The Dish

William Frey of Brookings parses Arizona's demographics:

[T]he state’s swift Hispanic growth has been concentrated in young adults and children, creating a “cultural generation gap” with largely white baby boomers and older populations, the same demographic that predominates in the recent Tea Party protests. A shorthand measure for this cultural generation gap in a state is the disparity between children and seniors in their white population shares. Arizona leads the nation on this gap at 40 (where 43 percent of its child population is white compared with 83 percent for seniors). But the states of Nevada, California, Texas, New Mexico, and Florida are not that far behind.

It's not just a handful of states:

Nationally this gap is 25 percentage points.

Jim Denevan makes them.

Manzi doesn't think the paradox of choice exists:

Sure, lots of people consciously simplify their lives — this has been a real social movement for at least the past decade. In less self-dramatizing ways, all of us do this without announcing it when we use brands and other methods for restricting our considered alternatives because we have only finite time and energy to devote to a given purchase decision.

But I think that viewing this kind of decisionmaking as evidence of the need to restrict choice coercively is a mistake. We make these decisions within nested hierarchies of choice. Person A decides to shop for hammers at Home Depot because the enormous range of choices is important to him in this category, but buys his beer at 7-Eleven. Person B shops for beer at a specialty store, but buys whatever hammer he can find at Walgreens. One quick observation is that A has probably spent time learning about hammers and B about beer, or they too would have felt overwhelmed by the variety of choices on offer.

Today on the Dish we homed in on Gordon Brown's historic gaffe. Video here. The media jumped into action, Labour officials spun, the old widow reacted in shock, Alastair Campbell sounded off, his fictional doppelganger raged, Andrew Rawnsley saw a long pattern in Brown's behavior, and the polls continued to look bad for his party. A big round-up of commentary here.

In immigration coverage, the Mexican ambassador warned his citizens to avoid Arizona, Sarah Palin spread a pernicious lie about the law, a congressional candidate called for implanting chips, Byron York didn't see the problem with ID checks, Reynolds pandered and waffled, Andrew called out the hypocrisy of the tea-partiers, and Kos foresaw a huge backlash against the GOP among Hispanics in the state. And we rounded up commentary on the right.

As the stability of Iraq continued to slip, Bernstein worried about the media coverage and Musings On Iraq examined the country's crime problem. Daniel Altman checked in on Haiti and Ezra Klein did so on HCR. Financial reform coverage here and here. In assorted coverage, Scott Morgan suggested revisions to DC's pot law, Dreher talked epistemology, and Bartlett took stock of conservative dissenters.

Fly old guy here, crazy ballin' here, naked-ish models here, preview of summer blockbusters here, and creepy ad here.

— C.B.

Labour partisan Hopi Sen gives the incident a positive spin:

I’m willing to go out an a limb and say that the number of people who feel sympathy for Gordon Brown over all this is a greater percentage of the population than say they will vote Labour. It’s not that people will agree with him, it’s just that a lot of people know they’re not perfect and would also say stupid things if on tape all the time.

Paul Owen and Andrew Sparrow see no silver lining:

[T]he two key points here are that he seemed two-faced and he seemed to see all discussion of immigration as bigotry. The first is an aspect of character that it's hard to feel sympathy for, and the second is something that a large section of the electorate feel sensitive and angry about…On the other hand, it has to be said that the more the media concentrate on Gordon Brown the less they keep reminding people that a guy called Nick Clegg is standing for PM.

James Forsyth:

I suspect Nick Clegg will also suffer some collateral damage as it will push immigration to the top of the political agenda, an area where the Lib Dems with their plan for an amnesty for illegal immigrants are on the wrong side of public opinion.

Wife In The North:

The electioneering car-crash of "Gordon Brown meets Gillian Duffy" may just have put paid to all hope of Labour surviving another day courtesy of the resurgence of the Lib Dems.

The irony. Throughout this campaign, women have been virtually invisible. And I say this with no disrespect to our new First Ladies of politics, but frankly they've been there to look decorative, supportive, and ideally fecund. They are allowed the occasional innocuous tweet or video appearance, but let's not fool ourselves, they are not there because they have spent decades on the political frontline and have something to say.

Dizzy:

What I find myself wondering though is what the response would be to the story if it was brought to us in the traditional form of an "unanmed source"? It would be denied of course and called a smear or "tittle tattle". This story actually gives strength to those sort of stories in a way, especially in relation to Brown.

Does anyone believe that he would be having an epiphany in private and apologising to this woman if he hadn't been caught saying it? Of course he wouldn't.

Here's round-up of British front pages. All of them are leading with the Duffy story. Massie's two cents:

I think opening the British labour market to the new EU-member countries was one of the best, even noble, things this government has done. If you believe that Britons should be able to work across the EU it's logical to believe that Poles and Lats should be able to as well. And if you believe in the free movement of goods and capital then there's a certain logic to believing in the free movement of labour too. And you can also believe that the accession of the eastern european states has been one of the greatest advances in liberty (at least in some sense of the term) since 1989.

You don't have to agree with this argument and it's not disreputable not to but Gordon could still have made this argument, he could have made a case for himself and his party's record. But he chose not to. This too is feeble. And, alas, all too typical.

Anne Applebaum compares Clegg to the tea party movement:

[T]he Conservative and Labor parties have issued dark pleas to the voters: This could be the very last general election to be held under those very British rules; this could be the end of politics as we know it; and so on.

Maybe these dire threats will win voters back by next Thursday. But at the moment, it seems that the man on the Clapham omnibus, like his Tea Partying colleagues across the Atlantic, is perfectly happy to vote for the end of politics as we know it. The faster the better, please.

Michael Tomasky doesn't approve of the parallel:

[S]o the Lib Dems are like the Tea Partiers. Exactly why? Because they want to shrink dramatically the role of government? Well, no. They like government quite a lot. Because they despise taxation in all its forms? Well, no, that doesn't seem true either. Because both have as their main issues electoral reform and proportional representation? Well, no – nothing about process or democratic reform is remotely on the Tea Party agenda, let alone central to it. Because the Lib Dems are inherently suspicious of a potential head of government who isn't as British as all other past prime ministers have been, in the way US Tea Partiers suspect Barack Obama's origins? Well, no. If there's anyone in this race who fits that description, it's Clegg himself, with his Dutch mother and Spanish wife and half-Russian father.

So it's just that they're both, you know, some kind of new force. You, amateur that you are, may think the fact that they have utterly nothing in common should prevent the making of such analogies. But that just shows how little you understand about column-writing.

Guess what? Governments with clear single party majorities tend to have the worst structural balances – headed by Greece, Japan, the UK and the good old US of A. Countries with coalition or minority governments – the Scandinavians, the Belgians and the Dutch, for example, tend to have much better ones.

Nothing, of course, is black and white. There is a fair amount of scatter in the scatter diagram. Majoritarian France has a relatively low structural deficit, minority Portugal a high one.

Republican heavyweights such as Rove, Rubio, Jeb Bush, Tom Tancredo, (contrary to earlier reports Tancredo says he fully supports the law) and Tom Ridge have voiced concerns about Arizona's new law. So what has the debate among right-of-center pundits looked like? Here's George Will:

Arizona's law might give the nation information about whether judicious enforcement discourages illegality. If so, it is a worthwhile experiment in federalism.

Julian Sanchez and Lexington protest. Malkin's says Mexico is hypocritical because it too treats illegal immigrants badly:

Here’s the proper rejoinder to all the hysterical demagogues in Mexico (and their sympathizers here on American soil) now calling for boycotts and invoking Jim Crow laws, apartheid and the Holocaust because Arizona has taken its sovereignty into its own hands:

Hipócritas.

Hewitt nods in agreement with Rubio. We covered the Michael Gerson and Byron York spat earlier. Cesar Conda, writing at the Corner, counters York:

The bottom line is that this new law places enormous discretion in the hands of local police officers, since there are any number of circumstances in which an interaction between a police officer and a private individual is "lawful contact"; indeed, there are very few in which it is anything other than lawful contact, according to Mr. Otis.

This is why conservatives like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Tunku Varadarajan, David Boaz of the Cato Institute, Bob Barr, and others have raised concerns about the Arizona law, and specifically that this "reasonable

suspicion" standard could lead police officers to unreasonably single

out legal immigrants and American citizens.

Ramesh admits that York is incorrect on one account but largely sides with Byron. John McCormack, who also buys York's view of the debate, worries about Rubio:

It remains to be seen if Rubio's concerns about the Arizona law will hurt his credibility as an opponent of illegal immigration.

Larison also sides with York:

Unless there is another undesirable provision that critics of the law have failed to mention, it would seem that the only people who have reason to complain about this law are those who are here illegally and those who believe that immigration laws should simply not be enforced. This is one reason why Gerson’s objections ring so hollow: he insists that he favors enforcement of the law, but objects vehemently the moment someone attempts to enforce the law.

Via Slog, Glenn Beck is upset that Democrats are comparing the Arizona law to Nazism:

Arizona sure is putting the AZ in Nazi. I really hate to rain on the hate parade, but could we slow down for just a second here and ask: You’re out of your mind? Are you comparing the systematic cold-blooded extermination of millions of Jews, to America making sure people are here legally. The parallels are non-existent.

Reynolds earlier comment falls along the same lines. Lowry defends the law:

Arizona’s offense is to attempt to enforce the nation’s immigration laws, in the absence of any serious commitment to do so on the part of the federal government or our political class. The Arizona law makes it a state crime for aliens not to have immigration documents on their person. This sounds draconian, except it’s been a federal crime for more than half a century — U.S.C. 1304(e).

As does Ponnuru:

Nearly everyone in the immigration debate has claimed to favor enforcing the immigration laws. But if you think it is draconian to require that anyone have to show papers proving their legal status, then you're simply against enforcement. And if you really believe that, you're not going to change your mind just because the government has set up a "temporary worker" program or a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants: You're going to be against truly enforcing any conceivable set of immigration laws.

And Matt Welch says Arizona could take his car, if he lived there.

Tanner Ringerud narrates an exciting clip:

With just .6 seconds left on the clock in a NLB League final game, the Croatian basketball team nailed a 3-pointer and cinched a narrow victory. Naturally, celebration ensued. That is until Serbia, with just .5 seconds left, threw up a miracle half court shot and took the game right back.

Bonus backflip dunk here.

Jennifer Viegas relays two new studies on the behavior of chimps:

"In the days before Pansy died, the others were notably attentive towards her, and they even altered their routine sleeping arrangements to remain by her, by sleeping on the floor in a room where they don't usually sleep," lead author James Anderson told Discovery News. Blossom, another elderly female, and Pansy's daughter, Rosie, both stroked and groomed the dying Pansy, and sometimes just sat, subdued, beside the elderly female. Blossom's son Chippy checked to see if Pansy was alive by manipulating her arms and trying to open her mouth.

All of the chimps tossed and turned at night, much more than normal, during the dying female's final few days.

Video caption:

Three adult chimpanzees gather around an elderly chimpanzee as she dies peacefully. They contact her and closely inspect her face at the presumed moment of death. One chimpanzee in particular manipulates the dying females head and shoulders. In the absence of signs of life, two of the chimpanzees leave. The remaining chimpanzee remains for longer, forages, and then moves away.

Max Fisher rounds up commentary. The consensus is that the Republican bill overlaps significantly with the Democrats' bill. Ryan Avent jumps in:

These seem like the kinds of differences that can be ironed out during, say, a floor debate of [the] Dodd bill. The trouble is that Republicans have banded together to filibuster a measure to begin debate. Not to pass the bill, mind you. Exactly zero members of the Republican Senate caucus could be found to vote in support of the measure to begin debate. Despite the apparent similarity of philosophies in the parties' approaches to regulatory reform. How is one supposed to move from that to a good faith effort to negotiate away differences?

Republicans Sen. Bob Bennett, co-sponsor of the Wyden-Bennett health care bill, is down in the polls. Ezra Klein explains what this means for the rest of us:

Bennett looks likely to lose primary. And the main example of his perfidy? Cooperating with a Democratic senator to develop a market-driven universal health-care proposal that would've covered every American with private insurance and abolished Medicaid.

Bennett isn't a liberal. He's not even a moderate. But he's a legislator: He's willing to work with the other side to get things done. And he's paying for it now.

The result of this isn't just that Bob Bennett might lose his seat. It's that other legislators will stop legislating.

Chait has complementary thoughts.