I remember last fall when I saw this article by Christopher Ingraham, I hesitated to share it because it is so sad.

This week a 2-year-old in South Carolina found a gun in the back seat of the car he was riding in and accidentally shot his grandmother, who was sitting in the passenger seat. This type of thing happens from time to time: A little kid finds a gun, fires it, and hurts or kills himself or someone else. These cases rarely bubble up to the national level except when someone, like a parent, ends up dead.

But cases like this happen a lot more frequently than you might think. After spending a few hours sifting through news reports, I’ve found at least 43 instances this year of somebody being shot by a toddler 3 or younger. In 31 of those 43 cases, a toddler found a gun and shot himself or herself.

This week, Ingraham updated the numbers.

There have been at least 23 toddler-involved shootings since Jan. 1, compared with 18 over the same period last year.

In the vast majority of cases, the children accidentally shoot themselves. That’s happened 18 times this year, and in nine of those cases the children died of their wounds.

Toddlers have shot other people five times this year. Two of those cases were fatal: this week’s incident in Milwaukee, and that of a 3-year-old Alabama boy who fatally shot his 9-year-old brother in February.

I know we all despaired when even the shooting of 20 first and second graders in Newton wasn’t enough to unseat the power of the gun lobby in blocking the implementation of small steps towards common sense gun control. But are we really willing to be the world’s leader in toddler shootings?

Recently President Obama initiated one step in a process that could prevent these kinds of tragedies.

President Obama will use the power of his office to try to jump-start long-stalled “smart-gun” technology that could eventually allow only the owner of a firearm to use it, the White House announced Friday…

The administration stopped short of mandating the use of smart guns by federal agencies but said it saw promise in committing more federal money and attention to a technology that has evolved in fits and starts over more than two decades.

The idea behind the smart-gun technology is to limit the use of a firearm to its owner, through personalized identifiers like a biometric sensor on the gun grip, a ring sensor worn by the owner or a digital pass code entered on a wristband.

Advocates see the technology as a way of stopping criminals from using stolen guns — or children from accidentally shooting themselves or others.

In reporting on this, the Fox News headline reads: Obama set to push for ‘smart gun’ tech despite concerns. You might wonder about the source of those “concerns.”

The NRA does not oppose the technology. But in responding to the president’s controversial January executive action, the group’s Institute for Legislative Action said the private market, not the government, should drive its development.

“Although NRA is not opposed to the development of new firearms technology, we do not believe the government should be picking winners and losers in the marketplace,” the statement said.

While the administration may not be pushing an executive order mandating the purchase of smart guns, Second Amendment advocates fear a slippery slope.

There is no argument to be made here that this is an attempt by Obama to take away anyone’s guns. In light of that, the fallback position is to worry about a “slippery slope”…the case to be made when all else fails.

Second Amendment advocates can’t stop President Obama from pursuing the possibilities of this kind of technology. But in light of these numbers on toddler shootings, it actually blows my mind that they would even attempt to raise objections.

I always enjoy a good juxtaposition. And this one can’t be beat.

Here’s Ted Cruz giving his frank assessment of Donald Trump’s character:

“I’m going to tell you what I really think of Donald Trump. This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of this mouth.”

And here is Donald Trump answering a question about whether or not he’d consider nominating Ted Cruz to the Supreme Court:

“I don’t know, I’d have to think about it.”

How long do you think Trump will have to think about it?

Part of this job involves looking for things to write about two, three, four or thirteen times a day (if you’re Ed Kilgore), and sometimes you have to settle for something a little less than intellectually titillating. This is how I feel anytime I feel the need to write about Ted Cruz.

But, stories about Cruz, his wife and his father are what’s topping the political news aggregators this morning, and the biggest political story of the day is the Republican primary in Indiana.

To begin with, Gallup notes that “Republicans’ views of Cruz are now the worst in Gallup’s history of tracking the Texas senator. His image among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents is at 39% favorable and 45% unfavorable.”

He must be doing something wrong, and I’d suggest that the thing he’s doing wrong is to try to overturn the verdict of Republican primary voters that they have chosen Donald Trump to be their nominee. Last week, I mentioned that Cruz was getting pretty desperate and making people hate him by going after transgender people who sometimes need to use public restrooms. But he hasn’t limited his pandering to Indiana’s roster of Christian conservatives to picking on society’s most vulnerable minority. He’s sent his father out to tell people that God wants them to vote for his son. No, not that son.

This one:

In a brief video conversation with [Micah] Clark, [executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana] posted on the AFA Indiana Facebook page, Rafael Cruz made the case for Ted. “I implore, I exhort every member of the Body of Christ to vote according to the word of God, and vote for the candidate that stands on the word of God and on the Constitution of the United States of America,” Cruz said. “And I am convinced that man is my son, Ted Cruz. The alternative could be the destruction of America.”

Cruz’s advocate, Glenn Beck, is traveling around Indiana with the same message, which is that the choice between Cruz and Trump is a choice between good and evil. Even Louie Gohmert is in on the act.

But what’s more interesting than this sad display of politicized and perverted Christianity is the clown car aspects of this race, as Heidi Cruz feels compelled to assure us that her husband isn’t actually the Zodiac Killer and the Cruz campaign tries to fend off accusations that his father Rafael somehow assisted Lee Harvey Oswald in some way in his alleged assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Aside from a few laughs like these, the Republican nominating process long ago ceased to be good entertainment. Watching it just makes me feel dirty, the way I kick myself when I can’t help but rubberneck to see the results of a car accident or when I have to remind myself that a good person doesn’t root for injuries when the Cowboys play the Eagles.

The evidence suggests that, far from God wanting us to vote for Ted Cruz, he’s cast some kind of Oedipal curse on the Republicans.

Maybe it’s because they invaded the wrong country and broke the whole region featured so prominently in the Bible.

As the era of “tough on crime” developed, this country lost sight of the fact that prisons should be about both punishment and rehabilitation. Instead, we were presented with an either/or: any suggestion that it was important to provide for the emotional, physical and educational needs of prisoners was seen as a threat to the need to punish them. As a result, most of the rehabilitative programs in prisons were eliminated.

I remember cringing when I heard stories about that. Even if you find it difficult to see the humanity in prisoners, the reality is that over 600,000 are released from state and federal prisons every year with these results:

According to a study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics tracking data for a five-year period ending in 2010, about two-thirds of all offenders incarcerated in state systems were arrested for a new crime within three years, and more than three-quarters were arrested within five years.

For federal inmates, the numbers were only moderately more encouraging. Nearly half of all the freed inmates were rearrested within eight years for a new crime or for violating conditions of their release, according to a separate study last month by the United States Sentencing Commission.

As Attorney General Loretta Lynch recently said:

“Certainly by providing individuals coming out of institutions with ways to become productive citizens, we reduce recidivism,” Lynch tells NPR in an interview. “What that means is we reduce crime. There are fewer victims when individuals have options — when they have job skills, when they have life skills, we break the cycle of children following their parents into institutions.”

That is why the Obama administration, under the leadership of AG Lynch, has launched the Roadmap to Reentry based on these five principles:

Principle I: Upon incarceration, every inmate should be provided an individualized reentry plan tailored to his or her risk of recidivism and programmatic needs.

Principle II: While incarcerated, each inmate should be provided education, employment training, life skills, substance abuse, mental health, and other programs that target their criminogenic needs and maximize their likelihood of success upon release.

Principle III: While incarcerated, each inmate should be provided the resources and opportunity to build and maintain family relationships, strengthening the support system available to them upon release.

Principle IV: During transition back to the community, halfway houses and supervised release programs should ensure individualized continuity of care for returning citizens.

Principle V: Before leaving custody, every person should be provided comprehensive reentry-related information and access to resources necessary to succeed in the community.

Because so many of these reforms depend on action at the state level, AG Lynch has been touring the country and visiting prisons to promote them. This is more than simply PR. It is a direct attempt to change the narrative about the role and function of prisons. For those who have claimed that this administration doesn’t make enough use of the so-called “bully pulpit”…there you have it. This is how it’s done.

Have you ever had the experiencing of reading an explosive headline only to click on the story and find that the actual context doesn’t back it up? I sure have. Let me give you an example.

Perhaps you’ve heard that, at a news conference, Bernie Sanders said that Democrats would have a “contested convention.” Jonathan Easley and Amie Parnes have a story at The Hill with this headline: Clinton allies fume over Sanders’s vow to fight on. That headline repeats the first paragraph of the story.

Hillary Clinton’s allies are fuming over Bernie Sanders’s vow to take the presidential nominating contest to a floor fight at the Democratic convention this summer.

After that, you get some background on the state of the race. When it comes to what “Clinton allies” actually said, here is the report:

“Hillary leads in pledged and unpledged delegates, and there is little opportunity for that dynamic to change over the next few weeks,” said former Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Holly Shulman. “Nothing about these numbers says we’re headed to a contested convention.”

And none of the more than half-dozen Clinton supporters The Hill interviewed believe Sanders would risk casting the Democratic convention into the kind of chaos that Republicans are bracing for in Cleveland.

If he tries, they say, he’ll fail…

Rather, Democrats view Sanders’s rhetoric as a last-ditch effort to stay relevant in a race that has gotten away from him.

That’s fine with most Clinton supporters, at least for now.

Many Democrats are at peace with Sanders staying in the race through the end of the primaries and using his leverage to push for a more progressive Democratic platform at the convention.

There is little pressure on Sanders to drop out, even though he trails.

Who’s fuming? I guess a headline suggesting that Clinton allies are fine with the fact that Sanders is launching a last-ditch effort to stay relevant, are at peace with him staying in the race, and are not exerting pressure on him to drop out just wouldn’t sell.

But I can imagine that there will be people who only read the headline and run with the story about how the Clinton campaign is angry and lashing out at Sanders for vowing to fight on. If so, it is a total media fabrication designed to promote conflict - because that is what sells. Politicians and their allies acting like grown-ups apparently doesn’t.

* Recently I noted that the Department of Justice had filed an antitrust lawsuit to stop the merger of Halliburton and Baker Hughes. Today comes this news:

Oilfield services giants Halliburton and Baker Hughes have nixed their merger following opposition from the Obama administration.

The Houston-based energy companies last month pledged to “vigorously contest” the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Halliburton’s acquisition of Baker Hughes, but the obstacles appeared too significant to surmount.

The demise of a deal previously valued at $34 billion was generally anticipated on Wall Street, where investors had expected government opposition to the tie-up of two of the three largest U.S. oilfield services companies.

Halliburton will pay Baker Hughes a $3.5 billion breakup fee to compensate for the deal’s collapse.

* When Republicans gained a majority in the Senate after the 2014 election, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made some promises about how their party would demonstrate the ability to actually govern. That’s not exactly how things are working out.

Senate Republicans have left town for another recess with their yearlong claim that the Senate is “back to work” an increasingly tough sell to voters.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has worked painstakingly to craft an identity that’s distinct from the raucous presidential contest — one built on stability and passage of legislation the Democrats couldn’t get through when they controlled the Senate.

But the chamber is on pace to work the fewest days in 60 years, the party continues to insist it won’t act on President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination, and Republicans’ ballyhooed strategy to shepherd all dozen spending bills through the chamber is in serious trouble.

* Here is yet another constituency Donald Trump is alienating.

Donald Trump is the catalyst who could force a decisive break between Miami-Dade County’s influential Cuban-American voters and the Republican Party, a new poll has found.

Local Cuban Americans dislike Trump so much — and are increasingly so accepting of renewed U.S.-Cuba ties pushed by Democratic President Barack Obama — that Trump’s likely presidential nomination might accentuate the voters’ political shift away from the GOP, according to the survey shared with the Miami Herald and conducted by Dario Moreno, a Coral Gables pollster and a Florida International University associate politics professor.

Thirty-seven percent of respondents supported Trump, a number that is still higher than the 31 percent who backed Clinton — but also “the lowest in history that any potential Republican candidate polls among this traditionally loyal demographic,” according to Moreno. He added that the results put likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton within “striking distance” of winning over the influential voting demographic.

* Bill Scher writes that Closed Primaries Did Not Stop Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders is so convinced that his campaign was fatefully hamstrung by “closed” primaries in which independent voters could not participate that he is including the end of closed primaries in his list of convention demands…

Although he has every right to pursue that goal, he’s wasting his time, and squandering his leverage, by focusing on closed primaries. Yes, he was swept in the closed states. But he also lost the open primaries by a 2-to-1 margin.

* Finally, Michael Grunwald recently wrote an article titled, The Selling of Obama: The inside story of how a great communicator lost the narrative.

Obama was hailed as a new Great Communicator during his yes-we-can 2008 campaign, but he’s often had a real failure to communicate in office. The narrative began spinning out of his control in the turbulent opening days of his presidency, and he’s never totally recaptured it. His tenure has often felt like an endless series of media frenzies over messaging snafus—from the fizzled “Recovery Summer” to “you didn’t build that” to the Benghazi furor, which is mostly a furor about talking points.

David Roberts, who writes for Vox, took to twitter in order to disagree. Here is a sample of his response.

"Obama deals poorly w/ shallow, insular circle-jerk of campaign press corps." Maybe press corps should focus on *latter half* of headline.

— David Roberts (@drvox) May 2, 2016

"Obama fights for policies alone, while terrified bubble-headed Dems flee & hide." Sounds like a *Dem* problem, not an Obama problem.

— David Roberts (@drvox) May 2, 2016

"GOP offers Obama zero cooperation, even when economy is collapsing." Sounds like a *GOP* problem, not an Obama problem.

— David Roberts (@drvox) May 2, 2016

None of this is to say Obama is blameless, but it's long past time to quit seeing US politics as drama primarily about the president.

— David Roberts (@drvox) May 2, 2016

Gina Kolata, a science writer for the New York Times, writes today about the results of research on the participants of the reality TV show “The Biggest Loser.”

Kevin Hall, a scientist at a federal research center who admits to a weakness for reality TV, had the idea to follow the “Biggest Loser” contestants for six years after that victorious night. The project was the first to measure what happened to people over as long as six years after they had lost large amounts of weight with intensive dieting and exercise.

The results, the researchers said, were stunning. They showed just how hard the body fights back against weight loss…

It has to do with resting metabolism, which determines how many calories a person burns when at rest. When the show began, the contestants, though hugely overweight, had normal metabolisms for their size, meaning they were burning a normal number of calories for people of their weight. When it ended, their metabolisms had slowed radically and their bodies were not burning enough calories to maintain their thinner sizes…

What shocked the researchers was what happened next: As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover. They became even slower, and the pounds kept piling on. It was as if their bodies were intensifying their effort to pull the contestants back to their original weight.

But the human body doesn’t simply slow down metabolism in response to weight loss.

Dr. Proietto and his colleagues looked at leptin and four other hormones that satiate people. Levels of most of them fell in their study subjects. They also looked at a hormone that makes people want to eat. Its level rose.

“What was surprising was what a coordinated effect it is,” Dr. Proietto said. “The body puts multiple mechanisms in place to get you back to your weight. The only way to maintain weight loss is to be hungry all the time.”

Kolata is right to point out that the significance of the research conducted by Dr. Hall is that he followed the participants from “The Biggest Loser” for six years. But this is information that has been identified previously in shorter-term studies. Kolata herself chronicled much of this in her book Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss - And the Myths and Realities of Dieting, which was published back in 2008. You can read an excerpt here. The truth is, much of what we think we know about obesity and weight loss is regularly challenged by science. For example, here are the conclusions of research by Dr. Albert Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania back in 1986:

The scientists summarized it in their paper: “The two major findings of this study were that there was a clear relation between the body-mass index of biologic parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that genetic influences are important determinants of body fatness; and that there was no relation between the body-mass index of adoptive parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that childhood family environment alone has little or no effect.”

In other words, being fat was an inherited condition.

Having studied this one for years now I can tell you that almost everything we think we know about obesity and weight loss is a myth. For example, we all assume that people who are obese eat too much because they lack will power. But imagine the kind of will power it takes to accomplish what one contestant on “The Biggest Loser” described as his daily routine.

Wake up at 5 a.m. and run on a treadmill for 45 minutes. Have breakfast — typically one egg and two egg whites, half a grapefruit and a piece of sprouted grain toast. Run on the treadmill for another 45 minutes. Rest for 40 minutes; bike ride nine miles to a gym. Work out for two and a half hours. Shower, ride home, eat lunch — typically a grilled skinless chicken breast, a cup of broccoli and 10 spears of asparagus. Rest for an hour. Drive to the gym for another round of exercise.

If he had not burned enough calories to hit his goal, he went back to the gym after dinner to work out some more. At times, he found himself running around his neighborhood in the dark until his calorie-burn indicator reset to zero at midnight.

In other words, other than sleeping, his entire day was devoted to losing weight. This is one of the people who recently learned that the result of these efforts is that his body is now producing hormones that make him feel hungry all the time and his metabolism has slowed to the point that he needs to consume 800 fewer calories per day than normal-weight people in order to avoid putting on pounds.

Why do the myths continue when the science is saying otherwise? Much of it is because they have become culturally embedded. But the $60 billion-a-year weight loss industry also has a lot a stake in maintaining them. Until we reject these myths and start following what science is telling us, we will continue to see the obesity problem grow.

Fracking is a difficult issue, as it allows for a lot of domestic energy production which brings down consumer costs and gives our foreign policy establishment more flexibility, but also introduces new environmental concerns that range from the traditional degradation associated with fossil fuel extraction to the urgent concerns we have with climate change to the associated earthquake damage we’ve seen in fracking areas. These concerns have led some areas (New York state, for example) to ban fracking outright. In other places, the bans have been passed locally.

That’s what happened in Colorado, and the Supreme Court that just struck down those local ordinances.

Colorado’s highest court overturned two cities’ bans on hydraulic fracturing Monday, ruling that state law preempts them.

The state’s Supreme Court cited the main state law regulating oil and natural gas drilling and found that lawmakers clearly intended to severely limit the ability of cities and towns to regulate or outlaw the controversial practice also known as fracking.

It’s a major loss for environmentalists, who have tried in recent years to get local fracking bans passed in places where state leaders are friendly to the oil and gas industry.

“The Oil and Gas Conservation Act and the [Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation] Commission’s pervasive rules and regulations … convince us that the state’s interest in the efficient and responsible development of oil and gas resources includes a strong interest in the uniform regulation of fracking,” the court wrote in striking down Longmont, Colo.’s ban on fracking.

It had a similar finding for a five-year moratorium in Fort Collins, saying the measure “materially impedes the effectuation of the state’s interest in the efficient and responsible development of oil and gas resources.”

The decision could have effects beyond those two cities and in other localities in Colorado that have sought to regulate fracking without outright banning it.

The oil industry applauded the decision.

I try to separate out the two distinct issues here. Whether fracking is a good or bad thing, and whether it should be outlawed or simply regulated, are matters that need to be decided by scientists, regulators and lawmakers, not judges. But what level of government should get to decide? Should it be the federal EPA, or each of the state legislatures where fracking is viable, or every potentially impacted community?

I’d have to study the issue further to be sure, but I kind of doubt that fracking policy should be set by cities rather than (at least) states. So, I don’t really think the Colorado ruling is off base, even if the outcome is more fracking when we probably should have less.

Every once in a while an article comes along that forces us (or ought to force us) to question our assumptions. I think Andrew Sullivan has accomplished this with his new piece in New York magazine. It took me a while to warm up what he was trying to get across. As a philosophy major, I am a little impatient when folks try to take Plato to the masses. I know only too well how hard it is to use that kind of mechanism to break through and get people to really think.

I also believe that Plato’s ideas on politics are of limited use to us for several reasons, varying from anachronism to a basic lack of shared values. But, it’s true, Plato did kind of describe the rise of Donald Trump and it looks like he pretty much nailed the reasons why someone like Trump would have an appeal to a democracy well along its way to pushing equality to the outer fringes of the possible.

I’ve already begun to question some of this myself. I no longer believe we made a wise trade when we sought to stamp out corruption in state legislatures by moving to the popular election of U.S. senators. In retrospect, we may have cleaned up how senators are elected a little bit, and we certainly provided a system with more direct accountability, but the cost was to make senators as dependent on big money donations as congressmen, and to remove much of the insulation they were supposed to enjoy from the momentary passions of the public. We don’t have any need for a Senate that is just as frightened and knee-jerk as the House but which is dramatically less representative of the population. If we’re going to give Wyoming (with barely over a half a million people) the same representation in the Senate as California (now approaching 40 million souls), there must be something in it for us as a nation. And if there isn’t anything in it for us, then the Senate should be abolished. When we moved to popular elections, the only remaining insulation for senators was their six-year terms. Presumably, they would be willing to cast a difficult vote if they wouldn’t have to face the wrath of the voters for five or six years, and with a third of the body always about that far away from a reelection campaign, the upper body was supposed to be “august” and statesmanlike.

Right now, though, they are so frightened that they can’t even agree to hold a hearing on a Supreme Court Justice.

It may be true that democracy is unstable and prone to takeover by demagogues. The designers of our Republic certainly felt that way. We probably all agree that they were too cautious in not democratic enough, but it is possible to go too far in the other direction. At least, it’s possible to screw up their design by tinkering with it just enough to make it unworkable but not enough to give it newfound legitimacy.

There’s a lot more to say about Sullivan’s piece, but I’ll leave it with this food for thought for now.

It has become cool to mock the elite gathering of journalists, politicians and entertainers that is known as the White House Correspondents Dinner. But to ignore it altogether is to miss the comedic talent we’ve witnessed on stage over the last 8 years. Here is what Seth Meyers had to say about that after Saturday night’s event.

That was the greatest 8 show, 8 year comedy tour you'll ever see

— Seth Meyers (@sethmeyers) May 1, 2016

Dean Obeidallah explained why President Obama is the Comedian in Chief.

No U.S. President has been a better comedian than Barack Obama. It’s really that simple…

Presidents typically play it safe at the dinner. You can never go wrong with self-deprecating jokes; they make you more likable. But Obama rejected this approach. Instead, he has used the chance to filet his rivals. It’s like a comedic version of Game of Thrones, but instead of gouging out people’s eyes, Obama kills with punchlines.

Emily Heil says that we have been witnessing the first alt-comedy President.

For a long time, presidential humor was predictable as a knock-knock joke. Then along came President Obama, dropping the word “heezy,” mimicking viral memes, and quipping that he and Joe Biden are so close, they’d probably be denied service at an Indiana pizza joint.

Obama, who will take the stage at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday to deliver the traditional joke-filled monologue — the eighth and final of his administration — has a comic sensibility that’s edgier and more pop-culture-influenced than we’re used to hearing from politicians.

From the dinner dais, he’s made reference to drunk-texting and “The Hunger Games.” He’s used the phrase “piss off” and flirted with even bluer material. (Does he have a bucket list for his final year? “Well,” he quipped at the 2015 dinner, “I have something that rhymes with bucket list.”) Outside the dinner, he’s mocked the New York Times food section on Twitter (“respect the nyt, but not buying peas in guac”) and sparred with Zach Galifianakis on his culty “Between Two Ferns” faux-talk show.

He might not be the first truly post-racial president after all — but Obama is arguably the first postmodern humorist to hold the office.

On Saturday, from the time he took the stage to Anna Kendrick’s “You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone,” to the skewering of presidential candidates, to his video montage of “Couch Commander” (complete with references to everything from birth certificates to grand bargains) this year’s routine at the dinner was no exception. If you haven’t watched the whole thing, I’d suggest that you do so. It will brighten your day.

But the President’s ending was not simply a way of signing off on his last routine at this annual gala. It could just as easily capture his last two words on January 20, 2017.

MJ Lee at CNN says that the Trump campaign is going to make a play for Sanders’ supporters.

Trump’s advisers say these comments are a preview of more explicit overtures the campaign is ready to make to Sanders’ supporters once the populist liberal exits the 2016 race. That strategy is based on the broad areas of overlap between voters attracted to Trump and those who have flocked to Sanders. Both have angrily denounced the political system as corrupt and expressed deep frustration that Washington is not helping ordinary people. They both oppose international trade deals, saying they hurt American jobs.

Throughout this primary season a lot of pundits have suggested that there is some overlap between Trump and Sanders supporters. What they see in common is that both politicians have tapped into white working class anger at government, fueling a populist uprising. But unless those who have “felt the bern” buy into the notion articulated by actress Susan Sarandon that a Trump presidency would ignite the revolution (an incredibly dangerous notion), it is difficult to see any overlap between what the two candidates have proposed.

Lee specifically mentioned that both Trump and Sanders oppose trade deals. But Trump is the only candidate who suggests this would be a good idea.

The Republican presidential front-runner’s campaign pledges to impose 45 percent tariffs on all imports from China and 35 percent on many goods from Mexico would spark financial market turmoil and possibly even a recession, former trade negotiators, trade lawyers, economists and business executives told Reuters.

The other issue both campaigns talk about a lot is how big money is corrupting our politics. Sanders proposes to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and publicly fund political campaigns. The only thing Trump says on that issue is that he himself isn’t beholden to big donors. Otherwise, he has no proposal to change things.

While Sanders has made the case for raising the minimum wage to $15, Trump thinks American wages are already too high.

Trump said he wouldn’t raise the minimum wage, and the reason is that America “is a country that is being beaten on every front.” The problem, he said: “Taxes too high, wages too high, we’re not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard, and they have to get into that upper stratum.”

When it comes to the 1%, Trump thinks they need a tax break.

Trump’s proposal would cut taxes for everyone, but especially the richest of the rich. If enacted, the top income tax rate would drop from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. It would also create an even lower 15 percent rate for pass-through income that economists predicted rich individuals would rejigger their finances to qualify for instead. The corporate tax rate would drop from 35 percent to 15 percent. And wealthy individuals like Trump would be able to leave their fortunes to their kids without paying any estate tax at all, which only affects inheritances greater than $5.45 million in 2016 and tops out at 40 percent.

Obviously Trump wouldn’t do anything to combat climate change.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee - I'm in Los Angeles and it's freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2013

When it comes to foreign policy, this weekend Maureen Dowd suggested that Trump would play dove to Clinton’s hawk. Her entire premise is that the Donald now suggests that he was against the Iraq War - which is not true. Beyond that, the one promise Trump has made on foreign policy is that he will be “unpredictable” and he wouldn’t rule out the use of nuclear weapons against ISIS.

Overall, if a Sanders supporter is merely basing their vote on anger, perhaps they are ripe for an appeal from Trump. But based on actual issues, it is hard to imagine how this strategy will accomplish anything.

Congratulations, George Will: you’ve just been kicked out of the conservative movement.

You just knew there was going to be a profoundly negative reaction from the wingnuts to his latest syndicated column advising conservatives and Republicans to vote for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton with an eye towards throwing her out of office in 2020 rather than voting for presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. HotAir.com’s Jazz Shaw is leading the charge to have Will declared persona non grata on the right:

Will’s final argument, however, is where we come to the most bloated fly in the ointment. The original plan of defeating Trump in the primary was fully within the bounds of normal political play. True, I’ve personally chosen to try to help Ted Cruz win rather than attempting to destroy one of his opponents at every turn and view Trump losing as the be all and end all. This is because Trump has long seemed to be at least plausibly, if not probably the eventual winner and I’d prefer our nominee to go into the general election with as few battle scars from the primary as possible. But George Will pulls the mask away entirely and [declares] that the party as a whole should be working to defeat the GOP nominee in November…

This is a disingenuous argument on two fronts. First, Will himself [observes] earlier [in the column] that less than six percent of voters traditionally split tickets. Yet he turns around in his conclusion and states that this should be the strategy which Republican voters adopt. But much more to the point, he dismisses the idea of a Hillary Clinton presidency as a mere four years of comparatively mild discomfort which will somehow be wiped away when Ben Sasse miraculously wins the White House in 2020. This argument is delivered, apparently with a straight face, after an earlier paragraph in the same column where he points out how a Clinton victory will ensure Merrick Garland a seat on the Supreme Court and the uncomfortable fact that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer will be 83, 80 and 78, respectively.

And none of this touches on the fact that each and every Republican and conservative reading his advice will have to walk into a voting booth on November 8th, close the curtains, stand alone in the darkness and… vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As for me, I prefer to win, or at least go down swinging. Surrendering the battle for the White House uncontested is the business of cowards and I want no part of it.

Remember, right-wingers barely tolerate Will because he was presumably cordial to Barack Obama at the then President-elect’s January 2009 confab with conservative pundits (which was actually held at Will’s house). Urging conservatives and Republicans to vote for Clinton is akin to sleeping with the enemy in their minds; expect an organized right-wing effort to have Will’s column removed from many of the nation’s major newspapers, and to have him fired by Fox.

One man’s principle is another man’s career suicide, and Will’s contempt for Trump may have brought a premature end to his comfortable career as a right-wing pundit. Is Will ready to deal with the waves of hate that will flow his way from the bigoted billionaire’s boosters?

From a certain perspective, it’s odd that Will has had such a negative reaction to Trump: after all, as Rachel Maddow has noted, Trump is basically copying Ronald Reagan’s racist act from the 1980 presidential campaign—a campaign whose final debate Will infamously coached Reagan for. Unless Will feels some vestiges of guilt for his role in helping the racially divisive Reagan become the 40th president, it’s curious that he feels so chagrined by the triumph of Trump.

Let’s just take a moment to smile at this situation. In the minds of the least intelligent among us, George Will is now a liberal. Can this year get any funnier?

UPDATE: The Indianapolis Star on this Tuesday’s primary in Indiana.

Could the outcome of last week’s Democratic US Senate primary in Maryland hold the key to finally ending Capitol Hill’s half-decade of inaction on climate change?

Rep. Chris Van Hollen’s victory over Rep. Donna Edwards in the race to succeed retiring Sen. Barbara Mikulski is being spun in some quarters as a defeat for diversity—which is rather strange, in the sense that Van Hollen is perhaps best known for a policy proposal that will benefit Americans of all backgrounds. In 2009, Van Hollen introduced a rather innovative measure to address carbon pollution:

[I]t is an astonishingly simple piece of legislation - a mere 20 pages long.

The reason this little bill might end up punching above its weight is because it speaks loudly where the 648-page climate bill introduced the day before by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) remains silent: on the question of carbon credit auctions and allocations.

Van Hollen wants to auction 100% of the permits that companies will need in order to release carbon into the atmosphere - in other words, no free giveaways to polluters, despite their demands.

He also wants to return 100% of the auction revenues equally to every American resident with a social security number. That’s the “dividend” in the bill’s title - also sometimes referred to as “cash back” or “rebate.”

Van Hollen’s legislation was sidelined in favor of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (a/k/a Waxman-Markey), which passed the House in mid-2009 but died in the Senate in mid-2010. Four years later, Van Hollen took a second crack at market-based climate legislation; the Washington Post noted at the time that Van Hollen’s idea was perhaps the only remaining concept that had a chance of securing bipartisan support:

The country is reaching a moment of decision on global warming. Scientists’ warnings are sharpening, and President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is acting in the absence of a policy from Congress. The EPA rules can’t be as clean and efficient as market-based plans such as Mr. Van Hollen’s. That reality could persuade some industry groups and some Republicans to seek a bargain that would replace the EPA efforts with a less bureaucratic approach.

If, as some Republicans fear, Donald Trump causes the GOP to actually lose both houses of Congress this year, carbon-pricing legislation will likely be at or near the top of the Democratic Party’s Capitol Hill agenda thanks to a push from dedicated climate activists—and if Van Hollen defeats Republican opponent Kathy Szeliga on November 8, he could play a key role in ensuring that such legislation doesn’t collapse in the Senate this time around. If so, then Van Hollen’s bold idea will be remembered as one whose implementation could only be delayed, not denied.

I’m confident that the divisions of the Maryland primary will ultimately be healed. I’m also confident that if Van Hollen’s well-crafted policy becomes law, Americans of every race and creed will thank him for his efforts to protect their children and grandchildren.

Could Tom Steyer’s effort to mobilize environmentally-minded voters succeed and fail at the same time?

The need to encourage those who say human-caused climate change is their most important issue to consistently vote in elections is profoundly important, and Steyer deserves credit for committing resources to the cause of making sure that Election Day is the real Earth Day:

The billionaire environmentalist Thomas F. Steyer and his political advocacy group, NextGen Climate, will spend at least $25 million on a get-out-the-vote campaign targeting young voters this year in seven mostly battleground states, the group announced on Monday.

Mr. Steyer, the single biggest political donor of the 2014 midterm election cycle, said the campaign would target at least 203 college and university campuses. He called it the largest youth voter outreach program ever undertaken by a candidate or political campaign…

While polls show that younger people are more likely to support candidates with strong environmental policies, they are also less likely to show up at the polls.

Steyer’s effort is admirable, but so long as broadcast and cable news outlets fail to comprehensively cover the climate crisis, there will be a limited return on Steyer’s investment. As Media Matters has noted, some of the most significant recent studies on the risks of unrestrained carbon pollution have received scant coverage in print and broadcast media: Sen. Bernie Sanders is not wrong to fault the press for not paying extensive attention to the warnings of climate scientists.

As my former radio colleague Betsy Rosenberg observes, broadcast and cable news outlets have a journalistic and moral obligation not to let comparatively trivial issues trump the climate crisis:

There will always be “breaking news” that bumps a breaking climate, [which is why] we need dedicated programming, “appointment TV” as they call it in the biz, where you can tune in at a certain time, preferably daily, and get all your questions and concerns about our planetary pickle(s) addressed by experts in their field who are not only knowledgeable, but passionate and gifted communicators.

And if you don’t have any questions or concerns about our changing environment, how it’s affecting humans, animals and nature-and what we can do about it-then you haven’t been paying attention. And if, as a society, we continue to focus on the sensational rather than the scientific, well then perhaps we deserve what’s coming. Because we have a choice and the television news networks have a choice. To be responsible adults and face our challenges or turn away and “face the music.”

I can’t help wondering if the lack of consistent broadcast and cable news coverage of the climate crisis is one reason why Vox’s David Roberts seems so deeply pessimistic about the efforts to forge a bipartisan consensus on the need to address climate change, despite clear evidence that such efforts are beginning to bear fruit. CBS Evening News ran an impressive segment on April 20th about Denmark’s progress on clean energy, but when’s the last time you’ve seen a segment on America’s progress on clean energy—and the activists who are working against all odds to get Republicans and Democrats to come together on solutions to the problem of carbon pollution? If you’re not seeing news segments on the comprehensive studies showing how carbon pricing will boost the economy, or the House Republicans who are standing up to the forces of climate denial (and the House Democrats who are standing with them), then you’ll obviously have a gloomy perspective on the national push to price carbon.

If Steyer wants to make a lasting impact, he should use his voice, as Sanders did before him, to urge broadcast and cable news outlets to expand their coverage of the climate crisis. The value of his words won’t be $25 million. It will be priceless.

NEXT: A miracle in Maryland?

UPDATE: More from David Roberts.

SECOND UPDATE: Politico on right-wing harassment of Steyer.