From AntiWar.com:

In condemnation of the Boston Marathon bombings today, Obama said, "any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror."

Embarrassingly, Obama inadvertently described his own drone war as terrorism, given that he “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials,” and has rejected the stipulation of disrupting an imminent threat of attack as a prerequisite to dropping bombs on large groups of unidentified individuals.

In fact, on the very of the Boston attacks, Pakistan's government lodged a formal complaint over a deadly US drone strike on its territory over the weekend. The US quickly followed up with another deadly drone strike. We may assume that at least three of the nine killed in the two strikes were noncombatants...

Amazing. This crap is so widespread that someone actually asked Gov. Deval Patrick at a press conference if police had been using loud speakers to appeal for calm before the blasts, and if they were a "false flag" attack. (He said "no," of course.) Unreal. Read about it on Atlantic Wire.

Amy Davidson, blogging for The New Yorker (of all places), makes note of the case of a 20-year-old student of Saudi Arabian origin who was wounded in the attack and, seemingly based on nothing more than the prejudice of police and witnesses at the scene, treated as a suspect, his home searched by police with K9 units, and pilloried on Fox News, where Andrew Napolitano said "there must be enough evidence to keep him there" (meaning the hospital) and specualted, "Was he a real student, or was that a front?"

Authorities finally said he had just been "in the wroing place at the wrong time." As scores of people were—but he was the only one baselessly treated as a suspect.

Oh, and if you want the young man's name, just go to the right-wing idiot press, which also reports that he is being deported back to Saudi Arabia.

The right-wing blogosphere just won't let go of the young Saudi man who was wounded in Boston, baselessly named as a "person of interest," and is now to be deported. The Blaze is aghast that they are sending him home instead of holding him as a suspect. The professional ex-Muslim Walid Shoebat has a truly repugnant piece trying to impugn the young man on the basis of his last name, asserting that Saudi intelligence has identified many members of his "clan" as al-Qaeda collaborators. 

The New York Post meanwhile reports that a "Bangladeshi man out for dinner at a Bronx restaurant was viciously beaten hours after the Boston Marathon bombing by thugs who called him 'a f--king Arab' before pummeling him to the ground." Wonderful. As if random attacks on Arabs isn't bad enough, these morons don't know the difference between an Arab and a Bengali, just like their ilk can't tell Muslims from Sikhs.

The Post also splashed on its cover a shot of two kids "identified" (presumably as suspects) by self-appointed "Internet sleuths," prompting one, Salah Barhoun, 17, to go to the police to "clear his name," Business Insider reports. We hope Barhoun sues them for everything they're worth. The Post later issued a statement standing by the cover and asserting, "We did not identify them as suspects." Gawker correctly calls this out as "legalistic horseshit."

Then there was yesterday's devastating explosion at a fertilizer plant in, um... Waco, Texas. The Daily News tells us the death toll may be 15, with over 150 wounded and many nearby homes destroyed. Now, nobody has yet said this is terrorism, and until evidence to that effect emerges, we must assume it was an industrial accident. But if it was an industrial accident, it is certainly a remarkable coinicidence.

Finally, there is the surgence of bionoia right after the Boston attacks, inevitablty recalling the anthrax attacks that immediately followed 9-11, which were ultimately linked to the neo-Nazi right. AP informs us that a Mississippi man has been arrested, accused of mailing letters with suspected ricin poison to Obama and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), and he appears to be an anti-government conspiranoid, although no ties to the organized radical right are stipulated.

So... while we emphasize that we make no claims to any knowledge as to who was behind the Boston attacks, if it was the homegrown radical right, the perpetrators can only be laughing at all the kneejerk Islamophobia...

This arrogant racist bully just can't let go of the poor Saudi kid, claiming to have inside info about him and calling him "a very bad, bad, bad man"—and giving Obama until Monday to come clean about the cover-up. We really don't get this. If the government was going to let some Islamist freak walk, why would they set up some other guys who appear to be Islamist freaks to take the hit? Or maybe Glen hasn't heard that Chechens are Muslims...

This past week's events demonstrate that, contrary to the assumptions of the conspiracy theorists, there really is such as thing as coincidence. If the Tsarnaev brothers really were behind the Boston attacks, they seem to have chosen April 15 only because it was the day of the Marathon—not because of its historical resonances. And authorities are saying there is no evidence of terrorism in the blast at the fertilizer plant in West, Texas—despite its proximity to Waco and falling almost on the anniversary of the 1993 violence there.

However, the Sunlight Foundation notes that OSHA had not inspected Adair Grain's West Fertilizer Company facility since 1985. The federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency did find violations in that period, and issued thousands of dollars in fines. But the plant went on happily functioning anyway. The piece calls out the Agricultural Retailers Association for lobbying against federal oversight of such plants. 

This demonstrates once again the simple statistical reality we have repeatedly pointed out: capitalism is worse than terrorism. We have expended a lot of energy calling out idiot-left knuckle-heads who minimize or apologize for terrorism. So we can't be accused of that. But do the math. In 2005, the last year for which the State Department issued its annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, there were 14,602 recorded deaths due to terror attacks worldwide—and that was a peak year. This is compared to an estimated 2 million dead each year in on-the-job accidents and illnesses caused by workplace-related hazards. Approximately 2,500 are killed in traffic "accidents" (a loaded word) every day—because our public spaces and transportation systems are designed for the greater glory of Big Oil and Detroit, not human need. There are some times when Facebook memes get it just right, and this is one of those times...

From ThinkProgress, June 14:

A petrochemical plant in Geismar, Louisiana that exploded on Thursday, killing one person and injuring 73, has not been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the past two decades, according to an analysis by ThinkProgress. The Williams Olefins plant, which produces about 1.3 billion pounds of ethylene and 90 million pounds of polymer grade propylene, according to the company’s website, does not have any recorded inspections for plants producing either substance in OSHA’s database since 1993.

The explosion, fueled by propylene, started at 8:37 a.m. and burned for more than three hours. Three hundred workers were evacuated and residents within a two-mile radius were told by authorities to remain in their homes.

The same plant also had an accident in 2009, according to Reuters. At that time, 60 pounds of flammable mixture was released, causing a fire that did not lead to injuries. Louisiana has experienced at least two other explosions in petrochemical facilities in the last two years: an explosion at the Westlake Chemicals vinyl plant in Geismar that “sent a cloud of toxic vinyl chloride and hydrochloric acid over the town” in 2012 and another at a Multi-Chem Group plan in New Iberia in 2011. Neither resulted in injuries, Reuters reports.