Shit been gettin' real this week

So... these things happened just while we were sleeping.

With a bomb strapped to his chest, one of the Boston Marathon suspects was killed early Friday after he and his accomplice robbed a 7-Eleven, shot a police officer to death, carjacked an SUV and hurled explosives out the window in an extraordinary firefight with law enforcement, authorities told NBC News.

The second suspect — the one in the white hat in photos released by the FBI — was on the loose, and police ordered people in the Boston suburbs to stay inside and businesses not to open. Boston shut down its buses and subway system for the hunt.

The suspects are Chechen brothers with the last name Tsarnaev, law enforcement officials told NBC News. The suspect at large, Dzhokar Tsarnaev, is 19 and has a Massachusetts driver’s license, they said. Law enforcement officials told NBC News that both men are legal permanent residents of the United States, had been here about a year and had military experience.

Oh yeah, Texas also blew up the day before yesterday. (I'll come back to that.)

When an Elvis impersonator in Mississippi gets arrested for sending letters with ricin to his senator and President Obama, and that barely makes the news crawl... you know some serious shit has gone down during the week. Oh, and Pete Williams is winning the Internet has been crowned the new King of All Media.

First things first.

-- So are Chechens Muslim? Why yes, very likely so. Are people of Chechnya "dark-skinned"? That probably depends on several biases, including those of a white, conservative news editor at the New York Post. Since the country is in the region of the Caucasus mountains, I think it's safe to say that Chechens are Caucasian.

This is going to seriously confuse a lot of people, Glenn Beck among them. And chaos, as we all know, leads to fear.

-- West, Texas. Kolaches and fertilizer bombs plants. When Rick Perry brags about the booming state economy, this isn't exactly what he means. It is, however, what he gets. More importantly, it's what we get.

West Fertilizer Co.'s plans for a "worst case scenario" didn't predict the catastrophic explosion that destroyed the plant and neighboring homes Wednesday and killed at least five people.

Oops.

"The company said the plant had no alarms, automatic shutoff system or firewall."

That's two. Can you think of a third one?

(T)he Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) reports that it has pursued seven investigations of the fertilizer plant since 2002, both routine and in response to complaints. The last recorded investigation occurred in 2007, 10 months after the agency dealt with an odor complaint.

The Texas Tribune notes that this probably means the facility hadn't been inspected in the past five years. This would be consistent with a steep decline in the TCEQ's investigations in the past few years. The agency's last annual enforcement report showed that the number of complaints investigated has plummeted by 20 percent since 2007, though it is unclear it has been receiving fewer complaints. Its total number of investigations has fallen by more than 7 percent since 2007. Since 2008, the agency's operating budget has been slashed by nearly 40 percent. The TCEQ has not responded to a request for comment on its investigations and whether it was familiar with the West plant's 2011 risk report.

Turning to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for information on the plant's safety record turns up little. The plant's last OSHA inspection was in 1985—not surprising considering that it would take the short-staffed agency 98 years for the agency to inspect each of the state's workplaces. (It would take 130 years for OSHA to inspect every workplace in the United States.)

Strike three. Oh well, the governor can just ask Uncle Sam for a bailout.

At a press conference, the governor thanked President Barack Obama for calling for offer quick action after Wednesday night’s explosion.

“Last night was truly a nightmare scenario for that community,” Perry said. “President Obama called from Air Force One as he was en route to Boston… We greatly appreciate his call, and his gracious offer of support, of course, and the quick turnaround of the emergency declaration that will be forthcoming, and his offer of prayers.”

"Thanks in advance, buddy, for a quick turnaround on that federal aid that I ain't made a formal request fer yet. And nemmind that crap I talked aboutcher birth certificate and suckseedin' and all."

West's Congresscritter, Rep. Bill Flores -- who voted against federal aid for the victims of Sandy -- pledged to line up at the trough with his hat in hand. He's never been to the fertilizer plant but he's driven past it "scores of times"; he's not going down there now because he'd just get in the way, he IS leading prayers and updating his Facebook and Twitter frequently with updates on how the residents can seek the help they need.

Now for a conservative Republican, that's true leadership. Meanwhile, local blogman Charles Kuffner got out ahead of the congressman. That doesn't surprise me one bit.

I don't think I have time to keep up with the rest of what's going on, but I am going to keep my eyes peeled for a Friday document dump trying to get lost in the noise. And if I were you, I wouldn't watch my teevee or even read my Twitter feed. Trust me: you'll get scared, and not just because some of what it's telling you is accurate.

Question Everything

Because the accuracy of what you're seeing, hearing, and reading is just ghastly.

The New York Post was derided Tuesday for apparent inaccuracies in its reporting on the bombing at the Boston Marathon. And now, its rival tabloid, the Daily News, is facing criticism over an apparent photo touch-up.

On yesterday's cover wrap, the News ran a photo taken by John Tlumacki of The Boston Globe showing an injured woman lying in a pool of blood while being tended to by a civilian.
 
It was one of many widely circulated images capturing the moments after explosives were detonated near the finish line of the marathon on Monday afternoon, killing as least three and wounding more than 170 in a likely terrorist attack about which police are still scrambling to scare up leads.

But the version published by the News seemed to erase a gory wound to the woman's leg that was visible in other publications that used the photo. On Tuesday evening, a link to a blog post exposing the manipulation began circulating among News journalists, some of whom were none-too-pleased about the situation, multiple newsroom sources told Capital. 

The graphic photo -- before and after Photoshopping -- is at that last link.

We should remind ourselves that this sort of thing happens constantly, and not just on our Facebook pages. If you're like me, you barely have ingrained a Snopes habit of verifying everything you read. Now you have to add "photographs often lie" to the list, right behind politicians and car salesmen.

-- Andy Kroll at Mother Jones with the emphasis expressed in the title above. Richard Jewell, the Atlanta Olympics "bomber", was innocent. (Eric Rudolph was guilty.) There was no fire on the National Mall on the morning of 9/11/01 as CNN claimed. It wasn't Muslim jihadists that slew dozens of Norwegians two years ago; a James Holmes shot and killed people in an Aurora movie theater but not that Jim Holmes; and poor Ryan Lanza initially got the blame for what his brother, Adam, did at Sandy Hook Elementary.

These are just a few hideous examples of the damage that the race to break first has done. As I wrote earlier in the week, our increasing reliance on social media is making it worse.

I'm with Eileen.

I miss the days when you had to wait until the next morning to get the news.
— EileenDSmith (@EileenDSmith) April 17, 2013

Update: One serious, one not so much. You decide which is which.

“After monitoring every minute of CNN’s broadcast since Monday, we have found hearsay, rumors, falsehoods, and a steady stream of inane commentary,” one authority said. “Everything but information.”

“I fear we have permanently entered the Age of the Retraction. All the lessons of the past — from Richard Jewell to NPR’s announcement of the death of Gabby Giffords to CNN’s erroneous report on the Supreme Court Ruling on ObamaCare — fail to inform the present. The rush to be first has so thoroughly swallowed up the principle of being right and first that it seems a little egg on the face is now deemed worth the risk.”