Tonight's guests:

• Mick Cornett, mayor of Oklahoma City
• Todd Lamb, Oklahoma lieutenant governor
• Larry Tanner, research associate at The National Wind Institute at Texas Tech University

And here's execuctive producer Bill Wolff with a preview of what's coming up:

Today's edition of quick hits:

* The reports and images out of Oklahoma are simply heartbreaking.

* The latest from Moore: "Emergency crews in Oklahoma picked through neighborhoods without recognizable streets Tuesday in a grim, house-by-house search of the blasted-out husk of a city left behind by a ferocious tornado. Authorities lowered the death toll to 24, less than half the figure they gave in the initial chaos after the twister, but there was still no full accounting of those missing. Nine of the dead were children, including seven in a flattened elementary school."

* As big as they get: "The massive, mile-wide tornado that ravaged Oklahoma City suburbs on Tuesday with peak winds of over 200 miles per hour has been rated an 'EF5' by the National Weather Service."

* Lois Lerner's lawyers gave her obvious advice: "A top IRS official scheduled to testify Wednesday before the House Oversight committee has notified Congress that she will invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions."

* Immigration: "Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) struck a deal Tuesday on visas for high-skilled workers, a major breakthrough for the Senate immigration reform bill. The deal paves the way for Hatch, the most senior member of the Senate Republican Conference, to support the immigration legislation pending in the Judiciary Committee."

* The images we will not see: "Photos of American military personnel burying Osama bin Laden will remain classified, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with the government in finding that the release of postmortem images of the founder and leader of al-Qaeda could cause 'exceptionally grave harm' to Americans."

* Gallup: "U.S. Economic Confidence Reaches Five-Year Weekly High."

* Josh Marshall has an unexpected take on James Rosen: "It's difficult for me not to be more shocked by the self-interested preening of fellow journalists over a comically inept reporter and source than the arguable dangers this episode holds for press freedoms. Indeed, I've failed. I can't."

* Dear Kirsten Powers, please don't compare Fox News to Holocaust victims.

* And the NRA is outraged by the violence that Hollywood peddles and uses to poison our culture. On the other hand, the NRA also thinks violent movies are "cool." Good to know.

Anything to add? Consider this an open thread.

Ordinarily, with a story like this, I'd just shake my head in disgust and move on, but given recent events, I'm inclined to give it a little more attention.

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."

How can tornado truthers know for sure whether the Obama administration was responsible for yesterday's devastation in Oklahoma? According to Jones, we need to know whether locals saw helicopters and small aircraft "in and around the clouds, spraying and doing things." He added, "[I]f you saw that, you better bet your bottom dollar they did this." Jones, ever cautious, went on to say he does not yet know whether yesterday was a natural disaster or not. How reassuring.

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. I didn't realize "weather weapons" would be part of the story, but there's probably no reason to be surprised.

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.

Getty Images

About a year ago, we discussed a measure signed into law by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R), banning most abortions in the state after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Soon after, the 20-week standard became the new expectation for opponent of abortion rights in Republican-led states everywhere.

As of today, however, the law is no more.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law violates a string of U.S. Supreme Court rulings starting with Roe v. Wade that guarantees a woman's right to an abortion before a fetus is able to survive outside the womb. That's generally considered to be about 24 weeks. Normal pregnancies run about 40 weeks

Several states have enacted similar bans starting at 20 weeks. But the 9th Circuit's ruling is binding only in the nine Western states under the court's jurisdiction. Idaho is the only other state in the region covered by the 9th Circuit with a similar ban.

The entire ruling is online here (pdf). It was, incidentally, a unanimous ruling of the three-judge panel.

It's probably safe to assume that the Brewer administration will appeal, either to the entire 9th Circuit, seeking an en banc ruling, or to the U.S. Supreme Court (or probably both). To be sure, it's an important case anyway, but if it's headed for the high court, the case, Isaacson v. Horne, may prove to be one of the most important reproductive-rights cases in many years.

flaneur/Flickr

How do you know when congressional Republicans have gone around the bend on Benghazi? When their own staffers -- usually a hyper-loyal bunch -- are mocking GOP colleagues for pushing nonsense.

In particular, these aides say key staffers have been overly consumed with chasing down or addressing inaccurate or unfounded accusations emerging from the inquiry.

"We have got to get past that and figure out what are we going to do going forward," a GOP aide stressed. "Some of the accusations, I mean you wouldn't believe some of this stuff. It's just -- I mean, you've got to be on Mars to come up with some of this stuff."

Remember, this is a House Republican staffer talking about conspiratorial nonsense coming from other House Republican offices.

Senior GOP aides pointed out that many of the accusations involving security and military forces turned out to be unfounded. One recent example involved a supposed whistle-blower who reported that an armed Predator drone was operating in the area, but was not called upon to respond to the Benghazi attack, an assertion labeled erroneous by Pentagon officials and Hill staffers.

"There are some real issues there and then there is just some crazy stuff," the senior House GOP aide said. "The crazy stuff is, you know, the airman in Ramstein [Air Base, Germany,] that knew that the Predator [drone] was armed. There are no armed Predators in the region there. The [status of forces agreement] does not allow us to fly them armed, and everybody knows it."

It's against this backdrop that other GOP lawmakers are starting to back away from their own party's unhinged and conspiratorial accusations.

I realize there are some Beltway types (see Woodward, Bob) who still see a political scandal lurking in the shadows of this story, but when House GOP staffers are using phrases like "you've got to be on Mars" and "crazy stuff," you know this story is over.

We talked earlier about Oklahoma's junior senator, Republican Tom Coburn (R), announcing last night that he will only support federal disaster relief -- for his own constituents -- if it's financed by comparable spending cuts elsewhere. But what about Oklahoma's senior senator?

Republican Sen. James Inhofe, like Coburn, has opposed emergency aid in the recent past, including voting against a relief package for victims of Hurricane Sandy. This morning, however, the conservative senator said that was "totally different."

In the wake of the devastating tornado in an Oklahoma City suburb, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) rejected comparisons between federal aid for this disaster and the Hurricane Sandy relief package he voted against.

That was a "totally different" situation, Inhofe told MSNBC, arguing that the Sandy aid was filled with pork. There were "things in the Virgin Islands. They were fixing roads there and putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C. Everybody was getting in and exploiting the tragedy that took place. That won't happen in Oklahoma."

Inhofe didn't specify his intentions, exactly, but I took his comments to mean he'd consider supporting relief for his constituents, even if the costs are not offset, so long as the aid bill doesn't include expenditures unrelated to Oklahoma. In other words, at least at first blush, it seems to me Inhofe is not on board with Coburn's position.

Of course, all of this speculation is premature -- we don't yet know when there will be a disaster-relief bill, what will be in it, how much it'll cost, etc. -- but it appears the political fight got underway just five hours after disaster struck.

Tushka, Oklahoma, April 14, 2011. Courtesy of Gabe Garfield and Marc Austin/NOAA

The tiny town of Tushka, Oklahoma, sits a couple hours drive southeast of Moore. And like Moore, Tushka is vulnerable to tornadoes. A twister rated EF-3 struck Tushka in 2011, leveling much of the town. But as the Tulsa World noted at the time, Tushka was not defenseless:

Nearly 100 men, women and children crowded shoulder-to-shoulder into a six-year-old, above-ground, concrete-reinforced safe room adjacent to the Tushka pre-school. A block away, about 100 other residents, their kids and their dogs in tow, rushed into the 90-year-old, below-ground, public shelter -- 45-feet long and shaped like a tube, with dirt floors and steel doors at either end. 

Tushka lost two people that day who were not in the shelters. The safe rooms saved the others. The superintendent of Tushka schools, Bill Pingleton, says the newer shelter cost about $150,000 to build. Most of that cost got picked up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Divided over time, Pingleton says, safe rooms are not all that expensive.

The 2011 tornado destroyed Tushka's school; the new one they're building now will include three safe rooms, one each for the high schoolers, the middle schoolers and the grade schoolers. "That was absolutely our first thought, 'Where are we going to put the safe rooms?' " he tells us. "Then we sited the school around that." The design allows for all 460 kids to reach shelter within moments. 

Apple may be one of the nation's richest companies, but it did so by avoiding billions in taxes here and around the world. Congressional investigators found that the tech giant created "a web of subsidiaries so complex it spanned continents and went beyond anything most experts had ever seen," relying on "gimmicks" and "schemes" to sidestep tax laws.

This has generated a fair amount of bipartisan criticism, though Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) doesn't seem bothered. In fact, he wants the Senate to apologize to Apple for bothering the company.

Paul not only endorsed Apple's tax-avoidance schemes, but condemned Congress itself for daring to question the company's efforts to circumvent international tax burdens. The Kentucky Republican said he's "offended by the tone and tenor of this hearing," and lamented the very idea of "berating" a company just because it's taken unprecedented steps to avoid meeting its responsibilities, largely by creating shell companies abroad with no real employees.

"If anyone should be on trial here, it should be Congress," Paul declared. "I frankly think the committee should apologize to Apple.... I would say what we really need to do is to apologize to Apple, compliment them for the job creation they are doing, and get about doing our job.

Nearly three years ago, after much of the country -- and much of Congress -- was condemning BP for the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) apologized to the oil giant, saying it was wrong for Washington to try to hold the company responsible for its failures.

And now, it's Rand Paul wanting to apologize to Apple for questioning its tax-avoidance schemes. Amazing.

President Obama spoke from the White House this morning on yesterday's devastation in Oklahoma, giving the public an update on rescue efforts and how Americans can help with emergency relief.

For those who can't watch clips online, I posted a full transcript after the jump.

I suspect Republican officials, especially in Washington, had high hopes about the latest batch of polls. After all, the Beltway has embraced "scandal mania" in recent weeks, subjecting President Obama to near-constant criticism, even though the controversies don't relate to him directly.

But with several new national polls released this week -- CNN, Pew Research Center, USA Today, Washington Post/ABC News -- there's very little good news for Republicans. On the contrary, it seems the party's lack of popularity is preventing Republicans from taking advantage of the larger scandal-generated opportunities.

This chart, for example, shows the results from the CNN poll, which asked respondents for their general attitudes towards the two major political parties. For Democrats, support is up, and a 52% majority has a favorable opinion of the party. For Republicans, support is down, and a 59% majority has a unfavorable opinion of the party.

Adding insult to injury, the GOP's standing in the poll is at its third-lowest point since CNN started doing polls a couple of decades years ago.

In the Washington Post/ABC News poll, respondents were asked whether Congress is concentrating on issues that are important to them personally. While 43% said congressional Democrats are focused on the correct priorities, only 33% said the same about congressional Republicans.

Meanwhile, President Obama's approval rating is up to 53% in the CNN poll, up to 51% in the Post/ABC poll, and up to 53% in the USA Today poll. (The Pew Research poll did not publish a presidential approval rating.)

Jamelle Bouie summarized the issue perfectly yesterday: "The Virginia GOP has essentially posed an experiment: Can we win off-year elections regardless of who we run?"

That's funny, but it's not hyperbolic. Virginia is no longer the Republican stronghold it once was, and at least on a statewide level, is competitive Democratic territory. President Obama carried the state twice; the commonwealth has two Democratic U.S. senators, and Democrats have won two of the last three gubernatorial races.

But it's an off-year cycle, and Republicans are optimistic about their chances this November. At least, they were -- in the wake of the party's convention over the weekend, the state GOP is suddenly "panicking," largely because this guy is their candidate for lieutenant governor.

National Review reports this morning:

A minister who compared gays to pedophiles and Planned Parenthood to the Klu Klux Klan is not the No. 2 candidate Republican Party reformers had in mind for the marquee race of 2013.

Neither did the top of the ticket, Republican gubernatorial nominee Ken Cuccinelli, who has been downplaying his own socially conservative record in favor of a more mainstream message focused on the economy.

The GOP's slate is, by any fair measure, jarring. The Virginia Republicans' gubernatorial candidate is one of the fiercest culture warriors of any officeholder in the country. The Virginia Republicans' candidate for lieutenant governor is almost comically extreme on social issues. The Virginia Republicans' candidate for attorney general once advocated requiring women to report miscarriages to the police -- or face jail time.

It's almost as if the state GOP went out of its way to think of a scheme to motivate the listless Democratic base, alienate as many women as possible, and drive moderate voters away from Republicans in droves.

Associated Press

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.)

About a month ago, Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) started pushing a new anti-abortion bill, which he hopes to impose on the residents of the District of Columbia, against their will. The proposal mirrors efforts that have popped up among Republican lawmakers at the state level: abortion would remain legal, but only if pregnancies are terminated within the first 20 weeks.

Following Kermit Gosnell's murder conviction, Franks now wants to pursue this as a national policy, imposed on all states, constitutional concerns be damned. And while random members of Congress routinely introduce all kinds of bills that will never pass, this one seems to have put House GOP leaders in an awkward position.

If the bill gets a markup and a vote on the House floor, it would surely satisfy conservative members of the rank and file who want the chamber to take a firm stance on the Gosnell conviction and against abortion practices generally.

By this time in the 112th Congress, House Republicans had already made an unequivocal statement that they stand against the practice with the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which passed on a 251-175 vote.

The House's silence on the issue is notable because of the high-profile nature of the Gosnell trial and also given last week's vote to repeal Obamacare. GOP leaders argued that the vote was scheduled for the benefit of freshmen who had campaigned on overturning the 2010 health care law and wanted to go on the record against it. In theory, the same argument could apply to abortion.

This is the natural extension of the post-policy thesis we've been talking about lately -- these House Republicans know Franks' bill won't pass, won't become law, and probably couldn't withstand court scrutiny anyway, but want a floor vote because they see value in making a "statement." They could try governing and legislating for a change, but that's less important than sending "signals" to the party's far-right activist base.

Of course, there's also the small matter of the Republicans' rebranding initiative, and Franks' bill wouldn't do that effort any favors, either. For the American mainstream, there's quite a bit Congress should be working on right now, and legally dubious anti-abortion measures that can't pass isn't high on the list.

Indeed, as GOP leaders may recall, the preoccupation with the culture war among House Republicans cost the party dearly in 2012, and made the gender gap even worse.

Associated Press

As of this morning, at least 51 people, including 20 children, are dead in the suburbs of Oklahoma City, following one of the deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history. Rescue teams worked through the night, especially in the devastated city of Moore, and local officials fear the death toll may yet rise significantly. [Update: as of this afternoon, the death toll had been revised down to 24, not 51.]

Ordinarily, so soon after a disaster of this magnitude, discussions about political agendas and ideologies are put on hold, which is why it came as a surprise when one of Oklahoma's U.S. senators staked out a far-right position on federal disaster relief just five hours after the storm hit.

The tornado damage near Oklahoma City is still being assessed and the death toll is expected to rise, but already Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., says he will insist that any federal disaster aid be paid for with cuts elsewhere.

CQ Roll Call reporter Jennifer Scholtes wrote for CQ.com Monday evening that Coburn said he would "absolutely" demand offsets for any federal aid that Congress provides.

Coburn added, Scholtes wrote, that it is too early to guess at a damage toll but that he knows for certain he will fight to make sure disaster funding that the federal government contributes is paid for.

I've seen many note overnight that Coburn is at least consistent -- there are plenty of politicians who've balked at disaster-relief funds when there's a devastating storm, only to change their minds when their constituents are among the casualties. Coburn, however, has routinely questioned emergency funding for everyone, and apparently wants to apply the same standards to his own home state.

But while consistently is welcome, it doesn't change the questions about unnecessary callousness.

Death toll from the Moore, Oklahoma tornado is still officially 51, but expected to climb by another 40. Update: the official toll may be an overestimate. As of this morning, the Medical Examiner's office has received 24 bodies.

Bad weather is coming again today.

President Obama will deliver a statement later this morning about the tornado.

How to help.

Al Jazeera talks to the military doctor in charge of force-feeding hunger strikers at Guantanamo.

Vermont's Governor signs the "death with dignity" bill into law.

Afghans say a torture victim's body has been found near a U.S. base.

Astronaut Sally Ride will be awarded a posthumous Medal of Freedom.

Navy dolphins find a 130-year-old torpedo.