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Rachel Maddow visited the set of the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and talked about her bout with the swine flu, the tea baggers and going to a shooting range on her first date with her partner Susan Mikula.

Later Rachel showed Jimmy and announcer Steve Higgins how to make a White Lady coctail.

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From The Daily Show:

Wyatt Cenac exercises his constitutional rights to vote, drink and bring his gun to a health care reform rally.

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Chris Matthews asks Congressmen Jim Cooper and Phil Gingrey about the people bringing the guns to the town hall meetings and at least Cooper says he would discourage people from bringing them to the town hall meetings. Gingrey on the other hand defended it and says he feels perfectly safe at his town hall meetings and has no fear of anyone there with a gun. Well tough guy, if you were getting called Hitler and screamed at instead of applauded, maybe you'd feel a little differently about that.

Oh, darn. I was really looking forward to getting on my horse and going cross-country with my trusty six-shooter. Oh well!

Personally, I think the idea was a great one. In a time of constant right-wing hate directed against an African-American president, why wouldn't you want those patriots to take their guns across state lines? Why, a teabagging party, anti-abortion rally or a revolution might break out:

An amendment that would have allowed gun owners to carry their weapons across state lines fell just short of passage Wednesday in a vote that revealed deep divisions among the Senate's Democrats.

Supporters included all but two Republicans and 20 Democrats, but the vote of 58 to 39 in favor fell two short of the 60 needed to defeat a filibuster.

Despite its defeat, the amendment, sponsored by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), demonstrated the continuing power of the National Rifle Association and the gun rights issue in Congress. Rather than a setback, those backing the effort consider the vote a sign of strength for the Second Amendment and are planning more gun-related amendments to other legislation throughout the year. Afterward, Thune said he hopes the Senate will "reconsider this important issue" later this year.

It split not only Democrats, many of whom got to the Senate by supporting gun rights, but also the caucus's leadership: Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), campaigning for reelection in 2010, voted yes, while his top lieutenants, Sens. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) and Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), led the push by liberal Democrats against the measure.

Offered as an amendment to the annual defense authorization bill, the legislation would have allowed people to carry concealed firearms across state lines, provided they "have a valid permit or if, under their state of residence" they "are entitled to do so." It was considered one of the most far-reaching federal efforts ever proposed to expand gun-permitting laws.

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Sen. Orrin Hatch doggedly pursued Sonia Sotomayor today on a series of questions about the Second Amendment, since the matter of gun rights -- especially the evil President Obama Secret Plan to Take Your Guns Away -- is probably the biggest legal issue on the minds of most Utahns.

As you can perhaps see from the excerpts, Sotomayor handled them all ably (one of the rulings Hatch raised, she pointed out, was a very narrow case involving nunchucks and not guns). At one point, she had to point out that Hatch essentially wanted her to issue a ruling on cases that she might actually have before her on the Supreme Court, so she couldn't answer those.

Nonetheless, you can rest assured that the National Rifle Association and the various gun fetishists out there -- convinced that their gun rights actually are what keep us safe from government tyranny -- will find whatever she says unconvincing and denounce her anyway.

Last night, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA was on Glenn Beck's show, and he made it abundantly plain that they were going to go through the pretense of listening to Sotomayor patiently before they denounced her.

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Essentially, the NRA is demanding that Sotomayor prejudge all her Second Amendment cases and pay fealty to their often cockamamie legal positions, or else they will denounce her.

Count on more of the same from the Senators they have in their pocket. Orrin Hatch being one of the more prominent.

The only thing amusing about it is realizing just utterly impotent they all really are.

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Huckabee seems to have forgotten that most militaries have something a little larger than muskets to fight with these days. He apparently thinks arming the Iranians to the hilt and turning Iran into the wild, wild west would make things better over there. I don't think arming the citizens with guns is going to do them a whole lot of good trying to go up against that country's military force. They'd just be getting out bigger weapons to slaughter them with and more of them would end up dying. And while we're on the subject, just who do you think Jesus would arm Huck?

Huckabee: Well across America we celebrate this day as our nation’s 233rd birthday, and what a wonderful country. We ought to never take for granted our freedom, nor forget the depth of sacrifice for those that have given it to us. Just watch the events in Iran and breathe deep the air of freedom that you have. And we know the shot that murdered the twenty six old Neda Agha-Soltan has been called the shot heard round the world.

That’s a reference of course to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem commemorating the battle at the Concord Bridge in 1775, which begins:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

But there’s a huge difference between these two shots. A difference not just in hundreds of years and thousands of miles. The shot that took Neda was for brutality and darkness. It was fired not just to stop her young heart, but to destroy the demand for dignity and fairness. The Battle of Concord ended differently from the battle and the events five years earlier when Americans had thrown snowballs at the British and five Americans ended up dead. That confrontation became known as the Boston Mascare.

Now what’s the difference between a masacre and a battle? Well I’ll tell ya’. Guns. Some of us fail to understand that our 1st Amendment right to speak and assemble is meaningless without our 2nd Amendment right to bear arms. We don’t make the connection sometimes.

Without the 2nd Amendment there are no battles, just masacres. That’s why I don’t understand some people in groups who are so gung-ho on the 1st Amendment, but the 2nd Amendment, not so much. Some don’t seem to believe that we have an indivdual right to bear arms and the founding fathers wanted to make certain that what ever happened in this country, we would be prepared to protect our freedom like the Minutemen, and not be reduced to pathetic victims throwing snowballs or chunks of cement like the poor souls in Iran.

Forewarned about the danger of tyranny is forearmed against it. Unarmed, is simply dead. As long as evil exists the shots will continue to be heard around the world and as free men and women, we need to do everything we can to ensure that they echo the Battle of Concord, and not the masacre of Tehran.