We’re used to stories of terrorists getting away in extremely close calls because key pieces of information weren’t matched together soon enough. And it now looks like the arrest of Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad was almost a very similar case. Shahzad wasn’t just trying to fly to Dubai. He had actually already boarded a plane and it was taxiing on the runway. The air traffic control tower had to call the plane back to the terminal.
It’s straight out of a movie.
See our running updates of all the latest on the bombing investigation here.
Late Update: In the news conference currently underway, authorities say that he was flagged on the plane because his ticket was bought so late.
The latest Rasmussen poll has Charlie Crist, running now as an independent, with a narrow lead over Marco Rubio and a big lead over Democrat Kendrick Meek.
There’s been a lot of contradictory and erroneous information flying around about just who is responsible for paying for the cleanup of the BP Gulf oil spill. Is it all on BP? Are there caps to their liability? Here’s the bottom line on how it will work and who’s going to be paying.
Yesterday, on CBS, Mayor Bloomberg speculated that the failed bomb attack in Times Square might be the result of “someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the healthcare bill.”
Now the Tea Party Nation, the generally disrespected hocum group that put together the Tea Party Convention with Sarah Palin back in Nashville a few months back, has dashed off an email to members that we’ve obtained calling for an apology on behalf of Tea Partiers elsewhere. Because, I guess, if you wonder if the bomb might have been set off by a domestic crazy upset about the Health Care Reform bill, who else could that mean but the Tea Party Movement, right?
Email blast after the jump … Read More
A ‘conservation group’ quoted in today’s Times story about the Gulf oil spill has ties to the company, Transocean, that ran the rig that blew up.
Louisiana House to pass legislation to allow concealed weapons in churches and other places of worship.
President Obama’s approval and disapproval trend line since January 1st 2010.
(To see the full size graph, click the TPM logo in the box.)
Gibbs goes nuclear on Fox for having Brownie on to say President Obama sprung the oil leak on purpose in a sinister plot to advance the green energy agenda. See the video.
Coming off his Fox appearance yesterday, in which he claimed that President Obama had sprung the Gulf oil spill to advance his environmentalist agenda, Michael “Brownie” Brown just made an appearance on Hardball and doubled down on the claim. Matthews asked him whether he didn’t think people might suspect he was insane.
Matthews: “But don’t you know that what you’re saying, to a third party, not somebody like myself or somebody like yourself listening to you, thinks that you’re sounding insane.”
Doesn’t Matthews think he sounds insane too?
Video here.
In Indiana, it’ll be former Sen. Dan Coats (R) versus Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D) in the general election to succeed the retiring Sen. Evan Bayh (D), after Coats’ victory tonight in the GOP primary. Ellsworth is the presumptive Democratic nominee (recall that Bayh announced his decision not to run too late for there to be a Democratic primary, so the party’s central committee will select the nominee, but Ellsworth is the only contender). Coats held this seat until he retired in 1998. Now after 12 years in the lucrative lobbying business, he’s got a chance to get his old seat back.