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Archive for 2013
April 19, 2013
JOE PAPPALARDO: 3 Places to Know to Understand the Boston Bombing.
IN THE MAIL: 1636: The Kremlin Games.
GOSNELL UPDATE: The Atlantic: It’s Surprisingly Hard to Report a Shady Abortion Provider Like Kermit Gosnell. “Is this seriously the best system they’re capable of devising?” Nope. Though before you know if it’s the “best,” you have to know what their definition of best would be.
UNDERFUNDED/OVERGENEROUS PUBLIC PENSION UPDATE: California City Abandons Sinking Pension Fund.
Calpers already has its hands full with rebellious cities. The fund has been embroiled in a long fight with San Bernardino, which is looking to delay payments as it goes through bankruptcy. But Canyon Lake is the only city so far that has decided to leave the fund entirely, and it’s not yet clear how Calpers will react to this move. It’s not that Calpers is afraid of the city’s departure on its own. Canyon Lake is an extremely small city, with only two full time employee. But if other, larger cities follow Canyon Lake’s lead, Calpers will have a serious problem on its hands.
It’s kind of like a bank run — once it looks like others are going to pull their money out, it’s rational to bolt. And given Calpers’ management, it’s probably rational to bolt anyway . . . .
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Also, today only: Columbo: The Complete Series, $56.99 (62% off).
NOT TEA PARTIERS. AGAIN. Suspects described as brothers from Chechnya. “The suspects involved in the Boston Marathon bombing were brothers from the Russian Caucasus who moved to Kazakhstan before coming to the United States several years ago, a source briefed on the investigation told CNN.” If they’re Chechens, they’re almost certainly Muslim.
UPDATE: Much more here. Also, from the Boston Herald:
The suspects were identified to The Associated Press as coming from the Russian region near Chechnya, which has been plagued by an Islamic insurgency stemming from separatist wars. A law enforcement intelligence bulletin obtained by the AP identified the surviving bomb suspect as Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, a 19-year-old who had been living in Cambridge, just outside Boston, and said he “may be armed and dangerous.”
Two law enforcement officials told the AP that Tsarnaev and the other suspect, who was not immediately identified, had been living legally in the U.S. for at least one year.
State Police Col. Timothy Alben said the slain man was Suspect No. 1 in Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings and the man police are seeking is Suspect No. 2, the man in the white hat seen in images released by the FBI yesterday. The fugitive was described as armed and dangerous, as police set a 20-block perimeter bordered by Arsenal Street and Mount Auburn Avenue. All vehicular traffic has been banned in Watertown.
The entire MBTA system has been shut down.
Stay tuned.
MORE: One Down, One At Large.
Related: “It’s beginning to smell a lot like London and Madrid.”
STILL MORE: Nearly 400,000 people in lock-down as manhunt continues.
Plus: Suspects in marathon bombings are brothers, authorities say.
And several readers comment that there are probably quite a few people in the Watertown area who wish they had a gun right about now.
MORE STILL: Army of Islam? Stay tuned.
Plus: Drones.
Also: Boston, Benghazi, and the “T” Word.
LATEST: Source: Police Investigating Car from Mass. in Niagara Falls. “A police source tells 2 On Your Side that New York State Police have pulled over a vehicle in Niagara Falls allegedly with two Russian nationals in the vehicle. The car was pulled over at 19th and Elmwood in the Falls. Bomb techs and a robot are being used to investigate four suspicious backpacks in the vehicle. Another source tells us the vehicle has Massachusetts license plates.” Probably a false alarm, but who knows?
MORE: Explosions inside home as Boston police hunt second marathon bomb suspect.
JAMES TARANTO: Gabby Giffords Poisons the Well: The incivility and unreason of her case for gun control.
The hope was that people would be afraid to point that out. But they overplayed their emotional-bullying hand.
YOU’D HAVE TO GO TO CHICAGO FOR THE ANSWER TO THAT: Why do Democrats get 3 times as many Obama stimulus grants as Republicans? “President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill contained funding for Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program grants. Democratic districts have received $356,109,553 from the program, compared to just $132,272,695 for Republican districts.”
ANOTHER DUMB CAMPUS MOVEMENT: Divesting From Fossil Fuels. Sure. Colleges are swimming in money. Who cares how their endowments perform?
It’s almost like there’s a steady stream of these things, ginned up mostly to ensure that there’s something for lefty activists on campus to coalesce around. From the comments: “Oh goodness. Harvard students protesting. I’m all for not investing in Darfur. That’s a no-brainer. But nobody (except these students, perhaps) needs a reminder that university endowments took a huge hit, and Harvard was among those worst affected.”
OUCH: The Hill: Pompeo to Baucus: ObamaCare ‘train wreck’ is your fault. “No one in the country bears more responsibility for the complexity of this law than you.”
OKAY, I HAD TO READ THIS HEADLINE TWICE TO GET IT: Thatcher the Democrat vs. Slaughter the Post-Democrat.
HUBRIS: Why The President Lost On Gun Control: He Asked For Too Much, And Got Nothing. “In the negotiation over gun control, the alternative to an agreement was something that gun rights activists liked–no new gun laws–and gun controllers didn’t. That meant the administration started with a weak hand, and moreover, that everyone knew they were starting with a weak hand. They needed to be superbly tactical: move fast, propose a modest agreement that got the public on their side without fanning too much of a frenzy among the NRA’s membership, and get it done. Instead they squandered their post-Newtown momentum on an unwinnable negotiating position, and lost everything.”
That’s because they’re not actually very good at politics.
WELL, THEY HAVE TO RELY ON THIS BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE ARGUMENTS: Victor Davis Hanson: The Dangers of Politically Inspired Moral Outrage—From Sandy Hook to What Next?
It is a bad idea to demonize your opponents with epithets such “shameful” and “lying,” given that the case was not made that proposed gun-control legislation would have prevented a Sandy Hook. To prevent these school-shooting horrors might require either armed guards in schools, or Draconian new laws about gratuitous screen and video-game violence, or more frequently incarcerating the mentally unstable, or, on the theory of reducing rapid rates of fire, confiscating millions of previously sold semi-automatic handguns and rifles. All those measures would have offended millions across the political spectrum in ways that demonizing the NRA apparently does not. In the end, it was not the “lying” “gun lobby” that persuaded enough senators to defeat the bill, but the president’s inability to make the argument that his proposals would help stop another Sandy Hook or Columbine.
Moreover, the current sophistry of using catastrophic current events to rush legislative agendas or build political capital is as natural as it is also dangerous — and can rebound in unexpected ways.
Indeed. Related: Former Justice of the Peace Shot Texas Prosecutors, Not Aryan Brotherhood as Chris Matthews Supposed. “The wife of a former justice of the peace revealed to authorities this week that she and her husband are responsible for the deaths of two Texas prosecutors, ending a months-long mystery that aroused speculation, especially by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, that members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas were responsible. On his show, Matthews routinely tied the Aryan Brotherhood to gun-rights supporters.”
EVALUATION: Barack Obama can’t pass gun control despite 90 per cent support. Truly, he is a lame-duck president. “Yes, Newtown shocked the nation – but the top priority for the public remains the economy.”
TOM MAGUIRE: What Does Obama’s Common Sense Tell Him? “It was a bit of a plot twist to see the leading man booing the audience. Not entirely unexpected, considering the leading man, but still.”
MARRIAGE: And now, on to polygamy. “‘Why only two?’ isn’t a ridiculous question. . . . In fact the anthropological record suggests that the overwhelming majority of human societies have allowed men to have more than one wife simultaneously.”
NICHOLAS JOHNSON: Gun-Control Advocates Are Playing Chess.
FOUND: Boston Marathon suspect is killed, second on loose after extraordinary firefight.
With a bomb strapped to his chest, one of the Boston Marathon suspects was killed early Friday after he and his accomplice robbed a 7-Eleven, shot a police officer to death, carjacked an SUV and hurled explosives out the window in an extraordinary firefight with law enforcement, authorities told NBC News.
The second suspect — the one in the white hat in photos released by the FBI — was on the loose, and police ordered people in the Boston suburb of Watertown to stay in their homes and businesses not to open. Boston shut down its buses and subway system for the hunt. . . . Two law enforcement officials told NBC News that both men had international ties, had been in the United States about a year, were in their early 20s and had military experience.
Stay tuned.