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“It’s a legal oddity that doesn’t get talked about much: if you’re an American on the federal Terrorist Watch List, you can’t buy an airplane ticket, and you’re likely to have quite a bit of trouble at the border, but you can still buy an assault rifle.”

Gun Control Fight Finally Lays to Rest the Obama-as-Timid Meme

“What Obama did in the four months between Newtown and Wednesday’s Senate defeat showed some of the greatest presidential guts in U.S. history, says Peter Beinart.

Why did he do it? In part because the Obama-as-timid meme was always a lie. Timid politicians don’t oppose the Iraq War when virtually every other nationally ambitious Democrat is supporting it. Timid politicians don’t challenge the Clintons in a Democratic primary. Timid politicians don’t overrule their chief of staff and push through health-care reform when the polls show Americans oppose it and their party has just suffered a devastating defeat at the polls.

But beyond that, I suspect that once Obama saw an opportunity, he pushed gun control so hard because he simply cares more. As a community organizer, he worked and lived in the kind of communities where Americans are most often shot. And even when he left, he remained a black man living in a city, and a country, where government often treats black life as cheap. Try imagining Ann Romney or Cindy McCain or even Hillary Clinton saying, as Michelle Obama did in 2008, that her husband “can be shot going to the gas station.” Try imagining them saying that “Hadiya Pendleton was me.””

Read the rest here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/20/gun-control-fight-finally-lays-to-rest-the-obama-as-timid-meme.html

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev read his Miranda Rights

What you need to know about why the Boston bombing suspect hasn’t been read his Miranda rights http://t.co/4TmW22qzVm

@BostonGlobe: Official: Marathon bombing suspect in custody, another remains on the loose http://t.co/rjVrYlDRuo