Open Thread

[...]If your "way of life" involves handing deadly weapons to five-year olds, your way of life is completely screwed up and you should change it immediately because it is stupid and wrong. (And, again, also, too: goddammit, "learning to use and respect a gun" means at least knowing that the fking thing is loaded when it's sitting in the corner of the parlor like it's a damn umbrella stand or something, and we should talk about that part, too.) It is not in any way "normal" to hand a kindergartner a firearm. If a mother from the inner-city of, say, Philadelphia did that, and the kid subsequently shot his sister to death, Fox News never would stop yelling about the crisis in African American communities and the Culture Of Death, and rap music, too. If your culture is telling you that children who have only recently emerged from toddlerhood should have their own guns, then your culture is deadly and dangerous and that should concern you, too. If your culture demands that, in the face of a general national outrage over the killing of other children, your politics work to loosen the gun laws you have, as they apparently did in Kentucky, then your culture is making your politics stupid and wrong and you should change them, too.[...]

Michael Tomasky: "How stupid does the Senate background-check vote look now, I ask the pundits and others who thought it was dumb politics for Obama and the Democrats to push for a vote that they obviously knew they were going to lose. I'd say not very stupid at all. The nosedive taken in the polls by a number of senators who voted against the bill, most of them in red states, makes public sentiment here crystal clear. And now, for the first time since arguably right after the Reagan assassination attempt--a damn long time, in other words--legislators in Washington are feeling political heat on guns that isn't coming from the NRA. This bill will come back to the Senate, maybe before the August recess, and it already seems possible and maybe even likely to have 60 votes next time."

McKay Coppins notes that with teabagging criticism of the immigration reform effort "grow[ing] louder, many Republican operatives, donors, and consultants are bracing for an outcome that would be even worse, politically, than the demise of the bill: A fierce, national, right-wing backlash that drowns out the GOP's friendlier voices, dominates Telemundo and Univision, and dashes any hopes the party had of making inroads to the Hispanic electorate by 2016." I personally think we are going to get both nightmare outcomes for the GOP. The demise of the bill will be accomplished by having the right act all explicitly racist, anti-immigrant and insane.

In Pennsylvania, a new Quinnipiac poll has such horrible numbers for the Republican Governor that I am now worried that he will bag a reelection campaign all together, in favor of a Republican that might have a chance. Gov. Tom Corbett trails all three major Democratic challengers.

This was a deadly weekend for the City of Wilmington, with 4 shooting incidents in about 24 hours. Mayor Dennis Williams did not return Adam Taylor's calls for his article this weekend, but one of the WPD's PIOs spoke to WDEL this AM on the subject:

There have been several retirements among Senate Democrats this year. Rockefeller, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, and now Max Baucus of Montana. Many Beltway pundits tell us that means the Democratic majority in the Senate is thus in danger. That may be the case in West Virginia, where Rockefeller is likely to be replaced by Republican Shelly Moore Capito. But in Montana and South Dakota, these retirements have likely increased the Democrats' odds of holding onto these seats.

Nate Cohn notes that Hillary Clinton currently “commands a staggering 60 percent of the primary vote, an unprecedented figure for a non–vice presidential candidate and one of the highest levels…

As George W. Bush is disgustingly lauded today by the other living Presidents, including President Obama, during the opening of his presidential museum (it's not a library, its a museum with exhibits and displays, so everyone stop calling it a library) in Dallas, a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds just 35% of Americans view Bush favorably, versus 44% who view him negatively. That negative number has improved for W, probably because people don't care about him anymore. Meanwhile, here is Barbara Bush on her favorite son's possible run for the Presidency in 2016:

Appearing in an interview Thursday on NBC's "Today" show, Mrs. Bush was asked how she felt about Jeb, the former governor of Florida, seeking the presidency in 2016. Mrs. Bush replied, quote, "We've had enough Bushes." She went on to say she thought there were many worthy candidates, telling anchor Matt Lauer, "There are people out there" who are qualified. Mrs. Bush, who had a reputation for bluntness when her husband George H.W. Bush was president, spoke from the site of the presidential library.

Mrs. Bush, I couldn't agree with you more. But I wouldn't expect much from Jeb on Mother's Day.

Tennessee State Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) joked on his personal blog about "assault pressure cookers" in the wake of last week's bombing in Boston, the Tennessean reports.

"Under a headline that referred to U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein, one of the leading proponents of gun control, Campfield cataloged the dangerous features on a pressure cooker, including a 'muzzle break thingy,' 'tactical grip' and 'evil, black' color." When asked about his comments he refused to apologize and said liberal commentators should be calling for "crock pot control" if they were consistent with their calls for gun control after last year's Sandy Hook school shooting.

I am starting to wonder if all Republicans are sociopathic assholes. Hey asshole, bombs are already illegal.

Of course we all know that our Democratic congressional delegation has for a long time assumed that Delaware was a more conservative state, or at least its residents possessed a more conservative politics, and hence there was a need always for a Democratic candidate to always always moderate their message and move to the right (and this applies more so to Carper and Carney, and less so to Coons). And now we have statistical proof of this phenomena. David Broockman and Christopher Skovron looked at legislators’s perceptions of their constituents and compare to estimates of the the actual issue attitudes of people living in their districts.

There is a striking conservative bias in politicians’ perceptions, particularly among conservatives: conservative politicians systematically believe their constituents are more conservative than they actually are by over 20 percentage points, while liberal politicians also typically overestimate their constituents’ conservatism by several percentage points. A follow-up survey demonstrates that politicians appear to learn nothing from democratic campaigns or elections that leads them to correct these shortcomings. [...] These findings suggest a substantial conservative bias in American political representation and bleak prospects for constituency control of politicians when voters’ collective preferences are less than unambiguous.

Those results are actually somewhat heartening since they either involved terrorists who were not American citizens or whose citizenship was left unclear. I can see the argument that noncitizen terrorists do not have constitutional rights and are enemy combatants. But citizens? Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev is an American citizen. Yes, he is a terrorist too, but he is an American too. Just as Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial killer, but also an American citizen. Just as Eric Rudolph was a right wing bomber, but he was also an American citizen. So since he is an American citizen, he has constitutional rights. That means Tsarnaev has his 5th Amendment rights and 6th Amendment rights, which are, respectively....