Oh deer, overkill in Wisconsin

The militarization of local law enforcement reached a new low this week with the senseless slaughter of Giggles the fawn. In a scene reminiscent of a SWAT team raiding a criminal cartel's headquarters, nine fully armed wildlife cops and four local sheriffs descended on an animal rescue farm in search of illegal contraband -- to wit, one tiny baby deer. What happened next defied logic.

“I said the deer is scheduled to go to the wildlife reserve the next day,” Schulze said.

It was to go to a wildlife reserve in Illinois that allows the rehabilitation of deer. Schulze said agents corralled workers near the picnic area and then set out in search of the fawn.

“I was thinking in my mind they were going to take the deer and take it to a wildlife shelter, and here they come carrying the baby deer over their shoulder. She was in a body bag,” Schulze said. “I said, ‘Why did you do that?’ He said, ‘That’s our policy,’ and I said, ‘That’s one hell of a policy.’”

Granted, it apparently is illegal to harbor a wild animal in Wisconsin but they could have taken the poor little creature to the legal shelter themselves. Or fined Schulze and allowed him to transport it himself in the morning. Hard to see what was served by killing it. Fucking barbarians.

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Scalia's surprising dissent

This is bad news for civil rights advocates. In a dismal 5-4 decision Breyer jumped in with the cons and Scalia joined the liberals in opposing this breach against our bedrock right to be protected against unreasonable search and seizure.

Scalia said it "taxes the credulity of the credulous" to argue that DNA testing is simply a means of identification. It's a way to gather evidence — and thus Maryland's law doesn't pass constitutional muster, he wrote.

"The Fourth Amendment forbids searching a person for evidence of a crime when there is no basis for believing the person is guilty of the crime or is in possession of incriminating evidence," Scalia said. "That prohibition is categorical and without exception; it lies at the very heart of the Fourth Amendment."

This is a horrifying decision. It may look harmless to some because in this case it's confined to violent crime but you give the authoritarians an inch and they'll keep chipping away. Before you know it they could be taking random swabs at traffic stops.

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Media refuses to meet with Holder

I really hate it when I'm at odds with journalists I like and respect, (there's more of them than you might think), about the leak investigations. In the latest twist in the storyline, most of the major media heads are refusing to meet off the record with AG Holder to discuss the matter. I'm sorry to have to say this ends up looking like they care more about pumping up a so-called scandal than finding a solution to the problem.

It's too weird to find myself in agreement with the WaPo and Politico who so far are the only major news orgs willing to say wait a minute, we routinely have off-the-record conversations with the government, so we're going to the meeting. The rest of them are coming off as entirely off base. Or in other words, as this tweet points out:

@AlecMacGillis: Exactly. The piousness on this is a bit much. RT @jackshafer: News organizations that go off the record all the time suddenly get picky.

Hells bells. It's supposed to a gripe session, not a fucking press conference. It's not like they're going to be writing policy or making some secret pact. And frankly, I don't blame Holder for wanting it off the record. Who can't predict how that would go. They would spend an hour or two discussing the problem and all that would be reported is some out of context, off the cuff remark to draw traffic in the slow news cycle of summer.

Meanwhile, out in the real world, outside of the insider bubble, not seeing any sympathy for the solipsism. Media might want to take notice:

@BrettLoGiurato: This is perhaps the clearest indication about how the public feels about AP, Fox leak investigations:



Click through on that link to read the responses. My personal favorite being, "Sheesh. Go after the leaker, not the journo."

Funny. Last I looked, no journos were being hauled into court for national security reporters "standard operating practices." The only ones paying the price are the inside sources they convinced to breach their contractual agreements and the law simply for a "scoop" that didn't even expose any government wrongdoing. Seems to me the sources are the real victims here.

All that being said, I'm not without empathy for the media in this. I understand the pressure to produce traffic. What worries me is when inside sources are squandered for stories that don't expose government misconduct for short term gain, then when real misconduct occurs, the sources will be too afraid to come foreward. Not seeing how that serves anyone in the long run.

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News Corp can't find DoJ notice on Rosen subpoena

Well how interesting. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation says they don't know nothing 'bout any subpoena:

News Corporation said on Sunday that it had no record of being notified by the Justice Department nearly three years ago of a subpoena for the telephone records of a reporter at its Fox News cable channel.

The company’s chief legal counsel at the time also said that he had never seen material from the government related to the subpoena.

The Justice Department says they notified News Corporation on Aug. 27, 2010, that it had seized Rosen phone records by fax, email, and certified letter, as it the custom in all legal matters.

You may remember that this is the same News Corporation that claimed for months on end it didn't know nothing 'bout phone hacking and police bribery until the proof finally caught up with them. But hell, they pretty much got away with lying about that without any major punishment, so why wouldn't Murdoch's US enterprise lie about this now?

Not making any accusations until the facts are all in, but thinking the circumstantial evidence and history is on the DoJ's side. Surely DoJ will have copies of the notifications. Lawyers never throw anything away.

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How big is media surveillance under Obama

I'm as unhappy as the next guy about government surveillance on journalists and private citizens but I sure wish the media had been this focused when the Bush administration was doing it illegally. Even the NYT is verging on scaremongering about Obama's DoJ. I mean the hed screams US Leaks Inquiries Show How Wide a Net is Cast. About midway through the article it admits, "It is not clear how often the government has obtained reporters’ communications records."

The only person they could get on record for the story is one government guy whose life was ruined under the Bush administration for allegedly leaking about warrantless wiretaps -- on everybody. Meanwhile here's an interesting twist to the Rosen saga.

On Saturday, a Fox News executive said that the notice had gone to News Corp., its parent company, on Aug. 27, 2010, but that Fox News was not told until Friday. The executive said they were still trying to sort out how the notice fell through the cracks.

You might have thought this would be something the parent corp would have brought to their news station's attention right away. Kind of convenient they suddenly discovered it after the AP got all sorts of steam out of their surveillance. And again, in these Obama era cases it's not about wholesale spying on the population or the media. As the government states, "law enforcement officials said the leaks were alarming because someone had shared information while overseas intelligence operations were still under way."

If somebody can show me where any of these stories exposed government misconduct, I'm happy to join in the outrage but so far all I see is a few journos outing active counter-terrorism operations in countries that do pose a danger to our national security, effectively shutting them down because of the exposure. I don't feel so well served by that kind of traffic baiting journalism.

I have to agree with Kevin Drum about this hue and cry over this.

Something about the Rosen case just doesn't add up. But a lot of people don't seem to be taking the possible outing of an intelligence source very seriously. They're acting as if the DOJ prosecution is over a completely meaningless story. That might be, but I think a bit less circling the wagons, and a bit more serious questioning, might be in order here.

I often watch these big journos on the twitter. They hate Obama, not for his politics but because he doesn't treat them with the respect they believe they deserve. Sadly, I don't believe the vast majority of them deserve the respect. They aren't informing the public. When he does hold a presser, they leap to find a single phrase out of hundreds of words and manufacture some kind of fauxtroversy out of it. They skip most of the salient points he makes about policy. Too boring. Doesn't bring in the eyeballs. Maybe if they showed the POTUS the kind of respect he deserves, they would get some in return.

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Tea Party launches lawsuit against IRS

This is too precious. The biggest grifter born of the original Tea Party uprising is suing the IRS for making them wait too long and work too hard to get their for tax-exempt status.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati, the NorCal Tea Party Patriots accused the IRS of violating its constitutional rights due to the "intensive and intrusive scrutiny" it received while seeking tax-exempt status. [...]

The lawsuit has the backing of a group calling itself Citizens for Self-Governance, a group launched by the co-founder the Tea Party Patriots, Mark Meckler.

"We stand shoulder to shoulder with all those known and unknown who have been abused by a federal government run amok," Meckler said in a statement.

Well maybe not everyone. Meckler is seeking "class action status on behalf of all conservative and libertarian groups" who were asked to prove they deserved the exemption. Apparently the liberal groups who were actually denied the status, need not apply. And nothing says small government conservative like running to the federal courts for relief.

You may recall Meckler was a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots back in the days of the "proud angry mobs." He parlayed that slot into a big grift culminating in the publication of a book. He polished his bonafides with the rubes by railing against the GOP operatives who he accused of co-opting other Tea Party organizations. Of course he didn't mention his own failed attempt to get cozy with the GOP himself.

That aside, I say please proceed Tea Party. Can't wait to see this issue adjudicated. Fact is, these Tea Party groups are primarily political. Meckler's Patriots gave a cool million to political candidates, sponsored a political debate and actively campaigned to kill state legislation. Claiming "social welfare" status devoted to public education is the biggest fraud going. If there's any justice every one of the damn Tea Party groups will lose the tax exempt status they were wrongfully awarded in the last year or two.

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You can't yell fire in a crowded theater

Well we have a brand new brouhaha about surveillance on a journalist. Today it's James Rosen of Fox News over a story he published in 2009 about North Korea, based on an insider leak. To be clear, it's important to protect journalists. It's equally important to protect leakers when they're exposing government wrongdoing. But once again, this is not really the case here.

I'll spare you my thoughts on how ineptly they covered their tracks. Hell they were practically asking to get caught, but here's my big problem with James Rosen's reporting. His motive appears to more about career enhancement than truth telling.

[Rosen] also wrote, according to the affidavit: “What I am interested in, as you might expect, is breaking news ahead of my competitors” including “what intelligence is picking up.” And: “I’d love to see some internal State Department analyses.”

I've read a few posts about this today and noticeably missing from most of them, is a link to Rosen's original article. Here, via Booman, is the key flaw in his reporting.

What's more, Pyongyang's next nuclear detonation is but one of four planned actions the Central Intelligence Agency has learned, through sources inside North Korea, that the regime of Kim Jong-Il intends to take -- but not announce -- once the Security Council resolution is officially passed, likely on Friday.

As Booman explains:

It's important that the policy advisers and policymakers inside our government know if the intelligence they are reading is coming from straight inside the Pyongyang government. It is equally critical that the North Korean government not know that.

If someone in Pyongyang sticks their neck out to talk to the CIA, they should not be reading about it the next week on the Fox News web page. The government was basically forced to try to figure out who leaked that information, and the only thing that should be up for debate is how far the government should be able to go to solve the mystery.

I'd add I'm not sure it was in the national interest to tell North Korea we lost track of their missle movement either, but I guess that's a judgment call. Thinking it's better the North Koreans not know that, but an argument could be made that the public has the right to know.

In any case, in striking a balance between national security and protected speech, there are competing interests. This is point worth remembering as we seek to strike that balance.

Adam Weinstein: We as journalists have the right to work with leakers to report the truth. The gov. has the right, within the laws, to find/punish leakers.

First Amendment protections are not absolute. The press enjoys greater protection than most of us. The onus is on them to use it responsibly. I have to agree with Booman. This is yet another case where it wasn't.

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Where were you when we needed you

I'm about done with the pseudoscandals but one last word on the AP records grab. AP's CEO went on the teevee to wail about their persecution today claiming the DoJ violated the constitution.

“We don’t question their right to conduct these sort of investigations, we just think they went about it the wrong way. So sweeping, so secretively, so abusively and harassingly and overbroad that it is an unconstitutional act,” Pruitt said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. [...]

“Under their own rules, they are required to narrow this request as narrowly as possible so as to not tread upon the First Amendment. And yet they had a broad, sweeping collection. And they did it secretly,” Pruitt said.

I can't speak to the scope of the request. All we have to go on is AP's word about that and frankly, these days that's not worth squat. Certainly the time frame was limited. As far as I know it was done under the law, by subpoena, under precedents set at least as early as the Bush administration. Don't necessarily disagree that it's unconstitutional. If the AP wants to challenge the law on those grounds, they have my full support. But this bid for pity leaves me cold.

He said it’s already had an effect by making sources skittish about talking to journalists. “I think it will hurt journalists,” Pruitt said of the matter.

Really? If your business model depends almost solely on anonymous inside sources who leak to advance their own political agenda, as we saw so brilliantly illustrated this week with Jon Karl's fake scoop, then maybe you need a new model. One that's based on investigative work and independent fact finding instead of lazy repetition of unconfirmed rumors.

This guy articulated what galls me about the AP wailing really well:

And here's the funny part: after years and years of governmental power-grabbing, Unitary Executive over-reaching, Supreme Court rubber-stamping and congressional go-alonging, the dirty fact of the matter is that, almost certainly according to what now passes for American law, the Department of Justice technically did nothing wrong when they plundered the phone histories of all those reporters. [...]

Well, welcome to the future you helped to create. I have neither pity nor sorrow for you, but I am hopeful that your sudden inclusion in the ranks of the "Oh Shit, They Can Do That?" Club will inspire you to truthfully and factually inform the American people about what has been happening to their country right under their, and your, nose.

Hell, ten years ago this same media was sneering at the "unserious" left for raising the alarm about the Patriot Act. They ignored the anti-war movement. They showed no concern about the encroachment of civil rights against its activists. They fluffed every warmongering talking point. They treated the outing of Valerie Plame, done strictly to cover up the lies that started the damn war on terror, as inconsequential. We told them then, it would lead to this. They mocked us. So forgive me if I send my regrets to AP's pity party.

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I'll take self-serving traffic baiting for $1000 Alex

I love Alex Pareene. I wouldn't have thought him capable of writing such a mean-spirited tirade against Media Matters for trying to break through the knee jerk defense of AP going on among the big name stars of the media insiders and inject some much needed perspective.

Let's review the facts one more time. The AP didn't break the second coming of The Pentagon Papers with their story. They exposed an important counter-terrorism operation based solely on leaked information which ultimately led to to the outing of a CIA asset who had infiltrated an active terrorist group. Jack Shafer explains why that matters:

To begin with, the perpetrators of a successful double-agent operation against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula would not want to brag about their coup for years. Presumably, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula will now use the press reports to walk the dog back to determine whose misplaced trust allowed the agent to penetrate it. That will make the next operation more difficult. Other intelligence operations — and we can assume they are up and running — may also become compromised as the press reports give al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula new clues.

Likewise, the next time the CIA or foreign intelligence agency tries to recruit a double agent, the candidate will judge his handlers wretched secret keepers, regard the assignment a death mission and seek employment elsewhere.

Last, the leaks of information — including those from the lips of Brennan, Clarke and King — signal to potential allies that America can’t be trusted with secrets. “Leaks related to national security can put people at risk,” as Obama put it today in a news conference.

Alex sneers at Media Matters' question, “Is this story about a government source blowing the whistle on government misbehavior, or about a source gratuitously exposing ongoing counter-terrorism operations?” He finds it useless because no liberal wants Media Matters to be the boss of their talking points. Well they probably don't think they need Alex to be the boss of how they choose to influence the public discourse either. Better Alex should answer the question.

Kevin Drum confirms the entire undercover operation had to be shut down and the double agent was put in jeopardy. If the AP hadn't built the bandwagon with their irresponsible traffic baiting, this operation would still be delivering useful intelligence on terrorist plots. So tell me how was the public interest served by the AP story? And where do you draw the line between national security and profit seeking opportunism by the media? If AP hadn't published the leak, the government wouldn't be looking for the leaker and their records wouldn't been subpoenaed.

As I've said before, I've been fighting for First Amendment rights all my life. I worked my heart out in twenty years working for the ACLU and in private practice defending those rights. I want to protect the freedom of the press, but with that freedom comes responsibility to use it for the public good. I was outraged when Valerie Plame was outed by our government for political gain. Why shouldn't I be equally outraged when the media outs an agent in an active operation simply for their own profit? Dumping on Media Matters for trying to hold the press accountable for irresponsible reporting doesn't answer the question.

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Grasping at strawmen - Updated

There's no doubt the IRS was ham-handed in its handling of the tax-exempt applications after Citizen United. I've yet to see that they did anything against the law. Which is a problem to be sure. It suggests maybe we should be agitating to change the damn laws. Not that that's going to happen. Instead we have everyone looking to grind their own axe against the sharp edge of this pseudoscandal. That of course includes the "Obama has failed me" crowd of the left. Garance jumps in with this damning bit of evidence. On noes, there was no surge in applications in 2010. Quick fire more people. Heads must roll.

That's fine with me. Fire the whole lot. I seem to be the only one who remembers how George W Bush loaded the bureaucracy with GOP loyalists during his reign. Incompetent loyalists at that. Small wonder they screwed it all up. I've yet to see a high level official here who was hired under Obama.

Furthermore, as Steve M. points out, if the goal here was to suppress Tea Party influence on the election, they did a damn poor job of it. The chart showing the monthly approvals speaks for itself.



Oh and that bureaucrat who was in the tax exempt branch and is now in charge of IRS Obamacare enforcement? Hired under Reagan and promoted by none other than President George W. Bush, who also awarded her a hefty bonus in 2004 for distinguished service.

Our government agencies are riddled with GOP loyalists. Don't recall Obama doing any big purges like President Codpiece did. And let's not forget, the IRS admitted they outed themselves. I don't see any political advantage to Obama in engineering something so blatantly obvious. But looks like a helluva good way to invent a pseudo-scandal to help the GOP.

Update: Here's a list of all applications in that category which were approved in 2012. Just going by the obvious ones, looks like more conservative orgs were approved than liberal ones.

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I come to defend Holder, not condemn him

The AP phone records story is still developing so I don't have much to say yet. Still waiting for more facts to emerge from the noise. So far I've seen nothing to suggest the government acted illegally. As a TPM reader points out:

More important it is clear to anyone who understands what happens in this type of investigation that the Justice Department subpoenaed phone records. Those records came from the phone company not from AP. They relate to dates and times of phone calls not content. Under the law such a subpoena is perfectly proper and under the law Justice and the phone company must notify the party (in this case AP) that records were subpoenaed.

I think AP protests just a bit too much and seeks to smear Justice (knowing full well that many Republicans will jump on this quickly).

Which of course will be great for traffic. This is Drudge bait as tempting as pure crystal coke from Columbia to a junkie.

To be clear, it's vitally important to protect the freedom of the press, especially in its social mandate to investigate government wrongdoing. While it's apparent our present day media had mainly failed in that mission, devoting most of their time to inventing psuedo-scandals in order to drive traffic and make profits for their wealthy owners, we nonetheless need to continue to protect the media from government intimidation and protect whistleblowers from retribution when they assist the media in exposing government malfeasance.

All that being said, let's review why the DoJ started the investigation on the AP and its inside sources. This scoop was not the Pentagon Papers. They weren't exposing something like bombing Cambodia and lying about it, or the cover-up of the Mai-Lai massacre. The AP exposed an undercover, anti-terrorist operation that thwarted a bomb plot which would have killed Americans. In doing so, the AP jeopardized the life of an inside US intelligence asset and effectively forced a CIA operation that could have netted vital intelligence in stopping future terrorism to shut down.

Sorry, if that strikes me as more self-serving than noble. Finding it difficult to couch this one as serving the public. Feels more like serving the bottom line of the AP with a sensational scoop that actually endangered the public. So while it's far too easy for the government to claim national security as a cover for secrecy, in this one particular case I see no evidence Holder can't claim national security concerns drove the investigation. At least not so far.

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Eric Holder schools the bed wetters

I can't be the only one who finds it darkly amusing that the same gun hoarders who are preparing to engage in hand to hand combat with the gummit agents of tyranny piss their pants at the thought of closing Gitmo and giving those "dangerous" terrarists due process within the US of A's judicial system. As AG Holder mansplains to the would be warriors of freedom, we can do this.

The attorney general told graduates that federal courts are capable of handling terrorism cases, accusing critics of "ignoring reality."

"Let me be clear: those who claim that our federal courts are incapable of handling terrorism cases are not registering a dissenting opinion," he said. "They are simply wrong."

"Hundreds are properly, safely and securely held in our federal prisons, not Guantanamo, today. Not one has ever escaped custody. No judicial district has suffered a retaliatory attack of any kind," he said. "I defy anyone, on the merits, to challenge these assertions."

To which Republicans will answer: ZOMG! Obama wants to bring those Mooslim terrorists onto US soil and let them live right next door. The insider media will gravely report this development in the "controversy." There will be much polling to measure the daily public concern. Whereupon the very important pundits will predict what this all means for the President's agenda (almost always very bad) and give him earnest advice on to fix it.

What our mighty gatekeepers of BigMedia won't tell you is Eric Holder is absolutely right. We've had terrorists safely imprisoned on US soil for decades. All of whom were convicted under our regular judicial system. Fear of Gitmo prisoners is one of the lamest rightwing freakouts, ever.

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Break up the Too Big To Fail banks

Don't want to get too excited about this just yet, but it's the best shot at killing the Too Big To Fail beast I've seen so far.

Last week, on April 24th, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Louisiana Republican David Vitter introduced legislation called the "Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act of 2013 Act," or the "Brown-Vitter TBTF Act" for short. The bill is a gun aimed directly at the head of the Too-Big-To-Fail beast.

Who knows if they'll get anywhere with it. Big Finance will be throwing around a lot of big money to stop them. But there are quite a few surprise supporters including some Republicans and The Independent Community Bankers of America. The latter have been reluctant to take sides until now. And it surely sounds like a real fix in this telling.

Studies have shown that these banks borrow money at about 0.8 percent more cheaply than other banks, and that this implicit government subsidy is worth about $83 billion a year just to the top 10 banks in America. This bill would essentially wipe out that hidden subsidy and make the banks bailout-proof.

If it worked it would be a big step in restoring some balance to the national, and international, economy.

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GOP terror scarers out in force

The same crowd who demanded we not mention 20 murdered schoolchildren in the debate over gun safety reform immediately leapt to making a couple of crazy kids in Boston the new existential threat to national security. Led by Lindsey "Huckleberry Dunderhead" Graham and John "Grumpy Gramps" McCain, a gaggle of GOPers are clamoring to designate the Boston bombers as enemy combatants.

It's not that they don't know their demands are stupid and illegal under the rule of law. They just don't want an exploitable domestic terror event to go to waste. A good dose of fearmongering and pandering to Islamophobia never hurt a Republican, especially with reelection campaigns coming up and a crackpot voter base who threaten to kick them out every time they catch the barest whiff of co-operation with a single Democrat.

I don't think it's wrong to call this domestic terrorism. Every mass murder, successful or not and every bombing no matter how few the deaths is rightly termed as such. Every avoidable industrial accident such as the explosion in West, Texas, could rightly be called the same. The real problem is we only use that designation when the perps are non-white Americans of foreign origin. Thus the media paints Timothy McVeigh as a lone wolf, the Newtown killer as a troubled kid and so on, yet these two kids with foreign names are to be deemed existential threats when they killed less people and clearly were bumbling amateurs.

Indeed, the rush to portray the Boston bombers as larger than life villians is more dangerous to our security than the crimes they committed precisely because it breeds the sort of unreasonable panic which ultimately leads to further degradation of our traditional civil rights. The best take I've seen on this point so far, is this warning against misplaced paranoia. Definitely read the whole thing, but this is key graf.

It is a surreal and difficult-to-explain dynamic. Americans seemingly place an inordinate fear on violence that is random and unexplainable and can be blamed on "others" – jihadists, terrorists, evil-doers etc. But the lurking dangers all around us – the guns, our unhealthy diets, the workplaces that kill 14 Americans every single day – these are just accepted as part of life, the price of freedom, if you will. And so the violence goes, with more Americans dying preventable deaths. But hey, look on the bright side – we got those sons of bitches who blew up the marathon.

The ordinary threats to the public safety surround us but the daily death toll is as unnoticed as the scenery on our daily commutes. If we actually want to find the real existential threats to our way of life, we should be looking in the board rooms of multi-national corporations instead of pinning the blame on a misguided, hapless teenager.

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What really happened in Watertown

Everybody's an armchair tactician. One of major sources of contention on the internets in the last 24 hours has been over how law enforcement handled the search for the Boston bombers. Early on it was all about whether they should have crowdsourced the photos. That sequed into the wisdom, or lack thereof, of shutting down the city. I'm not judging anybody's take. I'm as guilty as the next guy of second guessing the primary tactics in any given major event.

Tom Watson made the best case for why shutting down Boston was unwise. I'm sympathetic to the argument that it sets a bad precedent for overblown LEO responses to less than super extraordinary events. It discomfited me to see tanks on the streets of Watertown, MA to take down a 19 year old kid. I'm concerned when I see citizens ordered to stay in their homes while SWAT teams conduct house to house searches. This is not the America I grew up in.

Thing is, the America I grew up in has changed many times over the years. There are millions of more people in it. Lots of them are crazy. And violent. Society changed. It's greedier. More restless. Easily bored. The demand for instant amusement is constant and insatiable.

So I can see what the LEOs were thinking. The intertubz were exploding like busting pipes in an aging water system. It was flooding false leads into the media that were about to drown out any semblance of reliable information. The public was being assaulted with conflicting reports. Panic and hysteria ensued. Innocent people were being hounded. From their point of view it must have been a choice between chaos and controling the search zone.

Tom Watson lives in NYC. He's seen bigger stuff. So have I in my worldly travels. But Boston is not New York. Watertown is not downtown Boston. People live quiet lives in their houses with flowers along the front walk and maybe a boat parked in the back yard that they put in the water on weekends. Nothing ever happens in Watertown. Until it did.

Easy to dictate what's best in the big picture when it's not your neighborhood hosting major gunfights on a street where shots haven't been heard since the Revolutionary War. In the end I look to the people who live there to judge the wisdom of the tactics. I think this pretty much tells that story:

Dan Adams: Incredible scene at #WatertownPD HQ. Grateful, tearful residents arriving every minute w home cooked meals, pizza, flowers, cards.

And then read Charlie Pierce's eyewitness account of the bomber's capture. In fact read Charlies blog for the last few days. It's a whole different picture than the manufactured media hysteria on the TV.

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