The Alabama Republican Party posted the photo above a few hours ago, with this caption: "ALGOP welcomes Republican state party Chairmen from across the nation to Birmingham to discuss how to take back the US Senate in 2014!" To which commenter Edward Kimmel applied this sardonic annotation: "Spanning the entire range of Alabama Republicans from Lutheran to Methodist."

And yes, if you're wondering, those are hoop skirts, more commonly used in the South for remembering the past than ginning up the future. (H/t my aunt CeeJay Garrett.)

Below, you can see how the Wisconsin Republican Party is getting ready to take back the Senate in 2014. Lefty blog RootRiverSiren spots the following photo on the Wisconsin GOP website and on iStock Photo as "Diverse Group of People Showing Community." 

Digital-Topo-Maps.com

The plan to have eight counties in northeast Colorado secede and form a 51st state -- behold, North Colorado -- is still not likely to happen. But the longer the county commissioners talk about it, the clearer their reasoning becomes. From the local Post Independent:

"I know that initially you're kinda like, 'Wow, it's a little out there,' " [Weld County Commissioner] Conway said. But he said a new state would be economically viable.

With an assessed value of $7.5 billion this year and continued announcements from Noble Energy, Inc., Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and others planning to invest billions more on drilling in the region, more money could go to ignored infrastructure and to education, which commissioners said is seriously underfunded in Weld County.

It's true that conservative, rural voters are mad about gun reform and new laws about energy and farming, but what makes the idea of North Colorado possible is oil and, specifically, oil money. If you live in one of the eight counties -- Weld, Morgan, Logan, Sedgwick, Phillips, Washington, Yuma or Kit Carson -- please holler out.

The Wisconsin State Senate today passed a bill that requires women who want an abortion to first get a state-mandated, medically unnecessary ultrasound. The bill also requires doctors who work in abortion clinics to gain admitting privileges at a hospital -- the same kind of provision that was designed to shutter the last abortion clinic in Mississippi.

The Wisconsin bill now goes from the Republican-controlled Senate to the Republican-controlled House. Republican Governor Scott Walker has said he would sign the bill into law. As Rachel reported on the show last night (video), it's still open season on reproductive rights in the states.

Viewer Dave Eveland of Madison, Wisconsin, forwards video from the Senate vote today, when Senate President Mike Ellis puts the hammer down. At about 1:50:

You're interrupting a roll call. Sit down. Right now! Call the roll....

You're interrupting a roll call and that will not be tolerated. Sit down!

The bill passed along party lines after Republicans cut off debate, 20 minutes in. Senate President Ellis told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel the trouble started when Democrats tried to debate a motion that was not debatable. "They triggered this," he said. "I am a nice guy."

Mississippi's law requiring admitting privileges has so far been blocked by the courts. But on, Wisconsin: the House is expected to take up the bill tomorrow. (Thanks for the clip, Dave. You can send us stuff here or through our Facebook page.)

President Obama today defended the surveillance programs that have dominated the headlines for the past few days. The President said that both a program to sweep up the top-level data of calls from Verizon Business customers and the Prism program to mine a vast array of data from major U.S. Internet companies had congressional approval:

"[They] have been authorized by broad, bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006. . . . It's important to understand that your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed on exactly what we’re doing.”

Tonight on our show, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) took issue with that characterization:

Certainly what the president said today stretched several things. He said that Congress had approved this program. Well, if Congress approves something with very specific standards, and those standards were secretly eviscerated -- the guts were torn out of them so they were meaningless -- then Congress really hasn't approved the program at all. And so I disagree with the president on that.

And when he said that members have been briefed, well, I was one of, I think, the few who sought a briefing on the cell phone side, because of what I'd heard in the public press, but I don't think many others outside of the intelligence committee got that briefing, so if the President believes that a hundred members of the Congress knew the details of that program under Section 215 [of the Patriot Act], I think he's wrong. I think very few outside of the Intelligence Committee, and in terms of the Prism program, which I think very few had ever heard of -- I certainly never heard of it -- I doubt that more than the Intelligence Committee would have known about that.

Merkley voted against the Patriot Act when it came up for reauthorization in 2011. Since then, he has tried to pass legislation that would have increased the oversight of warrantless wiretapping and declassified FISA court opinions outlining the government's powers of surveillance. Both measures failed.

Digital-Topo-Maps.com

Way up in the northeast corner of Colorado, folks have just about had it with the rest of the state. The Colorado legislature has come back under Democratic control, leading to new laws about transportation, farming and renewable energy, plus gun reform. What's a dispossessed conservative to do?

Secede. The Denver Post reports that a new plan would have eight counties in the northeast corner of Colorado form a breakaway state of their own, North Colorado. The counties' frustration is understandable, a local member of Congress tells the paper.

"The people of rural Colorado are mad, and they have every right to be," said U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner, a Republican from Yuma. "The governor and his Democrat colleagues in the statehouse have assaulted our way of life, and I don't blame these people one bit for feeling attacked and unrepresented by the leaders of our state."

North Colorado would include about 333,000 people, hiving off six percent of old Colorado's population.

The estimable Colorado Pols notes that leaders of the counties have all said they're at least interested in the notion of leaving. "Call us quaint," Colorado Pols writes, "but we're shocked to see elected county commissioners seriously talking about such a patently ridiculous idea." A spokeswoman for Weld County tells the Post the idea could go to voters in November.

Pat Gallagher sends this from the adult nonfiction section of his local New Jersey public library. (Send more stuff, please! Here, or through our Facebook page.)

Do you folks remember the last time Steve Benen took a day off? Yeah, we had to go back and look, too. I'm happy to report that Steve is taking vacation today and tomorrow, Thursday and Friday. 

While he's gone, our pal Zachary Roth will be blogging down the fort. Zack usually hangs out with the good folks on MSNBC's big website. He comes to us by way of Talking Points Memo, Yahoo and Steve's own former haunt, Washington Monthly. He loves a lot of the same stories we do, like voting rights and the triumph of big business at the Supreme Court. If you want to know more about the Tea Party groups who say they came in for unfair scrutiny by the IRS, Zack works that side of the street, too.

We're delighted to have Zack hanging out with us this week. Please join me in giving him the warmest of welcomes. You can reach him on Twitter, and you can read more of his work on the main MSNBC site.

P.S. Steve says he'll be escaping vacation at least long enough to post the new unemployment report -- and his famous bikini graph -- on Friday morning.

(Image: "Between Jump and Fall," by Llanddcairfyn on Flickr/Creative Commons. It has nothing to do with Steve Benen. For all we know, he's off back-country skiing someplace where you can still do that in June.)

We heard today from Oklahoma State Representative Joe Dorman, one of the minority Democrats in the legislature there. For the last few years, Dorman has worked on trying to get the state better prepared for extreme weather like tornadoes. After the devastating tornado killed seven kids at Plaza Towers Elementary last month in Moore, he put forward a $500 million bond issue for building safe rooms in schools. 

His proposal happened late in the legislative session, and it didn't go far. Dorman is getting ready to bring the bill back next session, but he tells us he doubts the Republican-controlled legislature will pass it. Figuring his odds are still long, Dorman has come up with a different approach.

Dorman wants to put the question of state funding for safe rooms directly before voters as an up-or-down citizens' referendum.

The plan calls for gathering signatures starting in August or September when the big fairs and football games generate big crowds filled with people who can be asked to sign the petitions. If the referendum qualifies for the ballot, he tells us he expects the kind of broad coalition from ordinary voters that can be hard to come by these days in a legislature, with knock-on effects:

Republican soccer moms would vote for something like this, and they would vote against a Tea Party type who would oppose a shelter.

And because the idea of protecting kids could prove to have bipartisan appeal at the ballot box, Dorman says he expects real opposition from conservatives who wouldn't want the question to drive up turnout. It's a fascinating political study, both the electoral dynamics and the strategy of just trying to get something done as a political minority -- in this case a blue dot in our nation's reddest state.

P.S. I don't know what Representative Dorman is doing with that snake. Maybe we can ask him later. We're expecting him on the show tonight.

We keep reading about a purple Texas in the making. We hear talk about a purple Georgia and even a purple Mississippi. Today in the American Prospect, Bob Moser looks at the widening consequences that would follow the end of the solid red South:

2012 map from the New York Times; striped states indicate gains for that party.

Over the next two decades, it will become clear to even the most clueless Yankee that the Solid South is long gone. The politics of the region’s five most populous states -- Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Texas -- will be defined by the emerging majority that gave Obama his winning margins. The under-30 voters in these states are ethnically diverse, they lean heavily Democratic, and they are just beginning to vote. The white population percentage is steadily declining; in Georgia, just 52 percent of those under 18 are white, a number so low it would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

By the 2020s, more than two-thirds of the South’s electoral votes could be up for grabs. (The South is defined here as the 11 states of the former Confederacy.) If all five big states went blue, with their 111 electoral votes, only 49 votes would be left for Republicans. (That’s based on the current electoral-vote count; after the next census, the fast-growing states will have more.) Win or lose, simply making Southern states competitive is a boon to Democrats. If Republicans are forced to spend time and resources to defend Texas and Georgia, they’ll have less for traditional battlegrounds like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Even if Democrats aren't competitive in those states for another decade, they will benefit from connecting with millions of nonvoters who haven’t heard their message. They are building for a demographic future that Republicans dread: the time when overwhelming white support will no longer be enough to win a statewide election in Texas and Georgia.

Moser's story today in the American Prospect is the first of four parts. 

On Friday night, at least 14 people were killed in Oklahoma in tornadoes and flooding. Another half dozen people are still missing.

The Oklahoman

The safe room worked.

The night of the storm, the Oklahoman posted a report from the city of Moore, where 24 people were killed last month, including seven kids at an elementary school with no safe rooms for them to take shelter in during a storm.

The report noted that researchers into extreme weather had finished their survey of safe rooms in Moore, and the safe rooms had worked, even in that EF5 tornado:

[Larry]Tanner said researchers found 16 aboveground safe rooms or storm shelters in the damage path or near the damage path of the storm. All survived.

"They all performed great," Tanner said. "We continue to have great success stories both in Joplin and in Oklahoma City."

In some cases, all that was left after the tornado passed were the shelters. Tanner said aboveground shelters have had a hard time catching on in Oklahoma, where people have been told for decades that the safest place during a tornado is underground.

During Friday night's storm, students at the Canadian Valley Technology Center in El Reno, Oklahoma, took shelter in an underground classroom as a tornado destroyed their school. They all lived. From the New York Times:

Mr. Winters, the superintendent of the three-campus technology center, said he would not build another school without shelters, underground or aboveground, or safe rooms. "If it was a full school day, 500, 600 people in the building at that time, that hallway would have been used," he said. "We're going to build a new building. Why don’t we build one that's got multiple safe rooms? Why don't we build one that we can safely put 500 people in at one time? When you see the devastation and you see the end result, it clears up for you pretty quick."

If the need for a storm shelter gets clear after you survive a storm thanks to having one, the question of how to pay for it remains. Governor Mary Fallin says she wants to have "a very vigorous discussion as to what can we do within budgetary means," which depends at least partly on government having the will to spend more. 

One state lawmaker, Democratic Representative Joe Dorman, is pushing for a $500 million bond issue to build safe rooms at every school in the state. Dorman tells us the state -- the reddest in the nation -- is resistant both to government mandates for things like storm shelters and to bond issues for putting them in schools. Still, he's going to try. Dorman's argument is that if we can mandate that kids attend school, then we can mandate that they have somewhere safe to go in dangerous weather.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of lawmakers has started a nonprofit to raise money for safe rooms. One big donor argues that Oklahoma doesn't have a consensus on paying for safe rooms and can't wait to get one:

"People on both sides of the aisle have concerns about government interaction/intervention, one way or the other, whether it be too much or too little. But the fact of the matter is that we have to take the safety of our children into our own hands. Who else’s hands would we have it be in? We cannot sit back and let these matters of life and death be handled administratively. We as a citizenry and a populace have to rise together and form a solution for the good of all. We are their parents, their guardians, the ones they look to for guidance and instruction. In times of need we cannot let them down. We owe more, but at least this much, to our children. That is why we have started this fund. 

"The children at Plaza Towers elementary did not have to perish.  Nothing we can do will bring them back or console their loved ones who remain, but we can try to stop this from ever happening again.  We cannot stop natural disasters, but we can endeavor to mitigate their effects at every step of the way.  We live where we live, and our weather will not change; but we must be proactive. We cannot wait for our government to fix this.  It is time we did what needs to be done, and do not suffer through yet another tragedy in another 14 years.  Now is the time to act.  A call to action must be made. Together we can make a difference.  We are a Country of the people, by the people, and for the people, and the people must come forward at this time.  No amount is too small, and certainly no amount is too large."

Click for bigger image. (The "letter" in blue is from my searching.)

Ohio Senate Republicans appear to have given the heave-ho to the plan to curb student voting. The measure, as passed in the regular budget this spring by the Ohio House, would have required colleges that vouch for students living on campus to give those students the lower in-state tuition, even if the students don't qualify for that. 

The bill would have cost Ohio colleges and universities as much as $370 million a year. Along the way, Ohio Republicans figured out that their bill to discourage the college vote might have led to more college voting, as students figured out they could get much cheaper tuition for the price of exercising their constitutional rights. 

Just now, Ohio reporter Marc Kovac tweeted from the new version of the budget released by the Ohio Senate:

Looks like college student tuition/voter registration language has been removed.

And it's true. If you dial up the comparison of the two budget versions -- old House and new Senate -- you'll see that where the House had the part about tuition and voting, the Senate has "no provision." It's on numbered page 554 482, the seventh mention of "letter."  (P.S. Last week Ohio Republicans said they're still interested in curbing the student vote, just not in the budget.)

Thanks for the news, Marc Kovac. Below, from his OhioCapitalBlog, kids love the White Stripes.

-- Mississippi State Senator Billy Hudson on his support for expanding Medicaid. Hudson says that leaving people without health insurance will hurt hospitals in his district when they have to pick up the cost for caring for the uninsured.