Somewhere aliens are watching us from outer space and scratching their headlike appendages. Because before all the blood had even dried on the sidewalks, the rightwing dropped the subject of what happened at the 2013 Boston Marathon and got back to the subject they seem to care most about: hating Pres. Obama.

This tweet hints at the problem.

Fort Hood? Wait. What? Wasn’t Fort Hood a case of a wacko with a gun shooting up his fellow service members, like James Holmes shooting up fellow Batman fans, and Adam Lanza shooting up his fellow Newtown youth? What distinguishes Fort Hood from the other mass shootings that have become part of the landscape? Could it be that the gunman in Fort Hood was a Muslim? Now we’re getting somewhere, because any time you have a Muslim person involved, it’s de facto terrorism. Right?

But why are we slamming Obama for not labeling all three of those events as terrorism, straight out of the gate? Here, this tweet should clear it right up.

Update: This picture of a couple being reunited after the woman apparently completed the Boston Marathon is making the rounds on Twitter. Not sure who to credit for it.

Like you, we are glued to Twitter and to news outlets for more information about the two explosions near the finish line of the Boston Marathon that took place at about 2:50 p.m. today. Our thoughts are with the injured and the loved ones of the reported two dead.

The Republican National Committee is holding its spring meeting this week in a hotel in the heart of Hollywood. As these sorts of events go, this one has generated more speculation about the GOP’s rationale for choosing to meet in a place that is home to an industry Republicans revile, and vice versa, than it has actual news coverage on local outlets.

So what was RNC Chairman Reince Priebus thinking when he decided to hold his spring meeting behind enemy lines?

The answer comes from Beltway insider Politico.com, which notes that a key criticism in the Republican National Committee’s aptly nicknamed 2012 election “autopsy” report released last month was that the “party is seen as old and detached from pop culture.” To counter this, the autopsy committee recommended that the GOP “establish an RNC Celebrity Task Force of personalities in the entertainment industry to host events for the RNC and allow donors to participate in entertainment events as a way to attract younger voters.”

Preibus’ decision to hold the meeting in Hollywood appears to have been the first step in the party’s celebrity outreach — and, if so, this first step has clearly been an abysmal, even laughable failure, so much so that Priebus is now denying that reaching out to celebrities had anything to do with his choice of Hollywood as the meeting site.

That was quick. Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren wasted no time in forgiving the person who sold online an unregistered handgun with the serial number filed off to his son, who used it to kill himself.

On the Thursday following 27-year-old Matthew Warren’s death on Friday, his father tweeted:

Someone on the internet sold Matthew an unregistered gun.I pray he seeks God’s forgiveness. I forgive him. #MATTHEW 6:15

The passage cited reads, from the New International version of the bible, “But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”

Warren is no doubt using the quick logic that if his son hadn’t gotten that gun he would have gotten another, because someone who is bent on suicide will find a way. But he should slow down and, painful as the truth is, examine that idea.

Two years ago, American-born Al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn released this video in which he informed his operatives in the United States that because of a loophole in America’s gun laws they could avoid background checks by buying assault weapons at gun shows. Gadahn’s implication was that it would be easy to assemble the arsenal required to launch an attack in the United States similar to the 2008 terror campaign in Mumbai, in which 12 simultaneous bombing and gun attacks across the city left 164 people dead and at least 300 people wounded.

Transcript:

In the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s death, there has been an outpouring of remembrance of her role as Britain’s first female prime minister. Hugo Young, a political columnist for the Guardian from 1984 until 2003 and Thatcher’s biographer, wrote this piece in 2003, two weeks before he died.

… Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. Three aspects of it never completely leave my head.

The first is what changed in the temper of Britain and the British. What happened at the hands of this woman’s indifference to sentiment and good sense in the early 1980s brought unnecessary calamity to the lives of several million people who lost their jobs. It led to riots that nobody needed. More insidiously, it fathered a mood of tolerated harshness. Materialistic individualism was blessed as a virtue, the driver of national success. Everything was justified as long as it made money – and this, too, is still with us.

More after the jump »

Here’s one for the WTF file: The Republican National Committee is holding its spring meeting in Hollywood, of all places, next week. It is a mystery why Chairman Reince Priebus would choose Hollywood, one of the GOP’s favorite punching bags, as the site of their meeting, especially since it is situated in a state where there is not a single elected GOP state official, where Democrats hold veto-proof majorities in both houses of the legislature and where Republican voter registration has cratered to 29 percent, the lowest it’s been since the 19th century:

In 21st century Jim Crow, it is not just African-Americans whose voting rights are being put risk by neo-Confederates. In North Carolina, the tea partyists who have recently taken over the legislature and governor’s mansion are targeting any group that reliably votes against them, including college students of all races.

A bill filed recently in the N.C. legislature, where Republicans hold veto-proof majorities (which are irrelevant because the governor is also a Republican), would impose a poll tax on the parents of college students who register to vote in the town where they go to college, which the Supreme Court has ruled is their right:

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Dana Milbank:

The gun-lobby goons were at it again.

The National Rifle Association’s security guards gained notoriety earlier this year when, escorting NRA officials to a hearing, they were upbraided by Capitol authorities for pushing cameramen. The thugs were back Tuesday when the NRA rolled out its “National School Shield” — the gun lobbyists’ plan to get armed guards in public schools — and this time they were packing heat.