Hillary Clinton made some remarks about Nancy Reagan.

It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s, and because of both President and Mrs Reagan, in particular Mrs Reagan, we started a national conversation…

It may be hard for your viewers to remember? Apparently, it’s really hard for Hillary Clinton to remember. I remember the 1980s; I remember our national nightmare of incompetence under the Reagans; and I most vividly remember their dismissal of AIDS, their neglect of the disease, the open ridicule that inflicted on the people suffering from it. Nancy Reagan was not an advocate for empathy or support or research into HIV. Quite the opposite.

Dan Savage remembers, too.

Hillary Clinton needs to walk this back immediately or she risks losing the votes of millions of queer Americans who survived the plague. We watched our friends and lovers die by the tens of thousands while Nancy and Ronnie sat silently in the White House. More than 20,000 Americans died before Ronald Reagan said the word “AIDS” in public—because it was a “gay plague” and Nancy and Ronald Reagan didn’t give a fuck about sick and dying faggots. I’m literally shaking as I try to write this. There are no words for the pain Clinton’s remarks have dredged up. I’m supposed to be writing a column—it’s way overdue—but all I can think about right now are all of my dead friends, lovely guys who might still be with us if Nancy and Ronald Reagan had started a national conversation about HIV/AIDS. Or done something about it.

You want to say something nice about Dead Nancy Fucking Reagan on the teevee? Compliment her taste in china. Don’t go on television and lie about her and her husband’s homophobic, hateful, appalling, murderous record on HIV/AIDS. Just don’t.

He includes a video of the Washington press corps laughing at people dying of the gay plague, and making jokes about each other not being gay, and therefore not having to worry about it.

This isn’t just a lie by Clinton. It’s demeaning a lot of people who watched the inactivity and obstruction of the Reagans in fury.

It’s also the kind of pandering remark to poisonous conservative ahistoricity that could cost her the election. We don’t need Democrats in office who look back fondly on the Reagan years — they were a horror.

Bernie Sanders, defying the polls, won the primary election in Michigan. Five Thirty Eight, the blog that is all about the polls, wonders what this means. Could it be that their polls won’t accurately predict the results of coming primaries?

I’ll tell you what it means.

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Louisiana is screwed. The second poorest state in the country has a $3 billion deficit, and no one is going to do anything about it, apparently. They’re in a race to become the poorest state, which will of course lock in all the citizens to the Republican party as they proceed to become more ignorant and angry about their condition, so it’s a political win for the Idiot Party in America.

Who’s to blame? You can guess.

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Yeah, I know — that’s absurd. But people are actually throwing around this idea that racism is part of leftist ideology, usually while babbling some ahistorical nonsense about how the modern Democratic party is somehow still the party of segregation, despite the whole southern strategy political move that scooped up all the racists and drafted them into the Republican party. Anyway, David Neiwert debunks the whole “KKK are lefties” baloney with a hefty dose of history and politics.

Moreover, the Klan in every incarnation — its original, its second, and its current, has been a creature of right-wing politics. Consider its current program:

— Anti-Semitism

— Racial separation

— The quashing of civil rights for minorities

— The destruction of federal government power

— Anti-homosexual

— Anti-abortion

— Anti-immigration

Hearing conservatives trying to claim that white supremacists are liberals fills me with the same discombobulating dizziness that hearing religious zealots declaring that atheism is a religion does. Dudes, do you even listen to the words coming out of your mouth?

I admit it. My eyes glaze over on a lot of important public policy issues. It’s especially foggy when you’ve got one group of advocates loudly advocating one position, and another group advocating something different. And then when it’s something remote from my direct experience, like UK public health policy, it’s even harder to focus.

So, for instance, I tried to puzzle out the Health and Social Care Act of 2012, and even the Wikipedia page was too much for me. I got bogged down in the details, and when the occasional name I knew, like “David Cameron”, came swimming out of the murk, they just discouraged me even more from trying to follow along.

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But then Donald Drumpf swallowed his soul and spat it back out on TV, and I realized that even bullying villains can feel pain. Watch Christie’s eyes in this short video, and read this tale of shame.

This is what happens when petty, small-minded corruption meets a vaster, more fatuous corruption.

I’m trying to reconcile myself to the likelihood that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, when along comes an announcement from a horrible fellow.

Conservative economist Ben Stein revealed on Wednesday that he was considering voting for Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders because Donald Trump was going to “sink” the Republican Party.

“I went to law school with Ms. Clinton so I’ve always had a kind of fondness for her, she was always a very nice young woman,” Stein told CNN’s Carol Costello. “I admire the fact that Bernie Sanders has a single-payer national health plan.”

I think he’s trying to scuttle everyone.

Just got back from the caucus — the turnout was YUUUUGE. Long lines snaking into the meeting place, crowds of people everywhere. We voted and left instead of staying for all the politicking just because it was standing room only and we felt we had to leave to give more people a chance to come in.

Now we just wait for the returns.

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You should watch the election returns on the Guardian. Not so much for the quality coverage, but for the mesmerizing little cartoon candidates zipping back and forth to paint in the county results.