Politico says that Republicans are already arguing over whether the disaster relief for Oklahoma should be offset with budget cuts elsewhere.

“Finding some way to offset is not the priority,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a member of Senate GOP leadership who opposed the $50.5 billion Sandy aid package at the beginning of the year. “Meeting the known and immediate needs as quickly as possible is the priority.”

The calls for swift funding from Congress comes as a key Oklahoma Republican, Sen. Tom Coburn, is renewing his long-standing call that any disaster relief funds should be fully offset, potentially putting him in the awkward spot of opposing an emergency aid package for his home state...

When this vote comes, it's going to be a real shitshow for the Republicans. Some of them (like, presumably, Senator Blunt) are only for giving money to red states. Others want lengthy budget discussions before they agree to anything. This could be the event that winds up being the historical example that people will one day use to illustrate the decade of the do-nothing Congress.

Media Matters:

Conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones explained to his audience today how the government could have been behind the devastating May 20 tornado in Oklahoma. On the May 21 edition of The Alex Jones Show, a caller asked Jones whether he was planning to cover how government technology may be behind a recent spate of sinkholes. After laying out how insurance companies use weather modification to avoid having to pay ski resorts for lack of snow, Jones said that "of course there's weather weapon stuff going on—we had floods in Texas like 15 years ago, killed 30-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force." Following a long tangent, Jones returned to the caller's subject. While he explained that "natural tornadoes" do exist and that he's not sure if a government "weather weapon" was involved in the Oklahoma disaster, Jones warned nonetheless that the government "can create and steer groups of tornadoes."

Steve Benen at Maddowblog:

Now, I realize that fringe figures are going to share nutty ideas all the time, and it was probably inevitable that some nonsensical allegations about the Oklahoma tornado would pop up.... This caught my eye, however, because of recent developments—we've seen Republican officeholders in state legislatures, the U.S. House, and even the U.S. Senate take Alex Jones' ideas seriously. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) intends to run for president—of the United States—and he's been a guest on Alex Jones' show. In other words, the guy raising the specter of Obama using "weather weapons" to kill Oklahomans is the same guy helping influence several Republican policymakers in 2013.

Maybe it's just me, but I find that rather alarming.

I find it alarming too. I mean, President Obama—who can't control Congress (not even the Dems in Congress)—can control the weather. He's weaponized the weather. And why is the president killing Oklahomans? Just for the fuck of it. Want proof that this wasn't a "natural" tornado? Back to Alex Jones:

According to Jones, this possibility hinges on whether people spotted helicopters and small aircraft "in and around the clouds, spraying and doing things." He added, "if you saw that, you better bet your bottom dollar they did this, but who knows if they did. You know, that's the thing, we don't know."

Sigh.

Anyone who watched the news saw helicopters flying around the edges of the tornado in Oklahoma. They were television news station helicopters and they were tracking its path. The reporters and pilots in those helicopters were risking their own lives so they could warn people in its path. And if the Obama administration is hellbent on killing Oklahomans with "weaponized weather"—you know, just for the fuck of it—why is FEMA paying to build storm shelters in schools and private homes in Oklahoma?

• E.S.
• Washington Senator Patty Murray

Patty Murray may be the dullest, most unremarkable member of the United States Senate. Two decades in, she lacks any major legislation to her name, isn’t associated with an issue, rarely appears on television, almost always speaks in gray generalities, and seems to have spent the bulk of her time focused on sending earmarks back to Washington state. As one staffer puts it, the most interesting thing about Murray is how uninteresting she is. She’s also the most important politician you’ve never heard of.

James Fallows writes about the response to President Obama's Morehouse graduation speech, and why it outlines how impossible it is to be Barack Obama:

Before I had a chance to write anything about the speech, I read two other reactions. One was from my former colleague Andrew Sullivan, who was defending the speech against idiotic accusations that it was "race-baiting" and too black. The other was from my current Atlantic colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates, who criticized the speech for being too hectoring of Obama's Morehouse audience in a way he wouldn't have been at Dartmouth or Stanford: "Barack Obama is, indeed, the president of 'all America,' but he also is singularly the scold of 'black America.'"

A lot of the problems the Obama Administration are going through right now are the fault of nobody but the Obama Administration. Their continued fumbling of the AP scandal is a disappointment and a disgrace. But a lot of this is simply coming from a place of hate. No president can ever totally satisfy all Americans—hell, no president can ever totally satisfy their base—but the dissatisfaction that surrounds every move President Obama makes is a special kind of dissatisfaction. Because of who he is, everyone holds him singularly responsible for the thorniest issue in the United States, and it's an issue he can never solve to everyone's satisfaction. It'll be fascinating to see how history judges this part of his legacy.