There is no open thread.  

…

April Fool’s, there is!  Did I get you?  April Fool’s on the Internet is awesome!

• Speaking of April Fool’s jokes, apparently an Ellen Tauscher staffer got so upset at this joke post about the Congresswoman marrying bin Laden that he put up a cease and desist in the comments.  Giving the post about eleventy-billion times more publicity than it would have had.  Nice one, Jonathan Kaplan!

• Speaking of fools, Lisa Vorderbrueggen decides that a Congressional race 3,000 miles away in New York has tons of significance to the upcoming race in CA-10.  Why?  Because a win there for Republicans would signal “voter backlash” to the Democratic agenda!  Except, as Vorderbrueggen acknowledges, that seat has a 70,000 voter registration advantage for Republicans, while CA-10 has a 67,000 voter registration advantage for Democrats.  So there’s no correlation at all.  Never mind!

• As if California needed another debilitating hit to its agriculture industry, a manufacturing error at a processing plant in Terra Bella has led to mass recalls of pistachios, amid fears of salmonella poisoning.  Fortunately, the economy is gangbusters in the Central Valley so this won’t have an impact.

• Dan Weintraub is gushing about California Forward’s new co-chairman Bob Hertzberg.  I think there are enough of these bipartisan fetishists to make a colony somewhere in Idaho called Broderville and let them all get along in centrist harmony.  Think of how many journals of punditry would be published!

• William Bratton’s leadership as police chief of Los Angeles is seen as the cause for a continued drop in crime in the first quarter of 2009, despite the bad economy.  Which is great, but I want some answers about this Pro Publica report on a 12,000-case backlog in testing DNA evidence in sexual assault cases.  Surely with the drop in these crimes, we can eliminate this delay in justice.