The rightwing solution to violence

The Onion.

By GOP standards, 74% of Americans are ‘soft on terror’

A Washington Post/ABC News poll finds that Americans reject trying Dzhokhar Tsarnaev before a military tribunal, as “terror hawks” insist we absolutely must do.

And the rejection of a kangaroo court is bipartisan and across the board: 80% of Democrats, 72% of Republicans, and 73% of Independents agree that Tsarnaev should stand trial in a civilian criminal court.

Someone tell Lindsey Graham and John McCain. they’ll be interested to know that we’re all America-haters. Even 72% of Republicans “side with terrorists” on this one.

Boston PD takes three into custody in connection to Marathon bombing

Gawker: Boston Police just announced that three additional suspects have been taken into custody in the Boston Marathon bombing case. According to NBC’s Pete Williams, all three are college students arrested for “removing items” from bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s dorm room.

Whether they were involved with the bombing or just buddies who took it upon themselves to cover for their friend is unclear at this time. Police say the public is in no danger.

Boston man chews out stooge from Alex Jones’ InfoWars

[h/t Raw Story]

Tsarnaev confesses, say wars in Iraq, Afghanistan motivated crimes

Washington Post: The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings 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 familiar with the interviews.

From his hospital bed, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has acknowledged his role in planting the explosives near the marathon finish line on April 15, the officials said. The first successful large-scale bombing in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, era, the Boston attack killed three people and wounded more than 250 others.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed by police as the two attempted to avoid capture, do not appear to have been directed by a foreign terrorist organization.

Rather, the officials said, the evidence so far suggests they were “self-radicalized” through Internet sites and U.S. actions in the Muslim world. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has specifically cited the U.S. war in Iraq, which ended in December 2011 with the removal of the last American forces, and the war in Afghanistan, where President Obama plans to end combat operations by the end of 2014.

Investigators say the two had no ties to international terrorism. The right is trying to spin this in a way that allows them to score political points off it, but it’s hard to see how it’s going to work. They want to connect terrorism and American opposition to Bush’s wars in a way to smear the left, but who’s going to buy that? Remove Republican numbers (who already are on board anyway) and Bush’s legacy of war is tremendously unpopular — meaning they’re saying the majority of Americans are allied with terrorists. And this is supposed to win those people over to their side somehow.

Yeah, I don’t think they’ve thought this whole idea through.

[photo from Dept. of Defense]

Boston bombing suspect rejected mainstream Islam

Boston Globe:  Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the brothers accused of bombing the Boston Marathon, angrily disrupted a January talk at a Cambridge mosque when a speaker compared the Prophet Mohammed and the peace activist Martin Luther King Jr., the second time in recent months that Tsarnaev’s radical theology collided with mainstream Muslim faith at a public religious talk.

In the days since the suspects were identified last week, a picture has emerged of 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev — the elder of the two brothers, who was killed Friday in the battle with police — as an increasingly militant immigrant, whom family members described as unhappy and mean.

[…]

In disrupting the talk in January at the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s shouted at a speaker: “You are a Kafir” – a nonbeliever, according to Yusufi Vali, a spokesman for the mosque. Tsarnaev went on to say the speaker was contaminating people’s minds, and accused him of being a hypocrite.

The congregation disagreed, according to Vali, and “shouted him out of the mosque” on Prospect Street.

Take a swing through the rightwing blogosphere and you’ll learn that all Muslims believe the same things because the Koran has crazy, genocidal passages like this:

Suppose you hear in one of the towns Allah is giving you that some worthless rabble among you have led their fellow citizens astray by encouraging them to worship foreign gods.  In such cases, you must examine the facts carefully.  If you find it is true and can prove that such a detestable act has occurred among you, you must attack that town and completely destroy all its inhabitants, as well as all the livestock.  Then you must pile all the plunder in the middle of the street and burn it.  Put the entire town to the torch as a burnt offering to Allah.  That town must remain a ruin forever; it may never be rebuilt.  Keep none of the plunder that has been set apart for destruction.  Then Allah will turn from his fierce anger and be merciful to you.  He will have compassion on you and make you a great nation, just as he solemnly promised your ancestors.  “Allah will be merciful only if you obey him and keep all the commands I am giving you today, doing what is pleasing to him.”

Oops, sorry. That’s the Bible. Where it reads “Allah,” go ahead and substitute “the Lord your God.” Not sure how I got things all mixed up like that. We regret the error.

It’s weird. It looks like the congregation at the Cambridge mosque treated Tsarnaev the way you hope a Christian congregation would treat someone using that Bible verse to call for genocide. It looks like maybe all Muslims don’t believe the same things and even that the terrorist interpretation of Koran verses is the minority view.

Throwing all Muslims in the same pigeonhole is ignorant, bigoted, and un-American. This belief on the right is just a way for cowards to justify being jerks. And worse, they’re ignorant, bigoted, un-American, cowardly jerks who are also lazy — because the only reason you’d believe it is because it’s too complicated to try to figure out who’s a criminal and who’s not. You just throw all Muslims in the criminal pile and be done with it, because you’re an intellectually lazy and immoral slob who’d rather prosecute the innocent than determine guilt on an individual basis.

[photo from the FBI]

Panicked, gullible rightwing bloggers get the story exactly wrong — again

CNN:  Evidence uncovered so far supports the theory that the two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings had no help, authorities said Saturday.

“From what I know right now, these two acted together and alone,” Watertown Police Chief Edward Deveau told CNN. “I think we have to be ever vigilant, and we’re learning as we go along, but as far as this little cell — this little group — I think we got our guys.”

Deveau said investigators were continuing to look into where Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. and Dzhokar Tsarnaev, 19, may have gotten the resources to amass the cache of weapons used in the bombings and afterward. “We have to figure that out,” he said. “There’s a lot more work to go.”

But, asked whether Boston residents can rest easy, Deveau said, “We got our two guys.”

You might recall that during the weekend, the rightwing blogosphere was breathlessly repeating a Daily Mirror report about an FBI investigation into a 12-person “sleeper cell” who were responsible for the bombings. No one else was reporting this anywhere, but the rightwing blogs ate it up — just as they’d fallen for the New York Post’s Boston bombing fan fiction. All of these people need to print the following sentence out in giant letters and paste it over the PC’s they blog with: TABLOIDS ARE BULLSHIT FACTORIES!

The problem with the wingnut blogosphere is that they’re more interested in propaganda than in facts. So they’ll repeat the scariest stories, because that serves their agendas. They seem to think that sooner or later, GWB’s torture and wiretap legacy will get turned around by the facts and they’ll grasp at any straw that will make them look less like panic-stricken idiots who followed neocon monsters in the eyes of history.

But the facts never seem to do that job — mostly because they actually were panic-stricken idiots following neocon monsters. So they’ll keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over, because reality is never going to come to their rescue.

So just point and laugh. Because the only other option is to feel sorry for them… And they don’t deserve that.

[photo by thebudman623]

Are rightwing blogs allowing themselves to be led astray by a tabloid again?

The rightwing blogosphere demonstrated their endless gullibility in the Boston bombing by running with the New York Post’s ridiculously bad reporting. The New York tabloid had misidentified suspects — twice in a row — and reported 12 dead. The first clue that this was all wrong should’ve been that the Post was almost alone in their reporting of these “facts” and that the only other sources reporting them cited the Post.

Now the wingnut blogosphere is once again running with a tabloid news story. This time, from the UK’s Daily Mirror, which is running a story about the FBI investigating a 12-person “sleeper cell” in relation to the bombings. Once again, almost no one else is reporting this and it’s all based on unnamed sources. While it’s too soon to say it’s not true, it’s absolutely true to say it looks a whole lot like BS — especially considering the tabloid’s recent history of inaccuracy.

Once again, I find myself wondering how on Earth anyone can ever take these people seriously.

[photo released by FBI]

MSNBC’s Chuck Todd cuts off speculation about bomber’s motives, possible connections to terrorism.

Politico: …On today’s edition of MSNBC’s Daily Rundown, which Todd hosts, NBC News analyst Evan Kohlmann started describing what he believed was one of the suspect’s Amazon “wish lists” — that is, a list of products the suspect wanted to buy on Amazon.com, the online retail site.

“Let me stop you there,” Todd said. “We don’t know for sure this is one of his Amazon wish lists?”

“I want to stress, we don’t know for sure, but it is certainly his name….” Kohlmann said, before being interrupted by Todd.

“I’ve got to stop you there,” Todd said. “Our folks — we don’t necessarily want to put this on air yet until we verify it.”

Kohlmann said he understood, then started speculating on possible links between the suspects and Al Qaeda or other organized terror networks on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, which, he said, have been known to use Chechens or individuals who look like Chechens.

“One of those groups is known as the Islamic Jihad Union,” Kohlmann said.

In the studio, off camera, a voice could be heard saying, “Oh my God.”

Todd finally cut in again: “I didn’t mean to cut you off, but we don’t want to draw so many conclusions,” he said. “But your point is that this is the type of string that the intelligence community is going to start pulling at — is that right.”

Kohlmann said that yes, this was a possible clue, but not a solid fact.

I’m posting this mainly because it shows just how skittish networks have gotten about running with false reports. After CNN’s fiasco especially, they all seem to want to avoid reporting anything that isn’t confirmed as fact by investigators or officials.

“Chuck Todd may have saved MSNBC from an enormous blunder this morning when he stopped one of the network’s analysts from speculating on ‘the electronic trails’ of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects,” writes Politico’s Dylan Byers. Would that all reporting were as cautious and diligent. When the rush to be the first and slap “EXCLUSIVE!” on your report begins to outweigh the need to be right, you’re doing it wrong.

[image by Nic*Rad]

Anti-immigration conservatives rush to exploit bombing

Greg Sargent: There’s still a lot we don’t know, but it’s being widely reported that the two suspects in the Boston bombing — one of whom has been killed by police — are brothers of Chechen origin. According to law enforcement sources, the brothers entered the U.S. in 2002 or 2003, and at least one of them has been a legal permanent resident since 2007.

Some on the right are already pouncing on the news to cast doubt on the desirability of immigration reform. This morning, Ann Coulter Tweeted:

It’s too bad Suspect # 1 won’t be able to be legalized by Marco Rubio, now.

Bryan J. Fisher is a conservative radio host who rails about the “amnesty” that Senator Marco Rubio — one of the Gang of Eight Senators – supposedly supports in the form of immigration reform. Fischer Tweeted the following in response to today’s news out of Boston:

I think we can safely say that Rubio’s amnesty plan is DOA. And should be. Time to tighten, not loosen, immigration policy.

Meanwhile, over at the Washington Examiner, Conn Carroll, a Rubio critic and immigration reform skeptic, wrote that we still don’t know a good deal about the two brothers, adding that today’s planned Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the new immigration reform proposal should be delayed. “Today is not the day for an immigration hearing,” Carroll concluded.

Rubio’s office tells Sargent, “The situation in Boston is still developing and it’s too soon to jump to conclusions, let alone use the tragedy to make political points.”

The parallels to the gun debate are hard to ignore here. After the Newtown massacre, the right accused gun safety advocates of “politicizing” a tragedy to advance their agenda. Apparently, this is a luxury only allowed conservative deepthinkers like Ann Coulter and Bryan Fischer.

Also, if we follow the gun lobby reasoning, laws regulating immigration are completely pointless, stupid, and wrong because people will just break them. As with laws banning certain types of firearms and magazines, it’s important that you only pass laws that are impossible to break — perhaps by somehow tying immigration to the speed of light or some other immutable law of physics.

And if it turns out that both brothers are legal residents, how does this say a thing about immigration reform, which focuses on the problem of undocumented people?

As always, conservative talking points are completely at odds with other conservative talking points, because they live in a world of cognitive dissonance and perpetual logical inconsistency. I can’t imagine what it must be like to live with this sort of stuff going on in your head, but it has to be very disorienting.

[photo by hahatango]

Boston locked down as overnight manhunt for Boston bomber continues

NBC News: Boston and its suburbs, universities and transit system were on total lockdown Friday as police hunted for marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — on the loose after his accomplice brother was killed in a stunning chain of events that left one cop dead and another injured, officials said.

Authorities were confronting a double-edged nightmare: a ruthless killer at large in a densely populated area after a wild chase and firefights, and the possibility of other bombs. An explosive was found in Boston and disabled, an official said.

A possible associate of the brothers was also being sought.

Two unidentified people were taken into custody at the Cambridge, Mass., home where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan grew up, but they were not being described as additional suspects. Three dozen FBI agents were surrounding the house.

“There is a massive manhunt under way,” Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick said. “We are asking people to shelter in place.”

Earlier reporting linking a missing Brown University student to the at-large suspect seems to have been based on “scanner chatter” and were, obviously, incorrect. The brothers were reportedly originally from Chechenya, but grew up in the US.

Reuters is reporting, “Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev posted links to Islamic websites and others calling for Chechen independence on what appears to be his page on a Russian language social networking site.”

[photo released by FBI]

Boston bombing illustrates how the NRA and Congress hamstring law enforcement

MSNBC: One avenue of investigation is already closed off to forensic officials working the Boston Marathon bombing case due to efforts dating back decades by the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers.

The FBI said Tuesday that gunpowder, along with pieces of metal and ball bearings, were packed into at least one pressure cooker and another device to make the crude bombs that killed three people—including an 8-year-old boy—and wounded more than 170 more during the Boston Marathon Monday.

But a crucial piece of evidence called a taggant that could be used to trace the gunpowder used in the bombs to a buyer at a point of sale is not available to investigators.

“If you had a good taggant this would be a good thing for this kind of crime. It could help identify the point of manufacturer, and chain of custody,” Bob Morhard, an explosives consultant and chief executive officer of  Zukovich, Morhard & Wade, LLC., in Pennsylvania, who has traced explosives and detonators in use in the United States and Saudi Arabia, told MSNBC.com. “The problem is nobody wants to know what the material is.”

Explosives manufacturers are required to place tracing elements known as identification taggants only in plastic explosives but not in gunpowder, thanks to lobbying efforts by the NRA and large gun manufacturing groups.

According to the report, the NRA did not respond to a request for comment.

Turns out the reason for this is predictably stupid; gunpowder manufacturers don’t want to risk liability lawsuits. If you don’t know where the gunpowder came from, you don’t know who to sue. For manufacturers, this ignorance is bliss. The NRA “has twice deployed its lobbyists to block the mandated use of identification taggants by gunpowder manufacturers.”

Once again, we see the NRA more concerned with protecting the interests of arms dealers than the safety of the American people. If there’s a buck to be made off bloodletting, the NRA is there to make sure you can make it.

[photo by Asitimes]