus should be "the gnawing questions his actions raised from the shadows" - as in, how else is the government invading our privacy, why do Democrats condone in Obama the same curbing of liberties they blasted Bush for, when will the administration stop misleading - okay, lying to - the public, etc. Sanders = national treasure.