CNN

CNN is reporting that an arrest has been made in the bombing of Monday's Boston Marathon. The suspect was identified via numerous videotapes. No further details are available yet, but a nation is anxiously waiting to see who could cause such a horrible act of carnage and for what reason.

UPDATE (2:40pm edt)

Now they are saying no arrest has been made and Boston Police just sent out this tweet

Despite reports to the contrary there has not been an arrest in the Marathon attack.

— Boston Police Dept. (@Boston_Police) April 17, 2013

Sounds like another day of "no one knowing".

Remember back towards the end of last year when it came out that members of Congress were exempt from insider trading laws? The Senate quickly acted to fix that, rightly so, yet the House delayed acting on it. Actually it wasn't the whole House, but rather one man - Majority Leader, Eric Cantor. Here was his excuse back in December:

Cantor reportedly said he blocked the bill to give Congress more time to examine the issue. Critics of the move, however, fear that any delay could kill the bill entirely.

Well 5 months later and it finally got passed, but not before some "tweaks" went into it, by none other than Eric Cantor:

CNN is reporting that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) office wrote a loophole into the House version of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (STOCK) exempting Congress members’ spouses and children from having to report stock market transactions over $1,000 in a timely manner.

The Senate version of the bill requires these transactions be reported within 45 days by both its members and their families. But a memo from the Office of Government Ethics, which oversees all federal executive branch employees, used the House version, telling them spouses and children were not subject to the rule.

Neither of the bill’s Senate co-sponsors, Scott Brown (R-MA) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), knew about the discrepancy.

“I mean, bottom line, we’re supposed to have that level of transparency and have us be treated like every other member of the United States,” Brown told CNN’s Dana Bash. “Bottom line, if we can’t do it, then — sorry, if they can’t do it — then we shouldn’t be able to do it as well.”

Mitt Romney Communications Director Eric Fehrnstrom, appearing on CNN, was asked about his candidate moving to the far right and possibly alienating some of the more independent supporters. Here's what he said:

HOST: Is there a concern that Santorum and Gingrich might force the governor to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election?

FEHRNSTROM: Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.

Think Progress has the video from this exchange.

Welcome to the problem of politics that all American's know about. The fact that candidates now admit they don't believe what they say; that they are willing to say anything to get the vote, is a serious issue facing America. No one ever knows exactly what their candidate is going to do once in office, and once they do assume their elected position they will try and do everything to make you feel crazy for thinking they stood for something else.

And while this issue plagues all sides of the political spectrum, it has been most obvious in Mitt Romney. This man has constantly flip-flopped on issues. That's also why President Obama will have an easy time beating him. Even Republican voters would be willing to vote for Obama over Romney simply because they know what they are getting with Obama, but Romney will be a serious gamble. Fehrnstrom just reaffirmed that fear with many in the GOP. I'm sure Obama is thanking him right now.

As I have been saying for months now, the GOP's biggest problem this year is going to be energizing the base. It seems like that problem is now starting to show:

A new national poll from CNN shows two conflicting points of data. First, President Barack Obama remains vulnerable in a match-up with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by the numbers, as Romney bests the President by one point in the survey 48 - 47. But Romney’s presence at the top of the ticket, which is becoming more and more likely as he continues to win primary states, raise millions, and pick up endorsements, seems to be having another effect on the party — the CNN poll shows that GOP enthusiasm is going down just as 2012 is starting.

The CNN numbers were not the first to show this confluence of events — Pew released numbers in the second week of January comparing the level of Republican enthusiasm for their candidates at levels that closely resembled Democrats in 2004, both of which are well below the fire that both parties had for their candidates in 2008. “In the current survey, conservative Republicans and GOP-leaning independents express more positive opinions of the presidential field than do moderates or liberals (56% excellent or good vs. 43%),” Pew wrote. “In January 2008, 70% of conservatives and 64% of moderates and liberals said the GOP candidates as a group were excellent or good.”

Meanwhile CNN's poll shows Republican enthusiasm has dropped by 10 points since October. If those numbers don't improve then President Obama will have a much better chance at getting his second term.

During last night’s GOP/Tea Party debate on CNN, Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul if under his America would a sick man without insurance be allowed to die instead of receiving care. Before Paul could even answer, the Tea Partiers started chanting “yes”. Here’s the video caught by TPM:

It really hurts my brain to think about these people and how they go out and act like the righteous when it comes to religion, yet they ignore the most basically preaching's of God and Jesus. It also makes me want to break things when I think about these hypocrites. These are the same people that sat in town halls a couple of years ago telling politicians that the government better not touch their Medicare. These people believe that they are the ones entitled, but no one else.

An article currently appearing on Fox 19 in Cincinnati asks if the media is fairly covering the Ruppert Murdoch hacking scandal. After giving a vague background on the story, they go to their analysis:

In the great scheme of things,"News of the World" is pretty immaterial to News Corp.'s earnings, in the one percent range.  As one analyst said "whatever happens there is a flea on the back of an elephant,"

Where that flea becomes a bigger problem, when media entities like Fox news, which are owned by News Corp, barely cover the scandal.

The left leaning site Media Matters tracked the number of times the three cable networks covered the scandal between July 4th and July 17.  This was when the scandal first broke.

CNN covered it the most, 107 times.  Compare that to Fox news which ran only 30 stories.

Erick Erickson on CNN:

here is not in any way, shape, or form any rational explanation for the United States engaged in Libya to do nothing except for one I can think of — Barack Obama's re-election.

…

Suddenly Obama can look Presidential again — all through manufacturing the need for American involvement where there was no need. Barack Obama wants to be re-elected. The best playbook for his re-election is that of Bill Clinton. But Clinton had a government shutdown and Kosovo. In the absence of either, Barack Obama must manufacture them.

And he has.

From a 1998 Washington Post article:

In August 1998, when [Clinton] ordered missile strikes in an effort to kill Osama bin Laden, there was widespread speculation — from such people as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) — that he was acting precipitously to draw attention away from the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, then at full boil. Some said he was mistaken for personalizing the terrorism struggle so much around bin Laden. And when he ordered the closing of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House after domestic terrorism in Oklahoma City, some Republicans accused him of hysteria.

Whenever a Democrat takes military action, the right takes to their aluminum foil hats to create any conspiracy theory they can. Of course Erickson is one of those that still believes we found WMD in Iraq, despite the Bush administration even admitting we never did. Aren’t you glad he works for the “most trusted name in news”?