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Pardon me if I have a problem with someone who was happy to be a cheerleader for us invading a couple of countries that were not a threat to us and the huge overreach by the Bush administration in response to 9-11, now saying that maybe the city of Boston and law enforcement there potentially overreacted because they locked down a good deal of the city, while in pursuit of suspects who were lobbing explosives in their path as they tried to escape.

JEFFREY BROWN: But 9/11 was a while ago. Have we forgotten that sense of -- in our own cities?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I don't think so, judging by the reaction.

When this is all over, I want to see a debate from people who know what they're talking about, about the wisdom of shutting down a region to chase one 19-year-old. I mean, it -- it could be an overreaction. We will wait and see.

And, also, when you go to places that suffer from these sorts of attacks, Israel and other places, one of the things they tell you is that the power and the importance of resilience and the importance of normalcy. So, say in Israel, during the Intifada days, when there would be an attack in a cafe, that cafe would be open the next day. And so the idea was to keep society normal, not to minimize what's happened, but to keep society as normal as possible.

And so I'm not sure we're achieving that with the media coverage and the shutting down an entire city.

Brooks is a decade late with his feigned concern for Americans and their response to terrorist attacks. He's also a day late and a dollar short with catching up to Chris Hayes and Jon Stewart, who both expressed similar concerns over the way Americans react to gun and crime compared to the resources they're willing to pour into the name of preventing terrorism.

Full transcript below the fold.

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'Big Papi' David Ortiz: 'This is Our F**king City!'

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Red Sox DH David Ortiz returned to the line-up today with a few choice words for the terrorists. After introducing and thanking the Mayor, the Govenor, and the entire police department he said this:

BIG PAPI: “This jersey that we wear today, it doesn’t say Red Sox, it says Boston. We want to thank you, Mayor Menino, Governor Patrick, the whole police department for the great job they did this past week.”

“This is our fucking city!” Ortiz exclaimed, with roars from the crowd. “And nobody going to dictate our freedom. Stay strong.”



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Despite some blogs attempting to conflate Sen. Lindsey Graham's remarks that Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev should be held as an enemy combatant with the Obama administration's decision not to read him his Miranda rights due to the public safety exemption, as Roger Cressey explained to Chris Hayes this Friday evening, Tsarnaev still going to be tried in civilian court and eventually read those rights.

Think Progress has more on that here: What You Need To Know About Why The Boston Bombing Suspect Hasn’t Been Read His Miranda Rights:

Despite initial reports to the contrary, FBI agents did not read Boston Bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights immediately after he was taken into custody. Instead, they invoked what is known as the “public safety exception” to delay reading those rights to the alleged bomber. Here’s what you need to know about this narrow exception to the Miranda rule: The Public Safety Exemption Is Real

The Supreme Court first held that there is a public safety exemption to Miranda in a 1984 case known as New York v. Quarles. In Quarles a woman told police that a man with a gun raped her, and that he’d run into a nearby grocery store. Police quickly found the suspect within the store, arrested him after a brief chase, handcuffed him, and discovered that he was wearing an empty shoulder holster. Before reading him his rights, an officer asked him where the gun was, and the suspect told the cop where to find it. After retrieving the gun, police then read the suspect his Miranda rights.

Although the Constitution generally forbids law enforcement from interrogating suspects in custody without first reading them their rights, the Court held that a narrow “public safety exemption” permitted the limited questioning that occurred in Quarles. As the Court explained, “procedural safeguards which deter a suspect from responding were deemed acceptable in Miranda in order to protect the Fifth Amendment privilege; when the primary social cost of those added protections is the possibility of fewer convictions, the Miranda majority was willing to bear that cost. Here, had Miranda warnings deterred Quarles from responding to Officer Kraft’s question about the whereabouts of the gun, the cost would have been something more than merely the failure to obtain evidence useful in convicting Quarles. Officer Kraft needed an answer to his question not simply to make his case against Quarles but to insure that further danger to the public did not result from the concealment of the gun in a public area.”

As the Court emphasized, this exemption is “narrow.” It permits police to ask a limited range of questions for the purpose of removing any imminent threats. It does not permit wide-ranging questions intended to build a case against the suspect.

Go read the rest, and as they made clear, the FBI is not allowed to ask broad ranging questions for the purpose of building a criminal case and the suspect will eventually have his rights read to them, and they cannot be indefinitely delayed. And as Cressey explained in the segment above, they're going to have solid case against him due to all of the evidence they've collected already before he was taken into custody.



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Bill Maher's New Rules segment from this Friday evening and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed hearing him rip John McCain for his endless appearances on the Sunday morning bobblehead shows.

MAHER: New Rule. John McCain has to try spending a Sunday Morning with his family. Look, Senator, I'm with you. Anything to avoid church, but come one. It's Sunday morning. There's got to be an easier way to tell Lindsey Graham you don't want to cuddle.



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Lots of relief for the residents of Watertown, MA after finally getting the news that the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, Dzokhar Tsarnaev had been arrested and taken into custody. After what they experienced on their streets this Friday, this is nice to see.



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Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Friday said that Monday's tragic bombing at the Boston Marathon was a reason not move to quickly to pass a bipartisan proposal for comprehensive immigration reform.

"Given the events of this week, it's important for us to understand the gaps and loopholes in our immigration system," Grassley told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "While we don't yet know the immigration status of people who terrorized the the communities in Massachusetts, when we find out, it will help shed light on the weaknesses of our system."

"How can individuals evade authority and plan such attacks on our soil? How can we beef up security checks on people who wish to enter the United States? How do we ensure that people who wish to do us harm are not eligible for benefits under the immigration laws, including this new bill before us?"

CBS News reported on Friday that 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the man being hunted by police as a suspect in Monday's bombings, became a U.S. citizen on Sept. 11, 2012 after coming to the country on a tourist visa in April 2002. Before becoming a citizen, he sought asylum in September 2002 and gained lawful resident status in February 2007.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed in a firefight with police on Thursday night. His legal status was not immediately known.

Earlier this week, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) speculated that the bombings in Boston had been perpetrated by a “foreign national” and that Congress should proceed with caution on any immigration reform efforts. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) also warned that “radical Islamists” were “being trained to come in and act like Hispanics.”

(h/t: Huffington Post)



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On Friday, the uncle of two brothers suspected of planting bombs at the Boston Marathon earlier this week called on his nephews to "turn yourself in, and ask forgiveness for your crimes."

During a press conference outside his Boston home, Ruslan Tsarni was asked by reporters what provoked nephews, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, into carrying out the bombings.

"Being losers," Tsarni explained. "Hatred to those who were able to settle themselves. These are the only reasons I can imagine of. Anything else to do with religion, with Islam, it's a fraud, it's a fake."

Tsarni described the brothers as Muslims who were ethic Chechnyans, and speculated that the young men could have been "radicalized" by someone outside the family.

The uncle insisted that he "loved this country" because it "gives chance to everybody else to be a human being."

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was reportedly killed in a firefight Thursday night, but Tsarni had a message for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who police were searching for on Friday.

"If you're alive, turn yourself in!" he exclaimed. "And ask for forgiveness from the victims, from the injured and from those who [survived], ask for forgiveness from these people! We're not requiring forgiveness in this family. He put a shame on our family, Tsarni family. He put a shame on the entire Chechnyans ethnicity! Because everyone now names, now play with the word Chechnyan. So, they put that shame on the entire ethnicity!"

"Those who suffered, we're sharing with them with their grief. I'm ready just to meet with them, I'm ready just to bend in front of them, to kneel in front of them, seeking that forgiveness."



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If we can trust CNN's reporting this time around on the Boston Marathon bombing, this is very disgusting and disturbing to put it mildly: CNN: Unreleased footage shows suspects watched explosions :

CNN reports this evening that federal investigators have much more footage of the two men wanted in relation to the Boston Marathon bombing — and that some of that footage is shocking.

A federal law enforcement source “with knowledge of the investigation” told the network that the suspects stayed and watched as the two bombs exploded, then simply walked away from the horrific scene.

“When the bombs blow up, when most people are running away and victims were lying on the ground, the two suspects walk away pretty casually,” said the source — who CNN reported has seen the footage.

Here's more from the CNN article: FBI: Help us ID Boston bomb suspects:

'They acted differently than everyone else'

Other footage, still unreleased, shows that the two suspects stayed at the scene to watch the carnage unfold, a federal law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation told CNN's Susan Candiotti.

"When the bombs blow up, when most people are running away and victims were lying on the ground, the two suspects walk away pretty casually," said the official, who has seen the unreleased video. "They acted differently than everyone else."

While video of at least one suspect planting the bomb exists, the FBI had chosen not to release it, according to the official. One reason, according to the official, is that were the media to repeatedly show the suspects leaving the bomb, it might cause some people to overreact if they came into contact with them.

DesLauriers said intelligence had been developed on the first suspect "within the last day or so." The official who spoke with CNN said images of the second suspect were isolated Wednesday.



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Jon Stewart took our "broken bad" Senate and their failure to pass even some watered down gun regulation to task during the opening segment of The Daily Show this Thursday night. Stewart also took a page out of Chris Hayes' book, going after them for being willing to move heaven and earth to combat terrorism, while pretending there's no point in even passing any laws if criminals are just going to break them when it comes to guns.

After showing a portion of Hayes show comparing the number of terror vs gun fatalities in the United States, here's how Stewart wrapped things up.

STEWART: Well, thank God for Chris Hayes, because I'm not good at math. I'm so stupid. I still think 54 votes is more than 46, because I'm a f**king idiot. But I'm pretty sure that a million is more than 3400, and yet, to battle the evil of terror, we started two wars, tortured people, reorganized almost the entire federal government, disallowed the air trafficking of shampoo and conditioner and okay'd the robot sky killing of American citizens, if warranted by... someone.

Because one American life lost to terror is one too many, which I agree with. But it seems to me we'll move heaven and earth to do whatever it takes to prevent weapons from falling into the hands of foreigners who might kill our citizens, because apparently we think killing our citizens, is our job.

John Oliver continued the theme in the following segment, where he made a complete mockery of the Virginia Citizens Defense League's President, Philip Van Cleave, who was attempting to make many of the same arguments as those Senators, despite the fact that, as Oliver pointed out to him, Australia has proven that gun regulation can prevent mass shootings and gun deaths.

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Rep. Rogers: 'Opponents to CISPA Are 14-Year-Olds'

Crossposted from Occupy America

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) said Tuesday that most opponents to his controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) are teenagers in their basements as the Obama administration threatened to veto the measure for its potential to violate civil liberties.

"People on the Internet -- if you're, you know, a 14-year-old tweeter in your basement … I took my nephew, I had to work with him a lot on this bill because he didn't understand the mechanics of it," Rogers continued. "I hear that a lot. Once you understand the threat and you understand the mechanics of how it works and you understand that people are not monitoring your content of your emails, most people go, 'got it.'"

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, reflected concerns shared by the White House and many civil liberties groups, arguing that the bill did not do enough to ensure that companies, in sharing cyber threat data with the government and each other, strip out any personal data of private citizens.

"They can just ship the whole kit and caboodle and we're saying minimize what is relevant to our national security," the Democrat said. "The rest is none of the government's business."

Rogers stressed that his bill doesn’t extend any extra surveillance powers to the federal government, despite condemnation from critics that say exactly that. “It does something very simple: it allows the government to share zeroes and ones with the private sector,” he said. Rather, he called it "a critical bipartisan first step for enabling American’s private sector to defend itself" and "improves cybersecurity without compromising our civil liberties."

“We have yet to find a single United States company that opposes this bill,” said Rep. Rogers.

But companies do in fact oppose CISPA. Facebook rescinded their support of the act, according to Cnet’s Declan McCullagh, because a spokesperson for the social media site says they prefer a legislative "balance" that ensures "the privacy of our users.” Facebook made the decision to rescind their support for the legislation after facing pressure from Demand Progress, the Internet freedom advocacy group founded by Aaron Swartz.

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