The news stories are saying the likely Boston bombers are/were Chechen brothers (one has been killed). One story says they are ethnic Chechens who lived in Turkey before coming here. The younger one (the one still at large, age 20, give or take) appears to have been in the U.S. for a while.

This means it’s likely they are Sunni Muslims, although giving the mess in Chechnya it may be their motivations, whatever they were, were more political than religious.

Update: See Gawker headline that delicately suggests the New York Post‘s coverage of the bombings has fallen short of professional standards.

In the last post I said I wanted to see the Senate gun bill vote calculated by number of people represented. Well, Jonathan Cohn and Eric Kingsbury have worked it out —

If you assume, for sake of argument, each senator represents half of his or her state’s population, then senators voting for the bill represented about 194 million people, while the senators voting against the bill represented about 118 million people. That’s getting close to a two-thirds majority in favor of the measure.

And this is why we can’t have nice things. Ian Millhiser and Adam Peck write,

… a voter in Wyoming enjoys 66 times as much representation in the Senate as a voter in California.

As the least populous state, Wyoming makes out like bandits when it comes to Senate representation, but they are far from alone in enjoying such a windfall. A voter in Idaho (population 1,595,728) counts as almost 24 Californians. A voter in Nebraska (population 1,845,525) counts as nearly 21 Californians. And a voter in North Dakota (population 699,628) counts as more than 54 Californians. Indeed, if you add up the combined populations of Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska, Idaho, Nebraska, Utah, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Alabama, that still adds up to over 3 million fewer people than live in the state of California. That also adds up to 26 senators, all of whom opposed background checks.

As I recall, the original idea was that senators represent states, not people. But, functionally, I don’t think that’s been true for a long time. This imbalance in representation is doing serious harm to the nation in many ways beside leaving us more vulnerable to gun violence. Although rural citizens may flatter themselves as being the “real Americans,” it’s urban areas that drive the nation’s economy, not to mention culture and the innovations that will keep us from sliding into Third World territory. Increasingly, it feels to me that the more conservative parts of the country are just so much dead weight.

The best analysis I’ve seen so far about why the gun control vote failed is Ezra Klein’s —

The gun vote failed because of the way the Senate is designed. It failed because the Senate wildly overrepresents small, rural states and, on top of that, requires a 60-vote supermajority to pass most pieces of legislation.

The Manchin-Toomey bill received 54 aye votes and 46 nay votes. That is to say, a solid majority of senators voted for it. In most legislative bodies around the world, that would have been enough. But it wasn’t a sufficient supermajority for the U.S. Senate.

Of the senators from the 25 largest states, the Manchin-Toomey legislation received 33 aye votes and 17 nay votes — a more than 2:1 margin, putting it well beyond the 3/5ths threshold required to break a filibuster. But of the senators from the 25 smallest states, it received only 21 aye votes and 29 nay votes.

I’d like to see this broken down by population — the senators representing X million defeated the senators representing xxx million people. Whatever the numbers, what it tells us is that the legislative branch of the federal government has become utterly dysfunctional and unresponsive to the will of the people.

And it isn’t just the gun bill; it’s everything. It’s appointments to federal agencies and the bench. It’s the future of entitlement programs, and health care, and stimulus spending. Etc., etc. If this can’t be changed, then I see nothing ahead for the U.S. but long, slow (or not so slow) decline.

Professor Krugman made my day by confessing to be a Ulysses Grant admirer. Someday we Grantistas should come out of the woodwork and have a convention.

More important, maybe — there was a study released in 2010 about how government debt caused unemployment, as I understand it. This study, called Reinhart/Rogoff after its authors, was seized upon by conservatives to bolster their argument that the “debt crisis” is our primary economic problem, calling for strict austerity. This study has been enormously influential, apparently. Well, turns out the study is bogus. Krugman writes,

According to the review paper, R-R mysteriously excluded data on some high-debt countries with decent growth immediately after World War II, which would have greatly weakened their result; they used an eccentric weighting scheme in which a single year of bad growth in one high-debt country counts as much as multiple years of good growth in another high-debt country; and they dropped a whole bunch of additional data through a simple coding error.

Fix all that, say Herndon et al., and the result apparently melts away.

Further, the response from R and R to the criticism has been really stupid.

There also appear to be issues with bad Excel coding. See, again, Krugman, and also Rortybomb.

It’s been a whole day since the Boston bombing. The Murdoch/tabloid press is still flogging the story that a Saudi national is behind the bombing, and the usual idiots among rightie bloggers have even posted photographs of a person they say is the bomber. Official sources are not saying any such thing.

My Hero of the Day is a fellow who bought the domain name bostonmarathonconspiracy.com just so the whackjobs couldn’t use it. Thank you, sir.

He said,

Sadly, one of my first thoughts was that it would only be a matter of hours before a certain group of people would begin to say it was a government conspiracy; an act of terror on our own people for political gain. It’s sickening, but take a look at the massive numbers of 9/11 conspiracy nuts…people who think Bush and the gang took down the twin towers and ended the lives of nearly 3000 people so we could go to war. The heartless and sick Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists who think the Obama administration killed kindergartners to bolster the gun control debate. And there are plenty of others. Well, I was wrong. It didn’t take hours…it took minutes.

I wrote some more about the bombing at the other blog.

The Rupert Murdoch/tabloid press has been reporting 12 dead and a “Saudi national” in custody. As of this writing, other news sources say three dead and no one in custody.

I can’t imagine why anyone would chose the Boston Marathon as a target.

I will have no peace until I’ve finished the taxes. Will post something later.

True genius and master of improv.

Timothy Egan says that Wayne LaPierre is the “Kim Jong-un of American politics.” LaPierre’s job is to say things so crazy that it makes other crazy people seem reasonable.

Remarkably, yesterday Democratic leaders in the Senate actually defeated a filibuster so that gun control can be debated. However, the Manchin-Toomey bill to be debated has been called a toothless wonder that doesn’t come anywhere near providing universal background checks.

The bill would require background checks for any sale that “occurs at a gun show or event” or “pursuant to an advertisement” on the Internet or in a publication. Yet no other private sales require a check. Transfers among family members are explicitly excluded, as are sales between friends or acquaintances (who presumably won’t meet at a gun show or pursuant to an advertisement.) Yet we know that the vast majority of criminals obtain their guns from friends and family members.

Well, closing the loophole for gun shows and internet sales is better than nothing. A start. Wayne LaPierre continues to warn America that closing the gun show loophole will lead to registration which will lead to confiscation which will lead to black helicopters landing on your roof. Be afraid.

See also Mark Follman, New Research Confirms Gun Rampages Are Rising—and Armed Civilians Don’t Stop Them

So the President is making us all crazy again by negotiating with himself. I suspect this Politico assessment is pretty close to the truth —

Anxiety, not ideology prodded Obama to push for entitlement savings, people close to the president say. Obama has told people in his orbit that he feels “squeezed” by the rise of entitlement spending and sees it as a threat to getting anything else done, especially his plans for increased education and infrastructure spending.

For the past two years, Obama has championed what he calls “a balanced approach” to debt and deficit reduction, demanding $700 billion in high-earner tax hikes from Republicans earlier this year as a prerequisite to budget cuts and reform of runaway Social Security and Medicare costs.

The time to pay up is now, Obama’s aides say, and the White House needed to offer something to bring Republicans back to the bargaining table. They insist that he’s opposed to deeply cutting entitlements and is willing to do only the bare minimum needed to get a deal done.

However, the offer is doomed to fail, because ultimately Republicans aren’t interested in anything but obstruction. Paul Krugman:

Since the beginning, the Obama administration has seemed eager to gain the approval of the grownups — the sensible people who will reward efforts to be Serious, and eventually turn on those nasty, intransigent Republicans as long as Obama and co. don’t cater too much to the hippies.This is the latest, biggest version of that strategy. Unfortunately, it will almost surely fail. Why? Because there are no grownups — only people who try to sound like grownups, but are actually every bit as childish as anyone else.

This quote attributed to an anonymous White House staffer is revealing —

“We’re not going to have the White House forever, folks. If he doesn’t do this, Paul Ryan is going to do it for us in a few years,” said a longtime Obama aide, referring to the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate who proposed a sweeping overhaul of Medicare that would replace some benefits with vouchers.

This tells us that the Mighty Right is a major bugaboo in the White House collective mind; they will never be defeated; only temporarily contained. Charles Pierce —

Now, we have a Democratic administration, empowered by a solid re-election, that is proposing to its most loyal supporters that they support at least a partial sellout of the Democratic party’s greatest legacy because, some day, a Republican president might do something much worse. (As though said imaginary Republican president won’t go ahead and do much worse anyway, and claim a national mandate for it while he’s at it, and eventually find a way to blame “a Democratic president” for having launched the process in the first place.) I literally never have heard this argument made in any political context. I certainly never have heard it from anyone in an incumbent administration. If this is your rationale for making policy, what in the name of god is the point of running for office in the first place?

Yeah, that’s supposed to be how it works. Maybe the White House staffer believes democracy is already too far gone to be revived, though. In which case, perhaps the time for bargaining is over.