Author: Andrew Sullivan

Laura Tillman fears that the Arizona law will keep battered women from getting the help they need:

The law requires police officers to question those they suspect of being in the country illegally about their immigration status. A change to the law made late Friday specifies that these questions be asked only when an officer is stopping, detaining or arresting a person while enforcing another law or civil ordinance. This provision makes it unclear whether the perpetrator of the crime or both criminal and victim would be asked in the process of, say, responding to a complaint of domestic violence.

BUILDblog scours the Internet in search of new talent:

At first glance the composition appears unintentional and the construction shoddy. But further investigation reveals a clear delineation between indoor/outdoor space with a design focus on protection through the use of barrier. Planes are shifted off the orthogonal to accommodate function; as a side effect it relieves inhabitants from a harsh Euclidian geometry. Grade B

The next review, after the jump, would make Maddox proud:

Good God gentlemen, you’re a mess! You need walls, you need a roof. Get to work man!
Grade: F

DC's medical marijuana bill passed yesterday:

The DC medical marijuana program would allow members of Congress to get a first-hand look at how such programs work and ease the passage of medical marijuana legislation at the federal level, [Karen O’Keefe, director of state policies for the Marijuana Policy Project] suggested. "A well-working medical marijuana program in the nation’s capital will also provide members of Congress who have never seen such programs up close with a unique opportunity to do so, she said. Once they see for themselves that these laws do nothing but provide compassionate care for seriously ill patients, hopefully they will understand the need to create a federal policy that no longer criminalizes patients in any state who could benefit from this legitimate treatment option."

Daniel Engber looks at why we root for them:

[It] may be smarter to gamble your emotions on the team that's most likely to reward you with a stirring victory—and that's least likely to crush your soul. For Frazier and Snyder, that means betting on the underdog: If they win, it's the greatest feeling in the world. And if they lose—well, you kind of knew that would happen all along. The same reasoning applies in reverse: If you're pulling for the favorite, then a loss cuts extra deep, while a victory merely delivers what you thought you deserved. "Thus a utilitarian model would indeed predict the underdog effect," the authors observe.

In response, Jonah Lehrer points out that refs are immune to this effect and instead tend to favor the home team:

[W]hile the rest of us are rooting for the underdog, the referees are just trying not to get booed. And since the underdogs rarely have home-field advantage, the data suggests that refs and umps actively counter our desire for underdog victories. They make the superstars more likely to win.

Massie writes that "launched their most ambitious, 'biggest' manifesto in thirty years" but that there is "a discordance between the Tory message and the moment in which it is delivered":

The Conservatives have been caught between their rhetoric of "Broken Britain" and their promise of a brighter, optimistic future. The more thoroughly Britain is broken the more unlikely, even impossible, that future seems. If the Tories are right about Labour's record then their plans seem too airy-fairy, too intellectual, too unlikely to survive contact with brutal reality and useless Britain; if they're wrong then they seem necessarily apocalyptic.

"I’m feeling grateful to the prez these days because we happen to be in the middle of a bunch of midsized crises. There’s the oil spill in the Gulf (which is verging on a big crisis, I guess). There’s the Times Square bomber. There are various floods in Tennessee and elsewhere. The European Union is falling apart over the Greek debt crisis, and so on and so on. It’s good to have a president with equipoise. It seems to me that Obama is handling his role, which ranges from the marginal to the significant, in these events with calm professionalism. He’s active yet not annoying. He’s not taking credit for everything. He’s not creating friction by making any missteps. He is calm, cool and collected," – David Brooks on our temperamentally conservative president.

Sunder Katwala raises the alarm. Chris Brooke summarizes:

Roughly speaking, the idea is that in the event of a hung parliament, David Cameron isn’t going to wait patiently for Gordon Brown to deliberate at leisure over his future as prime minister, but is going publicly to declare victory and demand “the keys to Number 10″ (which is a funny expression, as the famous front door to 10 Downing St doesn’t have a keyhole in it); and that he’ll be cheered on in doing this by the rightwing press…

And yawns:

The bottom line is that politics is about power, and if the Tories are the only ones willing to play hardball, then – bluntly – good for them.  If the Queen discredits herself along the way by being pressured into being openly partisan, then that’s a good thing, as it’ll work to hasten the end of this stupid monarchy.  And if voters disapprove of what the Tories are doing, then they’ll punish them when they get the chance. That’s democracy.

On Friday, Britain's post-election politics could look alarmingly like Iraq's. The real story may be after this election, not before it.

(Hat tip: Harry)

Via Stuttaford, some clarity from the WSJ:

Mrs. Duffy had confronted Brown with the central fact of his economic record. Since 2000, public spending in Britain has grown faster as a share of GDP than any other country in the 28-member OECD — up 17 percentage points to 53% of GDP, compared to 15 points for Ireland and 10 points for Iceland. By comparison, Spain's grew by eight points and Greece by three points. If Gordon Brown had matched spending with tax increases, Labour would not have been re-elected twice.

They were like Bush on steroids. Hence the massive hangover.

More Colbert Bait from a fantastic site:

Conclusion after the jump:

More here.