DISINFORMATION: “The NY Post and other media outlets are being raked over the coals for releasing a photo of alleged suspects which turned out to be wrong, as I discussed. It turns out the cops may have been playing the media deliberately to give the real suspects the impression that their identities were not yet known.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Smaller Share of High School Grads Going to College. “The college enrollment rate — the share of recent U.S. high-school graduates enrolling in college or a university in the same year — dropped in 2012 to 66.2%, the lowest level since 2006, the Labor Department said in a report on Wednesday.”

DARK CLOUDS GATHER IN ITALY.

Clouds over Europe’s future grew a little darker yesterday. Italy is still without a new head of state as an effort to have former Prime Minister Romano Prodi elected failed miserably after 100 left-wing delegates refused to vote for the center-left politician. His defeat has thrown the Italian left into chaos, and ensured that the elections will drag on into the weekend.

The failure of the Italian Democrats (a coalition that stretches from the mildly liberal to the hard left) to get the widely respected Prodi through parliament makes it extremely unlikely that a stable government will emerge from the divided parliament created by the last election.

Polls show that Berlusconi would be the favorite in a new round of voting. This is an old pattern in Italian politics. Since Berlusconi emerged as a national force, the Italian left has never been able to provide stable and effective governance, so voters return to Il Cavaliere over and over again. Italy’s problem in a nutshell is that nobody but Berlusconi can govern it, and he is unwilling and perhaps unable to govern it well.

But there is a deeper problem: It is simply impossible for Italy to function along the lines necessary for the euro to work, and the Italian political system is breaking apart under the strain. No political movement in Italy could carry out the reforms the euro demands and survive in a democratic system. Italians do not want to be Germans and do not know how to operate a German style economy.

Europeans are fond of telling Israelis that Israel must choose between being a Jewish state (by ending the occupation) or being a democracy; some are beginning to realize that Europe faces an even more wrenching choice. Europe can have monetary union or it can have democracy; it cannot have both.

I worry about the outcome.

FUNNY, THIS NEVER SEEMS TO HAPPEN AT TEA PARTY RALLIES: Gunfire Erupts At Colorado Pot Rally, 2 Wounded.

SUING TO STOP TERROR FUNDING: “The lawsuits allege that Arab Bank, Credit Lyonnais, and two other foreign banks with New York offices were key to an intricate system that moved cash to aid terrorists and their families.”

YOU CAN’T FIGHT HERE — THIS IS THE WAR ROOM: ‘There Are No Questions Here. This is a Press Conference!’

SO MUCH FOR “DON’T BE EVIL:” Silicon Valley Companies Quietly Try To Kill Internet Privacy Bill.

AT AMAZON, Mother’s Day Gifts Galore.

Also, today only: 40 Kindle Mysteries & Thrillers, Each $1.99 or Less.

SOME POSSIBLE PROGRESS IN BRINGING DIVERSITY TO THE MEDIA: Koch Brothers Making Play For Tribune Newspapers.

Well, it’s not quite my plan, but . . . .

UPDATE: Reader Rich Bloom emails: “So why does the NYT headline the article with ‘Conservative Koch Brothers’ when they describe them as libertarian in the first sentence? Equating libertarians with conservatives is all part of the master plan I guess.”

Yeah, “Libertarian Koch Brothers” doesn’t sound nearly as scary. The average NYT reader probably thinks that’s like Bill Maher or something. . . .

DARRELL ISSA: “I want [to] assure everyone that the #Benghazi investigation IS going forward.”

A TALE OF TWO TERRORISTS:

Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be offered a teaching job at Columbia University.

Forty-three years ago last month, Kathy Boudin, now a professor at Columbia but then a member of the Weather Underground, escaped an explosion at a bomb factory operated in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The story is familiar to people of a certain age.

Three weeks earlier, Boudin’s Weathermen had firebombed a private home in Upper Manhattan with Molotov cocktails. Their target was my father, a New York state Supreme Court justice. The rest of the family, was presumably, an afterthought. I was 9 at the time, only a year older than the youngest victim in Boston.

One of Boudin’s colleagues, Cathy Wilkerson, related in her memoir that the Weathermen were disappointed with the minimal effects of the bombs at my home. They decided to use dynamite the next time and bought a large quantity along with fuses, metal pipes and, yes, nails. The group designated as its next target a dance at an Officer’s Club at Fort Dix, NJ.

Despite the misgivings of some, it is reported that Kathy Boudin urged the use of “anti-personnel bombs.” In other words, she wanted to kill people not just damage property. Before they could act, her fellows were killed in the townhouse explosion. The townhouse itself collapsed; Boudin fled.

She reappeared over a decade later driving the getaway car for the rag tag mix of Weathermen and Black Panthers who held up a Rockland County bank in 1981, murdering three in the process.

But she has the right pedigree, and the right politics, so the establishment has welcomed her back.

ROGER SIMON: Boston and America … Where the Fish Rots from the Top.

Apropos of the #BostonBombers, CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted this weekend: Big q is why FBI didnt keep an eye on/talk to Tamerlan Tsarnaev after he returned from Chechnya last year. So far from FBI: crickets.

Tapper’s right. The FBI is not looking particularly good as far as their surveillance of murderous Caucasian Islamists on our soil is concerned. And Tamerlan, evidently , left quite a trail, from domestic violence to reportedly attacking an imam for holding up MLK as someone to emulate. Not exactly subtle. They were even warned about Tamerlan by the Russians apparently.

The Feds must have been pretty clueless to ignore all this.

Probably. But I offer in their defense one of the hoariest of cliches: The fish rots from the top.

The Obama administration and most of those working for it have taken Islamic terrorism about as seriously as I am taking the Memphis Grizzlies/L.A. Clippers game currently on my TV — in other words, at best mildly interested. Not being a fan of either team, I could watch — I could switch to something else.

And when Islamic terrorism does rear its head, as in Benghazi, the administration evinces something worse than disinterest — dishonesty, lies, coverup and prevarication (sometimes aided by Tapper’s CNN cohort Candy Crowley).

And they don’t stop. They haven’t offered anything yet even remotely resembling a transparent account of the Libyan events or of their motivation. The secretary of State has told us it’s not even important. (How does that look in the light of Boston?) . . . Well, to employ another cliche that has overtones of its own, the chicken has come home to roost.

Not so good.

UPDATE: Flashback: FBI Training Manual Purged References to Islamic Terror.

THOUGHTS ON THE BOSTON LOCKDOWN:

My problem is this:

Thousands of police searched for hours to find the fugitive, and failed, even though he was hiding within their primary search area.

When the order was lifted, hundreds of thousands of citizens went out to check things that were important to them, and ten minutes later, the fugitive was found.

Doesn’t that suggest that shutting down the city was the wrong tactic?

A pack, not a herd.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

I’m a Tennessee expat who’s been living in Boston for years. (I’m a Maryville High School alum, actually.)

As a long time resident of Boston, I think there is a misperception about the lockdown on Friday. It is not at all unusual here for the governor or mayor to request that everyone stay indoors and no one enter the city of Boston: it happens once or twice a year every winter whenever there’s a big snowstorm. People gladly comply because no one wants to get in the way of the snowplows or imped an emergency vehicle. The requests usually last 6-12 hours until the storm passes, at which point the plows have mostly cleared the roads and people can go about their business again. On Friday, what was unusual and unnerving to us in Boston was not the request to stay indoors, but the fact that the threat was bombs and bullets rather than a blizzard!

And I believe that was a big part of the motivation for the lockdown. Boston is normally crowded with pedestrians. Officials were not only concerned with finding the suspect but with the violence that would likely occur afterwards. So, they warned people to shutter the windows, so to speak, and get ready for a storm. And if there’s one thing Bostonians know it’s how to survive a storm.

Thanks so much for the blog and for all that you do! If you share this with your readers please redact my name for the sake of my privacy.

Interesting.

THE VIRTUOUS CIRCLE OF DECLINING CRIME. The change in DC murders is dramatic since I lived there.

FORGET THE PEOPLE WHO DIED, LET’S FOCUS ON THE REALLY IMPORTANT IMPACT: Home-grown terrorist attack threatens to disrupt Obama agenda.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Randi Weingarten’s Enemies List: Another Reason to End Traditional Teacher Compensation.

HE SCARES THEM: John Hinderaker: Demonizing Ted Cruz.

FORGET THE TERRORISTS: George W. Bush Is The Victim Of A Rush To Judgment. “All of this overheated rhetoric and fear-mongering has come from academics who profess to live the life of the mind. In their hasty, partisan-tinged assessments of Bush, far too many scholars breached their professional obligations, engaging in a form of scholarly malpractice, by failing to do what historians are trained to do before pronouncing judgment on a presidency: conduct tedious archival research, undertake oral history interviews, plow through memoirs, interview foreign leaders and wait for the release of classified information.”

M. ZUHDI JASSER: Moderate Muslims Must Oppose Islamism.

THE ORIGINAL SPACE COLONIZATION BOOK: Gerard K. O’Neill’s The High Frontier free on Kindle today.

WAS A GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY EMPLOYEE tossing applications from white males into the trash? I wonder if someone would file a class-action suit over the application fees? As well, of course, as the usual sex-discrimination claims.

AT AMAZON, markdowns in Movies & TV.

HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT — IF TRUE. Boston bombers: FBI hunting 12-strong terrorist “sleeper cell” linked to brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Don’t know if the Russian-speaking Boston Globe reporters are connected.

NO, BUT NEITHER DID THE OTHER KIND: Social Media Did Not Cover Itself In Glory This Week. The problem isn’t amateur sleuthing. It’s vigilantism based on amateur sleuthing.