Actually, you probably did miss the news because most major media outlets didn't cover it in a serious way, if at all. Instead, they and their audiences evidently view such information as far less news-, buzz- and tweet-worthy than (among other things) the opening of George W. Bush's library and President Obama's jokes at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Such an appetite for distraction, no doubt, comes from both those who deny the problem of climate change and those who acknowledge the crisis but nonetheless look away from what feels like an unsolvable mess.

That sense of hopelessness is understandable. After all, some of the most hyped ways to reduce carbon emissions -- electric cars, mass-scale renewable energy power plants, etc. -- require the kind of technological transformations that can seem impossibly unrealistic at a time when Congress can't even pass a budget.

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Up until today, you might have been able to write all that anti-democratic pathology off as one infecting only the Republican Party's politicians and institutional leadership, but not its rank-and-file voters. But then this morning Fairleigh Dickinson University released this gun control-related pollshowing that authoritarianism runs throughout the the entire party.

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In 2008, the hysterical backlash to the above comment by Barack Obama's minister became a high-profile example of one of the most insidious rules in American politics: You are not allowed to honestly discuss the Central Intelligence Agency's concept of "blowback" without putting yourself at risk of being deemed a traitor to country.

Now, five years later, with America having killed thousands of Muslim civilians in its drone strikes and wars, that rule is thankfully being challenged, and not by someone who is so easily smeared. Instead, the apostate is one of this epoch's most revered journalists, and because of that, we will see whether this country is mature enough to face one of its biggest national security quandaries.

This is the news from Tom Brokaw's appearance on “Meet the Press” last Sunday. Discussing revelations that the bombing suspects may be connected to Muslim fundamentalism, he said:

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First and foremost, if my old boss and friend, the wildly popular former Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D), mounts a Democratic candidacy it means the seat would likely remain in the party's hands. Additionally, and more important for the long-term topography of American politics, Baucus is not just a single Democrat holding a Senate seat in a Republican-leaning state. He is one of the politicians most responsible for the Democratic Party's destructive long-term shift to the right on economic issues. That means his retirement isn't just a 2014 story or a Montana story; it is significant to the whole country.

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I talked to Silva about the new show, President Obama's research push and what we still do not know about the human mind.

Your show is predicated on the idea that many people do not really understand how their own brain works. Why do you think that is?

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In public, of course, prospective newspaper buyers continue to pretend that they are primarily interested in purchasing newspapers either to 1) preserve a venerated civic institution and objective journalism or 2) to seize an honest, straightforward business opportunity.

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My answer to the question about sadness should be self-evident: yes, of course I am sad, and if you aren't sad, you have no soul or aren't paying attention. That's because it should be sad to anyone to see a city terrorized into lockdown mode and Americans maimed and killed. That's a tragedy for the victims, sad for Boston, sad for America and sad for whole communities who are already being persecuted for the actions of individuals.

As I wrote in my syndicated newspaper column yesterday, there are no definitive answers to something as horrible as all that. But there are huge questions. Here are three to ponder at the end of an awful week:

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Sensory overload, of course, is the deafening effect of the Catastrophe Aftermath, one of the last unifying and consistent rituals in our atomized nation. Yes, regardless of whether the tragedy is a school shooting or a terrorist attack, the epilogues of these now-constant mass casualty events have become prepackaged productions that seem less like reality than scripted television dramas.

You know how it goes. Cable outlets blare breaking news chyrons. Twitter explodes with declarations that we are "all from (insert city name) today." Websites post videos of viscera and other disaster porn. Pundits wildly speculate about perpetrators. The president promises justice. Law enforcement press conferences review body counts. Municipal officials insist the community will "stand united." Funerals commence. A media icon says something outrageous. Other media carnival barkers then react to the bombast. Ultimately, the whole episode becomes another excuse to limit civil liberties and is forgotten by all but those personally affected.

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O'Reilly starts out by stating something every American almost certainly agrees with: We should all be first and foremost hoping that the perpetrator -- whoever he or she is -- is apprehended as quickly as possible. Then he moves into an analysis of the future reaction. As O'Reilly put it, "If this is an international terror attack, the repercussions will be severe," but, he added, "if it's home-grown" that will just "be another stain on American history."

In stating such an obvious truth, O'Reilly has (inadvertently) spotlighted the double standard that drives so much of our public policymaking and our cultural attitudes toward national security.

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This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings -- even though most come at the hands of white dudes.

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I heard the news as most did - through the digital grapevine. My initial reaction was the same as that of many people with loved ones in Boston - entirely personal and worried about possible friends and family who might have been maimed or, god forbid, killed. But while I fretted and texted and called, I also realized that something had changed in me -- and in all of us -- since I fled the U.S. Capitol back on Sept. 11, 2001. What had changed was that while I was nervous, worried, disgusted and anxious -- and while I was shaking my head muttering rhetorical questions about the senselessness of the world -- I was no longer shocked.

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This bizarre repetition of presidential history was the subject of Rachel Maddow's MSNBC interview last night of President Obama's top political consigliere David Axelrod. The discussion was significant for how Axelrod tried to avoid answering why, when it comes to Social Security, President Obama is now positioning himself to the right of Ronald Reagan. He is doing this by invoking deficits and debt as the reason to propose cutting Social Security, even though that program that has almost nothing to do with the national deficit and debt.

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As the coverage of Margaret Thatcher's death this week reminds us, the 1980s still define us in so many ways. The National Geographic Channel poll, timed to the Sunday premiere of the channel's three-night "The '80s: The Decade That Made Us," is chock-full of revealing findings about why exactly that is.

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This latter metaphor, with its impossible-to-predict outcomes and upsets, is supposed to define the NCAA's March basketball tournament. So obsessed are we by the "madness" of possible upsets and Cinderella stories that bracketology is now a national gambling ritual conducted in most workplaces, from the White House on down.

But what if March Madness is celebrating something that shouldn't be celebrated? What if the rags-to-riches, up-from-the-bootstraps metaphor that makes the tournament so appealing is the wrong one? What if, instead, the NCAA tournament is really a metaphor for something darker, more sinister and more disturbing about our society?

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Cautious AP executives did not frame it exactly that way. Instead, editor Kathleen Carroll portrayed the decision as one in defense of grammar, saying that the term "illegal" properly "describe(s) only an action" and that it is not an appropriate label to describe a human being.

"Illegal," of course, has been used as more than a mere label -- it has for years been used as an outright epithet by xenophobes. They abhor the notion of America becoming more diverse -- and specifically, more non-white -- and so they have tried to convert "illegal" into a word that specifically dehumanizes Latinos. Thus, as any honest person can admit, when Republican politicians and media blowhards decry "illegals," they are pretending to be for a race-blind enforcement of immigration laws, but they are really signaling their hatred of Latino culture.

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In a CNN interview discussing the plan, NRA official Asa Hutchinson claimed he is "open to expanding background checks," but the Huffington Post notes "he stopped far short of endorsing the type of universal background checks for all gun sales that have been proposed" in major legislation before the U.S. Senate.

All of this points to five key questions at the heart of today's increasingly bizarre gun debate - and their not-so-satisfying answers:

1. Why does the NRA oppose the universal background check policy it once championed?

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I don't personally agree that this logic is a convincing justification for the American Police State, and when I hear such arguments, I inevitably find myself confused by the contradiction of police-state proponents proposing to curtail freedom in order to protect it. But whether or not you subscribe to the police-state tautology, you have to admit there is more than a bit of hypocrisy at work when those who forward the Big Brother logic simultaneously insist such logic shouldn't apply to them or the governmental agencies they oversee.

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In its preview story of the political week ahead, the New York Times notes that the president is "seek(ing) to regain momentum" on the gun issue as "a filibuster threat is growing in the senate" and as a two-week congressional recess is marked by a nationwide activist push by the National Rifle Association. To counter it, the president is heading to Colorado, a state made famous by two of the most high-profile gun massacres in history - and now the first state in the historically pro-gun West to pass serious gun regulations.

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Yes, that's right -- NCAA basketball is a $780 million-a year business that makes 1 percenters out of NCAA executives, coaches, athletic directors and college administrators. Yet that same business offers relative scraps to the players who actually generate that money.

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