Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

It’s a doggy dog world.

Glad to see john eastman going through some things.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

You cannot shame the shameless.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

As long as McCarthy is Speaker, the House will never be in order.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Everybody saw this coming.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Second rate reporter says what?

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

You are here: Home / Strangest winger reaction to Boston bombing

Reader Interactions

257Comments

  3. 3.

    Gravenstone

    Wingers seem almost pants pissingly terrified of the potential this might have been one of their own, don’t they?

  4. 4.

    jl

    Since no on has a clue who did it, it’s irresponsible not to speculate. Especially if you are a VSP pundit.

    I mean, it’s not like anyone is going to go out and so something dumb on the basis of pundits and political hacks pointing fingers in random directions, right?

  5. 5.

    Cacti

    I was thinking it sounded similar to the PVC pipe/nail bombs that right wing christian terrorist Eric Robert Rudolph used in Atlanta in 1996.

    But 1970 is more recent, and George W. Bush kept us safe, because his Presidency began on September 12, 2001.

  8. 8.

    aimai

    I don’t think the Oughton/weatherman bomb was a nail bomb. It did a lot more damage than a nail bomb, at any rate. But, yeah, next they’ll be draggin’ up the Haymarket anarchists to prove that its always the left that does violence against a stable conservative base of regular people.

  9. 9.

    Gin & Tonic

    And as long as we’re searching for obscure historical analogies, aren’t they an eerie reminder of the shrapnel-packed anarchist bombs of 1919? Which is eerier, Chuckie?

  11. 11.

    jl

    @kd bart:

    ” At least they can’t blame Sacco and Vanzetti for this one. ”

    They’ve been very quiet lately. Too quiet, if you ask me. Way too quiet.

  12. 12.

    Jay in Oregon

    @Gravenstone:

    Wingers seem almost pants pissingly terrified of the potential this might have been one of their own, don’t they?

    I’m sure we can find some reasonable persons of interest and run them through a waterboarding session or two to get the information we need.

    I’m sure Charles Lane will look good at the bottom of a human pyramid in FEMA Detention Camp #035.

  13. 13.

    Princess

    @Gravenstone: Yes, that’s exactly how I read it. They’re so sure it is going to be some paranoid white guy they’re doing advanced damage control.

  14. 14.

    Citizen Alan

    Talking about the Weather Underground allows them to talk about Bill Ayers and therefore allows them to talk about how “Obama palled around with terrorists.” Never mind the fact that the Weather Underground bombed government buildings after phoning in to give everyone time to evacuate.

  17. 17.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    He’s digging in like a badger on crank. Six more tweets about seventies radicals and Kathy Boudin

  18. 18.

    NonyNony

    @Princess:

    Yes, that’s exactly how I read it. They’re so sure it is going to be some paranoid white guy they’re doing advanced damage control.

    Meh. Seems more like they are just doing their usual “scream loud and dominate the narrative whether I’m right or not” schtick.

    Sure they’ll look foolish if it turns out to be a domestic terrorist instead of a foreign one, but they look foolish 24 hours a day, 7 days a week anyway.

  19. 19.

    walt

    I lived during that era but my memory is hazy. Did the Weathermen ever terrorize by attempting to take a maximum number of civilian casualties? Like Rudolph and McVeigh?

    My sense is that left-wing terrorism was much more target-specific. No excuse for that, of course, or the Earth First! eco-terrorism, but when it comes to body counts, the right wins hands down.

  22. 22.

    The Ancient Randonneur

    Prior to 9/11 the largest terrorist attack in the 50 states was committed by a right wing extremist who also happend to be a white male Christian by the name of Timothy McVeigh. But, hey, HIPPIES!

    I recall quite vividly the morning of the OKC attack. Most of the speculation was about foreign terrorists. Since the young Saudi man questioned by the FBI was a VICTIM of yesterday’s bomb we still have … HIPPIES!

  23. 23.

    The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik

    Because even bombings have to be considered ‘both sides, same thing’.

  25. 25.

    raven

    @aimai:

    An initial search turned up a 1916 37-mm antitank shell.[11] In the following days, a brick-by-brick search of the rubble uncovered 57 sticks of dynamite, four 12-inch (300 mm) pipe bombs packed with dynamite, and 30 blasting caps. The pipe bombs and several eight-stick packages of dynamite had fuses already attached. Also found were timing devices rigged from alarm clocks, maps of the tunnel network underneath Columbia University, and literature of the political protest organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), from which the Weatherman organization had split.[8][10][11] Police described the building as a “bomb factory”, and said that at the time of the explosion dynamite was apparently being wrapped in tape with nails embedded to act as shrapnel.[8][12]

  28. 28.

    beltane

    Since Charles Lane likes to delve deep into history, why didn’t he invoke Sacco and Vanzetti while he was at at? Or the Siccari of ancient Judea?

    Going by the time tested law of “he who smelt it dealt it”, I’d have to say that Mr. Lane thinks it was one of his RW brethren who did this and he’s just making a very lame attempt to deflect attention. He obviously is unfamiliar with the concept of “silence is golden.”

  29. 29.

    raven

    @walt:

    ccording to Cathy Wilkerson who was a leader of the New York collective of the Weatherman, they were disappointed with the minimal effects of their earlier use of Molotov cocktails at the home of Judge Murtagh and other locations. At the suggestion of Terry Robbins, another of the leaders, they decided to use dynamite for newly planned actions.

    They were stupid but serious.

  30. 30.

    Davis X. Machina

    It’s airtight. If it’s a right-wing loon, he was driven to it by the left, so it’s tragic, but understandable.

    They call it ‘epistemic closure’ because of the …closure.

  31. 31.

    gene108

    @Gravenstone:

    Wingers seem almost pants pissingly terrified of the potential this might have been one of their own, don’t they?

    Read Free Republic at lunch, just to see what they were saying.

    The wingers are so not grounded in reality, I don’t think they really care who did this or that people got hurt.

    Everything is a conspiracy meant to diminish them, whether by Obama, the liberal media or the sheeple, who are led by Obama and the liberal media.

  32. 32.

    J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford

    I met Bill Ayers on April 6th at the International Activism event at UIC’s Forum. I recognized him immediately and talked briefly. My wife wanted me to get my picture taken with him but I didn’t want to bother him any more than I already had.

  34. 34.

    Cacti

    @Davis X. Machina:

    If it’s a right-wing loon, he was driven to it by the left, so it’s tragic, but understandable.

    And of course, if he was white, male, and christian, his actions should in no way be considered an indictment of white males or christianity.

  35. 35.

    Redshirt

    @gene108: Reading “Free Republic” should be required reading for anyone who cares about the state of this country and/or the world. For, there, you will gaze directly into their fevered brains and learn first hand, without filter, what they think.

    And that’s batshit crazy. They are awful, awful people.

  39. 39.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @drew42: From a club chair in a cozy den in a McMansion on a leafy street in a tony DC suburb. Just a hunch.

  40. 40.

    gene108

    @kd bart:

    They didn’t want to hurt anybody. They just wanted to make a political point by blowing up a government building.

    Clearly the same as McVeigh, who didn’t want to hurt anybody, but had no choice because the Imperial Federal government chose to work on the anniversary of Waco, as opposed to the times it shuts down for things like the anniversary of the end of the First World War.

    If only we could truly mourn the death of David Koresh and his brave stand for freedom, McVeigh would’ve only hurt a building and no one would’ve died.

    Clearly OKC’s Bill Clinton’s fault.

  42. 42.

    CT Voter

    Good to realize that Lane, as a 9 or 10 year old, was paying such close attention to those lefty terrorists in 1970…..

  44. 44.

    Cacti

    8-year old Martin Richard made a drawing after the Trayvon Martin shooting with a message for us all…

    Click here if you feel like sobbing.

  45. 45.

    Mnemosyne

    @raven:

    IIRC, Bill Ayers’ girlfriend at the time was one of those killed. It was one of the things that made him realize that the whole “bombings” strategy was a really bad idea.

  46. 46.

    gene108

    @Redshirt:

    Cole posted once, about when he was winger that they just hate us.

    Reading FR, I realize he’s right.

    They hate us and want us to DIAF.

    The scary people aren’t the Freeper’s, but those, who basically share their sentiments, but for fear of being mocked in polite society won’t air out their delusional fantasies in public; such as the number of folks, who thought the government overreached in handling the Branch Dravidian compound, even though federal agents had been murdered there.

    The FP’ers are the ones willing to come out of the woodwork.

    We are truly screwed as a society.

  47. 47.

    Redshirt

    @Davis X. Machina: I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m astounded how these clowns go on and on about Benghazi. Dollars to donuts they don’t even know why they’re upset, other than some vague notion that Obama went to bed as Americans were dying.

    It’s totemic – a “scary” word that sums up all the evil of the Keyan Usurper, regardless of facts, context, or even reality.

  48. 48.

    Tractarian

    strange
    /strānj/
    Adjective
    Unusual or surprising in a way that is unsettling or hard to understand.
    Not previously visited, seen, or encountered; unfamiliar or alien: “she found herself in bed in a strange place”.

    For right-wingers, this was not unusual or surprising.

  50. 50.

    jamick6000

    the weird thing (though not actually weird considering the source) is how it’s an odd, grasping reaction that’s not in the heat of the moment.

    and his follow-up tweet:

    Terrorism is terrorism, whether it comes from left or right, Christians, Jews or Muslims, for or against “social change.”

    Terrorism: both sides do it. These WaPo guys will pound any peg into that hole.

  51. 51.

    jibeaux

    I caught a retrospective of OKC over the weekend, I guess it was a slow news day since the anniversary is still 3 days out. Anyway, I had kind of forgotten that there had been a series of lucky breaks in that investigation that led to them getting McVeigh, from the traffic stop to the illegal concealed carry that turned it into a booking and arrest, to an especially good police sketch, etc. I hope that with all of our cameras and surveillance and just solid detective work, some good leads will follow. But with additional cameras and surveillance and of course crowds comes extra noise, too. Just to speculate recklessly, it doesn’t feel like professional international terrorism to me, I feel like it would be even worse. But it could be a wacko, foreign or domestic.

  52. 52.

    MattR

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    He’s digging in like a badger on crank. Six more tweets about seventies radicals and Kathy Boudi

    It seems like this was the whole point of his tweets – to bash the “lefty” universities for welcoming Boudin on campus as a lecturer thus implicating them as not serious on terror. Looks like a Rovian attempt to minimize the criticism when it turns out the Boston bombings were from a right winger (or inspired by right wing pundits)

  53. 53.

    doctortecate

    what’s great is right before this he tweeted EB White said it best: “Omit needless words.”

  55. 55.

    Gin & Tonic

    @BobS: The point of tree spiking was to make the logs damage the saws in sawmills; an unfortunate side effect was that sometimes the blades would fragment, injuring people working in the sawmills. Still not terrorism?

  56. 56.

    raven

    @Mnemosyne: Weatherwoman Diana. There is a made for TV movie with Sissy Spacek that us based on her life and death. She was from a wealthy family in Dwight, Illinois a little town between Champaign and Chicago.
    Here’s the Airplane song from Sunfighter:

    How do you feel to shoot down your brother now
    And bury us in cages of cement and steel
    What do you see when you look at one another now Who do you see tell me how do you feel
    Sing a song for the children who are gone
    Sing a song for Diana Huntress of the moon and a lady of the Earth Weather woman Diana

    How do you feel as you cut
    Down your children now
    And leave them dying
    On the grass in the sun

    What do you see
    When you look at one another
    Now?
    Tell me old man
    Tell me where will you run?
    Sing a song
    For the children going down
    Remember – the ones you know
    Remember how we danced
    And remember what we sang
    In America
    So many years ago.

  57. 57.

    Trollhattan

    My favorite first-person account from yesterday, thus far.

    I don’t deserve any kind of congratulations or pat on the back. My congratulations and pat on the back comes from being able to help and console people, and telling them everything will be all right. Today I can say, I can’t say what I’m gonna do in the future, but today I can say I’m gonna dedicate myself to being there for people less fortunate. There are a lot of people this morning not concerned about losing their phone or hoodie, but concerned about losing their limb or 8-year-old child. I’m grateful to have what I have and the support I have.

    My view on the world has definitely changed. Whoever’s responsible for this, if they were trying to instill a sense of terror, a sense of hopelessness, a sense of fear, that’s not what came across. What came across to me is the American spirit and the way they were willing to help, and how this brought people together. Multiple countries, multiple nationalities, multiple cultural backgrounds were side by side with one goal in mind: to help the people who were less fortunate than themselves. I think this situation had an opposite effect of what the person responsible was trying to accomplish.

    I’m not from Boston but it is an incredibly strong willed, some say hard-headed community, and I’m grateful to be a resident of this city. I’m just grateful.

    The rest is here.
    http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/firsthand-account-of-boston-bombing-041613#ixzz2QecbwacL

  58. 58.

    nellcote

    from the twitter machine:

    msbellows
    It’s April 15. See all those police, firefighters, EMTs helping people in Boston? This is why we pay taxes, people.

  59. 59.

    jrg

    The people who spent the first part of this century so far talking about beating anti-war protesters with 2x4s, hiding Eric Rudolph, and supporting torture… Only to spend the second part of this century so far howling about taking “their” country back, and carrying AR15s on the national mall would like you to know they had nothing to do with this.

  62. 62.

    ? Martin

    How the fuck can the 1970 event be considered a ‘massacre’ when the only people killed were the people putting the bomb together. Every fucking conservative in this country would consider that ‘natural justice’.

  63. 63.

    Todd

    @Jay in Oregon:

    I’m sure Charles Lane will look good at the bottom of a human pyramid in FEMA Detention Camp #035.

    Goddammit, thats the camp that I’ve been angling for Obama to appoint me to run. The will be no human pyramids – only forced gay marriages between San Francisco leftist vegan bears and all the incarcerated, er, educable wingnuts.

    Their daughters will get to be babymamas for radical black panthers, and their churches turned over to Gaia worshipping leftyst womyn.

  65. 65.

    Suffern ACE

    Ugh. I’m sure when they catch this guy there will be enough rambling in some kind of manifesto notebook that will implicate both sides, plus some rant about some movie star that will make no sense at all. It all looks fine for pointing out the potential of the right wingers for violence until it turns out that some guy interested in astral projection, pot legalization, and mad about the injustice of having his pension robbed and the women who’ve mistreated him shows up and none of our politics makes a lot of sense.

  66. 66.

    flukebucket

    @Tractarian:

    What does Charles Lane know that we don’t know?

    Hell, if he knows who he is he knows more about himself than I know about him.

  67. 67.

    wuzzat

    @Gin & Tonic: Fair enough, but tree-spiking doesn’t tend to be what I think of when I think of eco-terrorists anyway. I tend to think of the Animal/Earth Liberation Front types burning down labs and ranger stations and emailing biologists envelopes full of razor blades and white powder, but I’m a scientist-type. Nutjobs from both ends of the political spectrum hate science. The big difference, of course, being that the Left acknowledges their nutjobs as nutjobs and the Right elects theirs to public office or gives them prime time cable slots.

  68. 68.

    sb

    I’m really starting to sympathize with Stephen Glass. If I worked for Chuck Lane, I’d go a little crazy, too.

  69. 69.

    Roger Moore

    @Mnemosyne:

    IIRC, Bill Ayers’ girlfriend at the time was one of those killed. It was one of the things that made him realize that the whole “bombings” strategy was a really bad idea.

    More proof that he’s a wacky liberal. Conservatives know what they know, and they aren’t going to let any crazy “evidence” or “experience” change their views. Stick to your guns and carry on no matter what, that’s the Conservative way.

  71. 71.

    raven

    @Mnemosyne: That and the Madison bombings made a lot of people start thinking that fighting for peace was like fucking for chastity.

  72. 72.

    Seanly

    I remember the day of the OKC bombing. I was having lunch with some fellow grad students. Most jumped right to the conclusion that it was foreigners. I said that it was probably a domestic terrorist – a foreigner would do it in a major metro like NYC or LA.

    As far as this one, I could see reasons for it to be a foreign or domestic terrorist. The only thing I am sure of is that it’s not a leftie.

  73. 73.

    ? Martin

    @Gin & Tonic:

    The point of tree spiking was to make the logs damage the saws in sawmills; an unfortunate side effect was that sometimes the blades would fragment, injuring people working in the sawmills. Still not terrorism?

    That wasn’t the point of tree spiking. Everyone who runs raw wood through a saw checks them thoroughly for metal, because you don’t know what might have gotten nailed into them over the last century. Hell, I found a bullet fragment embedded in a piece of wood once, probably from a hunter. But every weekend woodworker I know that deals with raw or reclaimed wood has a handheld metal detector for the task – it’s extremely common.

    The point of tree spiking is to either make the spikes so onerous to deal with that the tree is considered unsafe to run and therefore unusable, or to make it economically prohibitive to run because of the expense of removing the spikes. If you run a log with a piece of metal in it, or you fail to check for nails, you’re a fucking idiot.

  74. 74.

    Ben Franklin

    @Davis X. Machina:

    Anti-personnel in Boston equates to cutting off legs of marathoners.

    I suspect Cheeto and Hummus aficionados of the keyboard terrorist variety.

  75. 75.

    Mr Stagger Lee

    @Redshirt: But be sure to delouse and disinfect after going there, plus look at some cute animal pictures to calm the mind.

  76. 76.

    BobS

    @Gin & Tonic: One time- not “sometimes” – a mill worker was injured by a either an old nail or tree spike (never definitively determined) that damaged the saw he was using. Earth First! subsequently renounced the practice while other groups posted warnings in spiked forests.
    Nope, not terrorism.

  78. 78.

    Redshift

    You would think it would dawn on them at some point that if the only examples they can find on the “other” side (Bill Ayers! Soviet Union!) are from before a large portion of the population was old enough to remember (or even born), it disproves the “both sides do it” case rather than supporting it.

    Please proceed, wingnuts.

  79. 79.

    ? Martin

    @Roger Moore: Not just sticking to your guns but doubling down. If your kid gets shot at school, the obvious answer is more guns at school. Conservative ideology cannot fail, it can only be failed. When evidence arrives contrary to belief, it surely means that society didn’t do enough of it. Not enough abstinence, not enough austerity, not enough voter suppression, not enough guns, not enough privatization. It applies to every situation.

  81. 81.

    Violet

    Second on list on Google’s Top Stories is “Al Qaeda”. Clicked to see and apparently two years ago some AQ magazine published directions for bombs made in pressure cookers. Also suggested bombing American sporting events.

    Wingnuts must be going Full Metal Muslin about now.

  82. 82.

    Chris

    @walt:

    but when it comes to body counts, the right wins hands down.

    I think that’s because right wing terrorism (most of the time) takes place with the tacit (at the very least) support of the authorities and elites and targets people in the underclass that no one in polite society will miss (think the Ku Klux Klan, the Central American death squads, the Colombian AUC). Whereas left wing terrorism tends to target those same authorities and elites, and thus invites a much more immediate and brutal retaliation.

    In other words, the right is allowed to fester on for far longer than the left, and thus gets to rack up a much bigger body count.

  83. 83.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Not altogether OT:

    Update
    Feinstein says Saudi national not a suspect in bombing.
    Josh Marshall

    That would be Senator Feinstien, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Repeating what Boston PD, ATF, and the FBI have been saying for the last ~18 hours. Kinda scary that so many people have had to repeat that so many times.

  84. 84.

    Jennifer

    Imma stick my neck out here and predict that when they find the guy or guys who did this, and they will, we will find out that they are citizens with a gripe about taxes, guns, or both.

    I pretty much knew back when Oklahoma City happened, while all the media were speculating about Middle Easterners, that it was some domestic nut. I have the same feeling this time.

  85. 85.

    Stella B.

    And of course everybody knows who the “mastermind was behind the Greenwich Village bomb making failure (the bomb makers only killed themselves) … Bill Ayres. We all know who his very close friend (okay, so they actually only met briefly a couple of times) is….

  87. 87.

    beltane

    @? Martin: We routinely find long nails, wire, fence parts, etc. when we’re cutting and splitting our firewood. Trees live for many decades on land that has been used for many purposes-you can count on finding the occasional metallic object embedded in their tissue.

  88. 88.

    Roger Moore

    @Redshift:
    “Both sides do it” still works even if it isn’t true. The point isn’t necessarily to make a valid argument, it’s to force the other side to defend itself and generally distract from your own guilt. Even if we eventually refute the counter-accusation, we’ve wasted time that could have been spent driving home the accusations against them.

  91. 91.

    Trollhattan

    @Jennifer:
    Basically my default position until proven otherwise. Statistically it’s the safe, if boring route.

    Since they’ve backed away from the notion of multiple other devices having been planted, it’s more plausible one guy is responsible (respekt mah sexism!) but I’ll stick with a small nest of wingers as the culprits.

    No arrests yet? I blame Obama!

  92. 92.

    Chris

    @Roger Moore:

    The point isn’t necessarily to make a valid argument, it’s to force the other side to defend itself and generally distract from your own guilt.

    The same rationale also largely explains why they went berserk this weekend over the abortion clinic in Philly.

    If the media starts to report that a “back alley abortion” clinic exactly like the one those hyperbolic liberals were warning about cropped up after Pennsylvania banned late term abortions and a Republican politician ended health inspections in abortion clinics in the name of saving money… whoo boy.

    Far better to get out in front of the story and make it all about liberal media bias.

  94. 94.

    Anna in PDX

    @Gin & Tonic: No, it was for the trees never to be cut down. Everyone knows this.

    The point of tree spiking is to notify the loggers so that they won’t try to cut them. And this was done in about 99.999% of cases where tree spiking was done at all.

    The only times tree spikes made it to mills is when the spiking was done by an individual who was not part of the actual groups who briefly employed this controversial technique.

    Earth First! made a consensus decision to come out against tree spiking decades ago after people were actually injured by tree spikes that they didn’t know about, because they did not want that to happen.

    But don’t let that keep you from spouting this ridiculous propaganda. The logging side rammed people with their trucks and car-bombed them, but it’s the tree spikers who were “terrorists.”

  95. 95.

    Suffern ACE

    @Redshift: Nah. They usually will equalize it out by adding muslim terror acts to the liberal side of the deck. Either because those liberals are sympathetic to the cause or don’t automatically want to round them up. Because nothing says “liberal” like anti-secularism.

  97. 97.

    pokeyblow

    Limbaugh spent much of his show talking about Ayers also.

    He knows there’s a good chance some teabagger dittohead killed those people in Boston, and he knows it’s an absolute certainty that reasonable people will suspect that to be the case in the early-going.

    So he talks AYERS AYERS AYERS trying to inoculate. Just like saying Democrats are the ones opposed to civil rights.

    Sad that they have to defend their present-day criminality and hatred by setting it off against “democratic-party” behavior from forty, fifty, sixty years ago.

  101. 101.

    ? Martin

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Kinda scary that so many people have had to repeat that so many times.

    The reason is because a GOP member of the comparable House committee started this shit by claiming that police had a suspect of Saudi nationality in custody.

    This wasn’t some assumption jumped to collectively by the public – it was a lie initiated by a Republican member of Congress.

  103. 103.

    geg6

    @Gravenstone:

    This.

    I have refrained from stating any opinion about this bombing simply because I don’t feel right doing so until we get some actual facts and an investigation that is more than a few hours old.

    But based on the freaking out among the wingeratti (see Charlie Pierce’s post comments here: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/boston-marathon-bombing-041513 and now Lane’s inane tweets, among many), I’m absolutely certain that they are shitting their pants in fear that it was one of their own who did this.

  104. 104.

    Anoniminous

    I held, and hold, the WeatherPeople with barely concealable loathing. But I do give them this:

    [The WeatherUnderground] were very careful from the moment of the townhouse on to be sure we weren’t going to hurt anybody, and we never did hurt anybody. Whenever we put a bomb in a public space, we had figured out all kinds of ways to put checks and balances on the thing and also to get people away from it, and we were remarkably successful. — Bill Ayers, 2003

  105. 105.

    gopher2b

    Apparently Rush was claiming “libs” would circle the wagons if it was a Saudi.

    Someone doth protest too much because wagons are a circling but it ain’t libs.

    I think everyone knows what’s coming here.

  110. 110.

    Anna in PDX

    @Anoniminous: We were discussing this at home yesterday, and my partner was mentioning how the IRA did that too. Before it set a bomb off it would notify the people to evacuate. The point of the bomb was not to kill but to scare. I guess even terrorism has a continuum of barbarism. Weird.

  111. 111.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @gopher2b: Apparently Rush was claiming “libs” would circle the wagons if it was a Saudi.

    Remember after 9/11 when Sean Penn smuggled bin Ladens out of the country in a rowboat?

  112. 112.

    Trollhattan

    @gopher2b:

    We used to haz wagons, then the Bush Recession hit and now we have these crummy handcarts, which don’t make much of a circle. Hrrmph.

  113. 113.

    beltane

    @gopher2b: Circling the wagons around what? As a rule, “libs” are not exactly enamored of religious fanatics not matter what their religion. Limbaugh sounds scared of something.

  114. 114.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @? Martin:

    it was a lie initiated by a Republican member of Congress.

    I’m shocked, shocked!, that a Republican member of Congress would initiate such a lie misstatement.

    Gives me the vapors, it does.

  116. 116.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Toots Dunham regularly went shooting with the King of Spain and Saudi Ambassador Bandar Obama, as he was jokingly known in Hyde Park.

  117. 117.

    Bokonon

    The right wingers should content themselves with reading Elmore Leonard’s book “Freaky Deaky.” There are characters based on Bill Ayres and the other Weathermen in there … and they end up blowing themselves up.

  118. 118.

    SatanicPanic

    @gopher2b: Add me to the list of people who are puzzed. Why? I don’t have any affinity for Saudi Arabia. Of course if the bomber turned out to be North Korean that would be a different story.

  119. 119.

    Morzer

    @Cacti:

    Well, come on. EVERYONE knows that white Christian males are the real victims of slavery and capitalism!

  121. 121.

    Steeplejack

    @Mr Stagger Lee:

    Can you be more specific? The generic link to that site doesn’t bring up anything obvious about a domain name. Possibly it has scrolled down, but I can’t find it.

  123. 123.

    fuckwit

    @jibeaux: Most busts are due to lucky breaks, or the perpetrator slipping up, just once, or in a subtle way, but just enough to get on someone’s radar. From the cops perspective, hard work and attention to detail are force multipliers for those “lucky” breaks.

    They always exist thoug. My old man used to say, “Criminals are stupid by definition. That’s what makes them criminals. If they were smart, they’d know how to get rich staying inside the law, and become businessmen.”

    Remember they caught the Unabomber because the style of prose in his manifesto seemed familiar to his brother, who called it in.

    They caught the whole LulzSec hacker group because just once, one of their guys logged into IRC without using Tor.

    You can be vigilant, but you can’t be vigilant all the time, forever. All it takes is one mistake. And often the perps make many more than one.

    We are living in a 24/7 surveillance state, and here’s a case where that might not be such a bad thing. There are cellphone logs out the wazoo for that event, and all the carriers have them. There were cameras everywhere. There were unexploded bombs found and almost certainly those are being studied in great detail. The perpetrators almost certainly have a digital footprint, especially if they were politically-motivated. There were people around everywhere who saw lots of stuff– the likelihood is high that someone saw something that could turn into a lead.

    And the science of forensics keeps getting better. Look, if one of the fucker’s hairs or eyelashes fell out while he was building one of the unexploded bombs, now they have his DNA. Maybe he had dandruff. Rubber gloves are not going to hide that.

    And then, especially if it was a political terrorism act, the perps might brag, or might have already. Or made some stupid mistake. Someone’s brother or sister or wife or neighbor or landlord might smell something is not right, and hopefully they’ll call that in.

    I’m confident that the FBI will turn someone up eventually.

    “You don’t have to run and confess, we gon find you, we gon find you. So you can run and tell that, run and tell that.”

  125. 125.

    max

    @jamick6000:

    Terrorism is terrorism, whether it comes from left or right, Christians, Jews or Muslims, for or against “social change.”

    Lane has apparently accidentally stumbled onto a good point. Killing large numbers of innocent people for whatever cause is terrorism. Sandy Hook (and Columbine! And etc.!) was terrorism too, although the motivations probably didn’t make much sense as politics.

    And pipe and/or nail bombs have always been very popular with the Reich-wing. The KKK has always liked them, and certainly for a long time (in the nineties at least) there were a lot of gunners who were also into making explosives (because things going boom was neat). Enough to make videos and stuff.

    Wall Street would be a lefty target, perhaps. Exxon/Mobil. Somebody like that, not marathoners.

    Since there was no martyr action involved, and AQ likes big bombs and property damage (they have an actual strategy involving damaging the US economy), they’re pretty much out. Could be an oddball Muslim, but this just isn’t that great a target for them; what’s the political point?

    Now your KKK/Reich-wing bombers – they like killing people more than property damage. And they really like getting away with it too, unlike AQ types. (AQ *wants* the publicity.)

    So, no suspect, sadistic style of attack, on tax day, and no demands. In Taxachutsetts, even.

    The pressure cooker angle doesn’t make a lot of sense – initially. They seem to be popular to use in AfPak and India and Nepal. (Which suggests the spread of a technique, rather than a stylistic signature.) It also explains the injuries – a pressure cooker loaded with explosives and shrapnel laid on it’s side would act like a shotgun shell. On the ground, the explosion cone would be focused between the ground and about knee-height. And you could rewire to use the electronic timer of the pressure cooker to set off the bomb.

    Taken together, that suggests an AfPak veteran perhaps (or someone who knows one), which suggests white, male, 25-45, probably lives in New Hampshire or Maine. A big healthy looking white guy in a track suit (or something similar – maybe a marine or army T-shirt?) and carrying a couple of duffle bags wouldn’t be suspicious, not at the marathon. And when he went home, he’d be out of jurisdiction.

    max
    [‘Hey, Lane wants to play.’]

  126. 126.

    ? Martin

    @SatanicPanic:

    Add me to the list of people who are puzzed. Why? I don’t have any affinity for Saudi Arabia.

    Because Obama bowed to the Saudi King as all uppity mooooslim Marxist usurpers do.

    And shut up! that’s why.

  127. 127.

    Trollhattan

    @Southern Beale:

    “in the clear” or “insufficiently waterboarded?” Big difference, right there, between an administration that Cares About America and one that jess don’t.

  128. 128.

    Southern Beale

    @gopher2b:

    Apparently Rush was claiming “libs” would circle the wagons if it was a Saudi.

    Riiight because of that picture where Obama is holding hands with Prince Bandar and kissing him on the lips OH WAIT NEVER MIND and then of course the Saudis own a huge chunk of the libs’ favorite cable news station, Fox News.

    What a fucking idiot.

  130. 130.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @fuckwit:

    And then, especially if it was a political terrorism act, the perps might brag, or might have already. Or made some stupid mistake

    But you’re repeating yourself.

    The thing is, this sort of act, to have the political impact that those committing it may want to happen, must be acknowledged by those responsible. Otherwise, the message they’re desperately trying to send won’t be heard.

    This could of course well be a diversion from settling a personal beef someone had with someone in the crowd, and everyone else is collateral damage.

    We don’t know yet. There are a plethora of motivations, and picking through them and focusing on what is real and what is imaginary will take more time than one 24 hour news cycle to resolve. I know this disappoints, but this is the real world, not Hollyweird entertainment where all the loose ends are tied up prior to the last commercial break, unless of course it’s a multiparter.

  131. 131.

    ? Martin

    @max:

    Could be an oddball Muslim, but this just isn’t that great a target for them; what’s the political point?

    High profile international target. Same political point as the Centennial bombing or the Times Square attempt. I wouldn’t rule out the lone wolf jihadist so quickly on this one. AQ might have a plan, but they barely exist as an organization. They’re nothing but lone wolfs now.

  132. 132.

    Anoniminous

    @raven:

    The Sterling Hall bombing was committed by a bunch of local fuck-ups. They intended to bomb the Army Math Research Center and instead blew-up a Physics Lab with no connection to the AMRC and didn’t damage the AMRC at all. They intended to give a warning so the building would be evacuated and the bomb blew before that could happen.

  133. 133.

    Svensker

    @fuckwit:

    And the science of forensics keeps getting better. Look, if one of the fucker’s hairs or eyelashes fell out while he was building one of the unexploded bombs, now they have his DNA. Maybe he had dandruff. Rubber gloves are not going to hide that.

    No unexploded bombs have been found. The reports of those were based on hundreds of backpacks and suspicious looking stuff people left along the marathon route as they fled.

  134. 134.

    Suffern ACE

    @beltane: Again, as I stated above, the right blames the liberals for all acts of islamic terrorism because, well, we’re so soft on terror and hate western civilization so much that we love Islamic fundamentalists.

    That said, there will be post-colonialist critics who will be more than willing to go on camera and blame the west for anything they can, but I don’t tend to want to carry their water for them, much less circle the wagon.

  137. 137.

    Trollhattan

    @fuckwit:

    Yup. It was an Oklahoma State Trooper on a routine traffic stop who caught McVeigh. Have always wondered how far he’d have gotten without that lucky break.

  138. 138.

    gopher2b

    @? Martin:

    Obviously if it was a Saudi then we have to invade Iran.

    Obviously.

    Because the next time it might be a mushroom cloud.

  139. 139.

    pokeyblow

    It would be ridiculous to suspect the Saudi national just because he ran away from an explosion.

    But Fox sources say he also whistled at a white woman moments before the blast.

  140. 140.

    Ben Franklin

    @Suffern ACE:

    the right blames the liberals for all acts of islamic terrorism because, well, we’re so soft on terror and hate western civilization so much that we love Islamic fundamentalists.

    They always revere the past. Just look at us now !

  141. 141.

    Chris

    @SatanicPanic:

    When they said “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” they were being very literal.

    Conservatives live in a binary universe where everything is all about them. If you don’t agree with them on school reform, then you must automatically be on the “other” side and in agreement with all the people on the other side and also actively trying to join in their crusade to harm you.

  142. 142.

    gene108

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    Yes, like “libs” see Saudi Arabia as the socialist paradise they all long for.

    Honestly, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, et. al. are more of a right-wingers dream, because those places don’t have income taxes.

    They fund damn near all of their government by oil revenue.

    You don’t want to pay taxes, those are the places to go.

  143. 143.

    Forum Transmitted Disease

    Not strange at all. I work with wingers. There wasn’t a one of them that would look me in the eye yesterday. They all knew what stripe of asshole did this as well as I do, and it’s not “Somali Al-Shabab pirates”.

  145. 145.

    GregB

    We can rest assured that if the perpetrators are Muslim terrorists or American leftists that will be a sure sign as to how morally bankrupt, and violent both Islam and the left wing American ideological agenda have become.

    If it is an American rightwinger, it is simply a mentally ill loner who’s ideas had no breeding ground in the fever swamps of the American conservative movement and media.

  146. 146.

    beltane

    @Suffern ACE: This is a little funny because the only people I have ever heard saying kind words about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are conservatives who admire its criminal justice system. That bit about chopping the hands off of petty criminals absolutely fills them with admiration bordering on envy.

  148. 148.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @gene108:

    Women are kept in their place, too. As are all the foreign “guest workers”.

    Plus, a religion RULES the entire country. Morality is enforced by religious police. Unauthorized sexytime is practically a capital offense.

    It’s fundigelical paradise, in reality. The only issue is niggling theological details.

  149. 149.

    drunken hausfrau

    They scan my ID when I buy Drano … will we have to register our pressure cookers?

    But don’t you dare require background checks!

  150. 150.

    pseudonymous in nc

    @Anna in PDX:

    my partner was mentioning how the IRA did that too. Before it set a bomb off it would notify the people to evacuate.

    That’s whitewashing their history: most of the time, when warnings were given, they were sufficiently vague or didn’t give enough time to evacuate; some of the time, the bombs actually went off along the evacuation route.

    Nail bombs were one of their 1980s specialities.

  152. 152.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @GregB:

    Naturally. You can count on your second paragraph as the storyline if it turns out it is a wingtard nutcase.

  154. 154.

    AHH onna Droid

    @Anoniminous: Until they needed money and started killing cops with assault weapons in botched armed robberies. Because cops arent anybody?

    Yeah, real radical, the 70s left. The black conspirators quickly landed in prison while the whites proudly took their place as political prisoners in Amerikkka. No, that didn’t happen, they bravely ran away, used family connections to evade prosecution or capture, and continue to maintain their innocence in the crimes they planned and carried out and let others take the hit for.

    Fuck them, I’m sticking with non violent movement. They don’t cut’n’run.

  157. 157.

    fuckwit

    @max: Hmm. So it seems (via GOS): http://nfttu.blogspot.com/2006/03/pressure-cooker-bombs.html

    So it’s an MO that is an import from India, not from Outer Bumfuck.

    And then again, everyone has access to the internet, anywhere in the world (even in Outer Bumfuck), and could have learned the technique there.

    So, I guess, it’s back to “who the fuck knows”. It still feels like the Spokane and Atlanta MO, target, and date, to me, not Islamists, but until the cops find enough evidence to arrest and convict, there’s no way to know.

  159. 159.

    gopher2b

    @Ben Franklin:

    Except they’ve been posting about how terrorists like to use pressure cooker bombs over at freerepublic for about six years. Soo……..if you wanted to learn how to make a bomb……

    You can go either way with that one.

  160. 160.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Ben Franklin: It says pressure cookers aren’t common in the US so seeing a pressure cooker in a public place should be considered suspicious. It says nothing about whether use of a pressure cooker is common among domestic bombers.

  161. 161.

    Herbal Infusion Bagger

    @Anna in PDX:

    @Anoniminous: We were discussing this at home yesterday, and my partner was mentioning how the IRA did that too. Before it set a bomb off it would notify the people to evacuate.

    Depended on the target: if the IRA target was a police station or army barracks, or a civilian target used by police or army, there wasn’t a warning, nor were there warnings if it was a car-bomb directed at a particular individual. They also tended not to give warnings when bombing mainland Britain.

    Many bombings against civilian businesses were extortion-related anyway. Rumor was the IRA would even bomb a business on contract from the owner as an insurance fraud.

  162. 162.

    AndoChronic

    Isn’t it correct that Weather Underground focused solely on causing only property damage and not creating a mass casualty event?

  163. 163.

    Chris

    @beltane:
    @Villago Delenda Est:

    If you ever come across one, I highly recommend reading Reagan era “intelligence” briefings about the Middle East and Islam. In a nutshell: “there are two kinds of Muslims, Sunnis and Shi’a, and the Shi’a are the crazy ones prone to extremism and revolutionary behavior, while the Sunnis tend to be moderate and pro-Western.” The briefs look like they were literally written in Riyadh.

    Really funny and yet depressing when you’re reading those things in the age of al-Qaeda. And thinking “yep, this is the quality of the foreign policy briefs our upper levels of government get.”

  164. 164.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @fuckwit:

    So it’s an MO that is an import from India, not from Outer Bumfuck.

    That’s it! Hindu fundamentalists who are pissed that we’ve been feeding their god a peanut!

  165. 165.

    JPL

    Not sure if this has been posted

    Our thoughts are with the Boston community. Tonight there will be a special moment of silence & Fenway favorite Sweet Caroline @ end of 3rd Yankees

    Classy
    I still don’t like them and tomorrow I’ll go back to honor Steve Gilliard favorite words

  166. 166.

    Herbal Infusion Bagger

    It says pressure cookers aren’t common in the US so seeing a pressure cooker in a public place should be considered suspicious.

    Fuck. I used a pressure cooker last night. I just needed to cook beans and barley for a soup quickly, I swear!

  170. 170.

    Chris

    @Herbal Infusion Bagger:

    Many bombings against civilian businesses were extortion-related anyway. Rumor was the IRA would even bomb a business on contract from the owner as an insurance fraud.

    Interesting; haven’t read enough about the IRA, but it’s my understanding that in addition to being an insurgency it basically controlled organized crime in the areas it operated in. Not the first time the two phenomena have merged together…

  171. 171.

    Suffern ACE

    @Chris: That wasn’t written in Ridyah. That was written by my high school social studies teacher. Those crazy Iranians! We’ll get dose guyz someday. And then they’ll be Sunni, shave their beards, and like us.

  173. 173.

    Herbal Infusion Bagger

    So it’s an MO that is an import from India, not from Outer Bumfuck.

    Import from AfPak, used in India.

  177. 177.

    Trollhattan

    @raven:

    Per the Globe some unions have announced a $50k reward. Only one I’ve read about, so far. They also say a circuit board has been found.

  179. 179.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Ben Franklin: Right. It permits one to infer that they are uncommon here, but it does not say it. I would hesitate to make any guesses as to who is responsible based on the use of pressure cookers.

  181. 181.

    AndoChronic

    @raven

    Thanks. Are 40 some-odd-year old references, which the right like to use, even relevant? It’s kind of like them saying “we like black people, we freed the slaves after all”.

  182. 182.

    scav

    Well, damn. There goes my cunning plan of using my pressure cooker as a carry-on to protect my bone china.

  184. 184.

    Forum Transmitted Disease

    Until they needed money and started killing cops with assault weapons in botched armed robberies. Because cops arent anybody?

    Yeah, real radical, the 70s left. The black conspirators quickly landed in prison while the whites proudly took their place as political prisoners in Amerikkka. No, that didn’t happen, they bravely ran away, used family connections to evade prosecution or capture, and continue to maintain their innocence in the crimes they planned and carried out and let others take the hit for.

    Fuck them, I’m sticking with non violent movement. They don’t cut’n’run.

    @AHH onna Droid: I’ll sign on. The time of the “violent left” in this country was very short, marked by extremes of comical incompetence, class privilege and staggering dickishness, and a whole lot of rich parents bailing their shitty offspring out of jail.

    It’s also worth mentioning that all this happened more than 40 years ago. The people blowing up buildings, people and children aren’t liberals and haven’t been for a really long time. An inconvenient truth for the right, who sooner or later will see one of their own bought to justice for this crime.

  185. 185.

    Trollhattan

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    The Times Square attempt is the only use in the States I’ve read an account of. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a lot of “monkey see, monkey do” among the terror set, regardless of political stripe.

    Kaczynski was pretty unique in his vast efforts to conceal himself and his devices, which were largely fashioned from found items. Worked, too.

  188. 188.

    beltane

    @Omnes Omnibus: My mother had a pressure cooker which we always used as a regular pot because she was afraid to use it as a pressure cooker. I grew up being vaguely terrified of the thing.

  189. 189.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Redshirt: Before Senate enacts a pressure cooker registry.

    P.S. A pressure cooker is like a low rent microwave, cooks stuff fast but destroys all the flavor. It is good for things like beans that take hours to cook but not much more. Just my opinion. YMMV.

  190. 190.

    Trollhattan

    @beltane:

    Common Danish terrorists only, who rarely strike outside their home country. Mmmm, waffles. Far more dangerous are the Æbleskiver gangs. [shudder]

  191. 191.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @AndoChronic:

    It’s kind of like them saying “we like black people, we freed the slaves after all”.

    Rand Paul used that one at Howard last week.

    Went over like a lead balloon.

  192. 192.

    Redshirt

    @Trollhattan: I’m not intending to glorify the Unabomber, but I read quite a bit about him back in the day, and his bombs were like works of art. Intricately hand crafted, and devious.

    I also think the only reason he got caught was he wanted to get caught.

  194. 194.

    Trollhattan

    @beltane:

    I’ll go out on a limb and guess McMegan has one, alongside a sous vide system. Still reading the manuals on both.

  200. 200.

    Herbal Infusion Bagger

    Interesting; haven’t read enough about the IRA, but it’s my understanding that in addition to being an insurgency it basically controlled organized crime in the areas it operated in.

    There was a linkage between the IRA, the INLA and organized crime, but it’s a complex one. Many areas in Northern Ireland effectively became no-go areas for the police: they wouldn’t go into without a military escort, and maybe not even then. So the population in those areas looked to the IRA to control crime, strange as it sounds. So hence you got knee-capping and punishment beatings of petty thieves, drug-dealers, and joyriders. There was virtually no heroin outbreak in Belfast in the 1980s when it was rampant in Dublin. Tolerance of pot depended on the local IRA: I heard that the one in my area was led by a pothead and that if the dealer gave a cut to said IRA pothead, they were tolerated as long as they didn’t go over a certain volume.

    Some splinter groups of the INLA tended to get into organized crime and drug dealing (as INLA got IRA’s rejects, they tended to have worse discipline), and got ‘shut down’ (often terminally) for that reason.

    The IRA also did contract threats. The brother of an acquaintance was told by the IRA to leave the country because he was dating a girl who’s father did not approve of the relationship. So the father went to the IRA and contracted to kill said acquaintance’s brother. The IRA allowed the brother to just leave the country because…said brother had *been* an active member of the IRA. Which is either a really bad or really good retirement benefit, I guess.

    The loyalist groups were more heavily involved in organized crime, as I recall.

  201. 201.

    Trollhattan

    @Redshirt:

    Agreed, he’s the closest thing to a Hollywood “mad genius” I can think of in my lifetime–he’s clearly both. I suspect he got bored toying with the authorities and was embarked on a series of increasingly risky acts until he’d eventually be caught. He murdered someone local, so was never completely off the hometown media’s radar.

    Had he kept his head down, I doubt he’d have even been apprehended.

  202. 202.

    BobS

    @fuckwit: I’ll be very surprised if it isn’t some domestic right-wing psychopath. They were the first and only ones I suspected when I considered the place & timing of the bombing- I figured they were re-claiming Patriot’s Day from those pretenders in Massachusetts. Never forget this is like Aryan/Tea Party Holy Week, considering the Waco debacle, the OKC bombing, their annual tax day grievances, and for the truly hard-core, Hitler’s birthday. They seem to be upping the ante on violence recently too, declaring hunting season on prosecutors and prison officials.
    It was icing on their cake that it occurred at the 26 mile mark, where there was a memorial for Newton victims- they get to strike a blow for gun rights, too.
    Too much right-wing symbolism for it to be anyone else.

  206. 206.

    Anoniminous

    @AHH onna Droid:

    What are you talking about? The 1981 Brink’s robbery and etc.? By that time the WO had shattered into at least two factions: The Prairie Fire Commune and the May 19th Communist Organization, with the former already starting to surface and the latter doubling down on the violence.

    I hold no brief for the WO but during their main bombing campaign they did do what the quote said. They called off a bombing that would have resulted in many deaths at a dance at an Army base because it would have resulted in many deaths.

  207. 207.

    gene108

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    P.S. A pressure cooker is like a low rent microwave, cooks stuff fast but destroys all the flavor. It is good for things like beans that take hours to cook but not much more. Just my opinion. YMMV.

    Good for cooking rice and to soften potatoes.

    As Indians eat a lot of rice and lentils, it gets used a lot in India and other parts of the subcontinent.

  208. 208.

    Herbal Infusion Bagger

    Imported from Pakistan to be precise.

    Article quoted said it was imported from the Baluchistan border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan. There’s Pashtuns both sides of that border.

  210. 210.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    P.S. A pressure cooker is like a low rent microwave, cooks stuff fast but destroys all the flavor.

    Jumbo versions are also essential for canning non-acidic foods, at least if you want to avoid death from botulism.

  211. 211.

    schrodinger's cat

    @gene108: I am not a fan of rice cooked in a pressure cooker, it turns to mush. I like the grains to be separate.

  213. 213.

    liberal

    @Ben Franklin:
    I know I shouldn’t laugh at these things, but the one that says “Be ready to be blown off the f***in map chinks” really made me laugh.

  214. 214.

    Herbal Infusion Bagger

    “My mother is terrified of them. She has offered me hers, but I don’t have any real need for it.”

    Modern ones are much better designed to prevent overpressure and failing.

    “A pressure cooker is like a low rent microwave, cooks stuff fast but destroys all the flavor. It is good for things like beans that take hours to cook but not much more. Just my opinion.”

    I have to leap to the defense of the pressure cooker. It is FREAKING AWESOME for stews or soups, or making stock. You’re likely cooking too long. Not only are you cooking under pressure (forces water in the food), you’re also cooking at a higher temperature and the kinetics of the cooking reactions go much, much quicker. So you can take stewing meat that would take six hours in a crockpot to cook until tender and do it in 40 minutes.

  216. 216.

    Trollhattan

    @Redshirt:

    Example the infinity of our dire need for adequate, effective mental health treatment. Not only was he a loss to society, he caused great grief and damage–a slow-motion Adam Lanza, if you will. And it’s not as though his family didn’t try, desperately to help.

  217. 217.

    Svensker

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    I am scared of my pressure cooker too, husband operates it. Any way it is getting old and am thinking of replacing it with one that doesn’t hiss.

    Pressure cookers are all the rage in the chefly cooking scene. I’ve heard that the new ones are not nearly as dangerous as the old ones. I had one in the 70s and it scared me so much the one time I used it that it got tossed.

  218. 218.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    @Trollhattan:

    I’ll go out on a limb and guess McMegan has one, alongside a sous vide system. Still reading the manuals on both.

    Yes, but her’s isn’t called a pressure cooker. It’s a Volgskad HeatPress 4000XPC. It’s Danish, it’s expensive, but, most importantly, it’s color is Egyptian Sand.

  219. 219.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Herbal Infusion Bagger: Yeah well, I have a stove, an oven, a microwave, a crock pot, a George Foreman grill, a quesadilla maker, and a complex rice/seafood/whatever steamer. I think I’m good.

  220. 220.

    Chris

    @Forum Transmitted Disease:

    I mean, that’s the Weather Underground. I think you’ve got a slightly more serious “violent left” forty years before that, on the one hand with the Anarchist bombings (which were swiftly shut down and gave J. Edgar Hoover his big start) and the union violence (though that was usually in reaction to horrific working conditions and the bosses’ hired thugs using the workers for target practice). The Battle of Blair Mountain was part of the latter, and as the article notes one of the largest armed rebellions in the history of the United States. Left wing violence wasn’t always about pretentious rich kids setting off a bomb or two and getting bailed out by their parents.

  222. 222.

    Anoniminous

    @Anna in PDX:

    The WeatherPeople were gonzo crazy, read Prairie Fire: the politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism : the political statement of the Weather Underground if you really want to visit LaLaLand. But the leaders and most, but not all, of the members weren’t totally gonzo crazy.

    And they never killed anyone who wasn’t a member of the WO.

    As I said, I can’t (and couldn’t) stand the idiots but I’ll give them credit for that.

  224. 224.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    @Trollhattan:

    I’m dedicating my book to her. The working title is “Pretentious Colors for the Douchebag”.

  225. 225.

    Chris

    @Herbal Infusion Bagger:

    Thanks for the information.

    As for your last point about the loyalists and organized crime – I think it’s a common occurrence in many places for the “establishment” to enlist the help of organized crime as street muscle when faced with a large and hostile insurrection (a lot of the Colombian paramilitaries, for example, were alumni of the Medellin and Cali drug cartels). Any idea if that’s what happened with the Irish Loyalists? That might explain why they were more involved in the business than the IRA.

  227. 227.

    Mnemosyne

    @Ben Franklin:

    Neither are truck bombs, which is one of the reasons McVeigh used one — he was trying to mislead authorities about who was responsible. Fortunately, he only managed to mislead fucking idiots like Laurie Mylroie.

  229. 229.

    dr. luba

    @drew42: And those under 40 don’t get the joke. The helpful weather site was started and is run by a meteorologist from the University of Michigan (birthplace of the SDS).

  232. 232.

    RaflW

    Remember when the hippies did it!

    Some guest on Talk of the Nation earlier today, wile talking about the possibilities of domestic terrorism, I think notice himself talking “too long” about right-wing hate groups and their role in whipping up lone wolf possibilites. So he quickly added, twice, that it could be a left-wing domestic thing.

    Because there’s so much left-wing hate speech on the radio, tv and internets??

    It was rank false-symmetry. I was, as usual, slightly aghast at the slack-jawed acceptance of bullshit by todays TOTN host.

  234. 234.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodinger’s cat:
    Yep. The bacterium responsible for botulism (Clostridium botulinum) is amazingly hardy. They can (and actually must) grow in the absence of oxygen, and they form spores that aren’t killed by boiling. So if you can something and only heat it to boiling, the spores will survive and germinate after it’s cooled. Since they produce the deadliest organic toxin known, this is a bad thing. The spores won’t germinate in moderately acidic environments, but they will in neutral to slightly acidic ones*. The only way to kill them reliably is to heat the food well above boiling, which requires a pressure canner.

    *Spores are also inhibited by very salty or very sugary environments, so things like jams don’t need to be pressure cooked. IIRC, they’re also inhibited by nitrites, which is why nitrites are used in fermentation cured meats like ham and salami.

  236. 236.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Roger Moore: See that’s the only variety of canning I have done, jams and jellies.

    ETA: Actually I have never made enough to can, I just make may be jams or chutney of about a pound of fruit at most.

  238. 238.

    schrodinger's cat

    @raven: I cook it on the stove top. If you wash the rice a couple of times, it takes just a little over half an hour.

  239. 239.

    Roger Moore

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    It doesn’t have to be super acidic. IIRC, most tomatoes are acidic enough that they don’t have to be pressure canned, though they’re close enough to the dividing line that I remember my mom adding some extra vitamin C to the tomatoes to ensure they were acidic enough. And naturally fermented sauerkraut and pickles don’t actually need to be canned to be preserved; they’ll keep for quite a while just from the salt, acid, and other fermentation byproducts.

  240. 240.

    Chris

    @Ben Franklin:

    As soon as I started reading that article I went “huh, that looks like something Conan Doyle would’ve based “The Valley Of Fear” (Holmes story) on.”

    And at the end of the article… yep, sure enough.

  241. 241.

    Suffern ACE

    @RaflW: The most recent LEFT wing “TERROR” plot I can think of was those marginally OWS kids who the FBI convinced to try to blow up bridges in Cleveland. And the lone wolf of the Discovery Channel hostage taker who was equal parts environmentalist and anti-immigrant fanatic.

  242. 242.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    If you wash the rice a couple of times, it takes just a little over half an hour.

    And if you have a fancy rice cooker, you can set it up to start cooking the rice unattended, so the cooking time is only a problem if you can’t plan ahead.

  243. 243.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Roger Moore: You can leave it unattended even on the stove top, after you have tightly shut the lid, letting the water and steam do its work.

  247. 247.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodinger’s cat:
    The knowledge of foodborne pathogens comes mostly from learning to cook sous vide, where cooking temperatures are often barely high enough to be safe. That and from having coworkers who are studying botulinum neurotoxin.

  252. 252.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Joel: I never said it is not useful. Just that I don’t use it much other than to cook hard to cook lentils and beans.

  254. 254.

    Jay in Oregon

    @Davis X. Machina:

    Small world dept. Wingnut ex-Rep. Mean Jean Schmidt (R-OH) finished the Boston Marathon just before yesterday’s bombing. She always has had perfect timing.

    What did she know, and when did she know it?

    It would be irresponsible not to speculate.

  255. 255.

    shortstop

    @Jay in Oregon: I’m quite impressed that she could finish a marathon, much less with that time. I figured she was powered by pure wingnut insanity that pooped out after a couple of miles.

  257. 257.

    magurakurin

    @gene108:

    Good for cooking rice and to soften potatoes

    Why would you cook rice in a pressure cooker? Seriously, why?

    The technology to cook rice is cheap and long perfected.

    Drop the 30 bucks for a cheap one or you could go all out and get one of the 500 dollar jobs they have here in Japan.

Comments are closed.