Once again, another hurricane or tornado, another member of the left politicizing it. This time around, it’s comedienne Lizz Winstead, the co-creator, back in the 1990s, of Viacom’s The Daily Show, before its current incarnation with Jon Stewart:

She thought she was making a topical political joke, but a co-creator of ‘The Daily Show’ managed to enrage many of her followers after tweeting joke about the Oklahoma tornado’s political motivations.

‘This tornado is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives,’ wrote comedian Lizz Winstead, in a tweet, around 3:30 Monday afternoon.

The tweet was an apparent attempt at using the occasion of the May 20 twister to comment on the scandal currently plaguing the IRS and Obama administration.

Winstead, co-creator and former head writer for ‘The Daily Show,’ promptly received a stream of angry responses to her tweet.

User @swashamokc wrote, ‘As an Oklahoman, I don’t think this was something that would result in my continuing to follow you.’

An unrepentant Winstead responded, ‘If its not OK to YOU for me to combine news stories to point out hypocrisy AND Im not making fun of victims u shld Unfollow.’

But then gravity of the tornado’s impact became clear. Winstead’s joke suddenly wasn’t so humorous and the normally funny lady was all red.

Well, all blue, actually, as the far left has a long habit of making some of their nastiest, worst-timed attempts at “humor” as hurricanes and tornadoes are in the midst of wreking havoc:

(Sorry for the interruption in posts. There’s quite a story behind it, which I’ll upload in the next couple of days.)

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Here’s the hard thing Republicans have to do if they don’t want this crisis to go to waste: they have to ignore their id, the temptation of the sugar high of partisan point-scoring. They must willfully set aside Obama’s presence in the fray, leaving the short term personalized attacks on the table, and go after the much bigger prize. Obama isn’t running for office again. Liberalism is. Making this about him is a short term boost to the pleasure center of the conservative brain. Making this about the inherent falsehood of the progressive project will help conservatism win.

– “Republicans and the Long Game,” by Ben Domenech in Real Clear Politics. Read the whole thing.

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James Taranto on “The New Nixon,” only this time around, “the press cheered as the IRS investigated the president’s opponents,” he adds:

Last year, the Post notes, “Tea Party groups complained . . . that they were receiving dozens of questionnaires from the IRS with regard to their applications for nonprofit tax status, probing their political leanings and activities.”

That prompted an editorial from the New York Times cheering on the IRS: “Taxpayers should be encouraged by complaints from Tea Party chapters applying for nonprofit tax status at being asked by the Internal Revenue Service to prove they are ‘social welfare’ organizations and not the political activists they so obviously are.” The Times did say the rules “should be applied across the board,” and the list of groups it wanted investigated included Priorities USA, a pro-Obama group, as well as a couple of conservative groups and Americans Elect, the failed third-party effort.

But the IRS now acknowledges that Tea Party people were right: The agency was investigating them because of their political profile. Viewpoint-based selective enforcement of IRS regulations would be a First Amendment violation even if the regulations themselves are constitutional. It is difficult to credit Lois Lerner’s claim that this was merely an error and not politically motivated. Imagine if the NAACP and the United Negro College Fund got hit with this sort of treatment and the IRS denied a racial motive while acknowledging it had deliberately chosen groups whose names contained synonyms for “black.”

Read the whole thing.

Regarding the Watergate flashbacks caused by Benghazi, in a guest post at Power Line, David Gelernter writes:

It is the Democratic Party that’s on trial today; and to a lesser extent, America’s mainstream media.  For Democrats (and especially Democratic senators) it is put-up-or-shut-up time: are they Democrats or Americans first?  Obviously their first instinct was to defend the Democratic administration.  Republicans would have done the same.  But starting with the Hayes story on the Rice propaganda points (and the neo-Soviet process that turned them from truth to lies), and then the Issa hearing Wednesday (and a recent ABC news piece focusing again on the phonied-up talking points), no honest observer can fail to suspect this administration of doing unspeakable things.  It is Congress’s duty to find out the truth.

How would Republicans act if a GOP administration were under this sort of cloud?  We know exactly how.  It was the radically partisan Edward Kennedy who proposed that a senate select committee investigate Watergate—but in February 1973, the Senate voted unanimously to create that committee.  Republican Senator Howard Baker was vice chairman, and asked the key question: ”What did the president know and when did he know it?”  Which Democratic senator will ask that question today, now that the issue isn’t breaking-and-entering but lying about four murders, including the murder of an American ambassador?  Which cabinet member will be Eliot Richardson and resign rather than continuing to be part of a coverup?  Will John Kerry rise to the challenge?

To ask the question is to answer it.

But speaking of All the President’s Men…

Update: Also at Power Line, John Hinderaker adds, “Come to think of it, this may be one more reason why Obama is so single-mindedly devoted to winning back the House in 2014: the way his administration’s scandals are multiplying, an all-Democrat Congress provides insurance against having to leave office via helicopter.”

And via the comments section:

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KGO-7, San Francisco’s ABC affiliate reports, “San Francisco firefighters are responding to a possible hazardous materials situation at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, a fire department spokeswoman said:”

The incident was reported at 11:38 a.m. today at the hospital, located at 900 Hyde St. between Pine and Bush streets.

A post office near the hospital, at 1400 Pine Street, has been closed. Two employees were taken to the hospital.

Fire spokeswoman Mindy Talmadge said crews are “testing a substance on somebody’s clothing” at the hospital.

No other information about the incident was immediately available.

More as it comes in.

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CBS-Houston reports that “Houston authorities say a man shot himself at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport Thursday afternoon:”

KHOU-TV reports the man walked into the airport’s Terminal B, fired at least two shots into the air with an AR-15 rifle and then shot himself in the head with a pistol.

Houston police spokesman John Cannon tells The Associated Press a call came in at 1:35 p.m. on Thursday that there had been a “discharge of firearms” near the ticket counter at Terminal B

Cannon says one armed man has been transported to an area hospital with life-threatening injuries.

KHOU reports that an air marshal fired at the shooter before he shot himself. No one else was injured in the shooting.

The terminal has been shut down.

Developing, as they say.

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Bad timing for a headline at the Internet Movie Database this past Saturday:

How he kept his radical edge

Robert Redford plays an ageing anti-war activist in his latest movie, The Company You Keep – just one more incarnation in an ever-changing image

Robert Redford’s new film sees the Hollywood liberal play a craggy radical, hiding away from a criminally subversive past under an assumed name. Once the FBI rumbles him, the agents on his trail spend some time comparing the image of his lined face to that of his much younger, 1970s, moustachioed self.

Cinema audiences across the world have travelled down that same long, ageing trail with Redford too, watching as his luminous youth in the role of Bubber in the 1966 film The Chase was gradually replaced, first by the poised cynicism of The Candidate and then by the stately leading man in Out of Africa or the worn-out sleaze of his Indecent Proposal to Demi Moore. Yet, as a man, Redford’s radical zeal remains undimmed.

See full article at The Guardian – Film News »

Shouldn’t Hollywood leftists be toning down the “radical zeal”? Especially in light of this item from Larry O’Connor at Big Journalism: “Scarborough Only Blames ‘Radicalism’ For Boston Terror, Not Radical Islamism”:

In an effort to cut against the excrutiatingly politically correct mindset on his home at MSNBC, Joe Scarborough mocked left-wing analysts who spent the weekend looking inward at America for possible motives behind the Boston marathon terror attacks.

Citing a column by Kevin Cullen, Scarborough said:

“Before you engage in the whole why do they hate us clap-trap, let’s just talk about the fact that these guys were evil. They were beasts. And guess what? It wasn’t our fault that they put a bomb at the feet of an eight-year-old boy.”

So far so good. But then, Scarborough can’t shed the PC shackles enough to take the extra, logical step of pointing to the leading cause of terror attacks in the world today. He uses the watered down “radicalism” as a catch-all to encompass all radical ideas under one umbrella, as if “radicalism” is the biggest threat in our society. He just can’t bring himself to point out the significant fact that the terrorists were hugely influenced by radical Islamism.  ”Don’t blame society for that. Blame radicalism, blame evil, blame them (the Tsaraev brothers.)”

But it’s not like Redford would support terrorist bombings, would he?

Scott Whitlock of Newsbusters summarized Redford’s appearance with fellow Democrat George Stephanopoulos on April 2nd:

George Stephanopoulos was so enthusiastic towards Robert Redford and his sympathetic new film about an ex-1960s radical that the actor enthused, “You ought to get on the marketing team!” The aging actor/director appeared on Tuesday’s Good Morning America and endorsed the violent actions of protest groups. Reminiscing on his own past, the liberal Hollywood star recounted, “When I was younger, I was very much aware of the movement. I was more than sympathetic, I was probably empathetic because I believed it was time for a change.”

After Stephanopoulos wondered, “Even when you read about bombings,” Redford responded, “All of it. I knew that it was extreme and I guess movements have to be extreme to some degree.

As I mentioned last week, it’s pretty rare for someone to drop the mask and admit that he’s cool with terrorist bombings; at Front Page, Bosch Fawstin explores “Robert Redford’s Terrorist Heroes”:

“ALL OF IT,” said Robert Redford, when asked if he supported the bombings by The Weather Underground.

Redford came out for terrorism on a mainstream morning television show in an interview with democrat-operative-leftist-hack George Stephanopoulos, who was slobbering over Redford’s pro-terrorist movie, The Company You Keep. I drew my illustration of Redford, below, days ago, and I wonder if he’s for the terrorist attack in Boston today. Or maybe he wants to wait and see if it’s leftist terrorists before he decides he’s all for it. Below is a list of what Robert Redford was for, via Sean Hannity on FOX News.

The Weather Underground’s history of terrorism consisted of:

1970: SFPD Bombing (1 Killed)

1970: NYPD Bombing (7 Hurt)

1970: NYC Explosion (3 Killed)

1971-72: Capital & Pentagon Attacked

1981: Armed Robbery (3 Killed)

(As John Boot at PJ Media notes: The Vietnam War, of course, had been over for years, [by 1981] which gives the lie to the film’s claim that the Southeast Asia conflict was anything but a pretext for the terrorist network.)

In their effort to give the aging Redford the full radical chic treatment, the Guardian profile the IMDB links can’t be bothered to notice the cognitive dissonance between lines such as this: “Redford is aligned with the anti-gun lobby in Hollywood, questioning the level of violence in entertainment,” and Redford’s pro-terrorism statements, such as this, only a couple of short paragraphs later in the same article:

The Company You Keep, based on the novel by Neil Gordon, has so far won two awards from the Venice Film Festival and is a hard look back at the radical era that made Redford. As a young actor in the late 1960s, he followed the leftwing organisation Weather Underground, founded on the University of Michigan campus with the express aim of overthrowing the American government.

“I supported their cause because I also thought the Vietnam war, just like the Iraq war, was built and sold on a faulty premise,” Redford has said. He saw the risks members took and watched the movement destroy itself. “I thought, ‘Gee, there’s quite a story in this. I don’t think it’s a story I want to tell right now’, he has recalled.

Journalists who interview Hollywood celebrities rarely ask tough questions, for fear of being tossed off the gravy train of easy access to stars. Will any reporters have the guts to ask Redford his take on the Boston bombers, and the rights of those people who were terrorized by them, both during their initial blasts and when the terrorists tried to escape the authorities later in the week?

(Incidentally, Redford’s embrace of radical chic in his dotage — and all of the hype the sympathetic MSM have given this film isn’t exactly giving him the edge at the box office.)

Related: “TMZ Targets Model for Donning Dress Decorated with Guns” – why are they giving model Karolina Kurkova grief, and not a superstar actor/director who is espousing pro-terrorist views? Or to reverse the equation, if Redford — and, as Christian Toto notes at Big Hollywood — anybody who wears a Che T-shirt gets a pass, why not Kurkova as well?

More: From Ace, “The Passive-Aggressive Voice: Newest Narrative From the Left and Media (But I Repeat Myself): It Was ‘Society’ to Blame, By Which is Meant Us”:

The left considers itself outside society, a critic apart from it, above it, superior to it, as a teacher is above and superior to his students. So any mention of “society” is an attempt to put blame on others. And the “we/us” language is the Accusatory version of the pronoun; they don’t mean they themselves.

Have you ever heard someone on the left specifically take responsibility for such a horror? The left could say, for example, “Perhaps by promoting terrorists as icons and to university professorships, we have transmitted the idea that terrorism is acceptable.” That would be a real expression of “We’re to blame,” we including the speaker. The true use of “we.”

But of course they never say such things. It’s always “We’re all to blame, because of various things you and specifically not I are guilty of.”

Also note that Melissa Harris-Perry pushes the idea that “we” (by which she means “You”) are “Otherizing” the terrorists — conceiving them as entirely unlike you — in order to reduce your own culpability for their actions.

Apparently it never occurs to this supposed intellectual that that’s precisely what she herself is doing.

Read the whole thing.

Update: “Report: Boston bomber confesses, cites US wars as motivation.” The more things change…

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In The Prehistory of The Far Side, a 1989 anthology of Gary Larson’s classic cartoons, there’s a panel he drew in 1986 featuring a nighttime metropolitan setting with buildings alternately on fire or knocked over, and smashed and overturned cars everywhere. In the foreground of all the devastation, a police detective in a raincoat and fedora and a uniformed patrolman stare at a giant handkerchief with the monogram “K.K.” on it. The detective barks, “Take this handkerchief back to the lab, Stevens. I want some answers on which monster did this — Godzilla! Gargantua! Who?”

As Larson wrote while reminiscing about drawing the cartoon, “the only name I could think of for the handkerchief was King Kong. There aren’t too many famous monsters running around with first and last names.”*

The cluelessness of the police in Larson’s cartoon reminds me of the left’s self-imposed blinders on not wanting to come to grips with the Tsarnaev brothers. Could their motives be, as Jonathan S. Tobin of Commentary spots Melissa Harris-Perry asking on MSNBC…classical music?

Michael Dyson: We fill in the blanks with what makes us feel most comfortable that this is an exceptional, extraordinary case that happened because they are this. 

So you take one part of the element, that he’s Muslim. But he also might have listened to classical music. He might have had some Lil Wayne. He might have also gone to and listened to a lecturer

Harris Perry: I keep wondering is it possible that there would ever be a discussion like, ‘This is because of Ben Affleck and the connection between Boston and movies about violence?’ And of course, the answer is no.

Of course no one will even think this is about those things. But at the same time there’s something, I appreciate the way that you framed that as the one drop. Like, because given that they’re Chechen, given that they are literally Caucasian, our very sense of connection to them is this framed-up notion of, like, Islam making them something that is non-normal. It is not us. The point is that it’s important to say, ‘That’s not us, you know, this is not American. This is not who we are.’ Because we couldn’t potentially do what they did. But if they’re more like us, the point you were making earlier, if they’re just like us, they grew up in the same neighborhoods, they listened to the same kind of music, they talk to the same kind of people.

It is easy to dismiss this sort of talk as just the public mutterings of the radical left, but it would be foolish to ignore it. The efforts of groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to muscle the federal government into excising a discussion of militant Islamism from our approach to combating threats is part of a campaign to prevent Americans from connecting the dots between terrorists and the belief systems that motivate them. The effort to make us pretend that the Tsarnaevs’ approach to their faith is as irrelevant to the atrocities they committed as the songs on their iPods is not absurd; it’s dangerous.

Of course, if groups of organized classical music lovers had been carrying out terrorist attacks in the name of their beliefs Harris-Perry’s brand of moral relativism might make sense. But in the real world in which the rest of us live, the source of the terror threat of the last generation has been Islamist.

Or perhaps it was a very different genre of music that set the Brothers Tsarnaev off, as another MSNBC guest posited?

MADDOW: A lot of people are trying to figure out if these men, uh, were terrorists who were radicalized overseas, if they were terrorists who were radicalized here, if this was totally unrelated to terrorist and, to terrorist causes. Do you think there will be a definitive answer with regard to their Chechen heritage in terms of whether that’s relevant and explanatory here?

KING: Well, I think it’s relevant to a degree. That is to say that, these guys grew up in a particular kind of community with a particular kind of history. They had a certain kind of background, but at the end of the day if we’re looking for motivation for this particular act, I think it’s going to lie in the way that they were radicalized in the United States, on the Internet, visiting chat rooms, putting their own kind of lives into some kind of narrative about this nihilistic, millenarian, sort of anti-Western, anti-modern, uh, jihadist ideology that you find in lots of different kinds of communities around the world.

MADDOW (quickly jumping to accused jihadists’ defense): If they, if they did.

KING: If they did. We still don’t know.

MADDOW: We have some evidence of a YouTube page that we think may connect to the older brother that posted some radicalized YouTube clips. The younger brother, there’s very thin evidence of anything.

KING: Well, and keep in mind that on his, on the elder brother’s, Tamerlan’s YouTube channel, there are an equal number of rap videos.

MADDOW (her spirit briefly lifted): Yeah.

KING: So, you know, I don’t know why we tend to focus on this one particular aspect because these guys frankly have a lot of consonants in their names and we’re kind of worried about that somehow (what this “we’re” stuff, paleface?). But in lots of other contexts of mass killing, we go to other kinds of motivations and I think we really ought to look at those in this case as well.

Perhaps an overexposure to the Boston area’s ugly modernist architecture triggered their attack:

 U. Mass Dartmouth, which started life as the Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute, dates from the same period and is a strange mix of technocratic rationalism and architectural megalomania. A vast parade ground posing as a campus green runs between lines of identical buildings. Hoisted on hefty concrete piers, highway-scaled beams span vast distances, holding up horizontal trays of academic space that jut pugnaciously into the green.

* * * * * *

Amazingly, Rudolph’s design has been barely altered and rarely added to. The newest dormitory has been built in a budget-minded medium-security-prison style that makes the Rudolph buildings look humanist.

* * * * * *

As I sat stewing under the lock-down order, my thoughts returned to the U Mass campus, which swarmed with students who looked much like Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the bombing suspect. Although it’s too early to know whether he was motivated to violence by political or religious fervor, that’s looking unlikely as I write this. He was a student at the Dartmouth U Mass campus, it turns out. He seems to have had many friends, but I wondered about the effect of such a deeply impersonal place. It’s isolated at the suburban edge and unintentionally expressive of the assembly-line education that’s become the cost-driven norm. Does such a place aid the alienation — or, at least, impede the forming of deep personal bonds — of even a smart, sociable kid?

It sounds much too glib an explanation — as the numerous other theories we are now hearing are likely to be — but I can’t help thinking it.

Please do. Considering the socialist and “Progressive” origins of modern architecture, and its disastrous impact on public housing, run with that explanation for the Tsarnaevs’ radicalism, leftists. Run with it hard.

Perhaps it’s simply “radicalism” in general, as another MSNBC host claims:

Scarborough can’t shed the PC shackles enough to take the extra, logical step of pointing to the leading cause of terror attacks in the world today. He uses the watered down “radicalism” as a catch-all to encompass all radical ideas under one umbrella, as if “radicalism” is the biggest threat in our society. He just can’t bring himself to point out the significant fact that the terrorists were hugely influenced by radical Islamism.  ”Don’t blame society for that. Blame radicalism, blame evil, blame them (the Tsaraev brothers.)”

So if we go with “radicalism” as an explanation, then pretty much everyone who works in front of the cameras at NBC News is to blame, considering that:

• Brian Williams — yes, Mr. NASCAR himself — has claimed at least twice on the air that he considers the founding fathers to be terrorists.
• Lawrence O’Donnell has said on the air, “I am a socialist. I live to the extreme left, the extreme left of you mere liberals,”
• Rachel Maddow has described herself as “someone who’s roughly to the left of Mao.”
• The aforementioned Melissa Harris-Perry believes your children don’t belong to you.
• Not to mention Al Sharpton, and Chris Matthews, who says that the Red (State) Menace “Reminds me of the ’30s in another country.”

If anybody can make sense of it all, it’s Victor Davis Hanson, as we’ll explore on the next page.

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As if there wasn’t enough news for one day, “Emergency crews in Texas are responding to two large explosions at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, near Waco,” Fox News reports:

Gayle Scarbrough, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Safety in Waco, told television station KWTX that DPS troopers have been transporting the injured to hospitals in their patrol cars. She says six helicopters were also en route.

The blast at West Fertilizer plant, reported shortly before 8 p.m. CT, was confirmed by Waco police dispatch operators. First responders are dealing with numerous injuries and major damage to structures and vehicles, Scarbrough said.

Several buildings, some in residential areas,  were reported to be burning, others destroyed, and a nearby nursing home was damaged, according to a report from KWTX

Initial reports say people are trapped in a nearby nursing home and an apartment building.

A local school football field is being setup as a staging area.

More at Twitchy, including photos from Twitter users in the area. And dramatic video of the explosion embedded above, from Waco’s KWKT-TV.

“West EMS Director Dr. George Smith says as many as 60 or 70 people died and hundreds were injured Wednesday night in a fertilizer plant explosion in West,” KWTX, another area TV station, ominously reports. “A rescuer earlier said he knew of five deaths.”

Though as we saw on Monday in Boston, early counts of injuries and casualties can vary widely from final reports.

Update: Judging by the sounds of the people in the car, I believe this is the same footage KWKT used, but from the raw cell phone camera, and not recomposited for a horizontal video format. But the sound of the blast and (presumbably) the son of the man shooting it from the window of his SUV shouting “Please get out of here! Please get out of here!” is more than a little disturbing:

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Reports of “20-30 people injured in front of Boston Public Library after explosion at finish line of Boston Marathon,” according the items in this post by Allahpundit at Hot Air:

Unconfirmed reports of two explosions.

Update: Hard to tell for sure from the top pic but it looks to me like the explosion might be coming from inside the building.

Update: John Ekdahl is watching Fox News and says the mic picked up someone at the scene saying, “Oh my God, they’re dead.” And there do appear to have been two explosions, the second one of which was bigger than the first per George Scoville. That’s a terror tactic: Set off a smaller explosion to get a crowd moving into an area where a bigger bomb is waiting for them. But I don’t mean to jump to conclusions. More updates coming.

Update: It’s as bad as you fear.

That last item links to a Tweet from Jackie Bruno of New England Cable News, which states, “I saw people’s legs blown off. Horrific. Two explosions. Runners were coming in and saw unspeakable horror.”

And note this: “Someone on Twitter points out that it’s Patriots’ Day in Boston, when Lexington and Concord are commemorated, in case you needed another reason to suspect this is terrorism.” Not to mention that it’s April 15th: Tax Day.

(Video atop post via the Weekly Standard.)

Update (12:27 PM PDT): A horrific looking photo atop the Drudge Report:

More photos can be found in this post at the Breitbart.com Conversation group blog by John Sexton.

Ace has numerous updates, tweets and photos, and a link to a live video stream (as of 12:36 PDT) from Bloomberg TV. Plus this:

Boston Fire/Police report “another device” may be in front of Mandarin Hotel on Boylston #BostonMarathon

— ★♥ Harriet Baldwin(@HarrietBaldwin) April 15, 2013

SDA links to this CBS Boston video of the initial explosion, in which the newsreader reports “missing limbs and bloody heads” at the scene.

Update (1:00 PM PDT): Particularly given that it’s April 15th, it was only a matter of time before old media began to look to the right for possible causes. And here we go:

You’re kidding RT @joebrooks: CNN’s Wolf Blitzer just speculated if anti-tax groups were behind the bombing WITH ZERO EVIDENCE

— Herbert Drewver (@FigDrewton) April 15, 2013

“The Boston Globe is reporting that police have intentionally detonated another device in Boston, by the Boston Public Library (about a mile from the original explosion),” Patrick Brennan writes at the NRO Corner. Mike Levine of Fox News tweets, “One source telling me at least 3 people dead in Boston explosions. Scrambling for more info/confirmation. Still unclear if this was accident”. Plus additional video at that last link.

Update (1:15 PDT): At Twitchy, “Horrible: Explosions at Boston Marathon finish line; injuries reported [pics, video]; Update: Possible fatalities.” It’s a lengthy post filled with numerous still photos, videos, and tweets from those on the scene.

NBC is tweeting “2 killed, 23 injured per @Boston_Police,” and that “Small homemade bomb is preliminary cause of explosion at Boston Marathon, law enforcement officials tell NBC News”. AP adds, “Intelligence official: 2 more explosive devices found at Boston Marathon; being dismantled.”

Update (1:25 PM PDT): The New York Times diagrams where the explosions occurred:

Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Nick Kristof wastes no time politicizing the story:

explosion is a reminder that ATF needs a director. Shame on Senate Republicans for blocking apptment articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-02-01/wor…

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) April 15, 2013

As does Luke Russert of NBC, attempting to find a Waco connection to the bombings.

Allahpundit adds, “We’re now two hours into this and I’ve yet to see any reports that these were suicide bombers or car bombs. Maybe too early to tell, but if this is AQ, the usual M.O. appears not to have been followed.”

Update: (1:35 PM PDT): There were initial reports of an explosion at the JFK Library in Boston, however, the library itself is tweeting that it was a fire that “appears to have started in the mechanical room of new building. All staff and visitors are accounted for and safe,” adding that “Investigators are investigating. Any tie to Boston Marathon explosions is pure speculation. More information as we receive it.”

The New York Post is claiming that “Authorities have a identified a suspect, who is currently being guarded in a Boston hospital with shrapnel wounds.” And Breaking News Online’s Michael van Poppel tweets, “CBS NEWS: Boston PD has surveillance video of someone bringing multiple backpacks to blast site.”

The Boston Globe probably has the clearest video of the initial blast, shot by one of their sports reporters covering the marathon:

John Stossel tweets, “If you’re in Boston and can donate blood, here are the locations.”

Update (2:15 PM PDT): AP reports that “Police Commissioner Edward Davis says authorities aren’t certain that the explosion at the JFK Library was related to the other blasts, but they’re treating them as if they are.” adding that “there are no injuries stemming from the third explosion.”

And the New York Post claims that “Authorities ID suspect as Saudi national in marathon bombings, under guard at Boston hospital.” I’d really like to see this one collaborated by other sources, given how sketchy the first day’s reporting of 9/11 was.

Update (2:33 PM PDT): “Just a Reminder” from Glenn Reynolds: “Based on past experience, at least half of what you’re hearing about Boston this afternoon will turn out to be wrong by tomorrow. And journalists/pundits: Try not to speculate in the absence of data. You don’t know anything either.”

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Scalia of the Anchoress blog sums up the current phrase of TV coverage of the bombings: “At this point on cable news, it becomes ‘crisis porn’ with no new information, re-views of event, phone-ins without any real info. TV OFF.”

Update (3:00 PM PDT): BuzzFeed tweets:

Photo of man detained by police in Boston (pic: @eric_twardzik) twitter.com/Eric_Twardzik/…

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) April 15, 2013

Larger version of the photo here.

Update (3:33 PM PDT): “Law enforcement official confirms that one of two people killed in today’s explosions was eight years old,” NBC News tweets. Andrew Phelps of the New York Times adds, “Reporter on @WBUR says most cases at Mass General are leg amputations. These are people who just finished the Boston Marathon,” or “were cheering the runners on,” Phelps continues in a follow-up tweet.

Obama refuses to use the T-word in his speech, but Roger L. Simon tweets, “WH quickly releases statement describing Boston as act of ‘terror’ after criticism Obama may have omitted. Everything is image.”

CBS journalist Alexander Romano tweets, “Frm FBI Asst Director and CBS News Senior Corr @johnmillercbs says a Saudi national is in custody but denies involvement”.

Update (6:18 PM PDT): CNN’s Nick Valencia tweets, “BOLO put out by Boston law enforcement for ‘dark skinned or black male’ who tried to gain restricted access minutes b4 1st explosion,” adding, “The man was seen wearing a black sweatshirt & had a black packback. Possible foreign national based on accent”.

As Ace writes, “I know what you’re all thinking: US tax-code protester.”

CBS reports that the death toll is now three according to Boston authorities.

Update (6:53 PM PDT): Talk about phoning it in from the White House speechwriters; to paraphrase SDA’s long-running leitmotif, now is the time when Bill Hobbs juxtaposes:

Update (8:21 PM PDT): Found via BuzzFeed on Twitter, a runner with a flip cam or cell phone video camera captures the first explosion:

Since it’s after 11:00 PM on the east coast, obviously the pace of new information has slowed considerably. However, Mary Katharine Ham is doing live updates at Hot Air, including a report from the Boston Globe that states that the current injury count is at 140.

Reports on Twitter that “WBZ-TV is reporting that just about every federal agency (FBI, ATF, DHS) and bomb squad is serving search warrant in Revere, Mass:”

BREAKING: Federal, State and Boston police searching a Revere apartment buildingtwitpic.com/cjo8r7 – @bogswbz

— NewsBreaker (@NewsBreaker) April 16, 2013

Update (8:40 PM PDT): Fox 25 Boston is reporting, “Large police presence in Revere connected to Boston bombing:”

Boston News, Weather, Sports | FOX 25 | MyFoxBoston

A law enforcement source tells Fox 25 that a large police presence at a home in Revere is related to the Boston Marathon bombings.

The source said that a suspicious driver was pulled over by Revere police after driving past the State Police barracks a number of times.

The driver reportedly had a “nervous demeanor.”

The driver then led police, as well as the FBI, to a home in the area of Ocean Avenue and Beach Street.

It was not immediately known what police were searching for at the home.

The Boston Police are tweeting a “Media Advisory from the FBI: A press conference is scheduled for Tuesday, April 16 @ 9:30am at The Westin Copley Plaza.”

Update (9:37 PM) PDT: Barring any dramatic developments tonight, I think this is the last update to this post. We’ll start fresh with a new post tomorrow. Obviously, the comments are still open below if you’d to explore the topic further here.

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“The AP’s problematic North Korea bureau” is explored in a must-read piece in the Weekly Standard by Ethan Epstein. Here’s just a sample:

Just last week, as Kim Jong-un was again threatening war, the AP reported from Pyongyang: “ ‘I’m not at all worried. We have confidence in our young marshal’ Kim Jong Un, a cleaning lady at the Koryo Hotel said as she made up a guest’s bed. ‘The rest of the world can just squawk all they want but we have confidence in his leadership.’ ”

Other dispatches read like New York Times travel features, à la “36 Hours in Pyongyang.” “Lively NKorean capital celebrates Lunar New Year,” said an AP piece from January 2012, which reported that “hundreds of children scampered and shouted as they flew kites and played traditional Korean games in freezing temperatures.” In another dispatch, Lee wrote, “A little boy skips along grasping a classmate’s hand, his cheeks flushed and a badge of the Great Leader’s smiling face pinned to his Winnie the Pooh sweatshirt. Men in military green share a joke over beers at a German-style pub next door to the Juche tower. Schoolgirls wearing the red scarves of the Young Pioneers sway in unison as they sing a classic Korean tune.”

This points to another problem with the Pyongyang bureau’s coverage: its focus on the trivial, mundane, unimportant, and just plain wrong at the expense of genuine news—a direct consequence of the bureau’s coverage being directed by the North Korean regime. So for example, last summer, in the same week that the Washington Post was reporting how the North Korean authorities had been ramping up border security and making it even harder for the population to escape, Lee filed a story breathlessly reporting:

From Mickey Mouse and a mysterious female companion, to the whiff of economic reform and the surprising ouster of his military mentor, evidence is mounting that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un will lead very differently than his secretive father.

Seven months after inheriting the country from Kim Jong Il, the 20-something leader suddenly began appearing in public with a beautiful young woman. Dressed in a chic suit with a modern cut, her hair stylishly cropped, she carried herself with the poise of a first lady as she sat by his side for an unforgettable performance: Mickey Mouse grooving with women in little black dresses jamming on electric violins.

And so instead of providing hard-hitting coverage of the world’s cruelest regime, the AP has seemingly morphed into TMZ: Pyongyang.

It’s plain to see why this is happening; the AP has put itself in a tough spot. For reasons passing understanding, it really wants to operate in North Korea. But in order to do so, it has to make sure not to offend its hosts, lest it get summarily kicked out of the country. (Malcolm Muggeridge once described a similar phenomenon among Western reporters in the Soviet Union.) Jean Lee at least appears to recognize this, sort of; while she denies that any hard censorship is occurring, she has conceded that the authorities “certainly see [her stories] after they move on the wire.” The AP, thus, is in a serious bind: If it reports real news, it will certainly get thrown out of the country. But if it softens the news, it will make its reporters look like fools. Lamentably, the AP seems to have chosen the latter course. That also explains why, ironically, some of the AP’s reporting on North Korea is still good—so long as it’s conducted from outside the country.

Read the whole thing.™

CNN found itself in a similar bind in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, as it later confessed — and in today’s North Korea as well. While CNN’s coverage of Kim Jong-un’s saber rattling and staggering human rights abuses haven’t been bad from what I’ve seen this week, when CNN reports from inside the Hermit Kingdom, they’re forced to produce items such as this infamous puff-piece:

As with AP, the above clip demonstrates everything wrong with arranging your news organization so that it can say “Dateline: Pyongang.”

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In the 1980s, Universal produced one of the most successful television shows of the decade, Miami Vice, which featured undercover cops fighting rampant drug use in southern Florida. (The series was cast with actors and guest stars who were no strangers to the show’s subject matter, themselves.)

Universal’s own take on drug use? They definitely see no evil, and would very much prefer if their employees also look the other way as well:

A former security guard at Universal Music in Los Angeles says she was fired for blowing the whistle on rampant drug use by the label’s artists.

The woman, who is suing her former employer, claims she was offered drugs by a variety of big-named stars as well as witnessed them using them.

In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday, she claims that ‘artists and high profile celebrities began visiting the premises with drugs in hand and oftentimes offering drugs to Plaintiff, which she refused.’

She claims to have personally witnessed drug use or drug paraphernalia from Macy Gray, guests of Jamie Foxx, MC Ren, rapper T.I. and his wife Tiny’s entourage and heard about drug use involving Maroon 5 frontman and ‘The Voice’ star Adam Levine….

A spokesperson for Universal Music has described the allegations as ‘absurd.’

Musicians and actors using drugs? That’s craaaazy talk, man!

Speaking of which, given that Universal is now co-owner of NBC, as soon as I read the above story, I flashed back to this excerpt from Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s mid-‘80s book, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, on SNL’s late seventies glory days, and the substances that fueled the show:

Cocaine, in fact, was a principal cause of the surliness the reporters sensed in Saturday Night. The drug itself made many of those who used it hostile. It also made them suspicious of the media, because now they had too much to hide. By the fourth season cocaine had become a staple on Saturday Night, an integral part of the working process there. Fears of a bust increased. In the fifth season Lorne actually posted a guard, a huge black man named Alvin, outside the elevators on the 17th floor. Ostensibly Alvin was there to keep away fans and other well-wishers, but few on the show doubted that an important part of his job was to prevent any sudden surprises from visiting law-enforcement officers.

Coke became the drug of choice on Saturday Night for several reasons. People had the money to pay for it now, and it was immensely useful in keeping them alive and kicking when fatigue was wearing them down. Cocaine is also the drug of success and ambition, a tonic to those for whom doubt and introspection serve no purpose. No accident that it replaced psychedelics in the Woodstock Generation’s stash boxes as flower children turned into young professionals. A key member of the show’s production staff found that she had to stop smoking pot when she worked on Saturday Night—ironically, since it was the first job she’d ever had where she could smoke pot—because it made her too sensitive, too soft in dealing with all the people calling in who wanted something. With cocaine she found she could tell them no very efficiently, very fast, with no emotion whatsoever. “Coke,” she said, “takes the heart out of people. It’s irrelevant if you’re hurting somebody. It’s all what you want to get across at the moment and who you want to listen to you.”

“Lorne” is Lorne Michaels, who created the show, and is now the de facto head of all of NBC’s late night programming. Saturday Night Live has long set the tone for all of NBC’s current programming.

And fortunately, tone is the one thing that today’s NBC-Universal is taking seriously, particularly the “liberal” network’s pledge for a new civility after Gabrielle Giffords was shot in early 2011. QED:

This was after former “Cop Killer” rapper turned cop-playing actor Ice T was caught earlier this week photographing himself clowning around with handguns, which for about thirty seconds in 2011 was considered the equivalent of racist hate speech on NBC.

Oh well, I guess for Law & Order: SVU it’s back to blowing the lid off the dangers of Big Soda.

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In place of our semi-recurring usual Quote of the Day, allow us to quote from the Department of Education. Or as the Weekly Standard quips in its Scrapbook department, “How Now, Chairman Mao?”

The Scrapbook doesn’t spend a lot of its time surfing tired bureaucratic websites that look like relics of the 1990s, but our interest was piqued last week by a quotation on the “Kids’ Zone” page of the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics: “Our attitude towards ourselves should be ‘to be satiable [sic] in learning’ and towards others ‘to be tireless in teaching.’ ”

The author was indeed a tireless teacher who tirelessly aimed his precepts at hundreds of millions of people. Too bad those who weren’t interested in his teachings were tortured, beaten, and killed.

The “Kids’ Zone,” of course, was channeling Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book (or more likely one of the thousands of “quotable quotes” websites on the Internet that mistakenly render insatiable as satiable. We’re not, by the way, suggesting that the Department of Education has been infiltrated by Maoists. Rather, one of its websites seems to be in the hands of historically illiterate hacks.

Needless to say, the prominent featuring of Mao’s quote attracted more than the usual quota of attention to the “Kids’ Zone,” and the snippet was quickly removed. Here is what it was replaced with: “Sorry there is no quote of the of the today.”

Come again?

Actually, on second thought, don’t. Considering that Mao Tse-Tung killed 65 million or so people, “NEVER QUOTE HIM AGAIN ON A DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION-RUN KID’S WEBSITE,” Moe Lane writes emphatically. “EVER.”

Exactly. And as Moe adds:

I understand that they’ve already scrambled to get the quote off of the site, but… nobody checks this stuff? – And that’s a question that should be asked Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the next time he’s speaking in front of Congress.  We would be seeing zero tolerance if they had put up quotes by the aforementioned German and Russian genocidal psychopaths: why, exactly, should we be expected not to care now?  Is it because Mao’s victims were Chinese, and thus apparently not as important to apologists for this administration?

I certainly hope that this is not the case.  I’d hate to think that the Left was still struggling with that kind of institutionalized racism…

No, the Left is institutionalized racism these days — QED.

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From about 10:00 PM PDT until Midnight, we’ll be offline. This time around though, our stewardesses have made plenty of coffee and turbulence should be mild, so no need to panic.

Update: …And we’re back.

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“Dan Rather on Reddit: No one proved that Bush documents were forged.” Fortunately, Dan had his webcam switched on for the chat.

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“Lincoln literally fought a war to keep the Union together. Obama seems perfectly content to foment discord in order to keep unions together.”

– Duane Patterson, Hot Air, “Reaping What Obama Sows.”

Related: “Union thugs… in broad daylight, on camera. Are they stupid… or do they know something about the willingness of the authorities to enforce the law?”

(Video of PJTV alumnus Steven Crowder’s assault via Instapundit.)

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“The Vatican’s top astronomer has some assurances to offer: The world won’t be ending in about two weeks, despite predictions to the contrary.”

Well, that’s a relief. Now, how do we get Al Gore to turn off his doomsday calendar?

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Alexandria of the Doubleplus Undead blog is angry. You’ll like her when she’s angry:

Gentlemen: I see that you have chosen to use the horrific crime of the murder of Kasandra Perkins to express your belief that guns are the problem, not the men who wield them. I am utterly certain that you believe that you have the moral high ground on this matter. I am equally certain that such a belief is appallingly wrong, not to mention terribly misogynistic. Why do I say this? Because had your desires on gun control been in place, I would not be alive to be writing this now.

Read the whole thing.

Related: “Greg Gutfeld blasts ‘ghoulish’ Bob Costas, ‘bigot’ Jason Whitlock.” Elsewhere, the Bangor Daily News reports,  “Angry about woman, Jovan Belcher punched out window, gashed hand in 2006 UMaine incident.” And a caller to Florida talker Todd Schnitt “Claims Family Brutalized” by Belcher as a preteen.

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Blogger Jammie Wearing Fool looks at the possibility of ex-con Mel Reynolds running for Jesse Jackson, Jr.’s Congressional seat and writes, “This is just perfect. A guy tossed out of Congress and into prison for having sex with an underage campaign volunteer, among other crimes, is tossing his baggage into the ring in a bid to win the seat of the disgraced Jesse Jackson, Jr. His criminal history should only serve as a resume-enhancer in that district.”

Another Democrat, former Rep. Debbie Halvorson, might also make a run for the seat. At Power Line, Paul Mirengoff notes that the famously racially torrent and diversity-obsessed left are terrified of “The horror, a white might win Jesse Jackson’s congressional seat.”

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Nancy Pelosi: Obama May Be Most Famous Person ‘In the Whole Galaxy.’

Klaatu Baracka Pelosi! But I thought Maureen Dowd had the trademark on the President Spock shtick. Personally, I believe Obama was born in Hawaii, but if Nancy and MoDo insist the president is an alien, legal or illegal, perhaps we really do need to see the birth certificate.

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Look around you. From now on, it gets worse. In ten years’ time, there will be no American Dream, any more than there’s a Greek or Portuguese Dream. In twenty, you’ll be living the American Nightmare, with large tracts of the country reduced to the favelas of Latin America, the rich fleeing for Bermuda or New Zealand or wherever on the planet they can buy a little time, and the rest trapped in the impoverished, violent, diseased ruins of utopian vanity.

– Mark Steyn, After America.

Update: “Finita La Commedia,” writes Kyle Smith.

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