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.

Margeret Thatcher is being remembered more fondly in the U.S. than in Britain, it seems, although not everyone on this side of the pond is being all that reverent, either. See, for example, Alex Pareene, “The Woman Who Wrecked Great Britain.”

The view from the American Right (example) is that she did what had to be done, for Britain’s own good, and while it’s a shame so many people suffered, by now everyone ought to agree it was for the best. Andy Sullivan saw in Thatcher “a final rebuke to the collectivist, egalitarian oppression of the individual produced by socialism and the stultifying privileges and caste identities of the class system.”

On the other hand, Paul Krugman points out —

Thatcher came to power in 1979, and imposed a radical change in policy almost immediately. But the big improvement in British performance doesn’t really show in the data until the mid-1990s. Does she get credit for a reward so long delayed?

And the answer is, from the Right, of course. Just like so many wingnuts wanted to credit Ronald Reagan for Bill Clinton’s economy, whereas (in their minds) President Obama owned George W. Bush’s economy as soon as he won the 2008 election.

In his column today, Paul Krugman asks, “How many Americans will be denied essential health care in the name of freedom?”

Specifically, the time-honored practice of attacking beneficiaries of government programs as undeserving malingerers doesn’t play the way it used to. When Ronald Reagan spoke about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, it resonated with many voters. When Mitt Romney was caught on tape sneering at the 47 percent, not so much.

There is, however, an alternative. From the enthusiastic reception American conservatives gave Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” to Reagan, to the governors now standing in the way of Medicaid expansion, the U.S. right has sought to portray its position not as a matter of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, but as a courageous defense of freedom.

And this begs the question, how does the U.S. right define freedom?

When I speak of freedom in the political sense, I’m thinking of self-determination and the exercise of free will. But there’s nothing terribly “free” about sickness, chronic pain, untreated disability, or death. The sick and disabled find their life options limited. They may have self-determination in theory, but not in fact. Where’s the “freedom”?

Prairie Weather has it nailed:

Krugman points to that shocking moment, back at a presidential debate in 2011, when Ron Paul was asked whether people without insurance should be left to die, and a tea party contingent yelled “yeah!” The tea party was still interesting, often titillating, back then. All along their idea of freedom has been nothing more noble than freedom from moral responsibility.

But now we know more about the arrogance, their authoritarianism, their self-indulgent cruelty and we have decided that the tea party’s definition of freedom should be, well, left to die.

Whatever. I’ll miss Roger Ebert.

Today’s news is that New York City Councilman Daniel J. Halloran III, who has made news for alleged election fraud and smearing unions, is a dedicated Pagan. I think I may have heard this before, but it’s coming out today and people are commenting.

I can’t say I understand Paganism, but I’m enough of a Celt to think that people who observe the old Druid holy days can’t be all bad. They are far less alarming to me than, say, Scientologists.