Armed with confidential memos to Hillary Clinton that were stolen from the e-mail account of a former White House aide, a hacker has distributed some of the documents to a wide array of congressional aides, political figures, and journalists worldwide.

In a series of weekend e-mail blasts, the hacker known as "Guccifer" disseminated four recent memos to Clinton from Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidant of the former Secretary of State.

The 64-year-old Blumenthal, who worked as a senior White House adviser to President Bill Clinton, had his AOL e-mail account hacked last week by "Guccifer," who has conducted similar illegal assaults against a growing list of public figures, including Colin Powell, relatives and friends of the Bush family, and a top United Nations official.

The hacker's e-mails went to hundreds of recipients, though the distribution lists were dotted with addresses for aides to Senate and House members who are no longer in office. But many of the addresses to which the Blumenthal memos were sent are good (though it is unclear whether karl@rove.com is a solid address for the Republican mastermind).

Republican Senator Rand Paul boldly declared last week when he introduced the Life at Conception Act that "human life begins at the moment of conception, and therefore is entitled to legal protection."

However, during an interview on Tuesday with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, the Kentucky senator seemed to soften his tone when asked about abortion in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is at risk.

"Just to be precise, if you believe life begins at conception, which I suspect you do, you would have no exceptions for rape, incest, the life of the mother. Is that right?" Blitzer asked.

"What I would say is that there are thousands of exceptions. I'm a physician and every individual case is going to be different," Sen. Paul responded. "Everything is going to be particular to that individual case and what is going on that mother and the medical circumstances of that mother."

Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday said Dr. Ben Carson has the entire Democratic Party "scared to death" for several reasons.

"He is able to articulate and explain conservatism in a way that is persuasive, without raising his voice at all," Limbaugh said. It sounds like your dad talking to you, not your dad, your best buddy talking to you."

Should Carson ever decide to run for office, like his supporters want him to, the left would have a very hard time demonizing him, Limbaugh explained.

Plymouth County Sherriff Joe McDonald attended the Republicans' rival St. Patrick's Day breakfast in Scituate on Sunday, and he's taking some serious criticism from left-leaning blogs for a joke he made suggesting that President Obama could help the nation by getting assassinated. The joke, it turns out, isn't just bad - it's also really, really old. According to an early edition of a Boston Globe article that has since removed the account, the joke goes like this:

McDonald offered a joke about Barack Obama being visited in a dream by three past presidents, who offered advice on how to improve the country. Lincoln's advice: "Go to the theater."

As Ted Nugent can tell you, joking about the assassination of a president typically doesn't go over well. At the breakfast, McDonald's line got "scattered laughter." In the blogosphere, it's getting condemnation.

St. Patricks Day breakfasts are a gauntlet for politicians to test out their best stand-up routines, so it's notable that McDonald failed not just for tastelessness, but for stealing his comedy. Indeed, politicians have been making this joke - replacing Obama with whichever president they dislike - since at least the Reagan years. Rarely has it gone over well. And it's not just an example of Republicans' poor taste. Cruddy comedians on both sides of the aisle have made use of it. (You think it's tasteless to make these jokes in the current era of gun violence, so imagine making it about a president who has actually already survived an assassination attempt!)

A county in Maryland is putting limits on some of the trappings of elementary school: Hugs from grown-ups are restricted, birthday-party invitations are banned, and no more bringing cupcakes for the whole class.

Parents who visit the 17 elementary schools in St. Mary's County are still allowed to hug their own children, just not other kids. Only parents registered as volunteers are allowed on the playground, and even then they can't push other people's kids on the swings.

"What's OK with some families is not OK with others," Kelly Hall, the district's executive director of elementary schools, told NBC News on Tuesday.

The guidelines come from a committee of parents and school administrators that started meeting last fall. They were put in place after the massacre last December in Newtown, Conn. District officials stress that they are not final, and say they want feedback from parents.

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper signed landmark new gun laws on Wednesday expanding background checks on gun purchases and limiting the size of ammunition magazines, placing the traditionally firearm-friendly state among the handful to pass new restrictions in the wake of the shooting in Newtown, Conn.

The Democratic governor defended the legislation in a press conference on Wednesday. Hickenlooper said he had found widespread support among state residents for broadening background checks, and dismissed the idea that politicians had been pressured from outside the state.

"This didn't come from the White House," Hickenlooper said.

Hickenlooper's signature came the day after the head of Colorado's Department of Corrections, Tom Clements, was shot and killed in his home, apparently after he answered a ring at his front door, authorities said.

The state has been scarred by some of the deadliest incidents of mass gun violence in recent U.S. history, including the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School and the Aurora movie theater shooting that killed 12 last July. The state's gun control bills have gained national attention since they were first proposed, drawing the ire of those who oppose any new restrictions on gun purchases or ownership.

"We're all in shock here," state Senator Greg Brophy, a Republican, said on Wednesday. "It turns out this guy who everybody thought was a moderate Democrat is actually a gun-control governor."

More than a dozen car bombs and suicide blasts tore through Shi'ite Muslim districts in the Iraqi capital Baghdad and other areas on Tuesday, killing nearly 60 people on the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.

Sunni Islamist insurgents linked to al Qaeda are regaining ground in Iraq, invigorated by the war next door in Syria and have stepped up attacks on Shi'ite targets in an attempt to provoke a wider sectarian confrontation.

One car bomb exploded in a busy Baghdad market, three detonated in the Shi'ite district of Sadr City and another near the entrance of the heavily fortified Green Zone that sent a plume of dark smoke into the air alongside the River Tigris.

A suicide bomber in a truck attacked a police base in a Shi'ite town south of the capital, and another blew himself up inside a restaurant to target a police major in the northern city of Mosul.

"I was driving my taxi and suddenly I felt my car rocked. Smoke was all around. I saw two bodies on the ground. People were running and shouting everywhere," said Ali Radi, a taxi driver caught in one of the blasts in Baghdad's Sadr City.

Ten years.

Two trillion dollars.

One hundred and ninety thousand lives.

And forty-two percent.

That's the percentage of Americans who do not believe the invasion, occupation and destruction of Iraq was a mistake. Even with what we knew then, it's hard to figure that anyone would still endorse the invasion. Given what we know now, it's a staggering and disheartening number.

But that's not the half of it.

A closer look at a 10th Anniversary Gallup poll shows a disturbing trend. In 2008, sixty-three percent of Americans believed the invasion was a mistake. Now, with even more perspective and more information and more carnage and a growing human rights mess in Iraq, the percentage of Americans who think the invasion was wrong has dropped to fifty-three percent.

Fifty-three.

Put bluntly, since Obama first took the White House, more Americans have decided that the war was, in fact, a good idea.

How is this possible?

Career First Amendment and transparency advocate James Goodale sounds the alarm about the current president

In 1971, when the New York Times decided to publish the Pentagon Papers leaked to it by Daniel Ellsberg, it knew it was triggering a major fight with the secrecy-obsessed Nixon administration. As expected, the Nixon administration sued the NYT in an attempt to ban it from publishing the documents, but the US Supreme Court, in a landmark decision for press freedom, ruled the prior restraint unconstitutional. The paper's general counsel at the time, James Goodale, said that he counseled the paper to publish despite "the more likely scenario that everyone feared was the fact that they could have gone to jail," and he subsequently became an outspoken defender of press freedoms. He now has a new book entitled "Fighting for the Press" in which he argues, as the Columbia Journalism Review puts it, that "Obama is worse for press freedom than former President Richard Nixon was."

CJR has an amazing interview with Goodale, some relevant excerpts from which relate to many topics written about here:

Let's talk about some of the challenges to press freedom now.

The biggest challenge to the press today is the threatened prosecution of WikiLeaks, and it's absolutely frightening. . . .

"The one case that is troublesome and is still out there as we speak is the case of James Risen, who was a journalist who was leaked national security information in respect to the warrantless wiretapping program, which was disclosed by The New York Times.

"He's won his case, but most people are going to be surprised if he can win it on appeal. It's been sitting on appeal for a year. Now what's going to happen - if the shoe drops and we're back to Judy Miller, it means Risen goes to jail. And if in fact it doesn't turn out that way and it turns out well, we'll have the question of whether the government will go to the Supreme Court and we will always have the question whether it will turn out well for the next Risen. And who's behind this one? Obama."

An Iraq War veteran who joined the U.S. Army two days after 9/11 has written a powerful open letter to former President George W. Bush and ex-Vice President Dick Cheney accusing them of war crimes, "plunder" and "the murder of thousands of young Americans - my fellow veterans - whose future you stole."

Tomas Young, who was shot and paralyzed during an insurgent attack in Sadr City in 2004, five days into his first deployment, penned the letter from his Kansas City, Mo., home, where he's under hospice care.

"I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney," Young wrote in the letter published on Truthdig.com. "I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans - my fellow veterans - whose future you stole."

The 33-year-old, who was the subject of Phil Donahue's 2007 documentary "Body of War," continued:

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to "liberate" Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called "democracy" in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq's oil revenues.

Young believes he was injured fighting the wrong war:

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.