The Commentariat -- April 27, 2013

Making the Planes Run on Time

Convenient Desequestration. Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "The House gave quick and overwhelming approval Friday to legislation to give the secretary of transportation enough financial flexibility to bring the nation's air traffic control system back up to full strength and end the mounting flight delays that had become a political headache for Congress. The vote came despite objections from some lawmakers that the nation's air travel was being given special treatment. The 361-to-41 vote came less than 24 hours after the Senate reached accord on the measure, which effectively undoes one of the thorniest results of 'sequestration,' $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts that took effect March 1. That is remarkable speed for an issue that has been brewing for more than a year, with ample warning of the consequences. Once signed, the law, which passed the Senate without objection Thursday night, will allow as much as $253 million to be moved from other parts of the Transportation Department to the Federal Aviation Administration." ...

     ... Update. New lede: "President Obama and Congressional Democrats on Friday abandoned their once-firm stand that growing airport bottlenecks would be addressed only in a broader fix to across-the-board spending cuts...." And atop the 3rd graf: "Republicans claimed victory." ...

... The President's Weekly Address, in which he declares he is not amused (but will sign the bill anyway):

     ... The transcript is here. Josh Lederman of the AP: "President Barack Obama chided lawmakers Saturday over their fix for widespread flight delays, deeming it an irresponsible way to govern even as he prepared to sign the legislation they hurriedly pushed through Congress. Wary of letting Republicans set a precedent he might later regret, Obama dubbed the bipartisan bill to end furloughs of air traffic controllers a "Band-Aid" and a quick fix, rather than a lasting solution to this year's $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester." ...

... . New York Times Editors: "Congress can't pass a budget or control guns or confirm judges on time, but this week members of both parties found something they could agree on, and in a big hurry: avoiding blame for inconveniencing air travelers.... Catering to the needs of people with money, such as business travelers, is the kind of thing the country has come to expect in recent years from Congressional Republicans. But Democrats share full responsibility for this moment of cowardice." ...

... Charles Pierce: "Did I miss a memo, or wasn't the whole point of the sequester to give Congress the choice of acting like adults on the budget, or visiting enough inconvenience on ordinary citizens so that they demand that same thing? Now, it appears, the point was to visit inconvenience only on those ordinary citizens who have no lobby to inconvenience you in return. Airport delays were what was supposed to happen." ...

... AND the Losers Are ... Democrats. Ezra Klein: "In effect, what Democrats said Friday was that in any case where the political pain caused by sequestration becomes unbearable, they will agree to cancel that particular piece of the bill while leaving the rest of the law untouched. The result is that sequestration is no longer particularly politically threatening, but it's even more unbalanced: Cuts to programs used by the politically powerful will be addressed, but cuts to programs that affects the politically powerless will persist. It's worth saying this clearly: The pain of sequestration will be concentrated on those who lack political power." ...

... Robert Reich: "Washington ... has now adopted the same kind of austerity economics that's doomed Europe -- cutting federal spending and reducing total demand. And the sequester doesn't end September 30. It takes an even bigger bite out of the federal budget next fiscal year. Earth to Washington: The economy is slowing. The recovery is stalling. At the very least, repeal the sequester." ...

... To Hell with Those People. Travis Waldron & Bryce Covert of Think Progress list "12 programs that have experienced devastating cuts because Congress insists on cutting spending when it doesn't need to -- and that have been ignored by the same lawmakers who leaped to action as soon as their trips home were going to take a little longer." Among them, long-term unemployment compensation, Head Start & cancer treatment. ...

... Bill Moyers & Michael Winship, in Salon: "If you want to see why the public approval rating of Congress is down in the sub-arctic range -- an icy 15 percent by last count -- all you have to do is take a quick look at how the House and Senate pay worship at the altar of corporations, banks and other special interests at the expense of public aspirations and need." CW: read it and weep. None of this will change without a Constitutional Amendment eliminating corporate financing of political campaigns. ...

... Dana Milbank: "This last weekend of April displays the very best and the very worst of Washington. The worst is the part most of the country sees most of the time in the capital: the triumph of money and power [at the White House Correspondents' dinner].... In Meadowbrook Park in Chevy Chase, just a few hundred feet from the D.C. line, about 500 people will assemble Saturday morning in a Race to End Poverty. Sponsored by the local nonprofit A Wider Circle, the race is a 4K -- a nod to the group's hope of furnishing 4,000 homes this year for people living in poverty in the Washington area." ...

... Paul Farhi of the Washington Post: "When all is said and paid for after all the parties surrounding the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner this weekend, some media organizations will drop as much as $200,000 each to entertain an elite list of guests." ...

... "The Annual Versailles Cotillion." Charles Pierce again: "These would be the same 'media organizations' that are laying people off by the carload, slashing the benefits of those they don't lay off, and making people do more work in less time for smaller salaries."

Katie McDonough of Salon: "President Obama addressed more than a thousand Planned Parenthood supporters at the organization's national conference on Friday, becoming the first sitting president to do so. After reaffirming his longstanding support of Planned Parenthood, the president denounced Republican efforts to turn the organization into a 'punching bag.' ... Despite his spirited defense of abortion rights, Obama did not use the word 'abortion' once during his remarks":

Andrew Higgins of the New York Times: "After years of insisting that the primary cure for Europe's malaise is to slash spending, the champions of austerity, most notably Chancellor Angela Merkel find themselves under intensified pressure to back off unpopular remedies and find some way to restore faltering growth to the world's largest economic bloc.... The flurry of activity comes after an influential academic paper embraced by austerity advocates as evidence that even recessionary economies should cut spending to avoid high debt levels, written by the Harvard scholars Carmen m. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, has come under attack for errors that opponents of austerity say helped lead European policy makers astray." Thanks to MAG for the link.

Adam Serwer explains the federal rules of criminal procedure to law professor & torture-memo author John Yoo., who never met a Constitutional right he didn't want to trample.

Kevin Bogardus of the Hill: "Sen. John McCain on Friday pleaded with business leaders to rally behind the immigration reform bill that he negotiated as part of the Senate's Gang of Eight. Speaking at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's immigration reform summit, McCain (R-Ariz.) said the bill needs the full-throated support of industry to make it to President Obama's desk."

Sam Baker of the Hill: "Democratic leaders said Thursday they're not seeking an exemption from a central requirement of ObamaCare -- that members of Congress and their staff purchase healthcare coverage through insurance exchanges. Republicans spent the day hammering Democrats for allegedly seeking to carve themselves out of a requirement in the healthcare law."

Jack Ohman of the Sacramento Bee.... Joack Ohman of the Sacramento Bee: "Several readers wrote me ... expressing varying levels of concern about the cartoon depicting Gov. Rick Perry's marketing of Texas' loose regulations, juxtaposed with the explosion of the fertilizer plant in West, Texas. Their comments ranged from 'you are a sick human being' to 'insensitive and tasteless.' ... What I am trying to do is make readers think about an issue in a striking way.... What makes me angry, and, yes, I am driven by anger, is that it could have been prevented." CW: if those readers are looking for sick & tasteless, they should latch onto Rick Perry, who doesn't see anything wrong about lobbying for Texas on the very basis of Texas's willingness to look the other way at industries that compromise the safety of workers & neighboring citizens. ...

... Here's the ProPublica report, by Theodoric Meyer, which Ohman links in his post. It includes gems like this: "Has Congress introduced any new regulation legislation? Yes, but it would roll back regulations rather than strengthen them. Eleven representatives -- one Democrat and 10 Republicans -- sponsored a bill in February that would limit the EPA's regulatory authority over fertilizer plants. It has been endorsed by industry groups such as the Fertilizer Institute." ...

... "The Koch Brothers Bill." Tim Murphy of Mother Jones, in the Huffington Post: "In February, 11 congressmen ... joined some two dozen industry groups, including the Fertilizer Institute, the American Chemistry Council, and the International Institute of Ammonia Refrigeration, to back the General Duty Clarification Act. The bill is designed to sap the Environmental Protection Agency of its powers to regulate safety and security at major chemical sites, as prescribed by the Clean Air Act. 'We call that the Koch brothers bill,' Greenpeace legislative director Rick Hind says, because the bill's sponsor, GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo, represents the conservative megadonors' home city of Wichita, Kansas. (The sponsor of the sister legislation in the senate, GOP Sen. Pat Roberts, represents the Kochs' home state of Kansas.) The brothers have huge investments in fertilizer production...." ...

... HOW did the Koch boys become "the world's largest producer of nitrogen the fertilizer? ... Thanks to the advent of fracking (hydrofracturing), natural gas is now the #1 source for ammonia (which is used to supply the nitrogen portion of most fertilizers) in the world."

Mark Landler & Michael Gordon of the New York Times: "President Obama said Friday that he would respond 'prudently' and 'deliberately' to evidence that Syria has used chemical weapons, tamping down any expectations that he would take swift action after an American intelligence assessment that the Syrian government has used the chemical agent sarin on a small scale in the nation's civil war." ...

Speaking of "deliberate" & "prudent," we now remember our former deliberator-in-chief ...

** Our Misunderestimated Former President. Do Watch. (If you listen closely, you'll hear Fugelsang take a crack at Al Gore, too):

Congressional Races

Thomas Beaumont of the AP: "Republicans are struggling to recruit strong Senate candidates in states that present the party's best opportunities to reclaim the majority, a sign that the GOP's post-2012 soul-searching may end up creeping into the midterm congressional elections." ...

... Scott Bland of the National Journal: "House Democrats now have candidates lined up in about half of the Republican-held seats that Obama also carried in 2012, part of the DCCC's concentrated effort to get an early start on recruiting this election cycle after redistricting kept potential candidates on the sidelines until relatively late in the process in 2012. Democrats would need to gain 17 seats to retake the House majority in 2012."

Gohmert Weekly News

This administration has so many Muslim brotherhood members that have influence that they just are making wrong decisions for America. -- Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas)

... Jonathan Bernstein, in the Washington Post: "I don't care about condemning Gohmert -- but mainstream conservatives are making a big mistake, it seems to me, by allowing themselves to be defined by the worst Republicans out there."

News Ledes

AP: "U.S. officials say Russian authorities secretly recorded a conversation in 2011 in which one of the Boston bombing suspects vaguely discussed jihad with his mother. Officials say a second call was recorded between the suspects' mother and a man under FBI investigation living in southern Russia.... They say the Russians shared this intelligence with the U.S. in the past few days."

New York Times: "Ending a crushing two-month political stalemate that had spooked European leaders, Prime Minister-elect Enrico Letta formed a rare coalition government on Saturday uniting left and right -- and including a record number of women and Italy's first nonwhite minister -- to steer Italy, with the euro zone's third-largest economy, out of the doldrums."

AP: "A Mississippi man whose home and business were searched as part of an investigation into poisoned letters sent to the president and others has been arrested in the case, according to the FBI. Everett Dutschke, 41, was arrested about 12:50 a.m. Saturday at his Tupelo home by FBI special agents in connection with the letters...."

AP: "Police in Bangladesh took five people into custody in connection with the collapse of a shoddily-constructed building this week, as rescue workers pulled 19 survivors out of the rubble on Saturday and vowed to continue as long as necessary to find others despite fading hopes. At least 340 people are known to have died...." CW: meanwhile, in the U.S., Donald Adair, the owner of the West Fertilizer Company, is facing only private lawsuits. Well, shuck, Don is "a prominent member of the community." Suing him don't seem sportin'.

Reuters: "The economy regained speed in the first quarter, but not as much as expected, heightening fears it could struggle to cope with deep government spending cuts and higher taxes. Gross domestic product expanded at a 2.5 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department said on Friday, after growth nearly stalled in the fourth quarter. Economists had expected a 3.0 percent growth pace." ...

... Washington Post: "A steep slowdown in defense spending tied to the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is undercutting the country’s economic recovery, new government data released Friday revealed." CW: oh. Government spending has an impact on the economy.

AP: "North Korea announced Saturday that [Kenneth Bae,] an American detained for nearly six months, is being tried in the Supreme Court on charges of plotting to overthrow the government, a crime that could draw the death penalty if he is convicted."

Where Facts and Beliefs Collide

The Common Politicus Americanus. Would that he were a rarer bird.

When I look at the news and opinion pieces I've linked over the past couple of days, I am struck by the number of articles that speak to our intrinsic inability to “face facts.” It is easy enough to write off some of the actors in these stories as craven or crazy. Yesterday, Zubeidat Tsarnaev, the mother of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, claimed that that the bombing “was staged, that the bombing was fake.... There was no blood, she said. It was paint.” Tsarnaev may not be the typical mother of a miscreant (or, in her case miscreants) who claim their mass-murdering son “was always such a good boy”; she is allegedly something of a miscreant herself who fled to Russia, perhaps to escape the “2012 felony charges of shoplifting and property damage in Massachusetts.”

But what do we make of a President of the United States, one George W. Bush, who not only confused Sweden and Switzerland, but refused to even consider that he might be wrong? (Evidently a staff member privately corrected Bush because a few weeks later he admitted he was wrong.) Or how about Dubya's equally-brilliant successor in Texas? “Gov. Rick Perry said Monday that spending more state money on inspections would not have prevented the deadly explosion at the West Fertilizer Co. plant that was last investigated by Texas environmental regulators in 2006. Perry told The Associated Press that he remains comfortable with the state's level of oversight....” He added, “(People) through their elected officials clearly send the message of their comfort with the amount of oversight.” Or what about PretendDem Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, who, when “asked about polls showing more than 90 percent of voters supporting expanded background checks, including back home..., doubted that was truly indicative of public opinion"?

As Paul Krugman has been pointing out for years now, it isn't just a few so-called leaders who can't get their heads around facts and fact-based data. As he remarked – again – in his column in today's Times, “... the dominance of austerians in influential circles should disturb anyone who likes to believe that policy is based on, or even strongly influenced by, actual evidence.” Krugman posits several likely motivations for politicians' unwillingness to accept reality, but once you get past their dubious claims about the immorality of public debt in a time of recession, it comes down to this: their reality is different from our reality: “The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences.... The wealthy, by a large majority, regard deficits as the most important problem we face. And how should the budget deficit be brought down? The wealthy favor cutting federal spending on health care and Social Security – that is, 'entitlements' – while the public at large actually wants to see spending on those programs rise.”

Lawmakers' preference for policies that help the wealthy was demonstrated again yesterday when House members didn't believe economists “from across the political spectrum” who argued before them that the mortgage interest deduction “is wasteful and does little to spur home ownership.” Why refute the economists' expertise? For one reason, the mortgage deduction is popular among voters, and for a second, it most “helps those in the highest income brackets.” Now, I am not suggesting members of Congress should not challenge “experts.” They should. But here's what Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio), a (former?) real estate agent, told the economists: “Never once did I have a client say to me, 'I want to buy this house because I can get a higher mortgage interest deduction.'” That's just stupid. Most people try to qualify for the highest mortgage they can get, even if they don't always decide to buy the priciest house. Their banks, in calculating their incomes, takes the anticipated mortgage deduction into consideration, and savvy home purchasers know this. Just like loan officers, these potential homeowners see the mortgage tax break as a boost to their annual disposable income. Because it is. So nobody told Tiberi this? I guess they thought he was smart enough to know. Their mistake.

Every one of us has experienced the cognitive dissonance associated with challenges to our long-held beliefs. For most of my life, I thought Tommy-guns were British-made and were so-named because British “Tommies” carried them. I only discovered, in writing about Tommy-guns as an aside to a long piece, that the Thompson submachine gun was American-made and named for its American inventor, Gen. John T. Thompson. This is a small thing, akin to Bush's confusion of Sweden with Switzerland, and it was easy to adjust my mistaken  belief in the origin of the Tommy-gun.

But we all also have experienced more substantial cases of cognitive dissonance – such as when a trusted friend, relative or spouse betrays us. Our first instinct is probably confusion. We're likely to blurt “I can't believe you did that.” But even with events that shatter our lives, we eventually do “believe you did that,” and we adjust, sometimes finding clues in past behaviors we ignored. That is, we “reduce dissonance,” as behavioral scientists would say, “by altering existing cognitions” or “adding new ones to create a consistent belief system.”

There is a third way to “reduce dissonance.” That is to “reduc[e] the importance of any one of the dissonant elements.” This is pretty much the crazy person's way of dealing with unpleasant realities that conflict with our beliefs, dreams and fantasies. People who take this approach “can't handle the truth.” So they don't. This is the methodology employed by our so-called leaders when they dismiss out-of-hand facts and fact-based assertions that conflict with their own preconceived notions. They are, for instance, amenable to Reinhart and Rogoff's thesis, so when Krugman says Reinhart and Rogoff got it wrong, they “reduce the importance of” Krugman. Their excuses are myriad. A while back I heard teevee blowhard Chris Matthews say, “We all know we have to reduce the deficit. Krugman is just an economist; he doesn't have to govern.” (Paraphrase.) Matthews' point was that Krugman lived in an ivory tower, not the real world – the Real World being the Washington of the Very Serious People – and therefore, Serious People were right to dismiss Krugman's fried-egghead musings. Charts and graphs? Pffft. We all know we have to reduce the deficit.

Frankly, there is little difference between Zubeidat Tsarnaev on the one hand, and politicians like Rick Perry on the other, when it comes to their methods for reducing their own cognitive dissonance. As Todd Robberson of the Dallas Morning News: wrote, "Perry made up, out of whole cloth, a supposed preference among Texans for freedom from regulation over being safe from industrial explosions and other disasters.... Never mind that the company had stored 540,000 pounds of highly explosive ammonium nitrate on the site without informing residents of the extreme danger and without informing the Department of Homeland Security – as required.” Really? Are Texans really “comfortable” with that? Even before the explosion that killed and injured so many, I doubt many Texans would agree that businesses should have the “freedom” to store huge amounts of explosives next-door to private homes, a school and a nursing home. The vaunted “free market” does not come with a license to kill.

Too many elected officials are operating under the same cognitive rules as the unstable mother of presumed terrorists. Now would be a good time for these political leaders -- and commentators -- to reacquaint themselves with reality. Now would be a good time for them to reduce their incidences of cognitive dissonance by "altering existing cognitions"; that is, by accepting, for instance, the vast scientific evidence on the man-made causes of climate change and the extensive sociological data on gun violence. As long as politicians routinely resort to insane denials of well-known facts, there is little hope we can reduce the problems we face.

We expect distraught mothers to be crazy. We should expect legislators and other political leaders to deal realistically with facts, however disturbing they find those facts.

The Commentariat -- April 26, 2013

Jim Fallows argues, in an essay republished in the National Journal, that despite our "polarized and unequal" economy, the stagnation of the middle class, and our increasingly "stratified and rigid" society, it is still worthwhile to believe in the American dream because it's aspirational. CW: not sure I agree. ...

... Amy Sullivan of the National Journal on the downsizing of the American dream. ...

... Ron Brownsten of the National Journal: "After years of economic turmoil, most families now believe the most valuable -- and elusive -- possession in American life is economic security."

Eric Moskowitz of the Boston Globe interviews the Tsarnaev brothers' car-highjacking victim. ...

... Massimo Calabresi of Time highlights the remarks of Philip Mudd, a former top CIA and FBI terrorist hunter, who spoke at a Brookings conference on Wednesday:

At left, Roger Sterling, a/k/a John Slattery. See today's Comments for context.

... CW: according to reports of what Dzhokhar Tamerlan told investigators, the brothers cooked up the bombing plan about a week before the Marathon, & they had no outside assistance. Assuming these assertions are true (and I don't take them as fact), it would have taken pretty close surveillance to catch these two improvisational terrorists. If you think you want a country that catches & incarcerates in Guantanamo Grande every potential terrorist, ask yourself this: "Would I be considered a potential terrorist?" If you have been highly critical of the government, ferinstance, the feds might consider you -- not to mention most of the Congress and the press -- to be potential terrorists. Nixon had an enemies list. If Obama has one, millions of Americans would be on it.

Paul Krugman: "The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences, wrapped in a facade of academic rigor. What the top 1 percent wants becomes what economic science says we must do.... The years since we turned to austerity have been dismal for workers but not at all bad for the wealthy, who have benefited from surging profits and stock prices even as long-term unemployment festers. The 1 percent may not actually want a weak economy, but they're doing well enough to indulge their prejudices."

Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, declared on Thursday that it was time to consider lifting a ban on repatriating low-level detainees to Yemen from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, amid rising desperation and a hunger strike among inmates there."

Desequestration, When Convenient. Ashley Halsey & Lori Montgomerey of the Washington Post: "The Senate took the first step toward circumventing sequestration Thursday night with a bipartisan vote that would put furloughed air traffic controllers back on the job. The House is expected to take up the measure as early as Friday, and the White House has promised to consider any bill which it receives.... The Justice Department had reversed a plan that would have required 116,000 workers to take 22 unpaid days off between now and Oct. 1. In a letter to his staff, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Wednesday that additional flexibility provided by Congress and 'aggressive steps' taken by the department to cut costs allowed him to eliminate the need for furloughs." ...

... The World's Greatest Deliberative Body Doesn't Always Deliberate. Steve Benen: "... when it really wants to, the Senate can move with lightning speed.... It appears that lawmakers are also mindful of which Americans are affected [by sequestration cuts] and what kind of inconveniences the political world is prepared to tolerate. Children being thrown out of Head Start centers is a shame, but wealthier air travelers waiting on the tarmac for a couple of hours is a travesty in need of swift congressional intervention." ...

... CW: I missed this, from Greg Sargent, which he published April 24: "Suddenly, the idea of temporarily turning off the sequester altogether is being seriously talked about by top Democrats. It required the outcry over sequestration-caused flight delays to bring it about, however. With Republicans complaining about the flight delays -- and attacking Obama as responsible for them, even as Republicans claim the sequester as a victory for themselves -- Harry Reid is now calling the GOP's bluff by suggesting we simply cancel the sequester temporarily, by counting war savings to reduce the deficit. The White House today endorsed Reid's idea...."

Emmarie Heutteman & Ashley Parker of the New York Times: "The House Judiciary Committee announced Thursday that it would introduce a series of bills beginning this week to overhaul the nation's immigration system. The move was designed to keep the committee in the middle of the debate over the issue, which is now percolating on Capitol Hill, and to press a bipartisan group in the House that has been working in private on its own broad legislation." ...

... BUT Greg Sargent: "At an event this morning, John McCain effectively boxed in House Republicans on immigration by stating flatly that reform is a complete nonstarter unless it includes a path to citizenship."

Kim Dixon of Reuters: "The popular U.S. tax deduction for mortgage interest is wasteful and does little to spur home ownership, economists from across the political spectrum said at a congressional hearing on Thursday, but many lawmakers mulling a tax code overhaul were having none of it."

Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: "Talks to revive gun control legislation are quietly under way on Capitol Hill as a bipartisan group of senators seeks a way to bridge the differences that led to last week's collapse of the most serious effort to overhaul the country's gun laws in 20 years." ...

... Alex Roarty of the National Journal: progressive groups are already targeting ConservaDems for their opposition to gun safety measures, & these progressives have "drawn a line in the sand" on "entitlement reforms."

Wherein President Obama & his researchers find some nice things to say about George W. Bush:

Kevin Gosztola of Firedoglake, in Salon: "Each of the words in his speech were deliberately chosen. Each of the words had a purpose and meaning, and he believed each of them because today President Obama has more in common with former President George W. Bush than with Sen. Barack Obama, who decided to run for president in the 2008 election." ...

... Bill Clinton speaks at the dedication of the Bush library:

... ** "Yes, George W. Bush Was a Terrible President, and No, He Wasn't Smart." Jonathan Chait: "He oversaw a disastrous administration for precisely the reason his critics always grasped: Bush was an intellectual simpleton, a man who made up his mind in absence of the facts, who swatted away inconvenient realities as annoyances.... The failures of Bush's governing method -- the staffing of hacks and cronies, the disdain for evidence -- was perfectly reflected in the outcomes. The Bush presidency was a full disaster at home and abroad, and whatever small accomplishments that can be salvaged barely rate any mention in comparison with the failures." ...

... Gene Robinson: George W. Bush's policies just keep looking worse in hindsight than they did contemporaneously.

President Obama spoke at a memorial service for victims of the West, Texas, fertilizer plant explosion:

... AP: "The service opened with a photo slideshow set to country music and projected onto a movie screen. It showed images of the men from their childhood, their weddings and other moments throughout lives filled with children and friends. Mourners were given programs with full-page profiles of each of the victims, describing their lives, their values and their faith. Both the president and first lady Michelle Obama wiped away a tear as bagpipes sounded 'Amazing Grace.' ... After the service, the president and first lady were planning to visit privately with relatives and friends of firefighters killed in the explosion, the White House said."

Alex Seitz-Wald of Salon on the changing reports as to particulars in the Boston Marathon case.

Local News

Katie McDonough of Salon: "While Minnesota state lawmakers consider a measure to legalize gay marriage and an alternative civil unions bill for gay couples, Democratic state Rep. Kim Norton has signed on to a third option: universal civil unions. The bill would offer civil unions to gay and straight couples, getting the state government out of the marriage business altogether and making 'certain that every Minnesotan couple gets a civil union in the state of Minnesota,' Norton told ABC's KAALTV. The measure would leave marriage 'to the churches that are offering them,' she added." CW: this is an approach I suggested years ago (I thought I invented it, but probably other people invented it, too) when it appeared gay marriage wasn't going to be legalized. It made sense then; it's anachronistic now.

News Ledes

New York Times: "Thousands of garment workers rampaged through industrial areas of the capital of Bangladesh on Friday, smashing vehicles with bamboo poles and setting fire to at least two factories in violent protests ignited by a deadly building collapse this week that killed at least 304 workers." CW: the people of Texas should have as much gumption.

New York Times: "George Jones, the definitive country singer of the last half-century, whose songs about heartbreak and hard drinking echoed his own turbulent life, died on Friday in Nashville. He was 81."

Ultimate Ingratitude. Boston Globe: "The family of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev ... received food stamps and welfare when the brothers were growing up, according to a letter from the state Department of Transitional Assistance that was obtained by the Globe. In the letter, sent Thursday to the chairman of the House Post Audit and Oversight Committee, the department outlined the benefits that the brothers had received through their parents, Anzor and Zubeidat, as well as benefits Tamerlan Tsarnaev later received as a member of his wife's household." ...

... Boston Globe: "Authorities are investigating whether an MBTA Transit Police officer wounded during the shoot-out with the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was hit by friendly fire, State Police spokesman David Procopio confirmed Thursday. Richard Donohue Jr., 33, was struck in the leg by a bullet, which authorities said remained embedded there. He was listed in serious but stable condition Thursday night at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge."

... AP: "The surviving Boston Marathon bombings suspect has been released from a civilian hospital and transferred to a federal medical detention center in central Massachusetts." ...

... Washington Post: "Nine months before the Boston Marathon bombing, a U.S. counterterrorism task force received a warning that a suspected militant had returned from a lengthy trip to Russia, U.S. officials said.... But officials said there is no indication that the unidentified customs officer provided the information to any other members of the task force, including FBI agents who had previously interviewed the militant."