34 Comments

There's a mad libs script they use. Insert latest bad thing, call it an Obama conspiracy. Rinse and repeat. You'd think the black-helicopters-and-tinfoil-hats crowd would get tired of it after a while, but every new plot gets them lathered up yet again.

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Is Frito-Lay a corporate sponsor?

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It was enough to make me not replace my TV when it broke. Literally: the black plastic shell (mandatory in the 1980s) finally disintegrated after decades of ozone exposure.

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Everything that Republitards dislike: meet hammer.

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The guntards of the NRA figure that a few million dead are a small price to pay. Probably because the vast majority of the victims are <i>not</i> gun owners.

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In a world where people actually spend a fraction of their finite lifetimes watching shit like Jersey Shore and the KardAssians, the networks obviously don't give a damn about whether or not they're broadcasting garbage. If they can grab audience share and sell ad time, they count it as a good week.

"CNN reports..." is essentialy the equivalent of "I read on the internet..." This is why I pay actual money to the NY Times.

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Waiting for the happy day when the Post gets sued for millions, for fucking up the life a private, non-public figure.

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Firesign Theater reference for the winning...

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Cool story! Thanks.

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If anything it's given Putin an internationally "justifiable" reason to scrutinize Chechnya. Yeah, they didn't need this.

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I had never heard of her until a reasonably sane couple in their 70's, who had just got back from a couple of months in Florida, talked my ear off about the case, because all they had done, it seemed, for their 2 months in Florida was watch the case. I was better off not knowing anything.

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Well, better Boston than westeros.

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I may be an optimist here, but I think the response depended on the circumstances. The initial heated manhunt was motivated by the need to determine the nature of the attack (i.e., was it just a one-off, or was it coordinated with some organization). The "lockdown", as I recall, went into place in the wee hours of Friday morning, following the shootout. At that point, the cops had no way of knowing that the kid was wounded, nor exactly what he had left of explosives. I assume the initial intent was to deny him the opportunity to do another carjacking.

It would have been reasonable to lift the lockdown except locally once he was known to be on foot, but I imagine the authorities were thinking about how much shit they would get if he somehow weaseled out of the area and blew up himself and a bunch of schoolkids. So, yeah, a fair amount of CYA about the daytime part. We're pretty damn lucky that our civic officials don't have much experience at this.

A couple of other points.

(1) It's difficult, and maybe pointless, to try to compare the magnitudes of terror attacks. These fuckers did "only" kill four people, but they seriously injured many more.

(2) In the cases of, say, Newtown and Aurora, there was no manhunt, because there was nobody to hunt.

(3) If we find ourselves, God forbid, living in the world of weekly carbombs, I'm sure we'll develop the same business-almost-as-usual attitude as have those who have preceded us. But I'm hoping that it never comes to that. I'm personally willing to put up with a bit of overreaction, in hopes that it may delay the day.

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Hmm. I didn't really intend to plagiarize you. I just type slow and I didn't check for more recent comments before hitting submit.

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Most of the lost commerce in greater Boston isn't lost, just delayed. Just like a blizzard that shuts things down for a day or two.

The LEO overtime, now that's real.

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Isn't that sort of like filing a defamation suit against a grackle? Lot's of nonsense screeching done by a bird who just wants attention and makes no sense.

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