The folks at Compound Interest have this eggcellent image for those breaking out the primary color dye, tiny cups, and that frustrating little twist of copper wire. If you’re engaging with the hiding of the little oval chickens this morning… please be careful to note where you put them. Finding one of these about July 4 will not be cause for celebration.
Look, there’s no getting around this: here there will be Trump. Again. Great bubbling heaps o’ Trump. Trumptacles. A Trump dump. Happy Easter.
I’m sorry about that. Believe me, I… like every person more than one notch removed from the title characters in Night of the Living Dead have heard everything I want to hear about Donald Trump. Everything. Many times over. And yet…
There’s a very good chance that in a very few months one of our (current, though perhaps not for long) major political parties will nominate Donald Trump for what’s widely regarded as the most powerful office on this here planet. So, yeah, Trump. Again.
Oh, and there will also be a lot of Ted Crud. I mean Cruz. Ted Cruz. There will be that.
This is also one of those weeks in which I need to remind you that, no matter what happened last night, most of the pundits I’m recapping this morning engraved their columns on clay tablets some time when Sargon was a candidate. So the stuff that you want to talk about? It may not be here.
But hey! Bernie! Whoo hoo! Keen beans. Nice job in all those states out on the Pacific. Those are cool states.
And now…
Jennifer Weiner on the politics of naked ladies.
To briefly recap: Before last Tuesday’s primaries, a “super PAC” called — you really can’t make this stuff up — Make America Awesome ran ads on social media targeting Mormon voters in Utah. The spots showed images of Donald J. Trump’s wife, from a 2000 photo shoot with British GQ. “Meet Melania Trump. Your Next First Lady,” read the text, over a shot of a sultry, nude Mrs. Trump, curled up on a fur. “Or, You Could Support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.” (Ted Cruz was not pictured.)
Even though the ad didn’t come from the Cruz camp, Mr. Trump was furious — which was more than a little ironic, given the vigor with which he’s been posting provocative shots of his nemesis, the Fox anchor Megyn Kelly, who posed for GQ in a short black slip dress and red high heels.
And on it went. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump slammed “Lyin’ Ted” for being behind the Melania ad, and threatened to “spill the beans” on Mr. Cruz’s wife, Heidi. The next day, no beans were spilled, but Mr. Trump retweeted a meme of a picture of Melania, looking appropriately model-rific, juxtaposed beside Heidi Cruz, looking probably a lot like I do when I need my roots touched up and I’ve had it with my kids. “No need to spill the beans,” text with the photos said. “The images speak for themselves.”
Did you know that the debates between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter are
on Youtube? Yup. I suggest watching them. Maybe a dozen times or so.
Kennedy - Nixon is out there, too. Grown men, acting like… grownups. Having a discussion about issues. With real opinions.
When I said I was sorry, I meant it. But then, this whole thing is pretty damn sorry.
Just come on in. No sense doing this out where everyone is watching.
Kathleen Parker attributes the war on women to one man.
When a presidential election devolves into a hydrant-watering contest between leading contenders about the relative attractiveness of their respective wives, not only does the United States look ridiculous but also we diminish our moral standing to denounce other cultures’ marginalization of women. ...
Once upon a time, I protested the Democratic trope that the GOP was waging war on women. Since the accusation was based primarily on the Republican Party’s continuing defense of the not-yet-born, amid absurd and offensive comments by a handful of GOP males whose tongues and brains have never met, I rejected the notion as little more than a political strategy.
See? Republicans were never waging a war on women. Just on women’s right to control their own bodies. And earn equal pay. And yes some Republican politicians said ugly things… but there was no war on women!
Sue me if you must, but I’ve changed my mind.
This isn’t the start of the GOP war on women. It’s just another battle. Still, make a note of this, I agree with Parker’s conclusion.
Should Trump become president, he likely will have defeated the only woman left in the race, Hillary Clinton, who is recognized globally for her work in raising the status of women. In that case, other nations may reasonably conclude that the United States doesn’t care much for women. Worse, they can congratulate themselves for keeping their own women in their swaddled places, deserving neither respect nor protection.
You’re just going to have to take my word for it that I skipped at least three more columns on this subject.
Danielle Allen on the real size of Trump’s support.
At his rallies, Donald Trump’s supporters carry signs that read, “The Silent Majority Stands with Trump.” On Twitter, his supporters invoke the slogan to answer the candidate’s critics, such as myself, adding, “Silent No More.” Yet it’s the other part of the phrase that merits attention. Is there any sense in which Trump’s supporters constitute a majority? ...
As of Tuesday’s primaries in Arizona and Utah, Trump had secured 37 percent of the vote of the Republican primary electorate, or roughly 7.8 million votes out of approximately 21 million.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 142.2 million registered voters in the country as of 2014. This means that, so far, Trump has secured the support of 6 percent of the electorate. Yes, that’s right, 6 percent.
Which sounds a bit reassuring, until you remember that the defining characteristic of this 6% was that they turned out to vote in a primary.
Yet recently, a journalist from a reputable outlet called me for an interview, and among her questions was one that began, “Given that the vast majority of Republicans support Trump . . . ”
Which makes said journalist an idiot.
Frank Bruni on how the GOP is learning to stop worrying and love Ted Cruz
It was clear to me weeks ago, even before Marco Rubio threw in the towel, that the G.O.P. was getting ready to cuddle with Ted Cruz.
But I never expected a love quite like this to bloom.
It’s a singularly tortured love, one that grits its teeth, girds its loins and pines for a contested convention.
It’s hate worn down into resignation, disgust repurposed as calculation. Stopping a ludicrous billionaire means submitting to a loathsome senator. And so they submit, one chastened and aghast Republican leader after another, murmuring sweet nothings about Cruz that are really sour somethings about Donald Trump.
...
Cruz has gone from the insufferable nemesis of Republican traditionalists to their last, best hope, and the likes of Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham and Jeb Bush have now given him endorsements — or approximations thereof — that will go down in political history as some of the most constipated hosannas ever rendered.
They hardly mention Cruz’s name. They barely manage to assign him a single virtue.
“Constipated hosannas” is a phrase I will remember. Oh, and that bit up there where I substituted Ted Cruz’s name for the word “bomb?” Not a coincidence.
Ross Douthat attends the Lindsey Graham School of Selecting the Marginally Smaller Evil.
On the surface, Cruz is a straightforward figure: The ideological zealot, the politician-as-activist, the unbending embodiment of True Conservatism. He’s the scourge of Obamacare, the bane of the G.O.P. establishment, the evangelical moralist with a flat-tax plan and a Reagan quote for every occasion. If Trump has dynamited Republican orthodoxy and tapped out nasty tweets from the rubble, Cruz has kept pace by promising to rebuild that same orthodoxy stronger than before.
In this framing, Cruz is basically Barry Goldwater come again, an ideological crusader who might still grab his party’s nomination, but whose general election prospects are limited by his own extremism.
Why, he sounds like just the champion every Republican voter is looking for. That is, if Republican voters actually cared about anything in the Republican platform except the we hate Mexicans, Women, and Gays part.
With Cruz, though, even the most fervent peroration always feels like a debater’s patter, an advocate’s brief — compelling enough on the merits, but more of a command performance than a window into deep conviction.
Aww. See? Peroration. This is how you know Ross Douthat is feeling better and learning to wub him some Teddy. And no, I did not promise to give up Douthat for good.
Dana Milbank needs ketchup.
Six months ago, I made a reckless vow. With Donald Trump dominating in polls, I said I’d eat a column — 18 column inches of toxic newsprint, wood-pulp, ink and all — if Trump won the Republican presidential nomination.
My rationale: “Americans are better than Trump,” and Republican primary voters wouldn’t nominate “a candidate who expresses the bigotry and misogyny that Trump has.”
This alone should be proof that Dana Milbank hasn’t actually met a Republican voter in the last three decades.
This prediction still looks viable. More than 60 percent of Republican primary voters have rejected Trump so far, and there’s a decent chance Republicans can at least force the nationalist demagogue into a contested convention. They know his racism and xenophobia would be a recipe for disaster.
There is no recipe in the Republican cookbook at this point that doesn’t produce a big fluffy pan of disaster.
Nate Cohn points the finger at former Democrats.
...Mr. Trump’s blue-state appeal is a little hard to explain. It’s well established that he fares best among less educated voters. Yet his strongest performance so far wasn’t in Mississippi, where he got 47 percent of the Republican vote, but in Massachusetts, a famously liberal state, where he won 49 percent of Republican voters.
His appeal in historically Democratic areas is a reflection of strength among new Republicans — whether they be white Southerners or white Roman Catholics and working-class voters in the North who would have had no place in the Republican Party a half-century ago.
Or… it could be the best example of spontaneous ratf$@#ing ever. Just saying.
Mr. Trump’s strength among those voters, who decades ago represented the base of the Democratic Party, helps explain the resilience of his candidacy. It’s no surprise that they are not offended by his unorthodox policy views, like his embrace of entitlement programs or his opposition to free trade. They may have moved to the Republican side, but they still have moderate views on economics.
Is there no politician or pundit who realizes that no one is voting based on Republican economics? No one. There are anti-immigrant Republicans, and anti-Muslim Republicans, and anti-women Republicans, and anti-black Republicans. There are probably a few aging anti-hippie Republicans. The only people who put more than one minute’s thought into the effect of economic policy on Republican voters are either begging money from the Kochs or writing for the New York Times.
Michael Kinsley is here to make you feel better.
For several election cycles now, pundits and political consultants have been fretting that the political system isn’t keeping up with how the country is changing demographically. Yet in 2016 — with almost no fuss and no self-consciousness — the presidential race looks like America and then some.
Consider: The overwhelming Democratic front-runner is a woman, yet all the questions that used to be raised about whether a woman could be president have disappeared. ...
The Democratic front-runner’s rival is a Jew, which also has not been an issue, and would probably be a revelation to many voters. … This election season has seen the president nominate a person who would be the fourth Jew (out of nine justices) on the Supreme Court. The other five seats are filled by Catholics. No fuss at all. And apparently no pressure on President Obama to pick a candidate of a more traditional religious background. Or if there was pressure and he resisted it, good for him.
And the GOP candidate, unfortunately, looks just like the GOP.
Barton Swaim has some advice on speechifying.
Recently I brought up several commonly mocked political phrases to a group of friends — “going forward,” “game changer,” “level playing field” and a few others. The only one disliked by all of them — indeed, they all loathed it — was the simple descriptor “the American people.”
Why does such an unremarkable noun phrase rankle so badly? Partly, of course, because it’s so overused. Scroll through transcripts of recent presidential primary debates and you find that candidates are addicted to it, with Democrats relying on it only slightly more than Republicans. Bernie Sanders speaks of “the American people” almost incessantly, sometimes three or four times in a single answer: “Roosevelt took the oath of office in 1933 at a time when 25 percent of the American people were unemployed . . . And he stood before the American people and he said, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,’ a profound statement that gave the American people the courage to believe. . . .” ...
These facile references to “the American people” must fool few actual American people. No politician seeks to do the will of the people or even knows what that will is, for the excellent and obvious reason that the people have no single will. Blathering on about what “the American people” want and what “the American people” deserve is as phony as it sounds. And here, again, I’m obliged to acknowledge the dark genius of Donald Trump. He seems to know instinctively to avoid phrases that sound too much like the faux-eloquence of modern political discourse: Virtually alone among today’s politicos, Trump never seems to use the phrase “the American people.”
On the other hand, it could be that Trump never mentions this phrase because Trump doesn’t give a flying fig what the American people want. Before you take too much from this discussion, recall that Swaim was the speechwriter for Mark Sanford. I wonder how the phrase “Appalachian Trail” plays with the public?
Mona Hana-Attisha is a pediatrician worried about where the children of Flint go from here.
In tests of tap water in Flint., Mich., over the last six months, some 1,300 homes exceeded the E.P.A. action level. Thirty-two had levels above 1,000 parts per billion. And just this month, a sample showed a concentration as high as 11,846 parts per billion.
To understand the contamination of this city, think about drinking water through a straw coated in lead. As you sip, lead particles flake off into the water and are ingested. For almost two years, Flint’s children have been drinking water through lead-coated straws.
… One of my patients, a 2-year-old girl, recently came to the clinic for her checkup. Running around the room with her colorful gown flapping, she hopped onto the exam table, grabbed my stethoscope and placed it on her chest. I gently nudged it over her heart. “Can you hear anything?” Her eyes lit up, and she nodded.
Her mother turned to me, trying to hide her tears. She thought the water was safe, and why not? The authorities told her it was. She mixed her daughter’s baby formula with warm tap water. She got a filter only when the National Guard came to her door this year. Now she wonders, will her daughter be O.K.?
The horrifying answer.
Numerous epidemiologic studies of lead exposure in children, particularly those under the age of 6, indicate an increased risk for damage to cognition, behavior and employment prospects, also lower I.Q.s, poor impulse control and decreased lifetime earnings. Epigenetic research suggests that lead exposure in women can lead to DNA changes in their grandchildren. Their grandchildren.
This deserves to be read in full. Go.
John Feinblatt stands up to the people who are really blocking Obama’s Supreme Court nominee.
By this point, we’re all familiar with the National Rifle Association’s political playbook.
We’ve seen their leaders misinform and exaggerate before, in debates about legislation, candidates for office and judicial nominees. While their tactics might be tried and true, they typically bear little relationship to the truth.
Their latest campaign, against Judge Merrick Garland, is no different.
... In a Post op-ed last weekend, the NRA’s chief lobbyist, Chris W. Cox, portrayed Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court as nothing less than an existential threat to lawful gun ownership.
The evidence for such a claim doesn’t exist. The truth is, appointing a successor to Scalia will not threaten our Second Amendment rights.
But the NRA hasn’t been interested in evidence in a long, long time. In fact, keeping anyone from acquiring facts or evidence is one of the NRA’s core principles.
The New York Times on the death of a king few will miss.
The grave environmental damage from coal-fired power plants has done nothing to deter the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, from decrying a “war on coal” and orchestrating his own war against the Obama administration’s climate change agenda. But he and other coal-state Republicans would be foolish to ignore the growing consensus on Wall Street that King Coal, for all its legendary political power, has turned into a decidedly bad investment.
JPMorgan Chase announced this month that it would no longer finance new coal-fired power plants in the United States or other advanced nations, joining Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley in retreating from a fuel that provides about one-third of the nation’s electricity and accounts for about one-quarter of the carbon emissions that feed global warming.
If you’ve wondered what might make someone say “good on you, JPMorgan Chase” now you know.
Leonard Pitts closes out the morning with a letter that should be read in full.
An open letter to American Muslims:
In April 1944, a Cpl. Rupert Trimmingham wrote the editor of Yank, a U.S. Army magazine, about what happened when he and eight fellow soldiers, traveling by train, had an overnight layover in a small Louisiana town. They went to get coffee, but no restaurant would serve African-American soldiers except the one at the depot. And it required that they go into the kitchen.
“But that’s not all,” wrote Trimmingham. That morning at 11:30, “about two dozen German prisoners of war, with two American guards, came to the station. They entered the lunchroom, sat at the tables, had their meals served, talked, smoked, in fact had quite a swell time. I stood on the outside looking on, and I could not help but ask myself these questions: Are these men sworn enemies of this country? . . . Are we not American soldiers, sworn to fight for and die if need be for this country? Then why are they treated better than we are? Why are we pushed around like cattle? . . . Why does the Government allow such things to go on?”
No. Seriously. Go read the rest. I’m not going to summarize, because it shouldn’t be summarized. Just go read it.