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I generally try to avoid doing consecutive comics about the same topic, but last week, a few polls taken after Snowden’s NSA whistleblowing show that Americans support the snooping, especially when it’s falsely framed against terrorism.

The same country that accepts thousands of gun and traffic deaths, for the sake of personal freedom, cowers in a corner, pisses their pants, and hands over their privacy whenever the authorities whisper “terrorism” into their precious little ears.

Fifty years or so from now, when books are written about us, we’ll be labeled “The Scaredest Generation,” if books are still around in 2063.

Matt Bors and I just wrapped up our weekly Google Hangout. And like most of the news, it was dominated by the overreaching of the NSA and the Obama Administration.

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Last week, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden confirmed that the NSA is running a gigantic domestic surveillance program. So much has been written and said about it that I don’t have much to add except that I agree with what Matt Bors said.

Besides the actual spying, the people defending it are the most noxious. From Dianne Feinstein, who presumably knows a lot about the program(s) as Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to the general public, who are still pissing their pants nearly 12 years after 9/11, this country’s still in the throes of an epic freakout over terrorists.

If terrorists killed 30,000+ Americans a year, I MIGHT be inclined to think this program was anywhere near justifiable, but that’s guns. Guns kill 30,000+ Americans a year, and we can’t even collect data on who’s buying them. Our security priorities: They’re fucked up and bullshit.

I forgot to post last week’s because the heat wave made me temporarily stupid. In addition to this week’s cartoons, Matt and I talked about the economy, FLOTUS heckling, and whether there’s any merit to rape jokes.

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The big economic news last week was a rise in housing prices, and that women are now the main breadwinners in 40 percent of families. Combined with the other indicators commonly used by the government and the media, the anemic recovery looks like it’s finally gaining some steam. But anyone with eyeballs can see unemployment has been insanely high for five years while those lucky enough to be employed have seen their wages stagnate or go down.

This “recovery” is fueled almost entirely by record corporate profits. I’m not sure what’s so great about rising housing prices anyway, since that’s what caused the last bust. And I couldn’t afford a house when prices were at all-time lows. As a lifelong renter, I’m essentially a non-entity as far as economists are concerned.

I personally won’t feel like the economy’s healthy until I can buy a boat. Right now the Brian Boat Index is at a pathetic 0 Boats. Thanks, Obama.

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I took a break from the faux-scandals of the week before the holiday and celebrated the unofficial start of summer. I don’t have a crystal ball, but it’s a safe bet that all of these titles will come up at some point, plus a bunch of silly season stories.

As for real summer blockbusters, I’ve only seen “Star Trek Into Darkness,” and it was okay. I’ll probably see “Man of Steel” too and have the same review. The only 2013 movie I’m really excited about is the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis.”

Matt’s back from his book tour, so we’re hoping to get back to our weekly chat Wednesdays at 4pm EDT. Here’s the one we just wrapped up.

We covered our more recent comics, tornado coverage and conspiracies, and the most important issue of all time: how to pronounce “GIF.”

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Of the three “scandals” that involved the White House last week, the AP one is the only one I think has legs. The Benghazi attack has become a sideshow ever since Mitt Romney held that weird press conference immediately blaming Obama for the attacks.

The IRS thing is shitty, but I doubt the Republicans will want to shine too much light on it and risk reintroducing the American public to the damage done by the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision. As Bors’ recent cartoon highlights, the “victims” of the IRS’s keyword targeting are pretty shitty themselves, so it’s hard for me to muster up the outrage to give a fuck.

The Obama Administration has been aggressively going after journalists for years now; indicting more of them than all previous administrations combined. The giant dragnet they used to get two months’ of the AP’s phone records is ridiculous. If sources know their records can be secretly obtained on a government’s whim, they’ll cease to be sources, which is the textbook definition of a chilling effect.

If the DoJ went after financial criminals with the same zeal they use against reporters for simply doing their jobs, the world would be a better place. But reporters aren’t the ones who finance campaigns.

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I’m a couple months too old to be considered a millennial, but since everyone under 60 has been screwed by the Boomer generation, I can sympathize. No benefits, no pensions, and no hope of ever retiring is our fate, all so they could play make-believe with supply-side economics.

I was drawing this when Time’s trolling cover story about “selfish, lazy, millennials” came out, so this isn’t directly in response to that, just a happy accident. Leave it to a rich-as-fuck columnist to be willfully ignorant of wage stagnation in the face of sky-high worker productivity and corporate profits.

It’s not all bad news, my fellow middle-agers and youngs; eventually these greedy shitheels will all die off. And we’ll have a couple months to enjoy a world without them before climate change finishes the job they started.

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The ongoing hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay has begrudgingly brought our illegal prison back into the public consciousness. A couple months ago I did a cartoon with a panel about the idea of an indefinite vacation, and decided to expand on that idea in The Strip.

This Digby post sums up everything that’s wrong with the rationale behind Gitmo. America turned into a bunch of scared babies after 9/11, and history will forever remember this period as “The Great American Freak Out.” Hopefully history will also remember that we locked up dudes, tortured and never charged them, all because some bad guys turned us into a nation of pants-pissing reactionaries.