An area in the prison that holds ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is "one of the saddest places on Earth," says his wife.

After a Mother's Day visit to the Littleton, Colo., facility with her family, Patti Blagojevich posted on Facebook that her husband was "so happy to see the us [sic] and we were so happy to see him."

It's a far cry from their Ravenswood, Ill., home, where the family lived for years while Blagojevich was governor. That home, listed at $1.07 million, was recently taken off the market.

Rod Blagojevich is serving 14 years for corruption. He was convicted on 18 counts after FBI wiretaps revealed him describing the opportunity to exchange an appointment to President Barack Obama's old U.S. Senate seat for campaign cash.

After a family visit in April, Blagojevich's attorneys told a Chicago TV station that their client wasn't happy about rules that only allowed his younger daughter to sit on his lap, while his older daughter was only permitted one hug.

Kissinger at a summit in Beijing, June 25, 2011. (Andy Wong/AP)

Henry Kissinger was searched by the Transportation Security Administration at New York's LaGuardia Airport on Monday.

Matthew Cole, a freelance reporter for The Washington Post, recognized the former secretary of state, who was in a wheelchair, at a security checkpoint. The 88-year-old Kissinger, Cole said, got a "full pat-down."

"He stood with his suit jacket off, and he was wearing suspenders," Cole told the Post's "In the Loop" blog. "They gave him the full pat-down. None of the agents seemed to know who he was."

In March, the TSA said it would begin testing a program that would allow passengers 75 and older to keep their shoes and light jackets on as they pass through security. But the TSA said that older passengers may still be subject to normal screening procedures if the full-body scanners detect any anomalies.

"It may not be the most egregious violation of privacy [by] the agency," the Atlantic Wire's Eric Randall wrote, "but certainly another high profile example of their less-than-stellar record for singling out comically unlikely suspects."

In January, Sen. Rand Paul claimed he was detained by the TSA in Nashville, Tenn., after refusing a pat-down. The TSA, though, refuted Paul's account.

Protesters opposing a mandatory ultrasound law outside the Idaho Capitol in Boise in March. (Jessie L. Bonner/ …

A popular new piece of abortion legislation may eventually end up in front of the Supreme Court as federal courts have disagreed over whether it violates the Constitution.

The law—versions of which have passed in Oklahoma, North Carolina and Texas—mandates that before a woman is allowed to obtain an abortion, doctors must give her an ultrasound, describe the procedure out loud and display the images for her. Five other states are considering similar bills, while six more already require the ultrasound before an abortion, although they don't insist upon the out loud description or the showing of images to patients.

To try to knock down these laws, abortion rights supporters have taken an interesting approach in court. Instead of arguing that the ultrasound and its description are an undue burden on women trying to receive a legal abortion, they say that the law is actually infringing on the First Amendment rights of doctors, who must recite facts about the fetus against their will. The Supreme Court has generally been supportive of this so-called "compelled speech" argument, ruling in 1943 that students could not be forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, for example. But commercial speech has been treated quite differently, which is why the government can get away with requiring cigarette companies to place warning labels on their cartons.