At least six politicians have now deleted tweets they sent about Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

All of them sent tweets offering initial praise of Bergdahl’s release, only to later backtrack and pull the posts off the web. But thanks to Politwoops, a website from the Sunlight Foundation, the Internet never forgets.

They include four Republican members of Congress, one Democrat and the Republican state senator who won Iowa’s five-way Senate primary on Tuesday night. That’s two more than the four Mashable reported on Tuesday.

See who’s scrambling to run from the spreading Bergdahl backlash.

Senator Thad Cochran (R-Miss.)

Cochran Bergdahl Tweet

Senator Thad Cochran, who is locked in a runoff with a tea party challenger in the Mississippi GOP primary, deleted a pro-Bergdahl tweet on Wednesday sent three days prior that welcomed the freed POW home from the clutches of the Taliban.

Senator Cochran tweeted, “Welcome home, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. A grateful America thanks you for your service.”

It was pulled early Wednesday afternoon. In it’s place now stands a tweet with a link to a statement questioning the decision to negotiate for Bergdahl’s release.

“While we can appreciate Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl’s service before he went missing in Afghanistan and the prospect of his reunification with family and friends, […]

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Researcher displays a sample of the record-setting new solar cell on the MIT campus. Credit: Chia-Hao Chuang

Solar-cell technology has advanced rapidly, as hundreds of groups around the world pursue more than two dozen approaches using different materials, technologies, and approaches to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Now a team at MIT has set a new record for the most efficient quantum-dot cells-a type of solar cell that is seen as especially promising because of its inherently low cost, versatility, and light weight.

While the overall efficiency of this cell is still low compared to other types-about 9 percent of the energy of sunlight is converted to electricity-the rate of improvement of this technology is one of the most rapid seen for a solar technology. The development is described in a paper, published in the journal Nature Materials, by MIT professors Moungi Bawendi and Vladimir Bulović and graduate students Chia-Hao Chuang and Patrick Brown.

The new process is an extension of work by Bawendi, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Chemistry, to produce quantum dots with precisely controllable characteristics-and as uniform thin coatings that can be applied to other materials. These minuscule particles are very effective at turning light into electricity, and vice versa. […]

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Lawyers claim the Diocese of Trenton, New Jersey, should not be held liable for sexual abuse allegedly committed by a priest because he wasn’t officially ‘on duty” when he molested a teenage boy.

Chris Naples claimed Rev. Terence McAlinden, who once headed the diocese’s youth group, sexually abused him during church-sponsored trips to Delaware in the 1980s.

But diocese lawyers told the Delaware Supreme Court that McAlinden was not officially on duty when the abuse took place.

‘You can determine a priest is not on duty when he is molesting a child, for example,” the attorney argued. ‘A priest abusing a child is absolutely contrary to the pursuit of his master’s business, to the work of a diocese.”

That statement left Naples reeling, he told The (Newark) Star-Ledger.

‘Any hope I had that the church was concerned about me as a victim or about the conduct of its priests was totally gone,” Naples said. ‘They were washing their hands of it. I was shattered. I just couldn’t believe that was one of their arguments.”

Delaware courts ruled Naples did not have jurisdiction to sue the diocese in that state because he couldn’t prove the trips were church sanctioned, but he did win a $3 million judgment […]

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Only in D.C. does the Republican Party drop like an anvil on any improvements to the country that could conceivably pass through our bicameral legislature. In our various state houses, the GOP is busy passing laws rather than squashing them.

And what laws they pass: divining menaces to the Republic in everything from high-speed buses to homeless people’s knapsacks to solar panels, state-level Republicans have gone on the offense. More often than not they’ve succeeded in getting laws passed that range from counterproductive to downright cruel. Below are the five craziest and most destrcutive, just in the past couple of months.

1. Missouri Legalizes Shooting People for Being in Your Section

Feeling the Castle Doctrine defined ‘castle” too narrowly, Missouri State Representative Joe Don McGaugh proposed a bill allowing any citizen to use deadly force to protect against unlawful entry of private property. ‘This is a common sense extension of the law that would empower a nanny or babysitter, or anyone with the owner’s permission to occupy a property, to defend himself or herself against an intruder,” he said.

Unfortunately, McGaugh didn’t write his bill very carefully, and the Missouri House ended up passing a law that endorses use of deadly force by anyone […]

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The rich aren’t like you and me. In public polling, the policy preferences of the top 1 percent of earners look very different than the general public’s.

The Campaign for America’s Future compared recent polling of the 1 percent, or those who have an average income of more than $1 million a year, with an averaging of public opinion polling from groups such as Gallup and Pew of Americans generally. Overall, the general public is strongly in favor of government spending on a variety of anti-poverty, educational, and jobs related initiatives while there is much more tepid support from elites. Meanwhile, the richest among us are quicker to favor deep cuts to services and programs.

When it comes to lifting people up, more than three-quarters of the general public thinks the minimum wage should be high enough that someone working full time doesn’t fall below the poverty line, but just 40 percent of the elites agree.

Nearly 90 percent of Americans think the government should spend whatever is necessary to make sure all children can go to high-quality public schools, but just over a third of the richest think so.

Nearly 80 percent of the public thinks the government should make sure […]

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