"National Security Agency officials are considering a controversial amnesty that would return Edward Snowden to the United States..."

"... in exchange for the extensive document trove the whistleblower took from the agency."

So the message is: If you take enough, you can get away with it simply by giving it back.

This is a variation on the big lie ("a lie so 'colossal' that no one would believe that someone 'could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously'").  Go big enough, and you can get away with what the small time liars/cheats/thieves/monsters must pay for.

Or what was it Donald Trump — I think it was Donald Trump — said? The bank turns down people who ask for small loans, but if you ask for a yoooge enough loan, they don't say no. Can't find the precise thing I'm looking for, but I did find:

"As long as you are going to be thinking anyway, think big."

Back to Snowden. I thought when he first took it on the lam, he said that there were copies distributed to various persons for safekeeping, so that if he were killed, it would all come out. How is the NSA to know whether all those copies are called back?

ADDED: Meade, reading this out loud, helping me proofread, said: "'a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence'.... how about the audacity?"

I'm irritated for a second by his discontinuity and say "It's a quote," as if I think Meade is offering me writing advice and there's a better word than "impudence," and then I realize that Meade is gesturing at Obama — "Audacity of Hope" — and the colossal Lie-of-the-Year lie that Obama told.

"You do realize that's a Hitler quote?" I ask, unnecessarily.

3-D printed food.

This seems incredibly dumb, unless you are hyper-focused on the shape of food — enough to ignore that it's all processed from already-highly-processed food paste.

[W]e had (once again) food in the shape of our initials. It was creamy and light, though the monogrammed letters made us feel uncomfortably Trump-like.

Are billionaires into monograms? Seems to me monograms are a pretty squarely middle-class affectation. Here's Pottery Barn's Monogram Shop, where the promotional copy stresses "personalizing" things like towels and pillowcases to make them "extraordinary."

I mean, it's funny to purport to squirm over feeling like a very rich man, when what you are doing is the sort of thing that stolidly mainstream retailers use to make the most conventional shoppers feel special.

What's funny is that the writer of that lengthy NYT article indulges in the liberal's cliché snubbing of Donald Trump, when he would know enough to refrain from displaying snobbery toward the actual middle-class Americans who patronize The Monogram Shop.

Beauty pageant contestant ordered to pay Donald Trump $5 million.

Former Miss Pennsylvania Sheena Monnin inopportunely asserted that the Miss USA pageant was "rigged."

Donald Trump says he's suing Bill Maher for $5 million after Trump accepted his offer, making a valid contract.

The "offer," made last month, was to "pay $5 million to Trump’s charity of choice if he provided a birth certificate proving that he’s not 'spawn of his mother having sex with orangutan.'"

Maher was comically commenting on Trump's offer to pay $5 million to Obama's charity of choice if Obama releases his college records.

This lawsuit news is, of course, Trump, once again, hogging — orangutanning — the media spotlight. Fine. I don't care. But to actually file a lawsuit is: 1. An offense against free speech, and 2. An irresponsible appropriation of the public wealth that will be consumed processing the lawsuit.

“I don’t think he was joking. He said it with venom. That was venom. That wasn’t a joke. In fact, he was nervous when he said it. It was a pathetic delivery,” Trump said on Fox News.

Speaking of pathetic... go away, Donald. And take your hair with you when you leave.