Brutally Honest

"On President Obama’s watch, the IRS was weaponized"

Matt Purple has a humdinger up over at The American Spectator:

When an American compound in Benghazi was attacked last year, the Obama administration targeted a filmmaker named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, accusing him of setting the Muslim world ablaze and then throwing him in prison. The government also pressured YouTube to remove his allegedly offensive video. After it became evident that Benghazi was a coordinated terrorist attack that had little to do with Nakoula, family members of those killed started asking for answers. Journalists reacted with a smattering of press coverage, followed by weary demands that we all move on.

But when we learned this week that the Department of Justice secretly collected two months of phone records from the Associated Press, suddenly bats flew out of hell, shrieking could be heard from distant castle towers, and Richard Nixon’s ghost was seen clanking about the White House. With one of their own under attack, the press, which was more than happy to ignore the parents of dead Navy SEALs, demanded that the Obama administration be held accountable.

“Journalism,” observed Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for f**koffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector.” I’ve always disagreed to an extent; there are plenty of decent members of my profession, even if they’re merely exceptions to Thompson’s rule. But this week the overweening narcissism of the Fourth Estate was on full display, hoisted from the flagpole and flapping in the wind.

The press is comparing the DOJ’s actions to Watergate. That’s all well and good, but why couldn’t any of them have sent a little affront in the direction of Nakoula, who now sits in a prison cell ostensibly for a parole violation, but eminently for making a video Muslims found offensive? And if collecting phone data is Nixonian, what about when the Obama administration chucked Delphi workers off their pensions because they weren’t unionized? Or tried to obfuscate its role in the Fast and Furious operation that left a Border Patrol agent and countless Mexicans dead? Or engaged in the unprecedented persecution of leakers for years before the AP scandal broke?

Those stories were either mostly ignored or snidely dismissed as fodder for right-wing witch hunts. Only when their fellow scribblers came under attack did journalists suddenly sit bolt upright in bed. “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel,” is a timeworn Mark Twain quote, but apparently it’s also the only rule this administration was ever expected to follow.

The AP matter is bad, and made worse by Eric Holder’s apparent decision to recuse himself from the matter and go paperless on the same day. But the real scandals here are Benghazi and the IRS’s treatment of conservative nonprofits. The latter seems to sprout a new polyp every hour. We now know that the IRS not only targeted Tea Party charities, but also conservative, constitutional, Jewish, and pro-life groups. For more than two years, the agency refused to approve any Tea Party tax-exempt applications whatsoever. Certain applications were inappropriately leaked to the left-wing news outlet ProPublica. IRS employees even tried to blackmail one pro-life group into signing a pledge not to picket outside Planned Parenthood.

On President Obama’s watch, the IRS was weaponized and used to block the growth of conservative intellectual infrastructure. This wasn’t about a couple overcaffeinated agents in the IRS’s Cincinnati office trying to adapt to an onslaught of nonprofit applications. It was a blatant attempt to stymie the spread of ideas; a very potent and unique abuse of power.

Mr. Purple isn't quite done.  What he's written is damning in every sense of the word and should be read by you, by your friends, by your loved ones and by their friends and loved ones.

This isn't really about the right against the left.

It's about the right against the wrong.

"It is among the most gruesome and horrifying actions perpetrated on innocent persons"

It... is abortion and the Kermit Gosnell trial and his subsequent conviction has opened the door to some much needed conversations:

I recently read with great interest a fascinating story by the Associated Press. The life of a young girl, Lake Annabelle Hall, was saved following surgery to remove a cyst on her left lung. Had it not been discovered it would have killed her. She received such tremendous care that four teams comprised of 43 doctors and nurses tended to her and her mother. If it had been otherwise, her doctor noted, “She wouldn’t make it out of the delivery room.”

Delivery room? Did I neglect to mention that this surgery was done before Lake Annabelle was born?

The cyst was discovered during a routine 20-week OB/GYN visit. Ten weeks later, Lake Annabelle was partially delivered and medical staff performed the life-saving procedure. Fox News reports that “Doctors pulled her halfway out of her mother’s womb, leaving her connected to her umbilical cord and placenta, which served as life support for her,” and then they cut into her little body so that they might save her life. Lake Annabelle is now 6 months old, a marvelous example of the life-saving prospects of modern medical technology.

What a stark contrast between this life-affirming story and the horrors we’ve heard in recent weeks concerning Kermit Gosnell’s murder trial. Gosnell faced numerous charges including first degree murder, third degree murder, and infanticide and he was found guilty of three first degree murder charges and numerous others including the involuntary manslaughter of patient Karnamaya Mongar. His “Women’s Medical Center” in Philadelphia has been accurately described as a “house of horrors.” The techniques employed by Gosnell to take the life of both unborn and born are too gruesome to describe here.

Usually over the top in it’s coverage of anything concerning blood, death, and mayhem, the mainstream media has virtually ignored the story, only reporting on it after being called out for failure to do so. Archbishop Chaput has noted that “the failure—the allergic disinterest—of some of our most important national media … really doesn’t surprise. It’s part of the fabric of a culture that simply will not see what it doesn’t want to see about the realities of abortion.”

The reality of abortion is that it is among the most gruesome and horrifying actions perpetrated on innocent persons. Yet abortion, and to a lesser extent, infanticide have become accepted by the so called cultural elite. In Evangelium vitae Blessed John Paul lamented that “[c]hoices once unanimously considered criminal and rejected by the common moral sense are gradually becoming socially acceptable… In this way the very nature of the medical profession is distorted and contradicted. (4) The routine infanticide done in the “Women’s Medical Center” has horrified many including the jury who rightly determined that Gosnell was guilty of murdering infants. It cannot be forgotten, however, that the primary difference between infanticide and abortion is the location of the child being killed.

Arland K. Nichols, the author of that Crisis Magazine piece, goes on to challenge every Catholic, dare I say every moral person, to no longer remain silent.  Silence is evil.  Period.

Read the rest.

Accept the challenge.

Doing nothing is in actuality doing something... on the side of embracing death, embracing wickedness.

Carry on.

“They said my name, and they said, ‘We’re here to take you home.'”

Jessica Buchanan tells of her harrowing abduction at the hands of Somali pirates and her rescue by Seal Team 6 after more than 3 months of captivity:

She was “completely surrounded” the moment she was seized by Somali pirates, she recalled Monday on TODAY. “Yelling, screaming, hitting windshields with AK-47s. Guns in my face, and then we just take off driving through the desert into God only knows where.”

Buchanan spent the next 93 days in conditions so unsanitary they ended up threatening her health. The former grade-school teacher wrote about her experience in “Impossible Odds,” a book she co-authored with her husband, Erik Landemalm.

Buchanan thought she would die every single day she was held, she told TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie.

“They were long and scary, sometimes incredibly boring,” she said about those days. “I worried that I was actually, maybe not going to necessarily lose my life, but lose my mind.”

Her abductors barely gave her any food – bread, some tuna fish, a bit of water.

“They never treated us humanely,” she said. “A lot of times I just felt like an animal put on display.”

Buchanan named her book “Impossible Odds” because of the outrageous ransom demanded by her captives. “It was a great title because it felt like the most impossible situation ever: $45 million. Where do you come up with something like that?” she said.

Meanwhile, Buchanan’s husband said he felt completely helpless, with very little information to go on.

“It was the worst kind of feeling that I have ever experienced,” he told Guthrie. “I just wanted to go in after her, but at the same time, I had to trust that the right people would do the right thing to get her back.”

The appropriate team did just that. President Obama had ordered the U.S. military to launch a secret rescue operation headed by SEAL Team 6, the same special forces group that took out Osama bin Laden. The team rescued Buchanan along with a Danish aid worker, while killing all nine of their kidnappers.

Buchanan said the rescue mission came as a total surprise. “Just complete shock and awe that these men risked their lives to come in and to save mine and give me a second chance,” she said. “They said my name, and they said, ‘We’re here to take you home.'”

But Buchanan has never had a chance to thank her rescuers since that night.

“They’re just like that,” she said. “They come in, they do their job and then they fade into the distance. Just incredible, incredible period.”

There's video at the link (if you can stomach the Obama cheering... I could but only barely).

If only the President would fade into the distance after these events.

Widening controversy

A week ago Sunday, as the commencement speaker for Ohio University's 2013 graduating class, President Obama said that graduates, and by extension all Americans, should reject those voices warning that tyranny always lurks around the corner.

Yesterday we learned that the scandal surrounding the IRS's scrutiny of conservative groups was wider than initially thought:

The Internal Revenue Service's scrutiny of conservative groups went beyond those with "tea party" or "patriot" in their names—as the agency admitted Friday—to also include ones worried about government spending, debt or taxes, and even ones that lobbied to "make America a better place to live," according to new details of a government probe.

The investigation also revealed that a high-ranking IRS official knew as early as mid-2011 that conservative groups were being inappropriately targeted—nearly a year before then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told a congressional committee the agency wasn't targeting conservative groups.

The new disclosures are likely to inflame a widening controversy over IRS handling of dozens of applications by tea-party, patriot and other conservative groups for tax-exempt status.

The details emerged from disclosures to congressional investigators by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The findings, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, don't make clear who came up with the idea to give extra scrutiny to the conservative groups.

The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax exempt status. John McKinnon reports on the News Hub.

The inspector general's office has been conducting an audit of the IRS's handling of the applications process and is expected to release a report this week. The audit follows complaints last year by numerous tea-party and other conservative groups that they had been singled out and subjected to excessive and inappropriate questioning. Many groups say they were asked for lists of their donors and other sensitive information.

Tyranny is defined as the arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power.  The IRS, the agency tasked with enforcing Obamacare, is admitting to arbitrary abuse of its power.

It's not lurking around the corner.

It's here.

It makes the following graphic making its rounds on social media more than simply revealing.

Is Catholicism in America dying?

Fr. Longenecker suggests it is... and that it's being killed by cultural forces and complacency.

From his first in a series of posts on the subject:

The first problem is cultural catholicism. The Poles, Italians, Irish, French, Czech, German and more Catholics came here from the old country and the bishops reckoned the best thing to do with them all was to allow cultural parishes. So in the same town the Irish Catholics went to St Patrick’s and the Poles to St Stanislaus and the Italians to St Anthony of Padua. Geesh, a man in my parish who grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania said that when he was a boy a girl from his Czech parish fell in love with an Irish boy and the Irish priest wouldn’t marry them because it was a mixed marriage.

I’m all for cultural customs and so forth, but the problem is that the immigrant Catholics–in a foreign land–clung to their culture for security and happiness and part of that culture was their Catholicism. The didn’t distinguish their culture from their Catholicism. Then, after a few generations, when they were all really American and stopped being Italian or Irish or German they also stopped being Catholic. The Catholic faith wasn’t much deeper than Mama’s special spaghetti sauce or stories of the Blarney stone.

Of course they didn’t all stop being Catholic. Something else happened which was even more subtle and insidious. They became Americans and because their mindset was that their Catholic faith was something which blended with their culture, instead of being Italian-Catholics or Polish Catholics they became American Catholics. Just as nationalism and love of culture blended with their Catholic faith when they were ethnic minorities, now it blended seamlessly with their new American culture. Just as Catholicism gave their former culture God’s approval, not their Catholicism gave American values and culture God’s approval.

Thus we have what I call AmChurch: the American Catholic church which is happily and blissfully blended with everything wonderful about America. Except that the “wonderful” values of most Americans are unapologetically materialistic, hedonistic and self centered. Thus at least 50% of American Catholics live like their American neighbors–going to the mall, getting as much stuff as possible, giving as little as possible, having a neat and tidy two children and a double income, and basically smiling their way to success like everyone else.

Of course there's more, to include what Fr. Longecker sees to be a solution but he doesn't stop there.

In Part II, he writes about complacency:

Too many American Catholics are complacent. They are lukewarm, and when a church is lukewarm (as it says in the Book of Revelation) God will spit them out. Why are American Catholics lukewarm in their faith? The problem is not simply laziness. It is linked with the first problem of cultural Catholicism.

Too many American Catholics have soaked up the materialistic spirit of the American age totally uncritically. They have chosen the way of materialism, hedonism,utilitarianism and consumerism, and this has dulled their commitment to Christ and the gospel. What are all these “ism’s”? Materialism is not simply buying lots of stuff at the mall. It is also a philosophy that the physical world is really all that matters. This translates into an attitude about the church in which all that matters is the good works of feeding the poor and doing peace and justice. While these things are important–to focus on them alone makes the church, (as Pope Francis says) no more than an NGO–just another charity.

Hedonism is the pleasure principle. If it feels good do it. You needn’t be a debauched drug addict to be a hedonist. Your a perfectly good candidate for the hedonist party with your dedication to a nice, comfortable middle class lifestyle. If you live for pleasure–even if it is a refined and tasteful pleasure–you’re a hedonist.

Utilitarianism is putting practicality first. It is relying on worldly common sense rather then the Holy Spirit. It is making choices according to the bottom line, efficiency and practicality. Most American Catholics choose birth control, for example, because it is a practical, seemingly common sense decision. While we should be practical and efficient and choose wisely–we are also called not just to be practical, but radical. The saints are never utilitarian. Instead they are devoted to the wild and wonderful and unpredictable love of God.

Finally, consumerism is not just soaking up just as much of the world’s resources as possible. It is also a mentality that one is a customer. It’s Frank Sinatra’s theme song, “I Did it My Way”. It’s the attitude, “I’m paying. I’ll choose.” When this attitude comes into the church everybody is the loser. It breeds discontent, disorder and dissent.

Together these “ism’s” produce a kind of lethargy in the American Catholic Church. There’s a deadness and torpor. Eyes glaze over. Parishes become like yesterday’s porridge: cold and hard to stir. The fire is gone. The Church is complacent.

Again, there's more and it's all revealing.  I believe he'll be writing additional pieces so be on the lookout.

It's well worth checking into and frankly, I'm a little relieved at what I'm reading thus far.

Regular readers know that I returned to the Catholic Church roughly 3 years ago after about a 40 year hiatus.  My return however was offset by a number of people I know, some of them in my own family, who quit going.  I thought that perhaps I was killing Catholicism in America... or at least in my circle of influence.

It's good to know it's actually something else.  I was getting a complex.

Carry on.

"The military will make it a crime--possibly resulting in imprisonment--for those in uniform to share their faith" (UPDATED)

There's a part of me that wants to dismiss this report:

The Pentagon has released a statement confirming that soldiers could be prosecuted for promoting their faith: "Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense...Court martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis...”. 

The statement, released to Fox News, follows a Breitbart News report on Obama administration Pentagon appointees meeting with anti-Christian extremist Mikey Weinstein to develop court-martial procedures to punish Christians in the military who express or share their faith. 

(From our earlier report: Weinstein is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and says Christians--including chaplains--sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ in the military are guilty of “treason,” and of committing an act of “spiritual rape” as serious a crime as “sexual assault.” He also asserted that Christians sharing their faith in the military are “enemies of the Constitution.”)

Being convicted in a court martial means that a soldier has committed a crime under federal military law. Punishment for a court martial can include imprisonment and being dishonorably discharged from the military. 

So President Barack Obama’s civilian appointees who lead the Pentagon are confirming that the military will make it a crime--possibly resulting in imprisonment--for those in uniform to share their faith. This would include chaplains—military officers who are ordained clergymen of their faith (mostly Christian pastors or priests, or Jewish rabbis)--whose duty since the founding of the U.S. military under George Washington is to teach their faith and minister to the spiritual needs of troops who come to them for counsel, instruction, or comfort.

This regulation would severely limit expressions of faith in the military, even on a one-to-one basis between close friends. It could also effectively abolish the position of chaplain in the military, as it would not allow chaplains (or any service members, for that matter), to say anything about their faith that others say led them to think they were being encouraged to make faith part of their life. It’s difficult to imagine how a member of the clergy could give spiritual counseling without saying anything that might be perceived in that fashion.

Someone tell me this is wrong.

Someone tell me that this is being blown out of proportion.

Please.

UPDATE: The Pentagon has weighed in:

“The U.S. Department of Defense has never and will never single out a particular religious group for persecution or prosecution,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen said in a statement. “The Department makes reasonable accommodations for all religions and celebrates the religious diversity of our service members.”

“Service members can share their faith (evangelize), but must not force unwanted, intrusive attempts to convert others of any faith or no faith to one’s beliefs (proselytization),” Christensen added.

He also said that “when religious harassment complaints are reported, commanders take action based on the gravity of the occurrence on a case by case basis.” He did not specify what the range of penalties could be.

The latest statement was aimed at refuting widely circulated reports in conservative media outlets that Christian soldiers could be court-martialed for sharing their faith.

Good to hear.  Lord, help me believe it.

"Priests are no longer considered to be emergency responders."

A friend yesteday filled me in on what follows and it's seriously troubling in my view:

The heart-wrenching photographs taken in the moments after the Boston Marathon bombings show the blue-and-yellow jackets of volunteers, police officers, fire fighters, emergency medical technicians, even a three-foot-high blue M&M. Conspicuously absent are any clerical collars or images of pastoral care.

This was not for lack of proximity. Close to the bombing site are Trinity Episcopal Church, Old South Church and St. Clement Eucharistic Shrine, all on Boylston Street. When the priests at St. Clement's, three blocks away, heard the explosions, they gathered sacramental oils and hurried to the scene in hopes of anointing the injured and, if necessary, administering last rites, the final of seven Catholic sacraments. But the priests, who belong to the order Oblates of the Virgin Mary, weren't allowed at the scene.

The Rev. John Wykes, director of the St. Francis Chapel at Boston's soaring Prudential Center, and the Rev. Tom Carzon, rector of Our Lady of Grace Seminary, were among the priests who were turned away right after the bombings. It was jarring for Father Wykes, who, as a hospital chaplain in Illinois a decade ago, was never denied access to crime or accident scenes.

"I was allowed to go anywhere. In Boston, I don't have that access," he says.

But Father Wykes says he has noticed a shift in the societal role of clergy over the past few decades: "In the Bing Crosby era—in the '40s, '50s, '60s—a priest with a collar could get in anywhere. That's changed. Priests are no longer considered to be emergency responders."

...

In light of the devastation in Boston, the denial of access to clergy is a trifling thing, and it might even have been an individual's error. (The Boston Police Department did not respond to a request for comment on its policy regarding clergy at the scenes of emergencies.)

But it is a poignant irony that Martin Richard, the 8-year-old boy who died on Boylston Street, was a Catholic who had received his first Communion just last year. As Martin lay dying, priests were only yards away, beyond the police tape, unable to reach him to administer last rites—a sacrament that, to Catholics, bears enormous significance.

As the Rev. Richard Cannon, a priest in Hopkinton, Mass., where the marathon begins, said in a homily on the Sunday after the bombings, "When the world can seem very dark and confusing, the presence of a priest is a presence of hope."

The times they are a changin'... and not for the better.

God help us reverse these sorts of things, help we who are believers do what is necessary to draw folks back to You and Your ways.  God help us overcome the inclination to keep You at arms length.

"The problem is not inadequate laws, but a growing spiritual vacuum at the heart of our modern societies..."

Charles Lehardy is talking stress cracks and to what those cracks might lead:

A stress crack — mix time, pressure, slight movements of the earth, perhaps some manufacturing defects, and eventually the PVC becomes stressed beyond what it can withstand. Under the relentless pressure of the water within the pipe a crack forms, water escapes, and a trickle becomes an artesian well.

I think of Adam Lanza, the mentally disturbed young man who killed children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary school, as suffering from a stress crack. At one time, he was probably a sweet kid, though challenged in ways we can't imagine by his autism. Autism doesn't make you murderous. Some other pressures built up in Adam's life — his parents' divorce, his mom's overprotectiveness, burying himself in the world of violent video games. The sum of these somehow shattered his human decency and pushed him into an inexplicable, callous rage towards innocent school children.

We would like to think that we can prevent such horrors by stricter gun laws or increased access to mental health services — and yes, it's likely that these sorts of legal and medical interventions would reduce the number of blowouts.

But as quickly as we might stop people like Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Eric Harris, Dillon Klebold and Seung-Hui Cho, along come a couple of demented individuals ready to park pressure cookers filled with ball bearings and explosives in the middle of a crowd.

What moves people to such unthinkable disregard for life? What produces such blinding anger and rage that murdering strangers seems a reasonable solution to the fury building up within?

The fact that evil persists despite all our efforts to eradicate it tells me that better laws and more generous social services are only dealing with the surface issues, while missing the deep internal flaws that are at the heart of these murderous outbursts, not to mention all manner of lesser rages and daily insults that we shrug off. The problem is not inadequate laws, but a growing spiritual vacuum at the heart of our modern societies, a vacuum crying out for the God Who Loves Us, a vacuum that we fill instead with modern skepticism and childish platitudes. 

He's far from done.

Finish with him.  You'll not regret it.

"If I let it rule me, I will go to hell"

Can I get a show of hands if at any time since the Boston bombings Monday you were thirsty for some serious revenge and retribution for those responsible?

More than likely, if I had the ability, I'd see a slew of hands.  I can openly confess that mine would be amongst them.

I think it to be a 'normal' response, a very human response.  Yet as a Catholic Christian, it's something I need to be able to control, something I need not so much to suppress but to not allow it to control and/or motivate me to do things I know to be problematic.

Why you might be asking?

In my mind, it boils down to something dramatically simple yet profoundly meaningful and impacting.

Mark Shea was able to summarize in a couple of paragraphs and he speaks for me:

People often get mad at me for vocally opposing the death penalty and torture.  They seem to think I regard myself as a stainless saint.  What people don’t get is that these things are–particularly at moments like this–massively tempting for me.  It is easy to fantasize about what I would do to these sons of bitches if I was the man whose wife was brain-damaged, whose son was dead, whose daughter had her legs blown off.  I have sufficient imagination to devise punishments of such cruelty and exquisite slowness that your blood would freeze.  Part of me wants very much to see men like this beg for death to relieve their agonies–and then to very slowly and with relish give it to them.

But that part of me has nothing to do with Jesus Christ and if I let it rule me, I will go to hell.  So I reassert the Church’s teaching here loudly, because I want to go to heaven.

Of course there will be critics who find things here to pick apart and ridicule but I remind you that I called it a summary, meaning that of course, there's much more to it.  

The teaching of the Church, through which Christ is revealed and made manifest, goes far deeper than two short paragraphs but should we take them seriously, we'll find ourselves mirroring the life, the character, the person of Jesus Christ.

Would He want us seeking revenge and retribution?  Would He want us fantasizing about what we would do to the sons of bitches responsible for the deaths of innocents?  Would He want us devising cruel punishments and ways to put them to death slowly and painfully?

I don't think so.  

Actually, I pretty much know so.

Mark is right.  We can't let that sentiment rule us, or we will go to hell, where Christ is not.

One bomber killed, second still on the loose in Watertown

Sadly, a police officer has also been killed, another wounded after tangling with the terrorists:

One suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing was killed during a shootout with police and a massive manhunt was underway for the second suspect in the Boston suburb of Watertown, officials said on Friday.

Police were searching for the bombing suspect who was photographed wearing a white hat just before the explosions that killed three people and wounded 176. The blasts triggered security scares across the United States and evoked memories of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

"We believe this to be a terrorist," said Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis of the bombing suspect still at large. "We believe this to be a man who has come here to kill people. We need to get him in custody."

The massive police operation was under way in Watertown after the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Thursday released pictures and video of two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, enlisting the public's help in identifying two men wearing backpacks and baseball caps in the crowd minutes before bombs exploded near the finish line.

Massachusetts State Police warned people in Watertown not to open their doors while police conducting a door-to-door, street-by-street search.

HOW THE NIGHT BEGAN

About five hours after the FBI released the pictures of the bombing suspects, a police officer was shot and killed on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Middlesex County District Attorney said in a statement.

A short time later, police received reports of a carjacking by two men who kept their victim inside the car for about half an hour, the statement said.

Police pursued that car to Watertown, where explosives were thrown from the car at police and gunfire was exchanged, the statement said.

"During the exchange of the gunfire, we believe that one of the suspects was struck and ultimately taken into custody. A second suspect was able to flee from that car and there is an active search going on at this point in time," Colonel Timothy Alben, superintendent of the Massachusetts State Police, told a news conference.

The report of the second officer being wounded comes from Fox News:

The Middlesex district attorney said the two men are suspected of killing the MIT police officer on campus late Thursday, then stealing a car at gunpoint and later releasing its driver unharmed. Hours earlier, police had released photos of the marathon bombing suspects and asked for the public's help finding them.

The suspects threw explosives from the car as police followed it into Watertown, according to the district attorney's news release. The suspects and police exchanged gunfire, and one of the suspects was critically injured and later died while the other escaped.

During the pursuit, a MBTA transit police officer was seriously injured and transported to the hospital, the news release states. Details on the officer's condition were not immediately available Friday morning.

Lots of unanswered questions in the wake of all this happening, to include where these two men came from, who trained them, whether there are others with them, etc.

I trust that law enforcement officials and others will get to the bottom of it all.

Pray for God's justice for the remaining perp (and anyone he's partnering with), God's peace and comfort and rest for all victims and their loved ones.