The Commentariat -- April 25, 2013

** Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "Guantánamo ... has become a place where no new prisoners arrive and no one can leave, and it makes little sense."

Frank Rich on Boston, guns, the Koch brothers' media aspirations, and Bush. ...

... Josh Lederman of the AP: "All the living American presidents past and present are gathering in Dallas, a rare reunion to salute one of their own at the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center." ...

... If you want to see some photos of the library & its exhibits, Time's Brooks Kraft obliges. ...

... He doesn't need my counsel because he knows what it is: Run! -- Former President George W. Bush, encouraging his brother Jeb (not his real name) to run for president

There are other people out there that are very qualified and we’ve had enough Bushes. -- Former First Lady Barbara Bush, discouraging her son Jeb (not his real name) from running for president

Congress's Very Special People. John Bresnahan & Jake Sherman of Politico: "Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, sources in both parties said. The talks -- which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers -- are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides. Discussions have stretched out for months, sources said." CW: note of caution: this is a Politico story.

Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. Jim Abrams of the AP: "An effort by House Republicans to highlight problems with President Barack Obama's health care law by bailing out a program for people with pre-existing medical conditions appeared to backfire Wednesday. GOP leaders postponed a scheduled vote after the measure met strong opposition from two directions: from conservative groups resistant to any federal role in health care and from Democrats who objected that the Republicans planned to pay for the high-risk patient program by raiding a disease prevention provision the administration says is essential to the overhaul. The legislation, a departure from the usual GOP efforts to kill the Affordable Health Care Act outright, also faced a White House veto threat." ...

... The Washington Post story, by Paul Kane, ledes with music to our ears: "House Republican leaders suffered a humiliating legislative setback Wednesday...." ...

... Dana Milbank on how House conservatives ditched their leadership's lame attempt "to make Republicans appear to care about the little guy" & opted instead for -- another vote to repeal ObamaCare. House Majority Leader Eric "Cantor can forget warm and fuzzy for now; he has enough trouble just making his colleagues sound humane." On the menu at the conservatives' lunch meeting: Chick fil-A of Cantor.

Your Taxpayer Dollars ...

Part 1. Waste. David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post: "This year, the government will spend at least $890,000 on service fees for bank accounts that are empty. At last count, Uncle Sam has 13,712 such accounts with a balance of zero. They are supposed to be closed. But nobody has done the paperwork yet."

Part 2. Fraud? Ayesha Rascoe & Deepa Seetharaman of Reuters: "Taxpayer-backed funds kept flowing to electric carmaker Fisker Automotive months after the company failed to meet key production benchmarks, lawmakers said at a congressional hearing on Wednesday. Republican lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee cited Department of Energy documents as showing Fisker got $32 million in payments, even after it failed to launch its Karma vehicle in February of 2011."

Part 3: And Abuse. Josh Hicks of the Washington Post: "The Internal Revenue Service issued more than $11 billion in faulty refunds through its Earned Income Tax Credit last year, according to an inspector general's report released this week. Treasury Department Deputy Inspector General Michael Mc'Kenney found that the IRS has failed for the past two years to comply with a federal law requiring agencies to reduce payment errors to a rate of less than 10 percent. President Obama signed the statute in 2010."

Girls Just Gotta Have Guns

Tommy Christopher of Mediaite: "In a new Public Policy Polling poll of very pro-gun New Hampshire, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) has seen a 15-point drop in her approval rating in the state, and a full 50% of New Hampshire voters say that Ayotte's vote against background checks will make them less likely to vote for her in future elections, including 66% of self-described moderates." ...

... De Nile Runs through North Dakota. Manu Raju of Politico: Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (PretendDem-N.D.) "Asked about polls showing more than 90 percent of voters supporting expanded background checks, including back home, Heitkamp doubted that was truly indicative of public opinion."

Science Daily: "... a new study shows that children are routinely killed or injured by firearms. The study, conducted by the Colorado School of Public Health, Denver Health and Children's Hospital Colorado, was published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). It examines trauma admissions at two emergency rooms in Denver and Aurora over nine years and found that 129 of 6,920 injured children suffered gunshot wounds." Thanks to contributor James S. for the link.

Jonathan Chait bids "a fond farewell" to Sen. Max Baucus (PretendDem-Montana), who is not running for re-election in 2014: "Baucus has an ex-wife; a new, former-staffer wife; the lowest net worth of any Senator; and a mortgage on a $900,000 home in Washington. That leaves Baucus with about a year and a half of auditioning for [lobbyist-seeking] clients while also serving as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, while his lobbyist trainees frantically cash in before their most lucrative window closes. Finally, Baucus's self-interest and the national interest are aligning behind one decision: He is leaving elected office." ...

... Nobody Likes Max. Kate Nocera of BuzzFeed: "Since Baucus announced his retirement on Tuesday, the news has been met with near jubilance among House Democrats and conservative groups alike.... The base of Baucus detractors is broad, bipartisan, and vocal, arguing that his long career has been governed not by ideology or conviction, but by self-interest and an unrelenting focus on helping out his friends and sending pork back home."

Henry Blodgett of Business Insider: "The economic argument is over -- Paul Krugman has won." CW: BTW, Stephen Colbert's explanation of the Rogoff-Reinhart errors is more accurate than Blodgett's explanation. (See yesterday's Commentariat for Colbert's take.) ...

... Paul Krugman: "... in sheer intellectual terms, this is looking like an epic rout.... The cynic in me ... says that after a brief period of regrouping, the VSPs will be right back at it -- they'll find new studies to put on pedestals, new economists to tell them what they want to hear, and those who got it right will continue to be considered unsound and unserious." ...

... "Very Sensitive People." Krugman: "What I think is happening is that austerians have put themselves in a box. They threw themselves -- and their personal reputations -- completely behind the various elements of anti-Keynesian doctrine: expansionary austerity, critical debt thresholds, and so on. And as Wolfgang Munchau says, the terrible thing was that their policy ideas were actually implemented, with disastrous results; on top of which their intellectual heroes have turned out to have feet of clay, or maybe Silly Putty." Krugman elaborates on this, with examples, in several recent posts to his blog.

Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post: "The lesson from Europe appears to be: Embrace Muslim communities. That's a conclusion U.S. law enforcement agencies would confirm. The better the relationship with local Muslim groups, the more likely they are to provide useful information about potential jihadis." ...

... Charles Pierce: "As the days go by, we learn more and more that what we were dealing with here, as deadly as their actions were, was a plot by the Wayne and Garth of terrorism.... Eevery little detail that's emerging about the brothers goes a long way toward defusing the OMIGOD MOOOOOSSSSLLIIIIIMMMMMM CALIPHATE JIHAD!!!! hysteria in certain precincts of the media.... Ennobling the actions of a couple of bloodthirsty square pegs by draping those actions with vast, geopolitical significance is a bigger disservice to their victims than laughing at the two of them is."

A couple of contributors -- Akhilleus & James S. -- have recommended this NASA video, "Three Years of the Sun in Three Minutes." "In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has had virtually unbroken coverage of the sun's rise toward solar maximum, the peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle. This video shows those three years of the sun at a pace of two images per day. SDO's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) captures a shot of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths." More info here.

Whoever is responsible for sending ricin-laced letters to President Obama & others -- is pretty weird. Campbell Robertson & Cynthia Howle of the New York Times look into the fraught relationship between Paul Kevin Curtis & James Everett Dutschke.

Local News

David Klepper of the AP: "Rhode Island is on a path to becoming the 10th state to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry after a landmark vote in the state's Senate on Wednesday. The Senate passed gay marriage legislation by a comfortable 26-12 margin, following a House vote of approval in January. The bill must now return to the House for a largely procedural vote, likely next week, but the celebration began Wednesday.... Gov. Lincoln Chafee, an independent, called Wednesday's vote historic. 'I'm very much looking forward to signing this,' he told The Associated Press as he congratulated supporters."

News Ledes

AP: "Police officers and investigators on Thursday were searching the high school attended by two football players who raped a 16-year-old girl after an alcohol-fueled party last summer, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said. Search warrants were also executed at Vestige Ltd., a digital evidence company in northeastern Ohio, in addition to Steubenville High School and the offices of the Steubenville school board in eastern Ohio.... The search warrants are part of an attempt to learn whether other laws were broken in connection with the rape."

New York Times: "The White House said Thursday that it believes the Syrian government has used chemical weapons in its civil war, an assessment that could test President Obama's repeated warnings that such an attack could precipitate American intervention in Syria."

Washington Post: "The Boston Marathon bombing suspects were planning to drive to Manhattan and detonate their remaining explosives in Times Square, New York City officials said Thursday. They said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect, told investigators from his hospital bed that he and his older brother hatched the New York plan on April 18, hours before their deadly encounter with law enforcement officers." ...

... Wall Street Journal: "A federal judge decided to advise Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of his Miranda rights, even though investigators apparently still wanted to question him further under a public-safety exception. The judge's move, made on Monday in the hospital where Mr. Tsarnaev was recovering, has prompted some Republican lawmakers to press the Justice Department as to why it didn't make a stronger bid to resist the judge's plans."

AP: "With deep visible in the walls, police had ordered a Bangladesh garment building evacuated the day before its deadly collapse, but the factories flouted the order and kept more than 2,000 people working, officials said Thursday. At least 194 people died when a huge section of the eight-story building splintered into a pile of concrete." ...

MEANWHILE, here at home ... New York Times: "A series of explosions on two fuel barges on the Mobile River in Alabama caused a fire to burn out of control into Thursday morning, leaving three people critically injured and forcing the evacuation of a Carnival Cruise Lines ship nearby."

CNN: "The mother of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing says she believes the tragedy that killed three people and injured dozens more was staged, that the bombing was fake.... There was no blood, she said. It was paint.... Zubeidat Tsarnaev [the mother] is wanted on 2012 felony charges of shoplifting and property damage in Massachusetts, according to court officials.... Anzor Tsarnaev, [the father of Tamerlan & Dzhozhar, who will return to the U.S. in a few days] ... has said he will cooperate in the investigations into the alleged crimes of his sons." ...

     ... UPDATE. The New York Times has more on the crazy mother. ...

... AP: "Sixteen hours after investigators began interrogating him, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings went silent: he'd just been read his constitutional rights. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev immediately stopped talking after a magistrate judge and a representative from the U.S. Attorney's office entered his hospital room and gave him his Miranda warning, according to four officials of both political parties...."

The Commentariat -- April 24, 2013

People, through their elected officials, clearly send the message of their comfort with the amount of oversight. -- Gov. Rick Perry, justifying lax regulation in the State of Texas ...

... Texas -- State of Denial. Paul Weber & Sophia Tareen of the AP: "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 following last week's massive blast in the rural farming town of West that killed 14 people and injured 200.... Perry was in Illinois on Monday on a trip intended to lure companies to relocate to Texas. Among his selling points: Texas' low regulatory climate.... Bills in the Republican-controlled Legislature ... include one that would restrict the public's ability to research a company's environmental compliance history. Another would eliminate, in some cases, the ability of groups to contest permits issued by state environmental regulators. On Monday, a Senate committee cleared the proposal for a full chamber vote." ...

... Todd Robberson of the Dallas Morning News: "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."

No, It Is Not All Obama's Fault. Steve Benen: "For many, especially in media, there's an assumption that there are two major, mainstream political parties -- one center-left, the other center-right -- and an effective president can govern through competent bipartisan outreach. Those assumptions are wrong.... Outreach doesn't work because Republicans have reached an ideological extreme unseen in modern American history. It's a quantifiable observation, not a subjective one.... There may have been a time a president could cajole rivals, but until recent years, presidents didn't have to deal with an entire political party that, statistically speaking, is the most ideologically extreme since the dawn of the modern American party system." ...

... BUT, But, but, Steve! Why can't President Obama be more like this? --

     ... (CW: Also, all presidential speeches should have musical accompaniments.) ...

... Exhibit A in New York Times reporters Michael Shear & Peter Baker's "Obama Is a Wuss" story was this: Democratic Sen. Mark Begich voted against the background checks bill, yet ...

Mr. Begich's defiance and that of other Democrats who voted against Mr. Obama appear to have come with little cost. Sally Jewell, the interior secretary, is still planning a trip to Alaska -- to let Mr. Begich show his constituents that he is pushing the government to approve the road.

... BUT as Oliver Knox of Yahoo! News reveals, the Alaska road is actually an excellent example of presidential deal-cutting: "... the real reason for [Jewell's] visit -- and the reason Obama agreed to give the road project a second look despite fierce opposition from environmentalists (and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)-- was a deal last month between the administration and Alaska's Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski." Knox provides the details. ...

... ** Jonathan Chait of New York takes down MoDo, the Times reporters & others who compare President Obama to Lyndon Johnson (who "enjoyed huge majorities in both houses, along with a majority-rule Senate") & movie presidents. ...

... ASIDE. Speaking of MoDo, there was an interesting discussion in yesterday's Comments about bodice-ripping. "How to Undress a Victorian Lady in Your Next Historical Romance" by Alexandra Alter of the Wall Street Journal is helpful, too:

NEW. Jeff Toobin of the New Yorker provides a guide to the case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev....

... Travis Waldron of Think Progress: Tamerlan Tsarnaev's boxing career "has led Drs. Robert Cantu and Robert Stern to urge examiners to study his brain for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease found in boxers since the 1920s...." ...

... Guess how much the scientists at the Daily Caller like this theory. Now, in case you mistrust your own intuition, check it out. ...

... Rand Paul, in case you were wondering, is still appearing on the teevee. Kevin Robillard of Politico: "Sen. Rand Paul on Monday made clear that in his view, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings should be tried through normal means, rather than as an enemy combatant." ...

... Eli Lake of Newsweek: "... there were good reasons that the [Russians'] tip [about Tamerlan Tsarnaev] didn't trigger a more aggressive American investigation, current and former intelligence and law-enforcement officials tell The Daily Beast. Those officials pointed to the FSB's habit of treating much behavior by Chechens as suspicious, and nearly all such behavior as terror-related. The Tsarnaev request, they speculated, was likely triggered by the FSB's concern that he would participate in or provide support to Chechen insurrectionists in Russia, rather that by any sense of a threat to American interests." ...

... David Henneberry, the man who found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hiding in his boat, talks to WCVB Boston. With video. Via Adam Martin of New York.

Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times: "The Securities and Exchange Commission may soon make publicly traded corporations disclose all of their political donations, and business groups are already preparing a counterattack."

Congressional Races

Buh-Bye, Baucus. Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "Under friendly fire in the Capitol and squeezed politically at home, Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and a man often at odds with fellow Democrats, announced Tuesday that he would retire in 2014 after almost four decades in Congress.... In Montana, the former Democratic governor Brian Schweitzer -- still a popular and formidable politician -- was making unsubtle suggestions that he might want Mr. Baucus's seat. Expectations among senior Democrats that Mr. Schweitzer was waiting in the wings relieved some of the pressure to keep Mr. Baucus in the re-election hunt." ...

... A Bad Day for Baucus's Former Aides:

... ** Matt Miller of the Washington Post: "Never has a politician done so much to lift the prospects of the republic simply by saying goodbye." ...

... Howard Dean is already circulating a Draft Schweitzer petition. He doesn't seem all sad about Max's move.

Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling: "PPP's newest poll on the special election in South Carolina finds Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch expanding her lead to 9 points over Mark Sanford at 50/41. Green Party candidate Eugene Platt polls at 3%." ...

It's All About Mark. Nick Wing of the Huffington Post: "GOP congressional candidate Mark Sanford picked an inopportune time to release a newspaper ad complaining about his 'rough week.' After a six-day stretch that included a bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, a catastrophic explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, and a daylong lockdown of an entire city, Sanford ran a full-page ad in the Charleston Post and Courier on Sunday lamenting recent negative developments in his campaign for South Carolina's 1st Congressional District." ...

... Forget the Alamo. Texas pundits are pretty pissed at Sanford's misremembering the Alamo. This Houston Chronicle post is a case on point. ...

... Oh, P.S. Gina Smith of the Beaufort, South Carolina, Island Packet: "First Congressional District candidate Mark Sanford, who previously has said he was in his ex-wife's home Feb. 3 because he didn't want his youngest son to watch the Super Bowl alone, said Tuesday that a second son was at the home, too."

Local News

Anjeannette Damon of the Las Vegas Sun: "... the Nevada Senate voted 12-9 to begin the process of repealing the gay marriage ban from the state constitution. Only one Republican, Sen. Ben Kieckhefer, joined with Democrats to vote in favor of Senate Joint Resolution 13, which would repeal the ban on gay marriage and replace it with a requirement that the state recognize all marriages regardless of gender." ...

... Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed: "The bill will now go to the state Assembly. If it passes there, it will have to be passed by the next legislature, which meets in 2015, and then by the people the following year." ...

... Erik Eckholm of the New York Times: "By a vote of 7 to 4, the [Rhode Island State] Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would allow gay and lesbian couples to marry, while allowing religious leaders who oppose such marriages to refuse to perform them. The landmark vote by the full Senate could come on Wednesday. Gay rights advocates said that they think they have the votes to prevail, all but ensuring adoption of same-sex marriage by the only state in New England that does not already allow it." ...

... French News ...

Laura Smith-Spark of CNN: "French lawmakers voted to legalize same-sex marriage Tuesday, despite vocal protests from some conservatives opposed to the step. The nation's lower house approved a marriage bill, which would also give same-sex couples the right to adopt, in a 331-to-225 final vote.... President Francois Hollande, who pledged his support for same-sex marriage on the campaign trail last year, will have to sign the bill before it becomes law."

Dubya News

As Akhilleus warned us in yesterday's Commentariat, we're coming up on George W. Bush Week. To prime us for Falling in Love with George, one of the Washington Post's resident wingers -- Jennifer Rubin -- has typed out her love letter & published it in the newspaper Unofficially Known as Fox on Fifteenth, an appellation that is about to become obsolete as the Post looks to fold the set of "All the President's Men" & move its HQ to the burbs or beyond....

... John Amato of Crooks & Liars, with an assist from Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns & Money, is helpful here. ...

... Ass. Exposed. Steve Benen: "... though the right likes to pretend otherwise, there were terrorist attacks during Bush/Cheney's tenure -- after 9/11.... It's a little tiresome to hear Republicans argue in effect, 'Other than the deadly anthrax attacks, the attack against El Al ticket counter at LAX, the terrorist attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush's inability to capture those responsible for 9/11, waging an unnecessary war that inspired more terrorists, and the success terrorists had in exploiting Bush's international unpopularity, the former president's record on counter-terrorism was awesome.' And finally, I'm not sure Republican pundits have fully thought through the wisdom of the 'other than 9/11' argument. Bush received an intelligence briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, at which he was handed a memo with an important headline: 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.' Bush, however, was on a month-long vacation at the time. He heard the briefer out and replied, 'All right. You've covered your ass, now.'" ...

... MEANWHILE, over at the National Journal, Ron Fournier, former AP Washington bureau chief and occasional head cheerleader at Karl Rove U., has written a piece titled, "Go Ahead, Admit It; George W. Bush Is a Good Man." Fournier's evidence is that Bush has been nice to him; fer instance, one time Dubya sent Fournier a thank-you note after Fournier stood when Dubya entered a press conference in Germany while the German press remained seated....

... Best not to read Fournier's Ode to a Bush without having an antidote at the ready: in this case, a swell point-by-point rebuttal by Stefan BC of Wonkette: "Yes unlike those contemptuous krauts AMERICAN journalists know how to show respect for their authoritarian father figure. Fournier wants you people to remember that politeness is always measured by the thank you notes that a person sends, not the people that one indiscriminately bombs without provocation."

CW: FINALLY, if -- like me -- you thought that nothing funny could be said about the Rogoff-Reinhart clusterfuck, then you don't know Stephen Colbert:

... Later, Colbert interviewed Thomas Herndon, the UMass grad student who discovered the errors in the Rogoff-Reinhart paper:

News Ledes

New York Times: "In what appeared to be a new phase in an intensifying conflict that has raised fears of greater bloodshed and a wider sectarian war, Iraqi soldiers opened fire from helicopters on Sunni gunmen hiding in a northern village on Wednesday, officials said."

Politico: "U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on Tuesday demanded the United Nations fire a human rights advocate who blamed the American 'global domination project' for the Boston Marathon bombings. 'Outraged by Richard Falk's highly offensive Boston comments,' Rice wrote on Twitter late Tuesday. 'Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the UN. Past time for him to go.'"

AP: "The nephew of a small-town Illinois mayor shot and killed five people, including two boys, before leading police on a chase that ended in an exchange of gunfire that left him dead, authorities said Wednesday. Illinois State Police said they believe Rick O. Smith, 43, entered a Manchester home through the back door and shot the victims at close range with a shotgun, leaving two women, one man and the boys dead.... Scott County State's Attorney Michael Hill said Smith, of rural Morgan County, had previous convictions for reckless homicide, drugs and bad checks."

Politico: "Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that Tamerlan Tsarnaev returned from Russia last year 'with a willingness to kill people.'" ...

... Politico: "The brothers suspected in last week's fatal Boston Marathon attacks used a remote-control device from a toy car to set off the bombs, a key lawmaker said Wednesday. Maryland Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, confirmed the details after a closed-door briefing with three senior national security officials on Capitol Hill." ...

... AP: "Two U.S. officials say the surviving suspect in the Boston bombings was unarmed when police captured him hiding inside a boat in a neighborhood back yard.... The officials tell The Associated Press that no gun was found in the boat. Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said earlier that shots were fired from inside the boat." CW: also kinda deep-sixes the theory that Dzhokhar shot himself in the neck. A more extensive report by the Washington Post is here. ...

... Reuters: " The security planning for last week's Boston Marathon, where two bombs went off killing three people and wounding 264, included preparation for such an emergency, a top Massachusetts public safety official said on Wednesday." ...

... Boston Globe: "Russian officials alerted the Central Intelligence Agency about their concerns over the potential radicalization of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in late September 2011, and a US intelligence official says the agency nominated Tsarnaev for inclusion on a government terror watchlist." ...

... New York Times: "Information about one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, [Tamerlan Tsarnaev,] was entered into two different government watch lists in 2011, but no action was taken after an F.B.I. review concluded that he had no links to extremist groups, American officials said Wednesday." ...

... Boston Globe: "The brother of slain MIT Police Officer Sean A. Collier today remembered him as a person born to be a lawman, a person with a compassionate heart that drove him to help others, and a country music fan with two left feet who still managed to learn how to square dance. 'People ask me if Sean were here, what would he think? Are you kidding me? He would love this,' Rob Rogers told Vice President Joseph Biden, top officials of the elite college, and thousands of others gathered at Briggs Field in Collier's memory." ...

... New York: Tsarnaev brothers may have experimented with explosives using fireworks powder before making the bombs they set at the Boston Marathon. ...

... Boston Globe: "Russian authorities contacted the US government with concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev not once but 'multiple' times, including an alert it sent after he was first investigated by FBI agents in Boston, raising new questions about whether the FBI should have paid more attention to the suspected Boston Marathon bomber, US senators briefed on the investigation said Tuesday." ...

... Boston Globe: "Thousands of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students, faculty and staff as well as law enforcement officials from across the nation are expected to attend a memorial service for fallen campus police officer Sean Collier.... Vice President Joe Biden, as well as MIT President L. Rafael Reif, police chief John DiFava and members of Collier's family are scheduled to speak."

New York Times: Italian "President Giorgio Napolitano on Wednesday appointed Enrico Letta, the deputy head of the Democratic Party, as prime minister designate tasked with forming a government to lead the country out of weeks of political impasse following inconclusive national elections."

New York Times: "An eight-story building in Bangladesh that housed several garment factories collapsed on Wednesday morning, killing at least 70 people, injuring hundreds of others, and leaving an unknown number of people trapped in the rubble, according to Bangladeshi officials and media outlets." CW: Like Texas, Bangladesh is a third-world country where the people prefer to let businesses like sweatshops flourish rather than be hampered by safety inspections. ...

     ... Reuters UPDATE: "A block housing garment factories and shops collapsed in Bangladesh on Wednesday, killing nearly 100 people and injuring more than a thousand, officials said.... One fireman told Reuters about 2,000 people were in the building when the upper floors slammed down onto those below.... Mohammad Asaduzzaman, in charge of the area's police station, said factory owners appeared to have ignored a warning not to allow their workers into the building after a crack was detected in the block on Tuesday."

Washington Post: "At 1:07 p.m. on Tuesday..., the official Twitter account of the Associated Press sent a tweet to its nearly 2 million followers that warned, 'Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.' ... At 1:08, the Dow began a perilous but short-lived nosedive. It dropped about 150 points, from 14697.15 to 14548.58, before stabilizing at 1:10 p.m., when news that the tweet had been erroneous began to spread. By 1:13 p.m., the level had returned to 14690. During those three minutes, the 'fake tweet erased $136 billion in equity market value,' according to Bloomberg News' Nikolaj Gammeltoft.... About an hour after it was over, a group of hackers who cause trouble in support of Assad, an informal collective known as the Syrian Electronic Army, claimed responsibility for the attack."

The Commentariat -- April 23, 2013

Andrew Rosenthal: "What's the difference between McVeigh and Tsarnaev? ... The real difference is that Mr. Tsarnaev is a Muslim, and the United States has since the 9/11 terrorist attacks constructed a separate and profoundly unequal system of detention and punishment that essentially applies only to Muslims. [Sen. Lindsey] Graham and others who are demanding that prosecutors treat Mr. Tsarnaev differently from Mr. McVeigh are not even trying very hard to disguise the fact that they're drawing distinctions based on religion and ethnicity." ...

... Rachel Weiner of the Washington Post speaks with a number of legal experts, who, as Alan Dershowitz does explicitly, suggest Graham "should go back to school & study their constitutional law." CW: Graham isn't an idiot. He knows Tsarnaev can't be tried as an enemy combatant. So why would he keep repeating his ignorant mantra? Oh, it makes him sound tough against "those people," and he's running for re-election.

Here's a Surprise. Sam Stein of the Huffington Post: Republicans blame Obama for flight delays, which would be even more impressive if their complaints were vaguely factual.

What do [White House] tours and flight delays have in common? They affect [Congress] members directly. -- White House Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer

... Meanwhile, in the Blame Obama for Everything pile-on, Michael Shear & Peter Baker of the New York Times concur with MoDo: Obama Is a Wuss: "After more than four years in the Oval Office, the president has rarely demonstrated an appetite for ruthless politics that instills fear in lawmakers. That raises a broader question: If he cannot translate the support of 90 percent of the public for background checks into a victory on Capitol Hill, what can he expect to accomplish legislatively for his remaining three and a half years in office?" ...

... Remember the Roll Call. Steve Benen, on April 18: "Four Democrats broke ranks, but even if they had stuck with their party, the proposal would have come up short -- because of the scope of Republican opposition.That's not opinion; it's just what happened.... On one side of the aisle, we saw Democratic senators trying to console heartbroken parents whose children were killed in Newtown. We also saw a Democratic White House ... condemning the Senate vote in passionate terms. On the other side of the aisle, we saw the Republicans' Senate leader, Kentucky's Mitch McConnell ... effectively dancing in the end zone." CW: why do New York Times reporters & columnists find it so difficult to count?

... Gene Robinson on the Congress's failure to pass background-check legislation: "Imagine what our laws would be like if the nation were losing 30,000 lives each year to Islamist terrorism.... When we say 'never again' about terrorism, we really mean it. When we say those words about gun violence, obviously we really don't." ...

... ** David Karol in the Washington Monthly: "... gun rights supporters and gun owners specifically ... are disproportionately white, male and old. Disproportionately white, male and old is a description that fits the Senate and, to a lesser degree, most other American political elites quite well. For example campaign contributors are disproportionately white male, and old too." In addition, unlike gun safety advocates, the old white guys belong to "social networks that facilitate collective action in favor of gun rights.... The structural and sociological factors working in favor of the gun rights side seem fairly durable, while the memories of the horrific Newtown shooting will continue to fade." Via Greg Sargent. ...

... CW: While Lindsey Graham is out there shredding the Bill of Rights, let us bear in mind that Graham was among the vast majority of Republican senators who voted against universal background checks. It is true that the bombs used in the Boston Marathon explosions were made of common household items (I own most of the bombs' ingredients myself). But the Tsarnaev brothers (allegedly) murdered MIT officer Sean Collier & gravely wounded transit officer Richard Donahue with guns they appear at this point to have obtained without background checks. As Jerry Markon, et al., of the Washington Post reported yesterday: "Authorities are trying to trace a handgun recovered from the suspects. Law enforcement sources said the effort has been delayed because the serial number was removed. Technicians are working to determine the numbers, after which the weapons will be traced by a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives facility in West Virginia." And, as Jonathan Allen of Reuters reported Sunday, "... neither brother appears to have been legally entitled to own or carry firearms where they lived, a fact that may add to the national debate over current gun laws." ...

     ... Update: see related commentary in today's Comments section.

... Meanwhile, in Other Stupid Republican Tricks ...

Why did the current system allow two individuals to immigrate to the United States from the Chechen Republic in Russia, an area known as a hotbed of Islamic extremism, who then committed acts of terrorism? -- Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, April 22, 2013

Paul appears to suggest that U.S. immigration officials ... could have discerned that two minor children, after living in the United States for a decade, would eventually commit a terrorist act.... Moreover, Paul misidentified the region from which the Tsarnaev family emigrated. Paul is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; one would expect he would know more about such elementary geography. -- Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post

The Dog Ate Their Homework. Peter Eavis of the New York Times: "After the Federal Reserve lent more than $1 trillion to big banks during the 2008 financial crisis, Congress required the central bank to devise specific ways of protecting taxpayers when doling out emergency loans to financial institutions. But nearly three years after that overhaul became law, the Fed still has not established these regulations." ...

The Amazing Shrinking Deficit. Zach Carter of the Huffington Post: "Goldman Sachs economists predicted on Friday that the federal budget deficit will shrink over the next few years by more than previously projected. After beginning the year expecting a $900 billion deficit for 2013, Goldman's economic team ... has now cut the figure twice, this time to $775 billion. By the close of 2014, the economists said, the deficit will decline to $600 billion, and clock in at $475 billion at the end of 2015." CW: of course the good news will not inspire Congress or the President to do more about unemployment. ...

... Ed Kilgore follows up on Paul Krugman's column (linked here yesterday) on unemployment: "Now we are talking about millions [of people] ... who may well descend into the underclass for the rest of their lives because they haven't held a job lately. At some point, if this status produces anti-social behavior, I'm sure a lot of comfortably situated people will share some additional self-righteousness with these folk, and find it in their hearts to support even more public expenditures for incarcerating them than anyone proposed for helping them get back into the mainstream economy."

Ashley Southall of the New York Times: "Praising the work of young scientists and inventors at the third White House Science Fair, President Obama on Monday announced a broad plan to create and expand federal and private-sector initiatives designed to encourage children to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics":

Erik Wemple of the Washington Post urges the young men implicated in the New York Post's "Bag Men" headline to sue the NYP for defamation of character. He explains why they have a good case. ...

... Jon Stewart comments on media coverage of the search for the Boston Marathon bombers. (The CNN footage is classic):

News Ledes

New York Times: "A state senator, [Malcolm Smith,] and a New York City councilman, [Daniel Halloran,] pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to charges that they plotted to bribe Republican Party bosses to place the senator on the ballot in the city's mayoral race."

Washington Post: "Paul Kevin Curtis, the Mississippi man charged with sending ricin-laced letters to the White House, a U.S. senator and a Mississippi judge, was released on bond Tuesday about the same time that more of the deadly substance was found in Washington.... Curtis's release came a day after an FBI agent told a court that a search of his home turned up no ricin, nor did investigators find any evidence that he was making it.... Meanwhile, a second Mississippi man, [Everett Dutschke,] said the FBI was searching his home in connection with the ricin letter case...." ...

     ... Reuters UPDATE: "U.S. prosecutors dropped charges against a Mississippi man accused of sending ricin-laced letters to President Barack Obama and a U.S. senator, according to a court order signed by a judge on Tuesday. The decision came hours after Paul Kevin Curtis was released from a Mississippi jail on bond.... Prosecutors said the 'ongoing investigation has revealed new information' without providing any addition detail."

New York Times: "As investigators sought answers to what or who radicalized the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, leading lawmakers on Tuesday said potentially important clues about at least one of the men may not have been widely shared within investigative circles months before the attack." ...

... CBS Boston: CBS correspondent John Miller "said there are still several unanswered questions about the murder of MIT police office[r] Sean Collier. '... The operating theory now in the investigation is [the Tsarnaev brothers] were short one gun. The older brother had a gun. They wanted to get a gun for the younger brother.... Officer Collier had a locking holster, it's like a three-way lock. If you don't know how to remove the gun, you're not going to get it out. There was apparently an attempt to yank it and they couldn't get it and left.'" According to the carjacking victim, who is ethnic Chinese & doesn't speak much English, the Tsarnaev brothers said they were not going to kill him because he "wasn't an American." ...

... Boston Globe: "Dzhokhar Tsarnaev admitted to authorities Sunday that he and his brother were behind the Marathon bombings, according to a senior law enforcement official. Tsarnaev made his admissions to FBI agents who interviewed him at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.... He had not yet been given a Miranda warning. Tsarnaev's attorneys are certain to challenge the legal admissibility of those admissions.... But in an interview with the Globe, a senior police official said authorities are not worried about the initial admission to authorities being thrown out, because they have a strong witness: the man who was abducted by the Tsarnaev brothers last Thursday night." CW: thank you, Senior Police Official, for backing up my contention that Tsarnaev's Fifth Amendment rights were superfluous because of all the evidence against him. ...

... Washington Post: "Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ... has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials...." ...

... AP: "Federal officials say the Boston Marathon bombing suspect’s medical condition has improved. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ... had been listed in serious condition at a Boston hospital since he was captured Friday. On Tuesday, the U.S. attorney's office said his condition had been upgraded to fair." ...

... Boston Globe: "A private funeral Mass was held today for Martin William Richard, the youngest of three people murdered in the Boston Marathon terrorist bombings." ...

... Boston Globe: "A private funeral service for MIT Police Officer Sean Collier was held today at St. Patrick's Church where the slain officer's casket was watched over by an honor guard from the two police departments where he once worked."

ABC News: "Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ... reportedly told investigators the whole attack was devised from the Internet. The two brothers, he said, had no direction or financing from governments or rogue groups overseas. Authorities tell ABC News they now believe the two foreign-born brothers were inspired to violence by the Internet preaching's of al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki ... who has been dead now for more than a year. They used instructions from an al Qaeda Internet magazine to make their pressure cooker bombs. And Dzhokhar, the younger of the brothers, may not have even known about the plot until a week or so before the attack, sources told ABC News." ...

... Grandstanding Alert. Reuters: "Top security officials face a grilling from lawmakers on Tuesday over whether authorities who have charged one man with the Boston Marathon bombings may have overlooked warning signs two years ago flagging the other suspect." ...

... AP: "Hundreds of people packed a hall at Boston University to say goodbye to Lu [Lingzi], a 23-year-old graduate student. She was one of three people killed in last Monday's bombings. Gov. Deval Patrick was among the people who showed up to listen to an hour of music and stories about Lu."

ABC News: "Two men face a bail hearing Tuesday after their arrest on charges of plotting a terrorist attack against a Canadian passenger train with support from al-Qaida elements in Iran, authorities said.... Authorities were tipped off by members of the Muslim community...."

Reuters: "Syrian government forces have used chemical weapons - probably nerve gas - in their fight against rebels trying to force out President Bashar al-Assad, the Israeli military's top intelligence analyst said on Tuesday."

Reuters: "At least 26 people were killed when Iraqi security forces stormed a Sunni Muslim protest camp near Kirkuk on Tuesday, sparking a gun battle between troops and protesters that threatens to inflame sectarian tensions. The clashes were the bloodiest since thousands of Sunni Muslims began staging protests in December to demand an end to perceived marginalization of their sect by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led government."

AP: "A car bomb targeted the French embassy in the Libyan capital early on Tuesday, wounding two French guards and causing extensive material damage, Libyan security officials said.... The blast wounded two French guards and set off a fire at the embassy entrance that engulfed some of the offices inside...."