I'm going to make this short today, since once the primary results start coming in from New York, I'm going to be too preoccupied to write coherently. I'm really just tossing this subject out for discussion, if truth be told, because it may become a lot more important once the New York results are in.

What is Donald Trump's real threshold for gaining the Republican nomination on the first vote at the convention? We've all (well, the wonkier among us, to be accurate) had the number 1,237 burned into our brains from all the punditry obsession with the subject (indeed, I didn't even feel the necessity of fact-checking that number, because it has become so prevalent). But because we're so deep into the minutiae of Republican nomination practices, there's an open secret that few have yet noticed: Republicans also have "unbound" delegates at their convention. They aren't "super" (like the Democrats), since nobody gets one of these seats just for being a current member of Congress, but they are just as free to select whichever candidate they feel like. I've seen numbers from the low 100s up to about 200 for how many of these there are (again, too lazy to fact-check that one), meaning they are an extra reserve of possible votes that could be drawn upon if a candidate is close enough to the outright majority of 1,237.

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Tomorrow's New York primary will be the decisive one, the pundits tell us. It will join a long list of other primaries and caucuses which were also deemed to be the crucial one which would decide the whole race: Iowa, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, and (of course) all the Super Tuesday states. All of these, in turn, were the decisive ones to watch, we were told. The fact that no decisive winner has emerged on either side is deemed irrelevant afterwards, of course, because by then we'll all be focused on the next big, definitive primary on the calendar. This will likely continue right up to California's (decisive) vote, in June.

The simple fact of the matter is that there are two Democratic candidates and two Republican candidates who are still relevant. This will likely be true all the way to the conventions, no matter how many delegates are won by the frontrunners. The battle between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump will still be contentious in Cleveland, and the fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders is still going to matter in Philadelphia. Both parties are struggling with the question of who they are and what they stand for, and on both sides this will likely continue long after the 2016 race is over.

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Believe it or not, it was a fairly quiet week on the Republican campaign trail. That's news in a sort of "man bites dog" (or, at the very least, "rabid attack dog refuses to bite") sort of way. In fact, the biggest news from the Republican side this week was Paul Ryan definitively refusing to be the Republican nominee this year. Ryan delivered a speech (called "Shermanesque" by every political reporter in existence) which essentially said: "Man, you couldn't pay me to be the GOP nominee this year -- no thanks, but I'll see you all bright and early for the 2020 contest!" This is a smart move indeed for Ryan, since it is looking more and more like Republicans don't stand a snowball's chance in Hell of winning the White House this particular year. So we're ignoring all the "but that's what he said about the speakership" tease articles, and we're taking Ryan at his word. No how, no way is Ryan going to be the nominee this year.

Ryan's got enough problems right now as it is, since he hasn't really gotten anything done in the House this year. Just like John Boehner before him, the Tea Party extremist faction is holding everything hostage and gumming up the works. Ryan truly wanted to live up to his billing as the "one man who could unify the party" (see: his election as Speaker of the House), but so far he is falling far short. Ryan swore that his House would be different, and that Republicans would start actually passing bills that laid out their plans for the future so the public could view the specifics (with awe, of course). So far, that hasn't happened. There's a Puerto Rico crisis that needs some action, but Ryan is heading back to the drawing board even though time is of the essence. Today, Ryan just missed a big deadline for passing a budget framework bill. This isn't even squabbling about the details, this is just the overview which sets how much will be spent -- and the Tea Party has now torpedoed Ryan's efforts to get something (anything!) passed before the deadline.

Good thing it didn't shut the government down again, because Ryan is proving that the problem wasn't in fact John Boehner, but instead the "take no prisoners" faction of the Republican Party itself. Since this is a largely unsolvable problem, we don't expect Ryan will be able to make good on any of his grand promises to prove to be the "party of ideas." Maybe the Democratic optimists are right and this will only help them retake the House this year, who knows?

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The last Democratic presidential debate was held tonight on CNN, broadcasting from New York City. This debate was not originally on the schedule the Democratic National Committee had approved, and was added due largely to popular demand. It will be the final time Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton face off against each other on a stage -- the next debate to happen will be between the Democratic and Republican nominees, later in the year.

I personally thought both candidates were a lot sharper tonight than they have been in previous debates. In fact, I'm one of those political wonks who would have been happy if there had been more debates held, because I think they provide one of the only opportunities for the public to see candidates being forced to occasionally think on their feet and spontaneously come up with answers to unexpected questions. So, in general, I'm pretty pro-debate. I think that no matter which candidate you prefer in the Democratic race, you'd have to agree that they both looked a lot sharper in this debate than in the first few they held.

I wasn't very happy with the moderators, but then I seldom am. We didn't get a whole lot of unexpected questions tonight, and we didn't get a whole lot of questions that hadn't already been asked and answered at previous debates. Having Wolf Blitzer host didn't really help, either. In fact, the most interesting exchanges of the night took place when the two candidates veered off on their own preferred tangents, and brought up subjects that the moderators hadn't even asked about. For Hillary, the best example of this was her strong support (while chastising the moderators for not even asking about it) of abortion rights for women. For Bernie (at least for me) the best example was when he strongly asserted he'd move marijuana off the controlled substance schedules entirely. Neither answer was prompted by anything the moderators said, but at least the answers were something new on the stage.

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The fight for a $15-an-hour minimum wage achieved its biggest success last week, when California's governor signed a minimum wage hike that will bring the entire state up to a $15-an-hour minimum within the next few years. This is a milestone for a number of reasons, the most impressive being that it is the first such statewide measure to be enacted in the entire country. But what was really notable about the new California law was the way it happened. Because it was a real vindication of Bernie Sanders's contention that without a "political revolution," nothing much of note will get done in politics these days.

There is a (probably fictional) story from the 1800s of a French politician who, hearing angry crowds in the street, exclaimed: "There go my people -- I must find out where they are going, so I can lead them!" I was reminded of this when I saw Hillary Clinton joining in with Andrew Cuomo while he signed his own version of a minimum wage hike. Clinton was full of praise for the new $15-an-hour minimum wage (which, unlike California's new law, only applies to the New York City area, not statewide). I found this somewhat ironic, considering Clinton has so far only been willing to commit to a $12-an-hour minimum wage. Sanders, who has fully supported the $15-an-hour goal since he started running, was barely mentioned in the media coverage. He certainly wasn't invited to the podium -- instead Clinton tried to take as much credit possible for a law that goes far beyond what she herself is calling for.

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I'm going to start by apologizing, because this column will be a bit abbreviated. Outside life intervened, and I didn't have time today to write a full column. But rather than just re-running an old column, I thought I could get the idea I wanted to write about today across quickly, just to toss it out there for discussion.

I thought the subject of how the war against the Islamic State is going in Iraq was worth an update today, because the Iraqi forces are on the brink of reclaiming a pretty impressive swath of the map. I should mention up front that for the purposes of this article, I'm going to largely ignore how the war is progressing in Syria, for no other reason than to keep things focused.

The problem I have with the way the war is being reported is that there is often no context given to any individual reports. "Iraqi Forces Retake Hit" was the most recent headline, but no map is provided or explanation given of any sort of strategic big picture.

There are two maps worth looking at to see the progress being made in Iraq, one from a little over a year ago and one that is up to date. The recent one is posted on Wikipedia, and changes over time (people update it with recent developments). The historical one is from the Washington Post and was printed to a companion article about what was going on last February (the Kurdish forces were about to retake Sinjar).

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The Republican Party seems to be in the midst of a period of soul-searching, heading into the remainder of the primary season. The viewpoints within the party are all over the map, and even the perception of how the 2016 presidential race is going to play out can be vastly different from Republican to Republican. How it all turns out is anyone's guess at this point, but at least one Republican faction will be able to say "we told you so" at the end of the process. The questions are who is going to be right, and what it will mean for the party going forward.

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There was some good news and some bad news on marijuana this week, which got us thinking about how the subject of federal marijuana policy relates to the presidential nomination race. So while we'll take care of the news (good and bad) in the awards section, we're going to also devote the talking points section to a list of questions we would love to hear answered by all the candidates. Obviously, the answers from Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are the most important, since they'd be the only ones who might actually try to improve the current situation, but it really shouldn't excuse the Republicans from having to answer them as well. Rather than just a quick "Do you support medical marijuana?" question, we really think the issue needs to be addressed in a little more depth.

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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.

The reason for this optimism was the news that the Drug Enforcement Agency has just sent a letter [PDF file] in response to a group of senators who, last year, formally asked the agency if it would consider rescheduling marijuana on the "Controlled Substances" list. The D.E.A. has now responded that it will make a decision on the matter by summertime (sometime during "the first half of 2016"). More on the technical aspects of what is being considered in a moment. But first, a little history is necessary to put the War On Weed into proper context.

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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.

Salon ran an article today from Digby which details some of the behind-the-scenes planning by supporters of Donald Trump. Some are already using the phrase "days of rage" for what they want to see happen if Trump is somehow denied the GOP nomination. This, of course, harkens back to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which saw waves of rioting in the streets (and also gave birth to the cry: "The whole world is watching!" since the television cameras were rolling during some of the worst of it). Could this be the year when Republicans see some sort of replay of what the Democrats went through in 1968?

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