The incredibly destructive federal war on marijuana may be about to end in a major way. It won't disappear entirely, but even so we may soon see the beginning of the inevitable end to the federal War On Weed. If so, it will become a major part of President Barack Obama's legacy -- even though he's actually the third president in a row who admitted to using marijuana at some point in his life. Obviously the scare stories couldn't all be true, if three presidents' lives weren't totally ruined by their recreational use of what is a fairly benign plant.

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The Republican National Convention will be held in Cleveland later this year. Already it is shaping up to be one of the most contentious party meetings in American history, even months ahead of time. Pretty much no matter what happens, there are going to be some seriously disappointed people (and that's putting it mildly), both within the convention hall and out in the surrounding streets. That much, at this point, seems almost guaranteed. The real question is whether this will boil over into anything other than the usual disgruntled muttering of the supporters of a losing candidate or not.

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We've reached the sparse and arid part of the primary calendar, which means that instead of another multi-state Tuesday, the political world is now focused solely on the Badger State. This follows last week, when (gasp!) no state voted on Tuesday, and will be followed by another two-week gap, before New York weighs in.

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I'm going to start this week's column by apologizing for it, up front. This is because I know it is going to be a weak and wooly-headed column today. I already know this because I myself am getting sick -- I woke up with flu symptoms, complete with the usual weakness and fuzzy thinking. I considered just punting altogether on today's column, but am feeling slightly better now, so I'm going to make the attempt. But it's going to be a pretty poor attempt, I'll warn you of that from the get-go. It will probably not be anywhere near as long as usual, for which some of you might actually be thankful (I do tend to ramble on, every Friday). One last warning -- normally, on such an auspicious date, I have lots of fun writing a piece of satire and then at the end stick in an "April Fools!" But I'm not going to do that today, which I'll explain further in the talking points section.

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I'm pleased to announce that ChrisWeigant.com is applying for press credentials for both national political conventions this year. Longtime readers of the site will remember that I (and my lovely wife, whose blogs also appeared in the Irish Times) attended the 2012 Democratic National Convention, but seeing as how the level of political excitement this year (in both parties) seems almost unparalleled, this year we really want to see what both parties have to offer, in person.

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I wrote the following exactly eleven months ago, when Bernie Sanders announced his run for the presidency. I'm running it again today, for two reasons. The first is that I am otherwise occupied, with putting together my applications for press passes for both national conventions (wish me luck). So I was going over a lot of old columns, looking for ones I could cite. The second reason is why this particular article leapt out at me is that it is pretty prophetic in seeing clearly the concept of a how a Bernie Sanders campaign effort would be run. The biggest thing I missed was the fact that Bernie would be the first Jewish president, instead of just "another old white guy." But while not every word in it came true, I think I did a fairly good job of predicting the overall dynamics of the race as it has played out. So again, apologies for the re-run, but here's what I had to say about Sanders, from the very beginning.

Originally published April 29, 2015

We've had a President Jimmy and a President Ronnie, so why not a President Bernie?

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Bernie Sanders just had a very good week. Six states voted in the past week, and Bernie won five of them. Overwhelmingly. Bernie got over 70 percent of the vote in four states, and over 80 percent in Alaska. All in all, a pretty good week. His delegate count has now hit four digits, with superdelegates added in. That's all pretty impressive, but rather than focusing on his chances for actually winning the Democratic presidential nomination this time around (which are still pretty low, even with that impressive string of victories), instead what intrigues me is how the movement of Democratic populism seems to be growing. If Sanders falls short this time around, the next time a populist runs they may actually succeed. Bernie has already gone a long way towards transforming the Democratic Party away from its embrace of economic centrism (the Bill Clinton and Democratic Leadership Council era) towards a much more people-centered party.

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That really should be "Copulating Rodents, Batman!" for full effect. Or it should just come right out and use the original term being euphemized. But somehow we couldn't quite bring ourselves to use either one of those in our title today.

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You'll have to forgive me for using such a lethal metaphor in that title, but I did not actually come up with the comparison myself -- that dubious honor goes to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. One month after he ended his own presidential bid, Graham addressed the question of which GOP frontrunner he could support, in pretty graphic fashion: "If you nominate Trump and Cruz I think you get the same outcome. Whether it's death by being shot or poisoning, does it really matter?"

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That's a pretty ambitious subtitle, but we're not going to get to the deconstruction project until the talking points, we should warn everyone up front. And we could never hope to deconstruct all of the GOP's absurdities in one column, so we'll be focusing just on their all-over-the-map reasoning on why they're not going to do their constitutional jobs in the Senate on President Obama's Supreme Court nomination. So we'll have all that to look forward to. For now, let's quickly review the week just to see where things stand.

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