WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

Here are just a few of the hundreds of messages from a public spreadsheet created within hours of the tragedy by Bostonians offering space in their homes to those in need after the Boston Marathon bombing.

My place has two beds, one air mattress, and a couch. A few blocks from the finish line. My place is small but open to any one that cannot get to their hotels tonight. I'm a local dentist, and I want to contribute.

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I am so sorry we all have to deal with this. My thoughts are with all people who got hurt. I have a guest room with a double bed. I am right on the orange line 5 stops away from Back Bay station. I used to host marathon runners in my house in the South End, steps away from Copley. I will give you a safe place to stay.

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If you're traveling with children, we have 2 Pack-n-Play's, toddler tub, diapering needs, etc. Our apt is rather small, but we do have a queen size inflatable mattress, a couch, and a day bed where people can sleep.

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Anything you need: food, comfy couch to sleep on, and even some wine and a cat to hang out with for as long as you need

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Henrique Capriles’ suicide mission will likely come to an end Sunday, when Venezuelans go to the polls and elect Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chávez’s handpicked successor, in a nasty, rigged campaign. If Capriles should somehow win -- an improbability by almost any measure -- it is, frankly, unlikely the Maduro forces don’t have a Plan B to hold on to power, such as an appeal to the Venezuelan Supreme Court -- handpicked by Chávez and a vital player in these last few months in the drama of Chávez’s death, Maduro’s presidential succession and the laying out of the campaign frame work.

The brief 30-day campaign has favored Maduro not simply because of his association with Chávez and because Chávez’s last public words were an endorsement of him as heir -- though this alone is a mighty reason for many Venezuelans to support him.

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Three takeaways from Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s trip to Cuba:

1) It was legal, but that it was legal doesn’t mean it wasn’t utterly fraudulent.

2) How anybody on earth can think the embargo is doing any good is a continuing mystery of American politics.

3) Anybody surprised by Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s trip to the island hasn’t been listening to Jay-Z. And anybody listening to Jay-Z probably knows nothing feeds a false sense of rebellion more than prohibiting something.

Now, one at a time.

Did anybody think Jay-Z and Beyoncé were going to make such a noisy trip to the axis of evil without a legal license to do so and embarrass the hell of their buddy in the White House?

They’re not that stupid, and Sen. Marco Rubio, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Rep.

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Is President Barack Obama playing the Republicans – or is he playing us?

Do you believe the budget he’s presenting this week – the first time in history a Democratic president tries to cut Social Security – is a shrewd political move to divide the GOP, or do you think the president wouldn’t mind tying Social Security benefits to a new formula, called “chained CPI,” that would effectively reduce benefits to everyone?

This is, after all, the president who came up with the sequester as an idea that was so abhorrent no one in their right mind would let it actually occur … and thus the Republicans would come around and cut a decent debt-limit deal and get budget talks going. Except, of course, it didn’t quite happen that way …

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You might have thought that after the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce came to an agreement over the weekend on guest workers – historically the trickiest part of immigration reform for unions – that the immigration bill the senatorial Gang of Eight has been working on would find the road a little smoother. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) even went on the Sunday shows this week and crowed about a “substantial” agreement moving forward with both Democratic and Republican support.

Except that the Republican most identified with the bill put the brakes on it. On Saturday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) fired off a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) asking him to slow down the possible legislation.

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There seems to be a growing consensus that the Supreme Court will strike down the Defense of Marriage Act but step away from Prop 8, ruling that the plaintiffs in the case -- private citizens who led a public referendum to undo California’s same sex marriage legalization -- don’t actually have standing.

If that’s what they do -- and I tend to lean in that direction -- the net effect will mean that, on Prop 8, the ruling of the lower courts will stand: Prop 8 will be thrown out and same sex marriages will be legal in California again. The ruling will affect only California.

Ruling DOMA unconstitutional will mean that same sex couples married in any one of the eight states and the District of Columbia that permit it will be eligible for all the rights and privileges of opposite sex couples -- and as the Justices pointed out, there are more than 1,000 benefits from which same sex married couples are currently excluded, including Social Security survivor benefits, military family housing, tax filing, etc.

But here are a few other things to consider:

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The weirdest part of this morning’s arguments on Prop 8 before the Supreme Court is that everybody -- including the lawyer representing Prop 8 backers -- seems to think same sex marriage is an inevitability, but that the court’s duty is not to hurry it along.

“Consider the California voter, in 2008,” said Charles Cooper, the attorney for Prop 8’s backers, “in the ballot booth, with the question before her whether or not this age-old bedrock social institution should be fundamentally redefined, and knowing that there’s no way that she or anyone else could possibly know what the long-term implications of -- of profound redefinition of a bedrock social institution would be.

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