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This just in: The League of Ordinary Gentlemen is not your best source for up-to-the-minute updates on breaking news events. Presumably we’ll talk about this more once it has played out.Report
I went over to the Fox News website and saw John Bolton quoted engaging in fact-free speculation about the suspects’ Chechen ties to Al Qaeda, so it’s still 2002 over there.Report
I’ve already seen a couple of my facebook friends hoping that if they catch the second guy alive they torture him. And one of them is someone I generally think of as liberal. Makes me want to bang my head against the wall.Report
I actively avoid Facebook as much as I can through times like this (also: the whole election) so as not to find out what some of my relatives are saying.Report
I find that facebook exposes me to the kooky left and kooky right ideas of all my friends.Report
I suppose it says something good about people I know that I haven’t read a single maddening thing on my Facebook feed about all this.Report
I have. A couple of my friends are dying to torture the surviving suspect.Report
The President’s High-Value Interrogation Group, made up agents from the CIA, FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency, is on standby and waiting to question the suspect, sources tell ABC News.
With waterboarding, electrodes to the genitals, sleep deprivation, and possibly the rack, they’ll make sure this one talks. He may be our first new lead on who shot JFK if we can just squeeze it out of him.Report
MD,
I only found out about the developments because of emails from friends in the city. I tend not to check the news in the AM but do frequent LoOG. I wanted to put this out there for others like myself who might otherwise not know about the overnight developments. This is not meant to be comprehensive.Report
Sorry, Kazzy, I was just trying make a dry funny. I was just saying that, of course, if you’re going to follow the story, you’re not going to do it here – as a general matter, not that your post was insufficient. I’m glad you put up a placemarker for it.Report
Got it. No worries, bro. People indeed should follow links to legitimate news sources for the most up-to-date info.Report
I’m So Tired of all this breathless reportage from the Chattering Classes.
You know I’d give you everything I’ve got for a little peace of mind….Report
Turn it off, then.Report
Heh. I’ve had it turned off for about 24 hours. CNN, msnbc, all of ’em, beyond worthless. Actively useless. Been watching back episodes of NOVA and Nature off the DVR. I read WaPo and that’s about it, in times like these.Report
Good choices. I’m a junkie; can’t really say whether I think they should be going more low-key (other than avoiding baseless accusation against innocent people, of course), but I can say I don’t particularly wish they were. I’m hooked.Report
Okay, here’s BlaiseP’s Rules of Sitreps, both reading and writing. I spent a lot of time in a forward unit, I got to write a lot of ’em.
1. Get the time and length of incident right.
2. Get the players and map coordinates right. Build a cast of characters so the debriefing works. “SSGT X reported incoming fire [details here].
3. Get all the comm incidents on the record, especially artillery fire missions and air strikes.
4. No second hand reporting allowed.
5. No adjectives or adverbs. You’re not writing up someone for a medal.
6. Short and timely.Report
Yeah, well this ain’t that.Report
If some knucklehead in S2 ever tried turning in some hee-haw such as we now see from the Supposedly Reputable News Sources, he would have been Woughly Sthwitcken.Report
Yeah, but this isn’t that.Report
Erm. What it is is a generalised clusterfugg of worldwide proportions with not even a hint of fact checking or common decency. The parallel to military sitreps is rather exact in this case. In the military, rumour mongering was routinely punished with Article 15 or under Article 99. Gossipy little barracks lawyers, repeaters and amplifiers of every sort of exaggeration.
And it’s everywhere. Doesn’t matter if it’s false or true, even the tech sites are now waist deep in this stuff. Drives up page views and therefore revenues.Report
The performance could certainly be better. But that doesn’t mean we want these standards to be those. I don’t (necessarily) want my private presses governed by the procedures of military sitrep reporting. I want them to do well – be accurate, be thorough, be fair, etc., but I don’t want them doing just what military intelligence officers do to inform their commanders. And I don’t really know specifically what all I want. I want diversity. I want some adjectives. What’s good in journalism? We don’t really know that as a certain matter- it’s an ongoing practice and private industry that is constantly evolving. But it’s not just what the military does to report just reliable, mission-relevant info up the chain. That’s not what we want.Report
I laid out some simple rules above. I think they’d work for responsible reporting, especially when there’s an ongoing public safety incident, as surely as they would in a combat zone.
Diversity my ass. We have public relations officers in every one of these law enforcement agencies. If some jackass reporter is taking a report from some Doughnut Eater and pushing it onto Twitter and a courthouse gets filled up with other Jackass Reporter Types, well I’m sick of it. First Amendment doesn’t cover yelling Fire in a crowded theater. Let ’em go back to talking about Jodi Arias or some other damned thing.Report
We disagree on diversity. There are bound to be some useful lessons that can be drawn from military reporting – didn’t mean to deny that (though most of those were probably developed in civilian practice separately and their formulations are better-adapted there, even if they’re not being as well-followed anymore) but it’s not a full-template-transfer situation. You’re gonna lose that argument (maybe not with me, but with people who think seriously about journalism) if it’s what you’re suggesting.Report
Journalism as it is currently practised is a joke and we both know it. Anyone willing to step up and defend the status quo is cordially invited to do so.
Whatever you’re calling journalism, may I snarquote you here? Thanks — Yeah, well this ain’t that.Report
I mean, I could understand if the argument was something like “the 24/7 news cycle demands that we do all of this stuff live! In the old days, we had 12-16 hours to polish a story before you even saw it! Now something happens and we need a response because we’re going before the cameras in five! You will hear the missteps, disinformation, and misorganized facts AS WE GET THEM. And, by the time we know what the story is, we’re able to tell it properly… with is, of course, 12-16 hours after you people are screaming for updates.”
That’d be a good argument if they didn’t print so many press releases the rest of the time.Report
BP: No, that’s entirely fair. 😉
JB: I never know whom (thus what arguments) you’re addressing, dude.Report
…But to both, one argument no one (at least not I) is making today is, “All or most of the reporting that happened this week is all good.”Report
I was agreeing with Blaise, Michael Drew.Report
That what (if you care)? That civilian news media should adopt intra-military reporting practices wholesale? Or that there have been major failures this week (failures, it might be said, to apply standards that have long existed in the civilian commercial news industry but have been discarded of late, but that can be debated)? Because if it’s the latter, there’s no one disagreeing with that point, and hasn’t been in this thread.Report
That civilian news media tends to be shitty when there are not bombs blowing up or cops locking down a major metropolitan area.
Why are we surprised when it is shitty when there are bombs blowing up or cops are locking down a major metropolitan area?Report
Was someone on this thread acting surprised? Are you even trying to address the questions the thread has dealt with?Report
We get the media we deserve or, in other words, are willing to pay for. You feel victimized because the NYT puts up a paywall to try to fund its reporters? Have fun with what you can get for free.Report
The expressions of frustration seem to indicate higher expectations that are not being met.
What are the questions that the thread is dealing with, again? How much editorialization we should expect from reporters who can’t get basic facts right?Report
I literally just wrote out the questions. You didn’t answer either one, and that’s okay. I’m gonna move on.Report
Mike, I don’t know how much of that is at bottom. I mean, it *MIGHT* be. But the culture still seems to have expectations for journalists that are higher than the expectations for, say, blog aggregators.Report
I’ll ape Schilling here.
We can import mil sitrep reporting procedures or we look longingly at civilian media standards that once obtained; either way, the reasons those sets of standards, whichever one we orient ourselves toward, won’t be broadly adhered to any time soon will be similar, and the reason won’t be because we’ve adopted the wrong set of standards. No: it’s the incentives, folks. Do we want to apply a military-style system of incentive-creation on the Fourth Estate?Report
…or we *can* look longingly…Report
To answer your questions, while I do not think “That civilian news media should adopt intra-military reporting practices wholesale”, I do think that a huge chunk of journalists would benefit from doing so and that the state of journalism would also benefit somewhat. Not for forever, mind… just thinking that going through a period where they had to do that would be a good thing for the journalists and their journalism.
As for the question as to why I was agreeing with Blaise even if no one was disagreeing with him, well… I’d have to say that sometimes someone makes points that are good points, even if no one disagrees with them. I felt that this was one of those times, so I agreed with Blaise.
I regret that that bothered you.Report
But the culture still seems to have expectations for journalists that are higher than the expectations for, say, blog aggregators.
Because we vaguely remember the days when that might have been true.Report
Didn’t bother me; as I said, it just wasn’t clear to me (frankly what you were saying, but) whom you were addressing ,and since I’ve been talking a lot in this thread that meant I didn’t know if you were addressing something I’d said by way of disagreement. turns out you were addressing something he said by way of agreement… something I also agree with (it’s been somewhat crappy this week). That’s great.
My point is that, sure it might be better compared to what we have now if they adhered to some tenets of military sitrep reporting, but that it would also be better compared to what we have now if they adhered to the tenets of civilian journalism that have been developed over time by conscientious practitioners of the trade. The latter might even be better than the former. But the former happens in the military is not because their standards are more attractive to the practitioners, it’s because of the system of discipline that incents those practitioners to do it. We can say that it would be nice for civ practitioners to follow mil procedures compared to what they’re doing now, but as long as we don’t address civ incentives, if we say we want them to follow mil procedures, we’ll just be wishing they were following a different set of standards that they won’t be following from the ones we (some of us) say we wish they were following now that they aren’t. So as long as we’re wishing, we might as well wish for the best standards for civ reporting. I’m not convinced I should wish for them to follow mil sitrep reporting standards for reporting battle situations to commanders of armed forces over wishing they’d follow the established tenets of good civilian reporting to the public. I think my first choice would be to figure out how to get them to follow the standards for good civilian reporting to the public as a first-best option. And I think the problem of creating those incentives will be just about the same, or similarly difficult to put in place, for either option. So I don’t see why not to have that first-best option be the one I’m for.Report
the idea that the unvarnished straight dope gets passed expeditiously from the front lines to op centers and then further up the REMF chain is pretty laughable, as is that inaccuracies in such reporting is regularly punished or even held accountable in any way.
That said, most of the mistakes are a matter of perspective and interpretation.Report
..Appreciate the link, though. 😉Report
But my original prognostications did turn out correct: long-term residents of Boston, knew exactly where to put their bombs.Report
Good point. I’ve really just been trying to watch (strangely, most any other night i’d have been up when it was all going down; last night I was sleeping at night like a regular person), not analyze, but on reflection it doesn’t seem like anyone could have scouted the marathon/Patriots Day that well who wasn’t very familiar with the city. Very.Report
Fishing Sir Walter Raleigh!Report
So far the best source for news seem to be Twitterer/Redditor JPDeathBlade:
http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1co395/live_updates_of_boston_situation_part_2/
https://twitter.com/JpDeathBladeReport
Just a few random thoughts:
1) I am more relieved than I thought that these guys appear to be foreign — or at least entirely unmotivated by domestic concerns. I don’t really want to think domestic disputes in the US have gone that far.
2) The 7-11 robbery thing? I don’t think these two ever thought they’d get caught. That seemed a panicked “get cash to run” sort of move.
Not really sure what to make of it, really. Professionals wouldn’t have stayed in town. (Even professional terrorists — they’d have either planned to die in the attack or planned a way out.). They’re obviously not trying to go out in a ‘blaze of glory’ or they wouldn’t be robbing stores and running (however unsuccessfully).
Honestly? It sounds like one sociopath that figured he was smarter than everyone, convinced his brother to go along with it, had some crazy idealogy probably heavily influenced by the hellhole of Chechyna, the war on Terror, Islam and god knows what else and just…went with it. And then got surprised as heck when his face popped up on the news as a suspect.
Or maybe he was just young and dumb and fighting for his God or country or whatever. Or maybe he’s just flat out crazy.Report
I’m kind of shocked the one kid got away. If he was indeed in the car with his brother and present during the car chase and shoot out, I wonder how he evaded police.Report
I think the explosives might have helped. I got up this morning, saw the headlines, skimmed what happened and thought it sounded like a bad action flick.
It feels like something that just went to hell on them. They had a plan (forget their reasons — doesn’t really matter at the moment), they obviously expected to get away free (or stoppped worrying about it after the first day). When their pictures went up, they panicked and tried to run — with whatever explosives they were making (which means they had plans to do it again).
I honestly think whichever of the two was the driving force — thought he could keep doing this without getting caught. And planned to keep doing it.
They don’t seem to come from radical families. They don’t seem to come from a radicalized background. heck, in between the Muslim equivilants of “John 3:16” on their online profiles they’ve got stock capitalistic desires and their politics seemed more focused on Chechyna and Russia than the US (which is, basically, kinda uninvolved). Maybe they’re deep-cover masterminds who faked being angry at Russia and whatnot for years.
Islamic terrorist? Radicalized student? Sociopathic spree killer with an easily manipulated brother? Psychotic break? Meglomania? Who the heck knows.
I guess part of me thinks that “real” terrorists would have either planned to go down with the bombs and gotten more bang for their buck, or wouldn’t have hung around being all smug and “I’ll never be caught” like some serial killer.Report
These people seem somewhat stupid.Report
Eh, there’s a certain sort of ‘stupid’ you can get from being smart, arrogant, and young.
Can be lots of things — teenagers and young adults (and this is biology) are wired to be risk-takers and optimists about risk. They’re inexperienced as well. And if they’re smart teens or young adults — and they know it — then they often come to believe that they’re smarter than EVERYONE.
I’ve met a couple of smart guys who obviously worked under the assumption that since they were the smartest guy they knew, they were smartest person in the world. Or if anyone was as smart as them, they’d agree with whatever stance they had OR obviously not be in ‘opposition’ since the opponents were all idiots.
That’s what this reminds me of.Report
Yes. I’ll just note the kids who had the brilliant idea of mooning the queen of england on her birthday… and sent their plans to Scotland yard.Report
“had some crazy idealogy probably heavily influenced by the hellhole of Chechyna”
[Unconfirmed] According to an aunt, they’re from Turkistan and only spent a year in Chechyna. But this is unconfirmed.Report
[Please delete previous comment and this one too. Redundent.]Report
had some crazy idealogy probably heavily influenced by the hellhole of Chechyna
And this is why I find it irresponsible of the media to keep describing the suspects as Chechens. It automatically leads people towards such conclusions as this.Report
The uncle, brother of the father, identified the family as Chechen, but did so in the context of concern that the brothers’ actions will cast the entirety of the Chechen people in a negative light.
If they do indeed identify as such, I think it acceptable to call them it, but only insofar as it relates to the investigation, their motives, or is otherwise pertinent. Given that right now any such connection is wholly speculative, it should be avoided.Report
Here’s something interesting:
“Loss prevention from Lord & Taylor called to report they had detained a shoplifter. Zubeidat K. Tsarnaeva, 45, of 410 Norfolk St., Apt. 3, Cambridge, was arrested and charged with larceny over $250 (women’s clothing valued at $1,624), and two counts of malicious/wanton damage/defacement to property.”
She shares the same address and is probably their mother.
The Marathon bomb was placed across from Lord & Taylor, as the video footage used to identify them was from the security feeds from that store. I imagine their attack shut down L&T’s business for several days.Report
I’m confused at the moment. A lot of websites are referring to the two suspects as being from Chechnya, but The Atlantic says they’re from Kyrgystan and only ever spent a short amount of time in Russia.Report
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/04/19/dissent-of-the-day-48/
answers your question if accurate.
“Here’s another fact: 1.7 million ethnic Chechens, only 2 of them have attacked the US. And those 2 were born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, as were their entire family for one generation, having been deported from Chechnya in 1944, and never lived in Chechnya during the conflicts there. Their family moved to Dagestan for less than a year in 2001, after which they became residents of the US at the ages of 8 and 15. They lived here for 11 years, studied here, wrestled and boxed here, graduated from school here, and one of them, Tamerlan, married a Christian woman and had a child HERE, according to his Aunt, who was interviewed on NPR. Whatever part of their lives inspired them to take this action, and WE DON’T KNOW if it had anything to do with their reading of Islam, they got those ideas HERE, in the US, on US soil, as US residents.”Report
Given this, it seems like the media who report them as being Chechens are being, if technically correct in terms of ethnicity, quite irresponsible. It associates them with a region where they did not live and a conflict which they did not experience, and leads readers towards conclusions which are likely to be incorrect.
Combined with their having lived most of their lives in the US, it is highly probable that there is no connection between their actions and their ethnicity or national origin.Report
Anything involved with questions of ethnicity in the republics of the former Soviet Union are incredibly complicated. If they identify as ethnic Chechnyan, they likely have deep roots the rebut ended up elsewhere due to the level of instability in the region. Nonetheless, no matter where they ultimately ended up, they’d be identified both by themselves and authorities as ethnically Chechnyan.
My husband’s family was in Russia for eons, but his USSR passport identified him as Jewish rather than Russian because ethnicity trumps all over there. It’s mind-boggling for us because here being American supersedes ethnicity. In Russia, it’s the reverse.Report
We’re heading that way now. My sweetie has been offered a sweet job there (sweetie’s deserve sweet jobs), and they booked us a room for the weekend to come check out the area, see if we feel like we could live there.
Sort of suits my fancy to go now; I don’t believe in cowering in fear.
Wish us luck; this job would pay well enough that we could keep our house here in Maine, too. I don’t think I could survive without my river and mountains.Report
Good luck! Everyone I’ve ever known who lived in Boston either loved it or liked it well enough.Report
Thank you, Michael. We lived here for 20+ years already, know lots of people, and have several professional relationships. My husband’s a jazz musician, and performs here regularly; that’s one of the reason’s we’d consider moving back.Report
Good luck, zic! May the stars line up and your fortunes be for the best.Report
Thank you, Burt. Now we just need to find a decent place to live. It’s the off season; but it’s also the end of the school year, which might work to our advantage.Report
http://www.samefacts.com/2013/04/crime-control/boston/
Worth noting, w/ concurrence.
Also worth noting, as someone said earlier today, that between Dorner and this, it seems now the SOP for any manhunt when the police have been targeted is for them just to declare martial law and bust into any and all homes they see fit.Report
On the bright side, the Boston PD seems to be considerably less trigger happy. They have yet to unload an arsenal into a car not even vaguely matching the proper description.
Silver lining? Small victories?Report
OTOH, Los Angeles was open for business the entire time the hunt for Dorner was underway. A major American city put on lockdown to find a single criminal is a disgrace — no matter how heinous the crime was.Report
Perhaps. I don’t live there, so really I can only speak hypothetically. If the citizens feel it’s an overreaction, I’m sure there will end up with a bunch of people fired.
Then again, I do recall how they acted with the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, so apparently Boston has a bit of a tolerance for excessive policing. I suppose it comes with the whole “lack of collateral damage” bit.
Perhaps LA might have been much happier to have a lot of itself shut down if the police would have refrained from shooting up random cars.Report
I think it has to do with the type of attacks.
The Marathon bombing targeted and killed civilians, with hundreds injured.
Dorner targeted cops, and while I believe he also harmed civilians along the way, they were not his target.
Now, I don’t think the suspect still on the run remains much of a threat, especially not to do what he did on Monday, but that is still resonating with people. It is a different emotional response, even if we concede that emotion shouldn’t dictate policing strategies.Report
On the facebook or the twitter or the something, I forget what, I saw the point being made that “If I were watching a movie and they locked down Boston because of a perp, I’d say that they were straining plausibility.”
But here we are.Report
As a side note, all last night the press talked about the incident at a gas station and would also talk about the “Marathon attack”. So all night I kept thinking they’d tried to rob a Marathon station.Report
They cancelled the Red Sox game???
Monsters… the entire lot of ’em.Report
The lock down wasn’t quite what the journalists were anticipating. Very early this morning (pre dawn) they’d been talking about the lock down and how tightly sealed the area was, and they frequently cut to police press conferences telling everyone to stay in their homes and not open their doors for anyone but uniformed police officers.
Then the sun came up and the anchors and newsmen seemed a bit surprised to see commuters, bicyclists, and joggers going about their normal business. Public transportation was of course shut down by executive order, yet another reason Americans love their cars.
Did anyone else find it amusing that the terrorists hijacked a car that had a “Coexist” bumper sticker on the back?Report
“Did anyone else find it amusing that the terrorists hijacked a car that had a “Coexist” bumper sticker on the back?”
Yeah, it’s that lack of attention to the details – the little things – that makes you realize today’s terrorists just don’t have that drive to be great the way our generation’s terrorists did. Pretty soon they’ll be demanding the nanny state plant the bombs for them.
Slackers.Report
But they are trying to go back to the glory days. The only major foreign attacks on US soil were carried out by the Japanese and by Islamic terrorists. During WW-II we feared German actions (and broke one ring of Nazi saboteurs), and afterward we spent decades living in fear of a Soviet attack. Cut to last night and we had Russian Islamic terrorists tossing bombs out of a German car (and since one was the Cambridge beer pong champion, the threat of a bounce shot was doubly dire), and now we’ve got a manhunt for a Russian Muslim terrorist running around in a Japanese car. If he learned his beer pong skills from the local Brits, Scots, Irish, and Hessians then he encompasses every threat America has ever faced.Report
Well at least he isn’t a confederate sympathizer, so we are spared that horror.Report
They are a couple a white guys born in the south that have an affinity for groups that hate the federal national government and long for the days when they were their own country – but just one hemisphere over.Report
kids these days just don’t know geography.Report
The latest from CNN:
[Updated 7:14 p.m. ET] The Boston Police Department tweeted that there are “police operations” on Franklin Street in Watertown, Massachusetts. CNN crew at the scene heard gunshots and saw several law enforcement vehicles race toward the scene.Report
The Czech ambassador to the United States has put out a statement making clear that the Czech Republic and Chechnya are not the same place.
“As more information on the origin of the alleged perpetrators is coming to light, I am concerned to note in the social media a most unfortunate misunderstanding in this respect,” Petr Gandalovic writes. ”The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities – the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation.”
As far as I know, no updates from Chattanooga or Chevy Chase.Report
“…or Chevy Chase.”
The actor? Or the neighborhood?Report
(eyes Chennai suspiciously)Report
And suspect #2 is in custody. His plans for seaborne escape had a few snags, like getting the boat towed down to the ocean sometime prior to Memorial Day.Report
So here we are; actually staying in Cambridge. Things were extremely quiet coming down into the city, and normally heavy traffic areas were virtually empty. Subway to Davis empty there and back.
But the pubs in Davis were bursting at the seams with youthful imbibers. And every time a police car drove by — guess what all those young inebriated college kids did?
Cheered their hearts out.Report