Boston bombers reportedly had plan to hit Times Square on trip to New York City.

Ok, a quick, but important update to the below post about whether members of Congress are trying to wiggle out of the requirement that they and their aides purchase insurance on the exchanges starting in 2014.

To sum up briefly, in 2009, members of the Senate Finance Committee adopted an amendment to their draft of the health care bill that was designed to effectively drop members of Congress and their staffs into the exchanges, just like regular individuals.

The question now is whether they’re trying to retroactively exempt themselves from that requirement, or simply trying to deal fairly with the same sort of implementation snafus that many states, etc, are experiencing on a day to day basis. Read More

Bill Clinton gets the audience laughing at the Bush Library opening. Watch.

It’s now been confirmed that the body pulled out of the Providence River on Tuesday is that of missing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi. For more on the background of what this is about and how – bizarrely and unfairly – it connects up with the Boston bombings, see this.

No sense in denying it. Politico won the primetime last night with a breathtaking story about Congressional hypocrisy. The article’s here. The nub of it is that Democrats and Republicans are supposedly, and secretly, trying to exempt lawmakers and their aides from Obamacare. Back in 2009, when the bill was in its infancy, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) introduced an amendment to effectively require members and staffs to obtain their insurance on the exchanges just like your average Joe whose employer doesn’t provide health benefits. It passed, for reasons which should be politically obvious. Now members want a mulligan.

Ezra Klein burrows into the specifics and lets these supposedly scheming members of Congress off the hook. All that’s happening, he reports, is that members are trying to figure out a way for Congress to continue contributing to employee premiums.

We’re still burrowing down into the specifics ourselves, because we want to give everyone a completely fair shake, without lapsing into credulity. But at first glance, and then after some initial reporting, I think the truth is somewhere in between. Read More

House GOP freshmen lament that they haven’t had more opportunities to vote to repeal Obamacare:

“If you’re a freshman — the guys who’ve been up here the last year, we can go home and say listen, we voted 36 different times to repeal or replace Obamacare. Tell me what the new guys are supposed to say,” he said. “We haven’t had a repeal or replace vote this year.”

Sahil Kapur reports.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, in about six weeks we’re going to roll out a new version of TPMPrime which among other things will have a members version of the site with a different layout and fewer ads. Click after the jump to see some in-progress designs. Read More

Officials tell the AP that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev described the bomb plot but stopped talking after being read his Miranda rights on Monday.

Meanwhile, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s name had been in the US terrorist database (apparently placed there by the CIA) for some 18 months prior to the attacks.

Rhode Island passes marriage equality bill.

It turns out that Rand Paul is actually okay with drone strikes against US citizens within the United States as long as the strikes are on bad guys.