The 1994 crime bill is back at the center of the Democratic presidential debate. This is largely, if not solely, the result of Black Lives Matter protesters interrupting a speech last week by the man who signed it, Bill Clinton, and Clinton’s vigorous and detailed attempt to address their shouted complaints. Fact-checking sites are now parsing Clinton’s comments. The networks are running forensic explainers about the 22 year-old bill. And the elite liberal media can’t stop talking about the controversy. Chris Hayes devoted a segment of his show last night to it. The New York Times editorial pages have two pieces on it today.

In one sense, this renewed interest in the ’94 bill is a good thing. As crime rates have plummeted in the last couple of decades, the press and public haven’t shown as much interest in the subject of crime policy, even though there’s still plenty of crime out there. 1994 was really the last time the country as a whole debated the matter, and few Americans recall—or are old enough to have heard—the details of that debate. And while there has been something of a sea change in expert opinion on sentencing and incarceration since then, a lot of the issues then—how best to train police, what role social programs play in crime prevention—are live issues today.

In another sense, however, the debate is shaping up to be a classic example of liberals eating their own. Most of the provisions of the ’94 bill—the assault weapons ban, community policing grants, stepped up enforcement of violent crimes against women—were and are not controversial, at least on the left. The parts the left really objects to are the stiffening of federal criminal sentences and the provision of federal money for states to build more prisons. These aspects of the law did indeed do damage. But as Mark Kleiman, in his definitive recent piece on the ’94 law, has noted, the damage was limited in scope and far outweighed by the benefits of the law—in particular the provision of extra police paired with management and training reforms, which most experts agree played at least some role in reducing violent crime rates, especially in minority urban neighborhoods.

Still, it’s legitimate to have a debate over the role the ’94 law played in sentencing and prison building. It’s the way that debate is playing out among liberals that is destructive to the liberal cause. First of all, it’s not as if this is an issue that actually divides Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Yes, she stumped for the bill, but he voted for it. Yes, he voiced concerns at the time about its worst provisions (a fact his supporters endlessly bring up). But so did the White House and just about every Democrat on the Hill.

That’s because virtually all of the parts of the bill that liberals object to—the stiffer sentences, the prison building—were put in by Republicans at the time and objected to by Democrats at the time. In congressional negotiations, Democratic lawmakers and the Clinton White House pushed back, and some of the GOP’s most onerous provisions were eliminated or scaled back. But, understanding that Republican votes were needed for the bill to pass, most Democrats—and Bernie Sanders—voted for it.

There were certainly some lawmakers and others on the progressive side who didn’t support the ’94 law. But their objections were the same as those of the Democrats who voted for it. There was almost nobody on the liberal side who actually wanted and advocated for the punitive stuff. The only serious dispute on the left was whether the benefits of the overall bill were great enough that it was worth swallowing the objectionable parts. The vast majority of Democrats thought they were.

That goes for African-American Democrats, too, a fact that the BLM protests, or at least the way they are being interpreted and spun, obscures. For instance, one of the New York Times opinion pieces today, entitled “Did Blacks Really Endorse the 1994 Crime Bill?”, argues that whites who say so are indulging in “selective hearing.” In fact, the authors (three academics) note, the congressional black caucus really wanted a bill with $5 billion in extra spending for drug rehab and early intervention programs and studies on police bias. The black lawmakers did indeed push these alternatives. But it was Republicans, not Democrats, who refused to go along, as the piece itself makes clear—one GOP lawmaker called the extra spending “welfare for criminals.” In the end, members of the congressional black caucus voted for the ’94 bill by more than 2 to 1. They made the same calculation as their white Democratic counterparts: the benefits of the bill outweighed the downsides.

The real division, then, was not between black and white Democrats or between progressive and “establishment” Democrats. It was between Democrats and Republicans. That’s still true today (though less so; some conservatives are coming around, for their own reasons, to the view that we need incarceration and sentencing reform). What’s really happening is that some on the left, included BLM and the editors of The Nation, who lost the argument among progressives in 1994, are attempting to re-litigate the debate, and in doing so are making a dispute between the two parties seem like one within the Democratic Party. The press loves phony controversies like that. Liberals shouldn’t.

Truer words were never spoken:

A top Republican National Committee staffer fired back Tuesday at presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, saying it’s not the committee’s fault that Trump’s campaign staffers and his children don’t understand the rules.

Sean Spicer, an RNC spokesman, said on CNN the delegate allocation rules in Colorado and every other state were filed with the national committee back in October and made available to every GOP campaign.

“If you’re a campaign and you don’t understand the process that’s going on, then that’s bad on the staff. That’s bad on the campaign,” he said. “Running for office entails putting together a campaign that understands the process. There’s nothing rigged.”

Spicer continued: “I understand that people sometimes don’t like the process or may not understand it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fair and open and transparent.”

Apparently, a couple of Trump’s children couldn’t even understand how to register themselves to vote in the New York primary.

Look, I understand the sentiment that the system is rotten and the game is rigged. I do. But I don’t take people seriously who seek power but have no real idea how power works. If you want to be the nominee of the Republican or the Democratic Party, you need to figure out how that can be done. And, if you’re an outsider who is running with a message that the gatekeepers are all a bunch of losers and morons, or that they’re all corrupted by money, then you’ll need a plan for winning the people you’ve insulted over to your side.

Let me remind you to take a look at the list of Republicans that Donald Trump has insulted just on Twitter. I won’t deny that Trump’s insult-dog comedy routine contributed to his electoral successes, but it’s biting him in the ass now that he’s losing delegates who should rightfully be in his corner.

Bernie Sanders ought to have understood that he needed to work very hard on introducing himself to southern black voters, but that’s only half of his problem. The other half is that the superdelegates are overwhelmingly opposed to his candidacy. He needed a plan to prevent that from happening.

We can argue about how possible it ever was for either of these candidates to win over more establishment support, but they both thought they could overcome the lack of it by going straight to the people. Trump may still pull this out, maybe, but he’s acting awfully surprised to discover that his delegates can be stolen from him for the simple reason that delegates don’t like him. A savvy adviser would have told him about this likelihood last summer, and maybe he could have been a little more selective in his insults and a little more solicitous of establishment support.

Obviously, Sanders is running an outsider campaign built on criticizing those who are flourishing in our current political system, but he’s also running to be the leader of a party (and all that party’s infrastructure and organizations), and there has to be a better middle ground that allows you to challenge entrenched power without totally alienating it. Even if there wasn’t a way to be successful in gathering more institutional support, I would have liked to see him make the effort.

So far, I’ve been focusing on a straightforward strategy for winning a major party nomination as an outsider and challenger of the status quo, which is difficult enough. But imagine if one of these two outsiders actually won the presidency. They’d both have a lot of repair work to do with an establishment that they’d have to govern.

I really do understand the appeal of declaring the whole system rotten and just going after it in a populist appeal for root-and-branch change. But I think it’s a bit of a sucker’s game to hitch yourself to that kind of wagon if you don’t get the sense that the challengers really understand how power works, how to seize it, and what to do with it if you get it.

I want a progressive challenger who is pragmatic and ruthless enough to navigate our rotten system and then have the leadership abilities to lead it once they’ve taken control of it.

I never got the sense that Sanders was that guy, or even close to that guy.

Contrary to the impression given by TV crime dramas like CSI and Law and Order, many people will probably be surprised to learn that most of the so-called forensic sciences have not been scientifically validated - no scientific research has been done to prove these frequently used forensic tools are actually reliable in determining the guilt or innocence of defendants accused of crimes. In fact, in nearly half of the convictions that have been overturned in recent years through DNA evidence, unvalidated and improper forensic science was a contributing factor in the original conviction.

Yet for decades, courts have allowed into evidence unreliable forensic practices such as bite mark comparison and microscopic hair analysis, which in many cases was the only physical evidence linking a defendant to a crime.

At the Innocence Project, of which I am proud to be a founding board member, our mission is to exonerate wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing and criminal justice system reform. Since its founding in 1992, 337 wrongful convictions have been overturned through DNA testing, and more than half were helped by the Innocence Project. These cases have helped to identify both the flaws in the system and how to fix it.

One of the Innocence Project’s principal priorities has been to rid the system of unreliable forensic evidence - which is often extremely persuasive to jurors precisely because it is cloaked in science. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences issued a seminal report, Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward, documenting the lack of scientific validation in forensic practices and calling on research and national standards to improve public safety and reduce wrongful convictions.

The Innocence Project has been an instrumental force in pushing lawmakers in Washington to act on the recommendations in the report, but we also realized that this is a problem that could be addressed through the courts. If courts did their job of properly weighing the evidentiary value of this evidence and excluded it from our courtrooms when it isn’t based on actual science, we could make a huge impact in preventing wrongful convictions.

Toward that end, the Innocence Project launched its strategic litigation unit, which I helped to inaugurate. For four years, I funded a position created in the name of my father, Joseph Flom, the distinguished senior partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom who passed away in 2011. I saw this initiative as an opportunity to honor my father’s legacy and the values of justice and fairness that he instilled in me.

This initial investment has turned out to be extremely successful. We hired a seasoned litigator, Chris Fabricant, to lead the unit’s initial efforts. Since then, the Innocence Project’s strategic litigation unit has expanded to include three lawyers and a paralegal. In just a few years, this small specialized team of lawyers has had a tremendous impact. It has made great strides in exposing the dubious value of bite mark analysis, a forensic technique where a forensic odontologist claims to “match” a defendant’s teeth to bite marks on a victim’s skin. At least 24 people have been wrongly indicted or convicted (and in many cases sentenced to serve decades in prison) based on erroneous bite mark evidence. After the strategic litigation unit persuaded the Dallas District Attorney’s Office to move to reverse the conviction of Steven Mark Chaney, who wrongly served 28 years for a murder he didn’t commit because of erroneous bite mark evidence, the unit brought the case to the attention of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which recently recommended a moratorium on the use of bite mark evidence in the state and called for a review of past cases where it was used. Once the Texas ban goes into effect, other states will undoubtedly follow suit, hopefully ridding our courtrooms of this highly unreliable practice forever.

The unit also recently scored a huge victory in helping to overturn wrongful convictions based on erroneous microscopic hair analysis. Because hairs can be submitted to DNA testing, law enforcement doesn’t rely on the discipline as often as it once did, but its use continues in some jurisdictions. The discipline is so unreliable (having contributed to more than 20 percent of the wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA testing) that the Innocence Project, working with the National Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, persuaded the FBI and the Department of Justice to conduct an unprecedented review of thousands of cases over several decades where FBI agents submitted reports or testimony linking defendants to hairs found at crime scenes. Initial findings from the FBI review are staggering. In 268 cases where FBI examiners provided testimony used to inculpate a defendant at trial, erroneous statements were made in 257 - or 96 percent - of the cases.

George Perrot was exonerated after 30 years in prison for a wrongful conviction.

The strategic litigation unit got involved in the case of George Perrot, who was one of the people to challenge his conviction based on errors identified in the review. A Massachusetts court recently released a landmark decision finding that Perrot - who served 30 years in prison - is entitled to a new trial “because of the introduction of hair evidence that in numerous and material respects exceeded the foundation of science.” This decision, which upset a century of precedent admitting hair comparison evidence as valid, “scientific” evidence will no doubt be of critical importance to many others whose convictions are based at least in part on erroneous hair comparison testimony and will help spur courts to do a better job excluding unreliable evidence in the first instance.

Using a similar science-based approach, the unit has also had some important court victories in tackling the leading contributor to wrongful convictions: eyewitness misidentification, a factor in nearly 75 percent of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA. The unit has helped to persuade high courts in New Jersey, Oregon and Massachusetts to issue decisions in those states to adopt new frameworks for how courts treat identification evidence. Jurors in those states are now warned about the problems of misidentification and urged to evaluate this evidence more critically. Thanks to the advocacy of the strategic litigation unit, states that once prohibited defense lawyers from presenting experts on identification and memory now allow these experts. There are now only two states with absolute bans on identification experts.

I am deeply committed to the work of the Innocence Project because I can think of nothing worse than to be wrongly convicted and imprisoned. Meeting and getting to know many of the good men and women who have suffered this horrible fate has profoundly impacted my life, making me want to do everything in my power to prevent and correct these horrible injustices. Being able to honor my father’s great legacy by providing the initial funding for the strategic litigation unit has given me great joy and comfort knowing that we are restoring the lives of those who have been wrongly convicted and preventing others from having to experience such great injustice.

We’ve been hearing a lot about the rising problem of student debt. For Americans who couple that challenge with a disability, the Obama administration brought some good news yesterday.

Hundreds of thousands of student loan borrowers will now have an easier path to getting their loans discharged, the Obama administration announced Tuesday.

The Department of Education will send letters to 387,000 people they’ve identified as being eligible for a total and permanent disability discharge, a designation that allows federal student loan borrowers who can’t work because of a disability to have their loans forgiven. The borrowers identified by the Department won’t have to go through the typical application process for receiving a disability discharge, which requires sending in documented proof of their disability. Instead, the borrower will simply have to sign and return the completed application enclosed in the letter.

If every borrower identified by the Department decides to have his or her debt forgiven, the government will end up discharging more than $7.7 billion in debt, according to the Department…

About 179,000 of the borrowers identified by the Department are in default on their student loans, and of that group more than 100,000 are at risk of having their tax refunds or Social Security checks garnished to pay off the debt.

Obviously this step doesn’t solve the problem of student debt that is facing millions of Americans. But it is yet another example of an effective use of President Obama’s ongoing pen and phone strategy that is slowly but surely making a big difference for a lot of people.

Recently two liberal activists have publicly stated their positions in the Democratic presidential primary: Bill McKibben endorsed Sanders and Tom Hayden endorsed Clinton. With the campaigns moving into territory like New York, Pennsylvania and eventually California, it is interesting to compare what these two men said about the candidate’s positions on climate change (especially fracking).

McKibben mostly critiques Clinton for her “evolution” on issues.

Ties to the past define Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She’s run on her experience, and she’s relied on senior voters for her margins of victory. Her call is for slow and evolutionary change, for a “realism” that rejects the supposedly romantic and idealistic hopes of her competitor.

At least on climate change, slow and evolutionary change is another way of giving up. Because the world is changing so damned fast.

Here’s why he supports Sanders.

…mostly it’s because there’s never been any need for his positions on these issues to evolve. Keystone? “No” in September 2011, not in September 2015. He co-sponsored the bill to stop fossil fuel extraction on public lands. Fracking? Nothing complicated, just a simple, “No.”

Hayden discusses other issues in his endorsement. But here is what he said about the candidate’s positions on climate change.

Hillary wants limits on fracking: a ban where individual states have blocked it, like in New York; safeguards against children’s and family exposures; a ban where releases of methane or contamination of ground water are proven; and full disclosure of the chemicals used in the process. Bernie’s position is that he’s simply against all fracking.

But Hillary’s position goes beyond what virtually any state has done. The New York Times writes that she “has pledged to end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry to pay for her ambitious climate plan” and intends to install 500 million solar collectors in four years. If and when Obama’s Clean Power Plan is upheld in the federal courts, now a likelihood after Justice Scalia’s death, that will bring a even greater change.

Meanwhile, Bernie’s total fracking ban leaves the question of how to do so unaddressed. His energy platform is comprehensive, but he offers no strategy to implement the Paris Summit in the short term. Instead, Bernie will call his own summit of experts in the first hundred days he is president. There is no recognition of the overwhelming wall of opposition from the Republican Congress, which can only be broken on state-by-state organizing. The climate clock is ticking towards doomsday. Where are we moving next, beyond waiting for the overthrow of Citizens United?

I’ve become accustomed to hearing that Sanders is more “progressive” on climate change than Clinton. So after reading these two endorsements, I decided to compare what their campaign web sites say about this issue (Clinton and Sanders). Other than the differences on fracking discussed above, I found very little daylight between the two of them. They both want to transition away from fossil fuels, invest in clean energy development and infrastructure, end tax subsidies for oil and gas companies and lead the world in combating climate change.

As Hayden notes, Sanders’ plan includes one unique proposal:

Convene a climate summit with the world’s best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists and indigenous communities in his first 100 days. The United Nations Paris climate talks in December are an important milestone toward solving climate change, but even optimistic outcomes of these talks will not put the world on the path needed to avoid the most catastrophic results of climate change. We must think beyond Paris. In the first 100 days of Bernie’s Presidency, he will convene a summit of the world’s best climate experts to chart a course toward the healthy future we all want for our families and communities.

Clinton’s plan also includes one unique proposal.

Building a 21st century clean energy economy will create new jobs and industries, protect public health, and reduce carbon pollution. But we can’t ignore the impact this transition is already having on coal communities. Hillary’s $30 billion plan to revitalize coal communities will ensure coal miners, power plant operators, transportation workers, and their families get the respect they deserve and the benefits they have earned; invest in economic diversification and job creation; and make coal communities an engine of US economic growth in the 21st century, as they have been for generations.

In the end, unless you base your decision on the differences between these candidate’s position on fracking or the importance of supporting those who are being impacted by the death of coal, I don’t see how either of them lays claim to being more progressive on this issue.

Joby Warrick brings some interesting news today in the Washington Post.

Two years after proclaiming a new “caliphate” for Muslims in the Middle East, the Islamic State is seeing a steep slide in support among the young Arab men and women it most wants to attract, a new poll shows.

Overwhelming majorities of Arab teens and young adults now strongly oppose the terrorist group, the survey suggests, with nearly 80 percent ruling out any possibility of supporting the Islamic State, even if it were to renounce its brutal tactics.

A year ago, about 60 percent expressed that view, according to the 16-country survey released Tuesday.

“Tacit support for the militant group is declining,” concludes a summary report by the poll’s sponsor, ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller, a public relations firm that has tracked young Arabs’ views in annual surveys for the past eight years. Other recent surveys have found similarly high disapproval rates for the Islamic State among general populations in Muslim-majority countries.

The article doesn’t attempt to describe why this is happening. But I immediately thought of what Eli Berman and Jacob Shapiro wrote about President Obama’s containment strategy with ISIS.

We’re fighting a failed state in the making, one that will implode if merely contained, and will collapse even faster under coordinated economic and military pressure from its neighbors…

As the Soviet Union was to communism, so ISIL is to jihadism: the purest articulation of a noxious ideology of governance, which incidentally has little connection to Islam. If we allow it to fail, then it will be clearly a failure of ISIL as an idea. The same is not true of a military defeat at the hands of Western forces. Given its deep structural weaknesses and its symbolic value in the global war of ideas, our best strategy is almost surely one based on containment, allowing the group’s motivating ideology to destroy the group from the inside—and thus more rapidly find its proper place in the dustbin of history.

The containment strategy involved more than simply using U.S. air power to support the coalition of Arab states fighting on the ground to deny territory to ISIS. It also included efforts to starve the group of financial resources and new recruits to carry on it’s agenda.

What we might be witnessing is the kind of success on that last front that would not have been possible if we had implemented the kind of strategy Republicans tend to support and “carpet bombed” major territories in the Middle East.

As Warrick goes on to report, there are still places where Arab youth have no love lost for the United States.

Arab youth were generally mixed in their views of the United States. More than 60 percent saw Washington as an ally, with the strongest positive rankings coming from Persian Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE. By contrast, more than 90 percent of Iraqis regarded the United States as an enemy. Dislike for Washington was nearly as high in Yemen and in the Palestinian territories, and more than half of Lebanese youth said they saw the United States as an enemy.

To the extent that the United States had done what ISIS wants and engaged in a holy war with Islam, we would have made the terrorist group a much more attractive draw to many of these young people. One need only contemplate what led 90% of Iraqi youth to see us as an enemy. The legacy of the Bush/Cheney war lives on.

President Obama has rejected the Washington Playbook when it comes to defeating ISIS. As a result, the “noxious ideology” of ISIS is becoming apparent and destroying the group from within.

* Jim Tankersley identifies five myths about trade. Here is number one:

America is “losing” in bad trade deals, particularly with China…

The United States does not have a trade agreement with China, neither a bilateral or a multilateral deal — much less a good one or a bad one. The two countries trade on baseline terms set by the World Trade Organization; Trump has long criticized America’s decision under President Bill Clinton to agree to China’s entry to the WTO. If the next president wants to change those terms, he or she would need to enact change at the WTO (nearly impossible, in the short term), negotiate an agreement directly with the Chinese (not remotely on the table) or pressure China through other means, such as officially declaring it a currency manipulator (theoretically possible and relatively simple procedurally).

* What do Jeb Bush, Sen Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) have in common? None of them are planning to attend the Republican Convention in Cleveland this summer. Apparently they’re not the only ones.

Rep. Mick Mulvaney, a co-founder of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said in an interview with CNN that after discussing his plans with about 20 other conservatives in recent days, roughly half of them agreed with him and have decided not to attend the convention.

His reason: “Let the activists, let the people decide” who the nominee will be, rather than the politicians.

In other words, when this thing blows up - I don’t want to be anywhere near the place. Let “the people” handle that one.

* The pundits at NBC’s First Read had this take on the results of their latest poll in New York.

According to a new NBC/WSJ/Marist poll of New York — conducted entirely after the Wisconsin results — Donald Trump leads John Kasich by 33 points, 54%-21%, with Wisconsin winner Ted Cruz in third at 18%. In the Democratic race, Hillary Clinton is ahead of Wisconsin victor Bernie Sanders by 14 points, 55%-41%. And it’s just not our poll; every New York survey we’ve seen has Trump above 50%… and has Clinton leading by double digits. It’s a reminder that, for all of the attention on momentum, demographics and geography continue to play the bigger role in these 2016 primary contests.

* This morning Sen. Chuck Grassley (Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee) had breakfast with Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in order to “tell Garland to his face that the experienced, qualified jurist, who’s enjoyed bipartisan praise, will be the first high court nominee in American history to be denied a hearing and a floor vote.” But it’s the Ritual Cafe in Des Moines that is getting all the attention for how they chose to mark the occasion.

The cafe served up dishes including “obstruction oats,” “Supreme Court scrambled eggs,” “needthenine.org burrito,” “justice delayed bowl,” “Constitution quiche” and “Garland’s granola,” and drinks like a “confirmation coffee,” “Article 2 iced toddy” and “advice and consent cappuccino.”

* Finally, I’ve been talking a lot lately about President Obama’s legacy of designating national monuments via the Antiquities Act of 1906. Today’s addition is an historical rather than natural site.

The new Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument will protect the iconic house, which served as the National Woman’s Party headquarters , but it will also serve to elevate and amplify the stories, memories, and accomplishments of the many women who passed through its halls - each profoundly dedicated to securing women’s suffrage and equal rights in the United States.

Named for activist and suffragist Alva Belmont, former president of the National Women’s Party, and Alice Paul, the Party’s founder and chief strategist, the monument was originally acquired in 1929 - and quickly became a vital organ in the movement for women’s equality. Women filled its rooms daily, working tirelessly to draft petitions, organize protests, write letters, and provide each other with both the physical and emotional support necessary to sustain each other’s intense commitment.

President Obama attended the ceremony today at the new Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument and said this:

We do this to help tell the story of these suffragists. In these rooms, they pursued ideals which shouldn’t be relegated to the archives of history, shouldn’t be behind glass cases, because the story of their fighting is our story. I want young girls and boys to come here, 10, 20, 100 years from now, to know that women fought for equality, it was not just given to them. I want them to come here and be astonished that there was ever a time when women could not vote. I want them to be astonished that there was ever a time when women earned less than men for doing the same work. I want them to be astonished that there was ever a time when women were vastly outnumbered in the boardroom or in Congress, that there was ever a time when a woman had never sat in the Oval Office.

I don’t know how long it will take to get there, but I know we’re getting closer to that day, because of the work of generations of active, committed citizens.

I have to admit that I don’t pay much attention to the Drudge Report. But apparently Ted Cruz thinks that they’ve become a mouthpiece for the Trump campaign.

“In about the past month the Drudge Report has basically become the attack site for the Donald Trump campaign. And so every day they have the latest Trump attack. They’re directed at me,” Cruz said. “By all appearances, Roger Stone now decides what’s on Drudge, and most days they have a six-month-old article that is some attack on me, and it’s — whatever the Trump campaign is pushing that day will be the banner headline on Drudge.”

Cruz also lamented the website’s lack of primary and caucus coverage.

“By the way, they no longer cover news,” Cruz said. “When we win a state, suddenly the state doesn’t matter. You know Colorado — there was no red siren on Drudge when we won all 34 delegates in Colorado. That wasn’t news, because — I mean listen, that’s fine. If people want to get on the ‘Trump train,’ they can.”

James Hohmann thinks he knows what’s up with that.

The Drudge Report has aggressively portrayed Ted Cruz’s sweep of all the delegates from Colorado’s Republican convention as a corrupt power grab…

If it was just Trump complaining about the “crooked” system, it would seem like sour grapes from a guy who got out-hustled. But The Donald’s allies in the right-wing media, including Drudge and Breitbart, are trying to make Cruz’s wins seem illegitimate in the eyes of the conservative base. If Cruz wins the nomination at a contested convention in Cleveland, he will need these grass-roots activists to rally around him. If regular Drudge readers believe he did not win fair and square, they will be less inclined to do so.

The word that jumped out at me in all that was “illegitimate.” The right wing seems to have perfected their chops in challenging a politician’s legitimacy with all the practice they’ve had in doing so over the last eight years with President Obama. Perhaps this is simply another way in which the GOP’s various institutions have turned into Frankenstein-like monsters.

To tell you the truth, I haven’t kept up with what right-wing site/personality is supporting each of the GOP contenders. But what we’ve learned from these folks in the past is that they’re deeply committed to “you’re either with us or against us.” As we watch various factions take hold, it seems pretty clear to me that - no matter the outcome in Cleveland - this is not going to end well for Republicans.

Paul Ryan is hard to read. I agree with a lot of political observers that many of Ryan’s recent moves have given the appearance that he’s throwing his name out there as a possible fallback nominee for the presidency. But he’s been denying he has that intention just like he denied that he’d accept the House gavel after Boehner stepped down. Is he just so bad at politics that he’s unintentionally leading people on? I don’t think so.

Yet, he’s going to hold a press conference at 3:15pm to give us a Shermanesque denial that he has any presidential ambitions.

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will definitively rule himself out as a contender to be the GOP presidential nominee in a formal statement before the media Tuesday afternoon.

“He’s going to rule himself out and put this to rest once and for all,” an aide said…

…The speculation has reached a fever pitch in recent weeks after Ryan gave a speech to a roomful of House interns before the House adjourned for its long spring recess last month calling for a more dignified political dialogue.

Ryan’s office — unintentionally, aides say — stoked the flames with the release of a video of the speech that some, including the conservative news site the Drudge Report, interpreted as a campaign advertisement.

And over the nearly three-week House recess, Ryan’s office regularly released photos of him meeting with prominent Middle East leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during his first foreign visit as Speaker.

If the Republicans have difficulty agreeing on a nominee in Cleveland, Ryan could be their savior once again. It might be awkward, though, since the Speaker of the House is the chairman of the convention.

He can deny it all he wants, but he’d make a lot more sense and unite the party a lot more effectively than Mitt Romney or John Kasich.

In politics, there’s certainly a sense in which the best measure of success is elections won vs. elections lost, and so it can be honestly said that the Republican Party is currently more successful than they’ve been at any time since 1928. The rationale for saying this is based on the current balance of power across the board, from Congress, to state houses, to state legislatures.

The 2014 election yielded the highest number of GOP House members since 1928, and the second highest number of GOP senators. There are currently 31 Republican governors. The GOP controls 70 percent of state legislatures and enjoys single-party rule in 25 states.

But, a healthy, successful party can’t be so weak that its supporters can write off any hope of winning a presidential election in April as former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson does this morning in the Washington Post.

Consider: If Republicans had fielded a strong presidential nominee this year, who managed to win a winnable election, the party’s success would have been more comprehensive than any since 1980. The tragedy is not that Republicans are on the verge of self-destruction; it is that they were on the verge of victory, and threw it away.

The thing that Gerson should consider, but does not, is how and why the Republicans are failing to field a strong presidential nominee this year. Because the answer badly undermines his assertion that his party is “brimming with health.”

This singular failure is not a small thing for the GOP. The patient is brimming with health and vigor in every way, except for the missing head. Either of this year’s likely Republican failures would complicate the job of candidates down the ticket and alienate demographic groups that are essential to future national victories.

Let’s review a few recent events. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was supposed to be the ideas guy for the GOP. He was the one who was listening to the Reformicons. But he lost a primary to an unknown tea partying college professor and then saw his preferred Reformicon champions (Jeb, Christie, Walker, and Rubio) fizzle on the campaign trail. These were the folks who at least had some theories about what the federal government should do, and who recognized that a president can’t lead a Party of No. But it turned out that the Republican base is more interested in firing these people than hiring them.

In the midst of their failures, a coup occurred in the House of Representatives, driven entirely by the fact that Republican lawmakers refused to follow the leadership of Speaker of the House John Boehner. Because they wouldn’t back his decision making, he had been forced to govern with a mostly Democratic caucus. The Democrats went along with funding the government even though they had almost no say in how the money was spent, but even this wasn’t good enough for the House Republicans. Rather than be forced out, John Boehner quit. And I don’t think a Speaker of the House would quit if he were leading a party that is brimming with health.

That the Republicans have had a lot of electoral success lately is indisputable, but the way they’ve achieved this success is not healthy, and that’s why I have to quibble with what Gerson says here:

The second fever [the Republicans need to break] is less common in the United States than in Europe, but it is a particularly vicious strain. This is the claim by right-wing populists that Republicans need to completely reorient their ideology in favor of nativism, protectionism and isolationism in order to appeal to working-class whites. This was the message of Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns starting in the 1990s. With Trump, it is back in full force.

The problem? Aside from the fact that protectionism is self-destructive economic policy, and isolationism is disastrous foreign policy, an attempt to pump up the white vote with nativist rhetoric alienates just about everyone else.

I’m sorry, but the problem is not that nativist rhetoric alienates so many people that it makes winning a presidential election impossible. The problem is that racism is wrong. Racism is not healthy. Racism is the cheap way out. It’s a cynical short-cut. It’s the opposite of moral leadership. It’s a form of ethical bankruptcy. It’s shameful, and meritless.

If you have political success that way, it’s the equivalent of getting rich by defrauding a bunch of people. You don’t judge the health and worth of people solely by how much money they have accumulated, and you can’t judge political parties that way either.

And it’s not just racism that’s a big problem. It’s also a strain of anti-intellectualism that makes it impossible to have a rational political dialogue in this country, and that prevents the Republicans from recognizing problems or crafting realistic solutions.

Just yesterday, I wrote about how the Republican base is under immense economic and cultural pressure and is literally smoking, drinking, drugging and suiciding itself to death. When you have a population in those kind of circumstances, how you choose to lead them matters a lot. If you appeal to their dark side, you can mobilize some of the worst human instincts and emotions for your political benefit. That’s what those who “reorient their ideology in favor of nativism, protectionism and isolationism in order to appeal to working-class whites” are doing, and Gerson is correct to call them out for it. But this is the strategy that has worked for the Republican Party in the Obama Era, and it’s why they’ve had enough success that Gerson can say that the party is “brimming with health.”

It’s a cliché at this point to argue that the Republicans are like Dr. Frankenstein. Maybe you prefer to talk about a deal with Mephistopheles. It certainly appears that the deal with the devil brought the Republicans downticket success at the price of presidential viability, although we still have an election to conduct and votes to count before we can say that with absolute certainty.

What we can say already is that the Republicans don’t deserve to win the presidency because they’ve lost the moral credibility to argue that they’ve earned it.

They have a base of voters who are in desperate need of help, but conservatives have no answers for them that don’t involve denying them access to health care, reducing their retirement security, building walls around the country, and expelling or denying entry to millions of people. They’d rather talk about a fictional War on Christmas and transgender people in the bathroom than deal with an opioid epidemic that has grown into a full-blown catastrophe for their supporters.

What’s needed is actual positive leadership. The right needs a leader who appeals to the best human instincts and emotions. And they need this, not because it’s in any way guaranteed to bring them electoral success, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Prior to Obamacare, there were two big problems in our health care delivery system: access and affordability. Most of what people know about what has changed since the reforms were passed in 2010 have to do with access. Other than expansion of Medicaid and subsidies, there hasn’t been much discussion about what Obamacare put in place to tackle the affordability problem.

For example, I find that very few people are aware of the provision related to medical loss ratios (what Rick Ungar once called “the bomb buried in Obamacare”). They limit the amount of premium dollars that insurance companies can collect to pay for administration and profit to 15% (20% for those who market to individuals and small groups*). If insurance companies collect more than that limit in any given year - they are required to provide refunds to their customers.

Of course, that is a reform to the way health insurance is provided. I remember that when Obamacare originally passed, Ezra Klein pointed out that when it comes to cost control related to actual health care, there wasn’t a lot of consensus on what would work. And so just about every idea was captured in the law as an experiment (sounds exactly like how Kloppenberg described Obama’s philosophical pragmatism which, “embraces uncertainty, provisionality, and the continuous testing of hypotheses through experimentation”).

As Michael Grunwald writes, the administration is about to launch another one of those experiments.

The experiment the administration will announce today, a program called Comprehensive Primary Care Plus, is intended to shake up the way 20,000 doctors and clinicians treat more than 25 million patients when it goes into effect in January 2017. In a sharp departure from the current “fee-for-service” system, which offers reimbursements per visit or procedure, providers who volunteer to participate will received fixed monthly fees for every patient and bonuses for meeting various quality goals. When their patients stay healthier and require less-expensive care, many primary care doctors will also share in the savings to Medicare, Medicaid or private insurers.

As someone who comes from Minnesota where “managed care” was invented as an alternative to “fee for service,” it is important to point out how this incentive program is different.

Studies have shown that about a third of all healthcare is a waste of money; the joke in the medical world is that nobody knows which third. The “managed care” craze that flamed out in the late 1990s basically empowered HMOs to try to figure it out. In some ways, CPC-Plus uses a similar per-patient payment model, except the primary care doctor rather than the insurer will be responsible for managing the care.

We’ve already seen how incentives in Obamacare have dramatically reduced hospital readmissions - another one of the “experiments” contained in the bill. So it will be important to keep an eye on this one.

* Correction: I had previously stated that the limits were 20 and 25%. That was inaccurate.

When the Obamas moved in to the White House, they made some changes to the artwork that decorated their new home. The painting above by Ed Ruscha titled “I Think I’ll…” was one they chose. At the time, a friend of mine told me that he thought it said something important about our new president. James Kloppenberg, who wrote the book Reading Obama, would probably agree.

It has become a cliche to characterize Obama as a pragmatist, by which most commentators mean only that he has a talent for compromise - or an unprincipled politician’s weakness for the path of least resistance. But there is a decisive difference between such vulgar pragmatism, which is merely an instinctive hankering for what is possible in the short term, and philosophical pragmatism, which challenges the claims of absolutists…and instead embraces uncertainty, provisionality, and the continuous testing of hypotheses through experimentation.

Elsewhere he wrote:

After almost two years as president, Obama has failed to satisfy the left for the same reason that he has antagonized the right. He does not share their self-righteous certainty.

Having grown up in a family and community where questioning was discouraged in favor of dogma handed down by those in positions of authority, I learned that an embrace of difficult questions and uncertainty was the only path available to me if I wanted to sort through what I truly believed. It was a terrifying journey to learn to think for myself and admit that I didn’t always have the answers. In the end, it left me extremely wary of anyone who presented themselves as an ideologue enveloped in certainty. We tend to think that people like that inhabit the right wing of the political spectrum. But it is not their domain exclusively. In addressing liberal bloggers at Daily Kos, the President himself once wrote:

…to the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, “true” progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward. When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive “checklist,” then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems. We are tying them up in a straightjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted.

I think about all that these days as I watch the political discussions taking place during this presidential primary. Of course, a competition like the one between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders tends to crowd out questions and uncertainty. As a result, no one is really listening and any discussion that happens merely leads to defensiveness and digging in to established positions.

I’ve come to believe that listening requires a suspension of certainty - at least long enough to hear what the other person is saying and attempt to empathize with where they are coming from. It also requires some curiosity about perspectives different from our own. It is in that spirit that I ask the question: Are things like uncertainty, listening, curiosity and empathy liberal values?

The vampire squid has agreed to a pay a “$2.4 billion civil penalty, as well as $1.8 billion in relief to underwater homeowners, distressed borrowers and affected communities.” It’s being announced as a $5 billion settlement, but that’s misleading, as all these settlement announcements have been up to now. Once again, you can blame the Republicans for this:

Since the initial JP Morgan deal that sparked outrage over tax deductions, consumer relief wiggle room, and other fine-print details that make such deals cheaper for companies than press releases indicate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and other lawmakers have tried to force federal and state lawyers to stop the doublespeak. Warren and (former) Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) have pushed for the Truth in Settlements Act since early 2014.

The measure would require federal agencies to clearly delineate between deductible and non-deductible settlement costs, and include an estimate of the actual corporate costs of such deals in their formal communications about them. It passed the Senate in September, but hasn’t moved out of any of three separate committees with jurisdiction over it in Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) House.

According to GovTrack.Us, the bill actually passed in the Senate by unanimous consent, meaning that there is no roll call of the vote, but also that there was no dissent. So, despite being universally approved by a Republican-controlled Senate, no committee chairs in the Republican-controlled House can be bothered to act on it.

Of course, Goldman Sachs employs Ted Cruz’s wife, so they basically pay his mortgage. They also loaned Cruz the money he needed to begin his race for the presidency, not that he or they volunteered that information to anyone despite the requirement that Cruz do so.

They call Goldman Sachs the vampire squid because its tentacles go everywhere, so we will hear about the six-figure speeches Hillary Clinton gave to Goldman executives in Lower Manhattan.

It’s nice to see some money extracted from them and given back to some of the people they defrauded, as well as some folks in underwater mortgages.

It’s be nicer still if we could take these settlement announcements at face value.

* Last week a lot of the news about the Democratic presidential primary focused on Bernie Sanders’ interview with the New York Daily News. It is worth noting that Hillary Clinton sat down for an interview with the same publication on Saturday. I doubt hers will get much attention though. Whether you agree or disagree with what she said, she demonstrated a total mastery of the topics explored.

* As I predicted a few weeks ago, the issue of open vs closed primaries is coming up for discussion as we get closer to the New York primary. Alex Seitz-Wald provides an overview that contains this information - which is probably not good news for the Sanders campaign.

Recognizing the danger last summer, pro-Sanders volunteers did an impressive job of organizing registration drives ahead of the October and March deadlines. Team Bernie NY alone says they collected information for 13,000 registrations. Hughes said over 4,600 people used his website to submit registrations.

But while state officials reported an unprecedented surge in new voter filings just ahead of last month’s deadline, overall voter growth was disappointing.

As of April 1, Democrats had added about 14,000 people to their rolls (out of close to 6 million registered voters) since the same day last year, according to Board of Elections data. Republicans added only 12,000 (out of close to 3 million).

* Last week I noted that, not only has Obama preserved more acres of land and water as national monuments than any other president before him, but those designations have been good for local economies. So of course it comes as no surprise that the Center for American Progress has identified an anti-parks caucus in Congress.

Today, Washington’s bipartisan work to protect America’s parks and public lands seems like a distant memory. Since 2010, Congress has been incapable of passing individual parks and wilderness bills, legislators are pressing to sell off tens of millions of acres of publicly owned lands, and laws which help protect at-risk public lands—including the Antiquities Act and the Land and Water Conservation Fund—are under relentless attack. A Center for American Progress analysis found that between January 2013 and March 2016 members of Congress filed at least 44 bills or amendments that attempted to remove or undercut protections for parks and public lands—making the 114th Congress the most anti-conservation Congress in recent history…

Research for this brief found that the breakdown of congressional support for national parks and public lands can be traced to 20 lawmakers—a group of U.S. senators and representatives that CAP has dubbed the anti-parks caucus—whose record on parks-related issues in the last three years sharply diverges from that of their colleagues and the American public.

* Here is some encouraging news about the economy:

Don’t look now, but over the last six months the narrative in the jobs market has changed for the better — for Obama and for ordinary Americans. Encouraged by improving employment prospects, more than two million people have flooded into the work force since September, the biggest six-month gain in records going back to 1990, using data adjusted for changes in population estimates. And unemployment has continued to fall, though admittedly by a smidgen, from 5.1 percent.

* Over the course of this primary (especially on the Democratic side), we’ve heard a lot about rising college tuition and increasing student debt. We’ve heard a lot less about this challenge:

Think college is expensive? Try sending your kid to full-time day care or preschool.

In nearly half the country, it’s now more expensive to educate a 4-year-old in preschool than an 18-year-old in college, a finding that illustrates the rising burden many families face affording care for children.

The annual cost of care for a 4-year old at a full-time day-care center or school is greater than the average cost of in-state tuition at a four-year institution in 23 states, according to new data from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

* Finally, tonight and tomorrow night PBS will air Jackie Robinson, a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns & David McMahon. Stephen Colbert talked with Burns about why this documentary is so relevant today.