Political MoJo

Dzhokar Tsarnaev was found by police hiding in a boat after a nearly 24-hour manhunt in Watertown, Mass. Massachusetts State Police/ZUMAPRESS.com

On Monday, it became official: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was charged with "use of a weapon of mass destruction" and "malicious destruction of property resulting in death" for his alleged role in last Monday's bombing of the Boston marathon. The federal criminal complaint comes three days after police captured Tsarnaev in a boat in Watertown, Massachusetts, and four days after a manhunt for these specific suspects began in earnest. For the time being, law enforcement officials believe Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan, who was killed Friday, acted alone.

Dzhokhar and Tamerlan's motive—or motives—is still unclear. But that's not the only unknown. Many of the Tsarnaevs' actions last week seem baffling in retrospect. Here are some of the most confounding things they did:

1. Wear a backwards hat and no sunglasses. Unlike his older brother, Dzhokhar made little effort to prevent cameras from capturing his face, making him easier to identify when the FBI released security camera photos on Thursday. Indeed, classmates at University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth did see him in the photos, but dismissed the similarity because it seemed so far-fetched.
2. Not react to the explosions. For three days, investigators pored over all available photos and surveillance videos of the blast area searching for abnormal reactions. The complaint filed in federal court on Monday specifically cites Dzhokhar's reaction to the first explosion as a giveaway; per the complaint, he glanced in the direction of the first blast only briefly.
3. Leave the car in the shop. The Wall Street Journal reported that Dzhokhar stopped by an auto-body shop in Watertown on Tuesday to pick up the Mercedes he'd brought in for repairs.
4. Stay in Boston. The second bomb exploded at 2:49 p.m. last Monday. Tamerlan carjacked a Mercedes at 10:39 p.m.* on Thursday. What did they do in the interim three days? Go to the gym, check in on their busted car, and, in Dzhokhar's case, go to a party on the UMass–Dartmouth campus. During the three-day window in which their involvement was unknown, they made no attempt to flee.
5. Kill an MIT police officer. Why did the brothers shoot 26-year-old Sean Collier? The murder at 10:30 p.m. on Thursday set in motion the events that would ultimately lead to their capture.
6. Run out of cash. When Tamerlan carjacked a Mercedes on Thursday night, he and his brother had one thing in mind: Get cash, and fast. They emptied $800 from an ATM using their victim's PIN number, before they reached the account limit. Holding up a stranger for money suggests a woeful lack of planning on their part (they hadn't budgeted) that helped alert them to the authorities.
7. Not understand how ATMs work. After reaching the daily withdrawal limit at one ATM, the Tsarnaevs, apparently not realizing that the machines are part of an interconnected system, decided to try their luck at two different machines. The quest to find a working ATM was how they ended up, coincidentally, at a 7/11 in Cambridge around the same time it was the scene of an armed robbery, and were spotted on the store security camera.
8. Confess to the hostage. According to the complaint, when Dzhokhar got into the Mercedes, he immediately told the driver, "Did you hear about the Boston explosion? I did that." That meant their cover would be immediately blown if the driver escaped. Which brings us to…
9. Stop for snacks. The Los Angeles Times reported that the hostage escaped after the brothers stopped at a gas station on Memorial Drive to buy snacks.
10. Keep the hostage's phone. The Tsarnaevs continued on without their hostage—but they did have his phone, which allowed police to track their location via GPS.
11. Bring a BB gun. The weapons used by the two suspects, according to police: a pressure-cooker bomb, seven IEDs, an M4 carbine, two handguns, and a BB gun. Why a BB gun?

Update: This Boston Globe interview with the carjack victim goes a long way toward answering question nine.

*Correction: This piece initially confused the timing of the bombing and carjackings, as well as the identity of the carjacker.

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Update: As of Monday evening, about 900 websites are participating in the protest

About 400 websites are taking part in an online blackout today to protest the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). The web-based demonstration, organized by the hacktivist organization, Anonymous, is not likely to interfere with the average web user's day, unless that user frequently posts funny videos on Reddit. CISPA, a controversial bill that aims to boost cybersecurity by removing legal barriers that prevent tech companies and the government from sharing sensitive information about web users, sailed through the House last week, despite strong opposition from privacy groups and President Barack Obama, who is threatening to veto the current version of the bill. Early last year,  the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), two online copyright enforcement bills, spurred widespread blackouts involving more than 7,000 websites and tech giants, including Wikipedia and Google, yet the biggest websites willing to take a public stand against CISPA merely include various subsections of Reddit and a Facebook page for the Libertarian party. 

"Unfortunately, there have not been any confirmed reports of larger companies joining the protest," says a spokesperson for Anonyops, a website that reports news on the activities of Anonymous. "SOPA threatened to take down websites that even linked to copyright infringed material, so for companies that allow their users to post freely on their sites [like Facebook, Google+, and Reddit] this would have been devastating. CISPA mostly effects the user's of these services, and doesn't cut into profits of these big companies, and let's face it, that's why they're a business, to make a profit."

"We've been running ads against CISPA for the past few months, but we didn't think the timing was right for us to participate in today's blackout," says Erik Martin, general manager at Reddit, the social news site. "We're going to plan more action closer to the vote in the Senate, but in the meantime, the [independently controlled] subreddits are becoming kind of a lab for how you raise awareness on something important like this. Some of them are blacked out, others are posting about it."

Molly Schwoppe, a spokesperson for the Libertarian party, tells Mother Jones that the party is "vehemently opposed to CISPA" but refused to confirm whether or not the Facebook page holding the blackout officially belonged to the party.

CISPA was first introduced in late 2011 by Rep. Michael Rogers (R-Mich.), but the measure failed to advance through the Senate. Rogers and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) reintroduced the bill in February of this year.  Dozens of civil-liberties-minded groups have cried foul and opposed the bill on the grounds that it delivers personal information like emails and Internet records straight to the hands of the government, which could freely use all this information for vague national security purposes. "This bill undermines the privacy of millions of Internet users" Rainey Reitman, activism director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a press release. The Obama administration last week declared that it "remains concerned that the bill does not require private entities to take reasonable steps to remove irrelevant personal information when sending cybersecurity data to the government or other private sector entities."

But privacy concerns may not be enough to stop the bill. CISPA supporters spent 140 times more money on lobbying for the bill that its opponents, according to the Sunlight Foundation. Big-name companies that openly support CISPA include AT&T, Intel, IBM, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon, and other tech giants are  quietly on board, including Google and Facebook, which released a statement arguing that "if the government learns of an intrusion or other attack, the more it can share about that attack with private companies (and the faster it can share the information), the better the protection for users and our systems." Facebook also claims that if shares data with the government, it will safeguard user information. 

Anonyops isn't so optimistic. "Do I find it hypocritical [that tech companies are supporting CISPA]? It could be seen that way, after all," its spokesperson says. "These companies do have privacy policies, which is the very thing that CISPA would basically make void."

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Charles (left) and David Koch.

Not long after the November elections, I met with Charles Spies, a big-time Republican fundraiser who'd run the pro-Mitt Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future, to hear his take on why Romney lost. We sat across from each other at a long wooden table in a tenth-floor conference room overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. (Before his firm moved in, Spies says the conference room used to be Al Gore's office.) We talked about super-PACs and the hundreds of millions they spent, the clout (or not) of wealthy donors and how they could get the most bang for their buck in a political campaign. Then, unprompted, Spies told me, "If I had the resources and wanted to impact the policy debate, I'd buy a newspaper or a magazine."

"Even in today's media climate?" I asked.

"Oh, absolutely." He explained:

Not to make money. They're not profitable. But imagine if I was, you know, a mogul that had 30, 40 million dollars to spend and cared about policy issues and elections. I'd buy the New York Times or the LA Times. Buy a major newspaper and put my people in on the editorial page and use that to frame issues the way I wanted to. And then I could claim that the news folks were separate from the editorial page but I think they know where the owner's heart is at.

Spies is not a friend of Charles and David Koch, the billionaire libertarians. He does not move in their political circles. But in our conversation, he laid out what may be the best reason why the Kochs and their company are reportedly considering a move to become America's newest newspaper barons.

As the New York Times reported on Sunday, Koch Industries, the massive conglomerate run by Charles Koch, is mulling a bid to buy eight prominent newspapers owned by the Tribune Company, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and Orlando Sentinel. Those newspapers are valued at $623 million, which is a pittance compared to Koch Industries' annual revenues of $115 billion. If the Kochs wanted to do what Spies described, the megaphone that those newspapers would provide them is nothing to scoff at. The LA Times is the nation's fourth-largest paper, the Tribune the ninth-largest, and tens of millions of people combined visit the newspapers' websites each month.

A bigger platform with which to spread their free-market ideas seems to be what the Kochs want. The Times quotes one attendee of the Kochs' exclusive donor seminars as saying of the brothers, "They see the conservative voice as not being well represented."

Koch Industries spokeswoman Melissa Cohlmia told the Times that the company is "constantly exploring profitable opportunities in many industries and sectors. So, it is natural that our name would come up in connection with this rumor." She went on, "We respect the independence of the journalistic institutions referenced in the news stories. But it is our longstanding policy not to comment on deals or rumors of deals we may or may not be exploring."

If they did buy the Tribune papers, the Kochs wouldn't be the first conservative billionaire to snap up a newspaper or two in the modern era. The Washington Examiner newspaper and the Weekly Standard magazine, both staples of conservative political media, are run by a company owned by Phil Anschutz, another secretive conservative billionaire who has attended a Koch donor seminar. And of course there's Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation paid $5 billion in 2007 for the Dow Jones and Company, which includes the Wall Street Journal.

Koch Industries has, at times, a fractious relationship with the media. The company says much of the reporting about Charles and David Koch and their privately-held company is inaccurate or unfair. That sense of grievance led to the creation of KochFacts.com, a website where Koch Industries posts requests for corrections, company statements, testy correspondence between Koch officials and reporters, and favorable news and commentary.

One journalist with whom Koch Industries has clashed is David Sassoon, the publisher of InsideClimate News, a nonprofit website devoted to environmental journalism. InsideClimate News recently won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the dodgy oversight of US oil pipelines. After InsideClimate News reported on Koch Industries' ties to the Canadian tar sands business, Koch Industries blasted the site's "agenda-driven, dishonest journalism" and pressured Reuters, the global news service, to reconsider its decision to publish InsideClimate News' stories. (Reuters stood by Sassoon and his small team of reporters.)

I asked Sassoon, fresh off his Pulitzer win, what he thought of the news of Koch Industries potentially bidding on the Tribune company newspapers. "We reported on the Kochs' involvement in the tar sands, and they played hardball to try to shut us up," he wrote in an email. "They pressured Reuters to drop us as a content partner, and ran ads on Google and Facebook calling me liar...What we've experienced of them first-hand makes me think they would not be trustworthy stewards of the honorable traditions of journalism."

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Few ideas have more support from voters and less from national politicians than legalizing marijuana. While major polls now show that most Americans back the concept, the president and leaders in Congress won't touch the issue except to laugh it off.

Like pothead soccer dads in the sitcom Weeds, however, some of the biggest backers of legalization are turning up where you'd least expect them. Take, for example, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who last week introduced a bill designed to prevent the feds from arresting pot growers and tokers in states where the drug is legal. "This approach is consistent with responsible, constitutional, and conservative governance," the 13-term congressman from California's ultraconservative Orange County told me.

Until recently, Republicans who supported ending pot prohibition were about as common as unicorns. There were US Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), and, well, some prominent former Republicans such as New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo. After ditching her Alaska governor job for a Fox News gig a few years ago, Sarah Palin finally stuck her neck out: "If somebody's gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody else any harm," she said on Fox's Freedom Watch in 2010, "then perhaps there are other things our cops should be looking at to engage in, and try to clean up some of the other problems that we have in society."

Back then that was crazy talk. Now it's mainstream enough that Rohrabacher's new marijuana bill has already attracted two other Republican cosponsors: Reps. Justin Amash of Michigan and Don Young of Alaska.

Rohrabacher got turned on to marijuana activism about 10 years ago, when he had to spoon-feed his dying mother because she'd lost her appetite. He learned that medical marijuana might help her eat. "My interest has evolved from there," he says.

[Read more]

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