I’m going to start off by suggesting that - if you haven’t already - go read Martin’s article where he puts Bill Clinton’s election and presidency into perspective. That is important because it lays the groundwork for where Hillary Clinton was coming from when she lost the 2008 Democratic primary to Barack Obama. A lot of the mistakes she made in that campaign were actually replicas of things that had worked (and sometimes hadn’t worked) for Bill Clinton. And they are the reason that some people went into this primary concerned about her prospects. But over the course of the last year or so, Hillary has demonstrated that she learned some things.

For 2016, what a lot of people wanted to see was a Clinton campaign staff that wasn’t led by the likes of Mark Penn. This time around, it is not simply that she is being better served by people like John Podesta, Robby Mook, Maya Harris and Joel Benenson, she has put together a staff that is both diverse and creative.

Over 50% of the campaign is female. Of the campaign’s more than 500 staffers nationwide, more than one-third are people of color; nearly 40% of Hillary for America’s senior staff are people of color. Regional press secretary Tyrone Gayle points out that these numbers roughly reflect national demographics…

Each department boasts steals from impressive firms including IBM, General Assembly, Etsy, Yelp, Google, Gawker, Facebook, Kiva, and DreamWorks. The digital team has talent from the New York Times and the analytics team from New York University’s formidable think tank on housing policy. The number of people from within politics is striking—for being so low. Less than half of the analytics team and almost none of the tech team ever held a campaign position.

One of the critiques often leveled at Hillary Clinton is that - because of all of the attacks aimed at her - she has developed a “zone of privacy” that she protects too fiercely. That might still be an issue for her. But the event that I suspect has had the biggest impact on this election so far is the Benghazi hearing. What we witnessed was Clinton being subjected to every insult, lie and attack that Republicans could come up with for eleven hours. Not only did she respond by demonstrating her amazing command of the facts, she neither lashed out nor withdrew - but calmly and competently addressed the questions and withstood the onslaught. It gave an awful lot of people confidence that she’ll be able to campaign and govern in an equally challenging environment.

The next move from Hillary that demonstrated what she’s learned since 2008 was her willingness to embrace the legacy of President Obama and build a firewall of support among African Americans and Latinos. These were two separate decisions, but one wouldn’t have happened without the other. While it’s true that the Clintons have a history of involvement with communities of color, that connection was strained during the 2008 primary - especially for African Americans. It was important for Hillary to mend those fences. She has done a superb job on that front.

The result of those efforts are one of the biggest reasons why Clinton has such a commanding lead in this primary. To get a feel for that, take a look at the results of the 2008 primary.

Clinton is currently working on replicating her results from 8 years ago (gold). But to that she has now added the Southern states that were won by Obama. That has been accomplished primarily by her “firewall” of support from people of color in those states.

All of that relates to how Hillary Clinton is campaigning this time around. What remains to be seen is how she will govern if she wins. I suspect that she will implement a different theory of change from what we’ve seen with President Obama. That is to be expected. It is important for any president to play to their own strengths rather than attempt to replicate other’s. On domestic policy, we already know that Clinton will work to maintain and build on the progress we’ve seen over the last 8 years. Where she has diverged slightly from Obama is on her approach to foreign policy - which is the one remaining area of concern for some of us.

Whether and how to legalize marijuana it is one of those issues that the presidential contenders get asked about quite a lot by average voters out on the trail but that seldom makes the cut of “serious” subjects that the press deems worth of covering. That’s too bad because each of the candidates has staked out positions on the matter which, with variations, mostly consist of punting the decision to the states.

Two years ago, the Washington Monthly published a cover package of stories that took a counter-conventional view on the issue. We argued that cannabis should be legalized, but with a much heavier regulatory regime than most states are considering—and than most pro-pot libertarians favor. In fact, lead writer Mark Kleiman argued, the federal government ought to step in and set strong ground rules for how states regulate marijuana in order to minimize the potential negative health consequences and to forestall a corporate takeover of the industry.

Though none of the candidates has taken up our idea, evidence from the handful of states that have already legalized pot mostly supports our case, I think. But whether you agree or disagree, if this is an issue you’re interested in, you should consider attending the Cannabis Science and Policy Summit that Kleiman and his colleagues at New York University are holding on April 17th and 18th. The event is being sponsored by NYU’s Marron Institute on Urban Management in partnership with the RAND Corporation, NORML, and a number of other organizations representing the full spectrum of expert opinion on the issue. If you can’t make the conference, a video of it will eventually be available here.

Meanwhile, you should also pre-order a copy of Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know. It’s the second (and heavily updated) version of a book by some of the same authors—including Kleiman and Jonathan P. Caulkins—who contributed to our cover package. Basically, it’s the book you need to read if you’re serious about marijuana legalization and how to do it right.

You walk into your teenage child’s bedroom expecting them to be puttering away on their iPad only to discover them slumped over in their chair, turning blue. As you look around, you see an empty bottle of prescription opioids, or maybe a needle and a spoon. How did things get to this point? Where did this junk come from? In the latter case, it may have come from someone like this:

As a boy, Esteban Avila had only a skinny old horse and two pairs of pants, and he lived in a swampy neighborhood called The Toad. He felt stranded across a river from the rest of the world and wondered about life on the other side.

He saw merchants pay bands to serenade them in the village plaza and dreamed of doing the same.

He had a girlfriend but no hope of marrying her because her father was the village butcher and expected a good life for his daughter.

Then Avila found an elixir and took it with him when, at 19, he went to the United States. It was black-tar heroin, and selling it turned his nightmare into a fairy tale.

That’s an excerpt from an article Sam Quinones wrote six years ago for the Los Angeles Times. He turned his investigation of the Xalisco drug gang into a book that was published in 2015: Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.

Of course, most kids these days are looking for something a little better than black tar heroin, but the Xalisco crew is still very active. Apparently, they made a move into the Cleveland area and Northern Ohio sometime last year.

This is just one piece of the opioid puzzle that Ben Wallace-Wells tackles in the Tilting at Windmills column in our latest issue of the Washington Monthly. You can read his whole treatment here.

But heroin deaths are concentrated most heavily in New England, and second most in the Midwest. The epidemic has, so far, bypassed demographically similar spots: Upstate New York, the Plains states. In individual stories you often see the line through the cases—a pain prescription, an addiction, a switch to heroin, a death—but the picture of the epidemic generally is not so clear.

One theory, advanced by the author and former Los Angeles Times reporter Sam Quinones, is that the shape of the epidemic may largely be the result of choices made by drug traffickers. Quinones focuses on a network of distributors from the Mexican state of Xalisco, who, at least in his account, are largely responsible for distributing a cheaper and less pure version of the drug, called black tar heroin, around the country. Quinones suggests that this network is low-profile and nonviolent (its members decline to carry guns). For this reason, he argues, it has targeted those regions where there are fewer drug dealers already operating—places like rural New Hampshire, and Ohio. The Xalisco network has largely avoided African American neighborhoods. The story of the Xalisco boys, in which a whole region is said to be co-opted into a drug operation, echoes the case of Marietta, Arkansas, during the crack epidemic, in which much of the population of this Delta town moved to Detroit in the employ of a drug supply chain led by four local brothers (Larry, Billy Joe, Otis, and Willie Chambers).

Quinones’s account is compelling. It could explain, for instance, the uneven spread of heroin through the country.

Explaining the uneven distribution of the opioid epidemic is an interesting exercise, but so is making an effort to understand the motivations of the Mexican kids who brought this deadly drug into your community.

There are no pat answers for how to roll back the opioid epidemic, and certainly the pharmaceutical industry and prescribing doctors are huge parts of the problem. But, people like Esteban Avila are part of the problem, too, and what’s the answer for that?

Building a wall?

As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is at least nominally responsible for refusing to hold a hearing for Merrick Garland, the president’s nominee to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. I say ‘nominally’ because it’s not clear that the decision is truly Grassley’s or how free he is to cross Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

What is clear is that Grassley is fully on board with the obstructive strategy, as he made clear in a February 26th blog post on his Senate website.

Yesterday, he elaborated on his rationale during a speech on the Senate floor. I first became aware of the speech because Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Adam Jentleson, blasted out a press release (bold in original):

In an epic display of buck-passing, an unglued Senator Grassley attacked Chief Justice John Roberts from the Senate floor, blaming Roberts for politicizing the Supreme Court.

These are truly wacky remarks coming from the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Combined with Senator Grassley’s strange CPAC remarks a few weeks ago (“I feel it’s about time that we have a national debate on the Supreme Court and its role in government”), one starts to wonder if Senator Grassley has a creative, albeit incoherent and self-serving, moon-landing-was-faked type theory of the Supreme Court that he’d like to discuss further.

Considering that Jentleson was calling Grassley’s performance ‘wacky’ and compared it to moon-landing denial, I expected to see some pretty unhinged remarks, but that’s not what I discovered when I read the transcript. Instead, I saw a very rational explanation for why the Senate confirmation process for federal judges has become so contentious and divisive.

The starting point for Grassley’s floor speech was a reference to remarks that Chief Justice John Roberts made shortly before Antonin Scalia died on February 13th. Here’s that segment of Grassley’s introduction:

…in a speech shortly before Justice Scalia’s death, Chief Justice Roberts maintained that the public wrongly thinks the Justices view themselves as Democrats or Republicans.

Of course, it’s irrelevant to the public how the Justices view themselves. What’s troubling is that a large segment of the population views the Justices as political.

It’s appropriate and instructive, then, to ask why the public takes this view, and whether it’s warranted.

I believe the public’s perception is sometimes warranted.

The Chief Justice ruled out that this perception has anything to do with what the Justices have done. Instead, he attributes it to the Senate’s confirmation process. As he sees it, senators ‘frequently ask us questions they know it would be inappropriate for us to answer. Thankfully, we don’t answer the questions.’

The Chief Justice also stated, ‘When you have a sharply divided political divisive hearing process, it increases the danger that whoever comes out of it will be viewed in those terms. You know if the Democrats and Republicans have been fighting so fiercely about whether you’re going to be confirmed, it’s natural for some members of the public to think, well, you must be identified in a particular way as a result of that process.’

Grassley then proceeded to say that on the one hand, precisely because Justice Roberts is correct to be concerned about how new justices are perceived, it’s a bad idea to have a confirmation hearing in the heat of a presidential election. While, on the other hand, according to Grassley, the Chief Justice has it all wrong:

But in another respect, the Chief Justice has it exactly backwards. The confirmation process doesn’t make the Justices appear political. The confirmation process has gotten political precisely because the court has drifted from the constitutional text, and rendered decisions based instead on policy preferences.

In short, the Justices themselves have gotten political. And because the Justices’ decisions are often political and transgress their constitutional role, the process becomes more political.

You might think this is just a partisan and highly contentious argument, but let’s give Grassley a chance to flesh it out a little.

The Chief Justice regrets that the American people believe the court is no different from the political branches of government.

But again, with respect, I think he is concerned with the wrong problem. He would be well-served to address the reality, not the perception, that too often, there is little difference between the actions of the court and the actions of the political branches.

Grassley then notes how easy it is to predict how the Justices will vote on most ‘hot-button’ issues that divide the Court.

As the Chief Justice remarked, although many of the Supreme Court’s decisions are unanimous or nearly so, the Justices tend to disagree on what the Chief Justice called the ‘hot button issues.’ We all know what kinds of cases he had in mind. Freedom of religion, abortion, affirmative action, gun control, free speech, the death penalty, and others.

The Chief Justice was very revealing when he acknowledged that the lesser known cases are often unanimous and the ‘hot button’ cases are frequently 5-4.

But why is that?

The law is no more or less likely to be clear in a ‘hot button’ case than in other cases.

For those Justices committed to the rule of law, it shouldn’t be any harder to keep personal preferences out of politically charged cases than others.

There’s a lot to critique in Grassley’s overall argument. He’s implicitly saying that the correct interpretation of the Constitution isn’t open to interpretation. And he’s setting an impossible standard that rulings on laws, which are political products, should be completely divorced from any political influence. But there’s one area where he is right.

What’s really animated the Conservative Movement’s anger with the Supreme Court, going back to Brown v. the Board of Education, is the fact that the Court has delivered political defeats that the legislatures were powerless to deliver. So, when Congress couldn’t end school desegregation, the Warren Court did it for them. When Congress couldn’t make abortion legal and accessible, the Burger Court did it for them. And the Courts cut them off from having prayer in school, and from banning gay marriage, and so on.

So, the reason that Supreme Court nominations became so contentious is that Conservatives used their political power to defend a system of racial apartheid, to prevent the liberation of women, to impose their religious superiority, and to discriminate in general, including against the LGBT community. And the Court stopped them either completely or partially.

Thereafter, controlling the Court became the only way for Conservatives to reverse these changes and to prevail politically. And, since Conservatives drifted away from the Democratic Party and seized control of the GOP, the Republicans are much more animated than Democrats when it comes to judicial nominations.

After all, if the Democrats win big majorities in Congress, they can achieve their goals, like vastly expanding access to health care. But Republicans cannot ban abortion legislatively unless they can amend the Constitution. They can’t re-ban gay marriage legislatively, either. They can’t get prayer back in schools by passing a law.

So, in this sense, Grassley isn’t crazy. He doesn’t sound like a man raving about how the Apollo 11 mission was faked.

He’s making an accurate presentation of the history of and the stakes in Supreme Court judicial confirmations.

But, if we ask a different question, we may get a more sensible answer.

Why has the Supreme Court acted politically to stymie conservative values? Why did the Warren Court end apartheid? Why did the Burger Court legalize abortion? Why did the Roberts Court legalize gay marriage?

The answer every time is that the did it because the Conservatives would not budge. And that’s why Teddy Kennedy wasn’t being too overdramatic when he opposed the nomination of Robert Bork by saying:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.

It might not have been true that Bork would have gone that far if he had been confirmed. Even he recognized that the country had changed. But ‘Bork’s America’ stood in the way of desegregation and legal abortion and secular public schooling, and without a Supreme Court to step in and intervene, this country would have remained Bork’s America.

Which means, in my book, that the Supreme Court acted politically because Conservatives were so deeply wrong. Of course it would have been preferable for legislatures to do the right thing rather than relying on the Court to rectify things, but we could only wait so long. Were we forever going to try to compete with the Soviets in the Third World while operating a system of apartheid in our Southern states?

Please.

So, I don’t think Grassley was making a wacky argument. I understand exactly why he thinks the Supreme Court has brought this divisiveness on itself. They did it to overcome the deplorable and inexcusable wrongness of the Conservative Movement.

But, who’s really to blame here?

Recently I suggested that Democrats need to have a more thoughtful discussion about trade agreements. Teeing off of another excerpt from the Sanders’ interview with the Daily News, Zack Beauchamp has written a must-read article about their impact on the very poorest people on earth.

He begins by pointing to the bar Sanders set for what would constitute fair trade:

I do believe in trade. But it has to be based on principles that are fair. So if you are in Vietnam, where the minimum wage is 65¢ an hour, or you’re in Malaysia, where many of the workers are indentured servants because their passports are taken away when they come into this country and are working in slave-like conditions, no, I’m not going to have American workers “competing” against you under those conditions. So you have to have standards. And what fair trade means to say that it is fair. It is roughly equivalent to the wages and environmental standards in the United States.

Beauchamp goes on to discuss an outcome of Sanders’ proposals to “reverse” NAFTA/CAFTA and get rid of permanent normal trade relations with China that is usually not included when we talk about trade agreements.

There’s one big problem, according to development economists I spoke to: limiting trade with low-wage countries would hurt the very poorest people on Earth. A lot.

Free trade is one of the best tools we have for fighting extreme poverty. If Sanders wins, and is serious about implementing his trade agenda as outlined in the NYDN interview and elsewhere, he will impoverish millions of already-poor people.

It is worth noting that in 2015, the number of people around the globe who lived in “extreme poverty” (less than the equivalent of $1.90 a day) fell below 10% for the first time. Beauchamp notes research showing that:

The global decline in extreme poverty is inseparable from the global trading regime. When poor countries can sell cheap goods to rich countries, or bring in a lot of foreign direct investment, growth skyrockets. This means more jobs, better government services, and thus less poverty.

This poses a dilemma for Americans because, as Beauchamp points out, the same trade agreements that have reduced extreme poverty around the globe have eliminated jobs in this country. It is understandable that, for Donald Trump and his supporters, this is a simple matter that is covered by his mantra about “making American win again.” But it poses a more complex challenge for liberals. A failure to acknowledge this dilemma constitutes what David Drezner calls, “economic nationalism from the left.”

Beyond the economics, however, is the fact that reducing global poverty is also in our self interest. As President Obama said back in 2009, a peaceful world depends on it.

…a just peace includes not only civil and political rights — it must encompass economic security and opportunity. For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want.

It is undoubtedly true that development rarely takes root without security; it is also true that security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine and shelter they need to survive. It does not exist where children can’t aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family. The absence of hope can rot a society from within.

President Obama has also suggested that - on almost every issue - our job as liberals is harder than the conservative’s job.

After all, it’s easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it’s harder to craft a foreign policy that’s tough and smart. It’s easy to dismantle government safety nets; it’s harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for. It’s easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it’s harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion. But that’s our job. And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose.

We can add another item to that list: dealing with the complexities of how both our country and people around the globe can benefit from trade.

Both Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders outperformed the polls in Wisconsin yesterday. The latest had Cruz ahead by 4.7 points and he beat Trump 43 to 35. The polling averages had Sanders ahead by 2.6 points, but he won 56 to 43.

Because the state was “winner take all” for the Republicans, that means that Cruz netted 30 delegates over Trump, but he still trails the real estate mogul by 226 delegates. Sanders netted 14 delegates over Clinton (so far), but he also trails by 249. So, overall, the leaders in both races took a hit in Wisconsin, but not enough of one to change the dynamics of either race.

A little over a week ago, I wrote this about the Democratic race:

If this pattern holds, Sanders should outperform the polls in Wisconsin, which holds an open primary. But by mid/late April he’ll run into a brick wall of closed primaries in New York, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Pennsylvania - with almost 500 delegates up for grabs.

In exit polls from Wisconsin’s open primary yesterday, Sanders beat Clinton among Independents by a huge margin (72/28). But the good news for his campaign is that he tied her among Democrats (50/50). That’s not enough to make much headway on the delegate count in the upcoming closed primaries, but it is better than he’s done in most states.

For the next two weeks the focus is all going to be on the 2nd biggest enchilada in the country when it comes to delegates - New York. It also happens to be the state that 3 of the 5 contenders in this race called “home” at one point or another. By the time April 19th rolls around, we’re all going to be in a New York state of mind.

* The tally on governor’s responses to so-called “religious liberty” laws is as follows: Governors Pence of Indiana and Deal of Georgia wised up and vetoed them. Governor McCrory of North Carolina signed one in his state and continues to feel the consequences. Today, Governor Phil Brryant of Mississippi joined him.

Gov. Phil Bryant signed the controversial Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act into law Tuesday morning, saying he did so to protect the rights of people with “deeply held religious beliefs.”

HB1523, authored by House Speaker Philip Gunn, has drawn state and national attention with groups as varied as the Human Rights Campaign and the Mississippi Manufacturers Association all calling for the governor to veto the bill.

* Janet Langhart Cohen responds to these events by suggesting that “Corporate America supports the fight for LGBT rights. It should do the same for black lives.”

Black Americans must call on corporate America to speak out and support our right to equal protection under the law, including demanding that public officials hold police strictly accountable for the excessive and unwarranted use of lethal force against us. If we are refused, the black community should use our economic power exactly as corporate America did in Arizona and Georgia.

* Today, President Obama announced new administrative actions to tackle corporate inversions.

When companies exploit loopholes like this, it makes it harder to invest in the things that are going to keep America’s economy going strong for future generations. It sticks the rest of us with the tab. And it makes hardworking Americans feel like the deck is stacked against them.

* Given a title like “What the MRI of Donald Trump’s soul reveals,” I just had to read the latest from David Axelrod. But what he writes about the process of presidential campaigns was even more interesting than how he applied it to Trump.

In 2011, as the presidential race was gearing up and many were predicting defeat for President Obama, I reminded a reporter, in judging potential opponents, just how exacting the process of running for president can be.

“Presidential campaigns are like MRIs for the soul,” I said. Whoever you are, the process will reveal you. And the deeper you go in the campaign, the more this is true.

Candidates for President of the United States are auditioning for the toughest job on the planet. Every issue that comes to that desk in the Oval Office is fraught and consequential. Every comment a president makes can send armies marching and markets tumbling.

Voters intuitively get this. They watch. They see how the candidates make split-second decisions under the klieg lights and measure how these men and women might deal with the relentless pressures of the presidency.

Issues are important. But command and sure-footedness in critical moments are essential.

* Finally, for the list of “ignorant things Donald Trump said,” here’s today’s addition.

When asked by Fox host Sean Hannity if he would eliminate any federal departments as President, Trump responded “largely, we can eliminate the Department of Education,” a common refrain among conservatives.

But he went on: “Department of Environmental, I mean, the DEP is killing us environmentally, it’s just killing our businesses.”

Sometimes you just gotta laugh to avoid totally freaking out about the fact that this guy is actually leading the Republican presidential primary.

Before Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote for the New Yorker, he was an editor here at the Washington Monthly writing stories about everything from deep background on Rep. Patrick McHenry to Paris Hilton to female boxing. Demonstrating stunning prescience, Wallace-Wells forecasted the plunge in home prices in 2004 and wrote about the Great Black Hope represented by Barack Obama in the same year.

In the current edition of the Washington Monthly, Wallace-Wells has brought that keen eye and insight back to these pages by writing the latest Tilting at Windmills column, which opens with this gem titled: Not a yooge difference.

As a Bronx native I’ve spent the campaign quietly weighing Donald Trump’s New York accent against that of Bernie Sanders. I can declare a split decision. Trump has the better vowels: His yooge obliterates Sanders’s yooge, the perfect measure of dismissiveness without dwelling on itself. But Sanders has the better consonants: when he says speculation, each syllable is a saliva receptacle. What is especially great about both of these accents is that no New Yorkers speak like that anymore, not even in deepest Canarsie. The city is too diverse; its population changes too constantly. Accents so extreme could only be preserved in environments where their bearers did not regularly interact with other New Yorkers: Burlington, Vermont, in one case, and a quartz penthouse in the other.

There’s a lot more where that came from. You can read them all here.

Simone Madden and Thomas Carroll, a young couple living in Baltimore, have a strong desire to build a stable home and solid foundation for their 4-year-old son, Mason. Part of their stated motivation for working together is that neither grew up with a father in their homes.

“By being in my son’s life, I can give Mason the strength he needs to be a father, not just another guy looking for his father,” says Thomas.

Simone and Thomas are part of a unique program, Couples Advancing Together (CAT), that has been successfully working with mothers and fathers as co-parents, helping them share responsibility for raising their children - emotionally, physically and economically - including developing communication skills along with family and career goals needed to strengthen their relationships, compete in the job market and develop family budgets.

Operated by the Center for Urban Families (CFUF), CAT is a “wraparound program” aimed at families who currently receive public benefits through the Maryland Department of Social Services. By providing services such as healthy relationship skill-building, employment assistance and case management services, the program puts fathers in the best position they can be to play an active role in their children’s lives.

CFUF does its work in a community that suffers from some of the highest rates of delinquent child support payments in the state. The West Baltimore community is home to more than 2,400 men owing more than $20 million in back child support payments. The area also has some of the highest rates of men returning from incarceration, many of whom are fathers.

“The women in our community are losing their sons, husbands and other male family members to incarceration, homicides and other circumstances,” says CFUF Founder and President Joseph Jones. “We can’t have women bear all of the burden. We have created a space here at CFUF where men can play a strong complementary role in their family.”

CFUF has served more than 26,000 Baltimoreans since 1999, providing the bridge that many have needed to attain stability, while also emerging as a leader in the national conversation on responsible fatherhood and black male achievement. Families in Baltimore face a host of challenges, living in a community that has been racked by racial tension, high rates of poverty and drug abuse, failing schools, alarming incidences of homicide and high incarceration rates that hamper the efforts of working families who strive for a better life.

The goal of strengthening families is what attracted us at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF) to invest $2.1 million in the great work being done by CFUF. The well-being of children is not only at the center of their work, but it is the focus that drives ours as well.

Every child deserves a fair chance at success in school and life, and at WKKF, we concentrate our resources on early childhood (birth to age 8) within the context of families and communities. We believe that this, as well as addressing the gaps that too many children face, offers the best opportunity to help both children and their families overcome the barriers caused by poverty and racial inequity over time.

Our work supports educated children, healthy children and economically secure families, by making investments that are community-led and family-focused. We also have a core value that “place” truly matters, and that communities like Baltimore are their own best sources of wisdom and effective solutions. By working alongside communities, we can work together to identify policies and practices that stand in the way of the success of children and families, like those that affect fathers’ ability to positively contribute to their children’s futures. This partnership also helps inform the development of smart public policy that helps break the cycle of poverty for families.

Helping families achieve economic security also allows them to be fully empowered and equipped to support their children. Yet 35 percent of children in the U.S. (almost 25 million) are growing up in single-parent homes. The highest rates of single parenthood are in the homes of children of color, which also increases the likelihood that these children will grow up in poverty.

CFUF has come to a clear understanding that integral to improving the lives of the children of Baltimore is the need to better engage fathers in playing a strong, supportive role in the upbringing of their children.

The organization has succeeded in developing a program that has sustained bipartisan support through three presidential and two gubernatorial administrations and leveraged public funding (state and federal) and other private investments from like-minded philanthropic organizations, to sustain them in their ability to create brighter futures for the children and families they serve.

Our investment in CFUF aims to help deepen the impact of their work to improve the lives of the children in the families they serve. In addition to relationship skills coaching and employment assistance, parents participate in a six-week, 12-session program that includes home visits and long-term follow-up after completion. CFUF facilitators guide parents through a program that meets the unique needs of the families in a positive and respectful environment that allows couples to share their experiences with their peers. Parents are able to learn how to successfully relate to one another and then work together to raise their children.

CFUF also assists couples with developing the family and career goals needed to strengthen their personal relationships, compete in the job market and develop family budgets. To ensure participation, CFUF provides transportation assistance, child care and dinner for parents and their children. The outcomes being pursued with WKKF support include ensuring that at least 50 percent of participating parents are employed and supporting 100 percent of participating families with self-sufficiency plans and case management. Since its inception in 2015, 116 couples have successfully completed the CAT program.

Additionally, our investment has made it possible for CFUF to solidify relationships with community child care providers, as there is great need for increased access to high-quality care for families. CFUF is supplying transportation to child care providers for its families, as well as working with providers to increase the quality of their care.

It’s this unique and intentional two-parent focus, along with a two-generation approach that simultaneously seeks to improve parents’ employment and financial status while engaging childcare for their children, that we believe holds promise for the continued success of the program.

Thomas summed up what the program has meant to him and to his family, saying, “Ever since the CAT program, we are stepping up. It’s not a one-year program, it’s a life program. We had a big learning curve, and some things were hard to grasp, but with encouragement and support from everyone at the Center for Urban Families, we have grown so much - individually and as a family.”

The release of the Panama Papers has already claimed the career of the Prime Minister of Iceland.

Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson resigned suddenly Tuesday, walking out of Parliament shortly after 3:00 pm local time — less than a day after publicly declaring he would not succumb to protesters’ demands that he leave office, and less than 12 hours after his attempt to dissolve Parliament was rebuffed.

Iceland is, of course, the country that actually put bankers in jail after the financial crisis of 2007-08.

Nancy noted earlier that Bernie Sanders hasn’t necessarily thought through all the details and implications of his promises to break up the big banks and hold some executives responsible for their actions, but it’s obviously something that can be done if a country has the right kind of culture.

In Iceland, the jailed bankers get to tend to sheep and horses and otherwise aren’t exactly doing hard time, but they’re also not free to leave and they’ve been thoroughly disgraced and financially punished.

Personally, whenever I think about the disparity between how much pain the American people felt during the Great Recession and the fate of the architects of that disaster, this is what runs through my head.

Even Iceland’s intolerance for their shenanigans seems too tame to me.

This election season has been marked by two different, but related, failures of analysis. On the one hand, numerous zombie candidates who were basically dead men walking were treated with the utmost seriousness for far too long. On the other hand, there have been premature obituaries, for Trump, for Cruz, for Kasich, and even for Sanders.

Today is most likely going to be a good day for those who were once written off. Cruz looks poised to carry Wisconsin and put a price tag on Trump’s many recent stumbles. And Sanders, who is still all but mathematically eliminated, will almost definitely pull out a win.

Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook posted a piece last night that spells out some of the hard facts facing the Sanders campaign. It’s true that it cherry-picks some of the statistics, but his basic point is unassailable. Regardless of what happens in Wisconsin, in order to catch up in the pledged delegates “Sanders has to win the four remaining delegate-rich primaries — New York, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey — with roughly 60 percent of the vote.” And, even then, he’ll have to win over the superdelegates which is a basically impossible task for a candidate who still sees the DNC and the Washington establishment as enemies rather than future allies who he hopes to lead.

Still, as vanilla as this analysis is, it’s true as far as it goes:

Winning Wisconsin, where polls will close at 9 p.m. EDT, would give Sanders a fresh dose of momentum — and perhaps new credibility for his claim that he has a chance to catch Clinton in the delegate count and win the Democratic nomination.

As Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” and if Sanders wins Wisconsin, he’ll get some breathing room. It matters a lot whether he wins narrowly, as he did in Michigan, or he wins convincingly, like he’s won most caucuses and the primaries in Vermont and New Hampshire. That’s because a narrow win will only net a half dozen or fewer delegates, and that’s basically a loss for him at this point.

Back before all this started, I tried to identify states (other than New Hampshire) with primaries that Sanders might win. Massachusetts seemed promising, but he lost there. Oregon seemed like a good state for him. But it was Wisconsin that I thought would give him almost a surefire win, provided his campaign was still active at this point. I’ve actually been surprised about how competitive the polling has been there, but it seems likely that the demographics and progressive traditions of the Badger State will send him to victory, and possibly the thumping victory I originally expected. At this point, he needs bushels of delegates, not a small handful of them.

As for Trump, I am beginning to wonder if he can really pull this out. He sat down with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa and the results were just as shocking and bizarre as Sarah Palin’s latest appearance stumping for The Donald in Wisconsin. Woodward and Costa tried mightily to treat Trump like a serious candidate for the presidency, but that just wouldn’t work on any level. It only served as a case study in extreme narcissism worthy of a Nero or Caligula.

Trump’s problem is that most of his delegates are not going to be loyal to him on a second ballot in Cleveland, which means that he most likely will need to win this thing outright. I could be wrong about that. Eugene Robinson certainly thinks I am wrong:

If Trump comes to Cleveland a few delegates shy of a majority, I find it hard to believe the party is going to tell primary voters, “Thanks for your input, but we don’t care what you think.” Sorry, but I just don’t believe the GOP has the fortitude to divorce its angry, energized base.

If the polls out of Wisconsin are correct, Trump is going to lose some ground tonight in his quest to win an outright majority of delegates. Meanwhile, the betting market is giving a 63% probability that Trump won’t reach his goal and the convention will be brokered. Still, the same oddsmakers place Trump’s chances at 2:1, while Cruz is pegged at 4:1 and Kasich is languishing with 9:1 odds.

There are a lot of variables to consider in gaming this all out, but I can’t avoid the sense that the wheels are starting to come off the Trump cart.

I’m not ready to write his political obituary yet, but I’m finally coming around to the idea that Ted Cruz might actually win this thing. And, considering Cruz’s standing in Congress and with the Republican establishment, that was unthinkable at the beginning of this process.

One thing is for sure, this campaign will remain interesting for the foreseeable future.

Richard Cohen has finally gotten around to writing about President Obama’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg that was the impetus for so much discussion almost a month ago. In doing so, he demonstrates exactly what the President referred to as the “Washington playbook.” As a reminder, here is what Obama said to Goldberg about that.

“Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power,” he said. “That is the source of the controversy. There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply.”

Cohen doesn’t so much champion the Washington playbook as we criticizes Obama for not employing it. For example, here is what he writes on the President’s statement about Russia’s incursion into Ukraine.

It’s a rule that Obama himself should have followed. He speaks the unspeakable, conceding that eastern Ukraine, Moldova and Crimea are Russia’s for the taking. “Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it,” he told Goldberg.

Ambiguity is not Obama’s forte. Rather than keeping Vladimir Putin guessing — and maybe restrained — he signals the Russian president not to worry. Putin already has Crimea. He’s got eastern Ukraine. Will Moldova be next? Just a matter of time, it seems to me.

The playbook Cohen is working from assumes that the only possible response to Russia is a war. If President Obama isn’t willing to do that in response to Crimea and eastern Ukraine, it’s just a matter of time before Putin goes into Moldova.

What that completely ignores is that there are other possible responses - like economic sanctions that are coordinated with our international partners and the European Union.

Cohen also doesn’t seem to think that President Obama is doing anything about the situation in Syria.

But the Syrian civil war has produced a humanitarian calamity, at least 250,000 dead and an almost unprecedented refugee crisis that is destabilizing Europe. Obama acts as though this is a minor matter, just another Middle Eastern dust-up, but the Syrian mess is an example of the slippery slope he does not mention when he mentions the one he wants to avoid. Like, possibly, Moldova, it is the consequence of inaction that may matter more than any action itself.

It seems as though Cohen is unaware of the fact that the U.S. is engaging in air strikes against ISIS in Syria. But even more importantly, Sec. of State John Kerry has been working tirelessly on the multilateral peace negotiations that are seeking an end to the Syrian civil war.

For people like Cohen, if the U.S. isn’t using military intervention to wield it’s way around the globe, it’s not doing anything. That pretty much sums up the Washington playbook that President Obama refuses to implement.

Bernie Sanders has done an excellent job in this presidential primary of summarizing what he thinks is wrong with our economy and politics and offering a few big proposals to correct those problems. A big part of his focus has been on the power of Wall Street and their practices that led to the Great Recession nine years ago.

There has been a lot of discussion about his proposal to reinstate the depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which put a firewall between commercial and investment banking. But his plans to break up the big banks and criminally prosecute them for the activities that led to the Great Recession haven’t received as much scrutiny.

In a recent interview with the Daily News, the editorial board asked for more detail on those proposals. Here is the discussion about breaking up the big banks:

Daily News: Now, switching to the financial sector, to Wall Street. Speaking broadly, you said that within the first 100 days of your administration you’d be drawing up…your Treasury Department would be drawing up a too-big-to-fail list. Would you expect that that’s essentially the list that already exists under Dodd-Frank? Under the Financial Stability Oversight Council?

Sanders: Yeah. I mean these are the largest financial institutions in the world….

Daily News: And then, you further said that you expect to break them up within the first year of your administration. What authority do you have to do that? And how would that work? How would you break up JPMorgan Chase?…

Sanders: How you go about doing it is having legislation passed, or giving the authority to the secretary of treasury to determine, under Dodd-Frank, that these banks are a danger to the economy over the problem of too-big-to-fail.

Daily News: But do you think that the Fed, now, has that authority?

Sanders: Well, I don’t know if the Fed has it. But I think the administration can have it.

Daily News: How? How does a President turn to JPMorgan Chase, or have the Treasury turn to any of those banks and say, “Now you must do X, Y and Z?”

Sanders: Well, you do have authority under the Dodd-Frank legislation to do that, make that determination.

Daily News: You do, just by Federal Reserve fiat, you do?

Sanders: Yeah. Well, I believe you do…

Daily News: Well, it does depend on how you do it, I believe. And, I’m a little bit confused because just a few minutes ago you said the U.S. President would have authority to order…

Sanders: No, I did not say we would order. I did not say that we would order. The President is not a dictator.

Daily News: Okay. You would then leave it to JPMorgan Chase or the others to figure out how to break it, themselves up. I’m not quite…

Sanders: You would determine is that, if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. And then you have the secretary of treasury and some people who know a lot about this, making that determination. If the determination is that Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail, yes, they will be broken up.

Daily News: Okay. You saw, I guess, what happened with Metropolitan Life. There was an attempt to bring them under the financial regulatory scheme, and the court said no. And what does that presage for your program?

Sanders: It’s something I have not studied, honestly, the legal implications of that.

Well…that’s as clear as mud, isn’t it? Senator Sanders seems unaware of the fact that Dodd-Frank set up criteria under which a “Systemically Important Financial Institution” (SISI) can be broken up. It doesn’t just happen because a president decides to do so. He also demonstrates no understanding of the complexity that would be involved or the potential for chaos in the economy. For example, here is what Paula Dwyer wrote about just a few of the questions that would emerge.

It’s unclear how regulators would split up, say, JPMorgan Chase, which got bigger after the crisis because the U.S. implored it to absorb Bear Stearns (ditto for Bank of America, which acquired Merrill Lynch and Countrywide). If regulators divided the bank into commercial and investment banking halves, how would they disentangle the interwoven asset and liability threads around the globe? Millions of contracts would have to be renegotiated. Lines of credit might have to be terminated because smaller banks can’t afford to finance them.

Here is the exchange about prosecution of Wall Street:

Daily News: Okay. Staying with Wall Street, you’ve pointed out, that “not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy.” Why was that? Why did that happen? Why was there no prosecution?

Sanders: I would suspect that the answer that some would give you is that while what they did was horrific, and greedy and had a huge impact on our economy, that some suggest that…that those activities were not illegal. I disagree. And I think an aggressive attorney general would have found illegal activity.

Daily News: So do you think that President Obama’s Justice Department essentially was either in the tank or not as…

Sanders: No, I wouldn’t say they were in the tank. I’m saying, a Sanders administration would have a much more aggressive attorney general looking at all of the legal implications…

Daily News: Okay. But do you have a sense that there is a particular statute or statutes that a prosecutor could have or should have invoked to bring indictments?

Sanders: I suspect that there are. Yes.

Daily News: You believe that? But do you know?

Sanders: I believe that that is the case. Do I have them in front of me, now, legal statutes? No, I don’t. But if I would…yeah, that’s what I believe, yes. When a company pays a $5 billion fine for doing something that’s illegal, yeah, I think we can bring charges against the executives.

For almost nine years now, people have been talking about the need to prosecute Wall Street firms and executives for their practices that led to the Great Recession. And yet a presidential candidate who makes it a central plank of his proposed agenda doesn’t seem to have spent any time looking into what laws were broken and simply believes that, because they paid big fines, an “aggressive attorney general” would have found something to prosecute.

I have to admit that I was rather stunned by this whole interview. Over the course of the last few months, I have been asking questions about the details of many of Sanders’ proposals. He doesn’t need to provide those in his stump speech. But when these kinds of bold structural changes are the cornerstone of your agenda, I assumed that a great deal of inquiry and thought had gone into reaching the conclusion that they were necessary. Throughout this interview I saw none of that. Here is what Bill Palmer had to say about it:

In other words, despite so many months of promising to break up the big banks, Sanders doesn’t appear to have ever stopped and asked an economic advisor how it would legally or functionally work or if it’s even possible.

The interview is long. But I encourage everyone to read it and develop your own conclusions.

* There’s a lot of chatter today about the release of the “Panama Papers.”

The hidden wealth of some of the world’s most prominent leaders, politicians and celebrities has been revealed by an unprecedented leak of millions of documents that show the myriad ways in which the rich can exploit secretive offshore tax regimes…

Journalists from more than 80 countries have been reviewing 11.5m files leaked from the database of Mossack Fonseca, the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm…

Though there is nothing unlawful about using offshore companies, the files raise fundamental questions about the ethics of such tax havens - and the revelations are likely to provoke urgent calls for reforms of a system that critics say is arcane and open to abuse.

* The Supreme Court did something today that doesn’t happen very often…they released a unanimous decision.

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against challengers seeking to change the long-held interpretation of the principle of one person, one vote. Siding with a lower court, the 8-member high court held that total population could be used to draw electoral districts…

The challengers had argued the use of total population — which includes non-citizens, but also children and disenfranchise prisoners — to draw districts was unconstitutional because it diluted the political power of eligible voters. Civil rights advocates argued that the lawsuit was an attempt to increase the political power of white suburban and rural voters, who tend to vote Republican, at the cost of minority and urban communities, which have a larger share of non-eligible voters in their districts.

* The population at Gitmo is down to 89.

Two Libyans held at the US military prison in Guantanamo have been flown to Senegal, the Pentagon said.

Salem Abdu Salam Ghereby and Omar Khalif Mohammed Abu Baker Mahjour Umar are the first of a group of about a dozen inmates expected to be resettled, US media report.

The two transfers mean there are now 89 detainees left in Guantanamo. President Barack Obama has presented Congress with a plan to close the facility but faces stiff opposition.

* Here’s something that might surprise a lot of folks.

Whenever minimum wage increases are proposed on the state or federal level, business groups tend to fight them tooth and nail. But actual opposition may not be as united as the groups’ rhetoric might make it appear, according to internal research conducted by a leading consultant for state chambers of commerce.

The survey of 1,000 business executives across the country was conducted by LuntzGlobal, the firm run by Republican pollster Frank Luntz, and obtained by a liberal watchdog group called the Center for Media and Democracy…Among the most interesting findings: 80 percent of respondents said they supported raising their state’s minimum wage, while only eight percent opposed it.

* It sounds to me like Donald Trump still thinks he’s on a reality TV show.

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump told the crowd at a Monday campaign rally his events would be “boring as hell” if his onstage presence was less bombastic.

* Finally, here is a new release from Jacob Collier - a musician that Quincy Jones describes like this:

I have never in my life seen a talent like this… Beyond category. One of my favourite young artists on the planet - absolutely mind-blowing.