Puppet Masters
Following a scathing 60 Minutes report on the topic, Congress passed the STOCK Act in 2012 to prohibit lawmakers and their staff from trading stocks based on information they learned during congressional briefings.
Stewart renamed the bill the "No Shit Sherlock Act of 2000 and Always" last year.
The New Hampshire Democratic Party on Tuesday highlighted a Facebook message Tremblay left on Glenn Beck's fan page last Friday.
The message claimed the U.S. government secretly carried out the Boston attack and that the suspect who was arrested was merely a patsy. The post linked to an Alex Jones video.
Up until that time, a wide assortment of local, state, and federal officials were engaged in a dragnet that essentially shut down the city of Boston, and included house-to-house searches in the neighborhoods of Watertown, Mass. and New Bedford, Mass., the latter being near where 19-year-old Russian immigrant Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had enrolled in college. Tsarnaev, a Muslim from the Dagestan area of Russia that abuts Chechnya, became a U.S. citizen on September 11 of last year.
In essence, the lessons from the Boston Marathon mean that the following procedures employed in the week-long manhunt proved to be completely ineffective in apprehending Tsarnaev:
- House-to-house searches in a dragnet-style;
- Use of military-style helicopters across the state;
- Use of tanks and armored vehicles on the streets of Boston, Cambridge, Watertown, and New Bedford;
- Shutting down the city, except for limited coffee shops;
- Stopping all public transportation;
- Banning taxi service across the city of Boston; and
- Abandoning the federal Posse Comitatus law banning the use of soldiers in law enforcement.
In two previous articles, for RT and for Asia Times Online I have looked into the superimposed levels of blowback implied by the Boston bombing.
With still so many unanswered questions regarding what took place on the ground in Boston after the bombing, it's time to look at an extra, possible Top Ten list of lingering absurdities.
And this without sidestepping other unanswered crucial questions, such as why a bomb drill - organized by Craft - was going on during the marathon at which the bombing took place; and why it was vehemently denied that a bomb drill was going on.
For this current set of questions, I'm grateful for the help of Asia Times Online's Bostonian readers.
"I don't care if she knew about this," Coulter said. "She ought to be in prison for wearing a hijab. This immigration policy of us, you know, assimilating immigrants into our culture isn't really working. They're assimilating us into their culture. Did she get a clitorectomy too?"
Hannity seemed momentarily puzzled at the sudden citation of female genital mutilation, stammering his reply. "I, uh, I don't know the answer to that," he said before confidently adding: "But your point is well taken."
Comment: Say hello to the new normal - For the authoritarians and their followers it's a dream come true.
It could have been a covert op gone real bad. It could have been blowback from former ''freedom fighters'' - in this case ethnic Chechens - reconverted into terra-rists. It could have been straight blowback for United States foreign policy targeting Muslims, whether dispatching them to Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib or Bagram, extraordinarily renditioning them, or target assassinating them.
The FBI, predictably, is not admitting any of these three options. It sticks to a convoluted screenplay worthy of those cocaine-fueled Hollywood nights in the 1980s; a couple of bad guys who ''hate our freedoms'' because... they do.
As I've written elsewhere in a sort of preamble for this article, there are inter-galactic holes in the story of the Tsarnaev brothers. Now we also know - via their mother - that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was monitoring elder brother Tamerlan for at least five years. In a subsequent interview to CNN's Piers Morgan, the mother actually talked, significantly, about ''counseling''.
The message, part of a training exercise and not intended for public distribution, was sent out about 11:30 a.m. by First Call, the company that operates the state's reverse-911 system, said Kevin Wilson, of the Delaware Emergency Management Agency.
It instructed the recipients who live within a half mile of 5 South Congress St. in Port Penn to shelter in place and tune radios to the Emergency Alert System for details.
The message led the recipients to believe that an actual event had taken place, Wilson said.
Then at 12:25 p.m., First Call issued another message to the homes affected saying the first one was sent in error.
Matthew Teague, president of First Call, apologized to residents for any inconvenience.

Jia's death is the second case in two weeks of an official dying while being held in Communist party’s secret detention system.
A senior official at a city court in central China has died under mysterious circumstances, his body bruised after 11 days in the custody of anti-corruption investigators of the ruling Communist party, according to his family.
The case of Jia Jiuxiang, who was vice-president of the Sanmenxia City intermediate people's court in Henan province, is the second in two weeks to surface of an official dying while being held in the party's secret detention system, which is not regulated by law.
Jia's relatives say they suspect he was tortured in detention. His brother-in-law, Zhou Qiang, said Jia was detained on 12 April by the local party's discipline inspection committee, turned up in a local hospital on Monday night and died on Tuesday morning after attempts to save him failed.
Jia's wife, who was allowed to see the body, said his face had turned blue and his body was covered in bruises, Zhou said.
"We think that in handling the case, the discipline inspection committee used cruel tactics against him," Zhou said. He said that Jia, 49, had previously been in good health.
Another relative, Ma Weihua, who identified himself as Jia's nephew, confirmed details of Zhou's account and said local officials told the relatives they would conduct an investigation into Jia's death.

A security inspector searches a traveler's bag at Ben Gurion Airport. Recently, several tourists thought to be pro-Palestinian activists were asked by security agents to open their Gmail accounts.
Responding to a complaint filed by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Weinstein, in a response issued by his assistant, Nadeem Abboud, said, "given the limitations of intelligence coverage and the difficulty of obtaining relevant information about foreign citizens, the questioning conducted at the border crossings by the representative of the Shin Bet carries weight in bolstering or refuting the suspicions against a foreign national wanting to enter."












Comment: Ann Coulter ought to be exorcised and/or entombed for being a demon.