Cruz is understandably incensed about The National Enquirer report that he’s had multiple extra-marital affairs. In zeroing in on the problems of the report, he cagily called attention to the fact that the only on-the-record source is Roger Stone, Jr., a former Trump adviser who has been a notorious practitioner of dirty-tricks politics since the Nixon administration. But Cruz’s way of characterizing Stone was curious. “He’s a man whom a term was coined for copulating with a rodent,” Cruz said. “Well let me be clear, Donald Trump may be a rat but I have no desire to copulate with him.”

Cruz’s words only make sense if we understand that Stone is famous for ratfucking, a term of art in politics for doing dirty tricks on your opponents. The term ratfucking, possibly of military origins, entered politics via the Nixon administration.

The  people at everyone’s favorite Supreme Court blog put on their “Make America Great Again” hats to do their “relist watch.” (What’s a relist? I’ll let SCOTUSblog explain it.) And let me tell you—this post is going to be huge. How huge? As big as my hands huge (that’s very huge, in case you were wondering).

Now for the new relists. I love relists and relists love me. Let me tell you something about relists. Relists are cases that could have given up. But instead they are fighting all the way to the Supreme Court, and then some. That’s just like me. I get sued a lot, okay? A lot. And I could settle all these cases against me. They’re tiny cases. I could settle them for very little money. But I never settle and neither do these guys so they’re all winners. The first new relist is Bravo-Fernandez v. United States,15-537. Juan Bravo-Fernandez, the president of a security firm, and Hector Martínez-Maldonado, a senator in Puerto Rico, were charged with committing two crimes on a weekend trip to Las Vegas, where I hope they stayed at the Trump International Hotel. It’s the most beautiful, most luxurious hotel in Vegas. I’m talking sixty-four stories and it looks like it’s made of gold. The most beautiful people stay there. So allegedly, Bravo-Fernandez paid for Martínez-Maldonado’s trip to Vegas and for boxing tickets a day after Bravo-Fernandez testified in front of Martínez-Maldonado about a bill he wanted passed. The two men were charged with (1) federal program bribery under 18 U.S.C. § 666 and (2) conspiring and traveling to violate 18 U.S.C. § 666. The jury acquitted them of the charge of conspiring and traveling but convicted them of the bribery offense itself. Which makes no sense – I’m not saying it was a stupid jury, but I hear other people saying that.

Read the rest of this big beautiful post here.

The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York has just achieved something very few of us can expect to do in our lifetimes—reach Bieber level of Twitter fame (ok not quite) in Turkey. After his office indicted Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian businessman, on Monday for violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, Bharara’s Twitter follower count shot up to over 250,000.  

The Los Angeles Times reports that Zarrab previously evaded arrest in Turkey for a corruption case, which many believe was covered up by the government. Turkish citizens hope that Bharara’s indictment, while unrelated, might finally bring justice to Zarrab. 

Bharara is already famous for his prosecutions of Wall Street executives, top city and state officials, and banks—earning him the title of Crusader—but it seems that now, he is finally getting his due.  

According to USA Today, donors have already given more than $1 billion to the presidential candidates and their allied super PACs. Four years ago, the candidates and their super PACs had only spent $403 million at this point in the race. 

$1 billion is a lot of money. You could book six trips to the moon and back. You could buy the Pittsburgh Pirates. You could shoulder the annual GDP for the Solomon Islands, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Samoa, or the Western Sahara. 

Instead, wealthy donors chose to spend their money on politics—and many of their investments flopped. Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor who left the presidential race in September, burned through his hefty war chest last summer and still owes creditors over $1 million, according to the Center for Public Integrity. Jeb Bush spent $130 million and got just six Republican delegates. 

2016 is on track to be the most expensive election in history. Experts estimate that candidates and their super PACs will spend $4.4 billion on TV ads before November. 

John McCain has written a tribute to a little-known person named Delmer Berg, under the eye-catching headline “Salute to a Communist.” The gist is that Berg, though a communist, fought against the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. He believed in a cause and didn’t give up on his comrades, and that made him a noble figure, like Robert Jordan from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which McCain describes as his “favorite novel.” 

In the novel, Jordan had begun to see the cause as futile. He was cynical about its leadership, and distrustful of the Soviet cadres who tried to suborn it.

But in the final scene of the book, a wounded Jordan chooses to die to save the poor Spanish souls he fought beside and for. And Jordan’s cause wasn’t a clash of ideologies any longer, but a noble sacrifice for love.

“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for,” Jordan thinks as he waits to die, “and I hate very much to leave it.” But he did leave it. Willingly.

No offense to Berg, but this is Hemingway at his worst, in equal degrees macho and maudlin. It is a way of romanticizing war, which is especially dispiriting when the war in question is the Spanish Civil War. A more clear-eyed view of the matter can be found in Homage to Catalonia, in which George Orwell, who also fought on the side of the communists, grows increasingly disillusioned by the internecine fighting between the communist factions. When the Stalinist purges begin, he doesn’t let loyalty sway him—he gets the hell out of there and writes a book about it. His description of getting shot in the throat, a near-death experience, is not only a fine specimen of limpid prose, but a sensible retort to the Robert Jordans of this world: “The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it!”

Trump has repeatedly dismissed the possibility of a contested convention and suggested that his supporters would riot if the Republican Party denied him the nomination for president. But according to NBC, Trump is working behind the scenes to leave nothing to chance at the Republican National Convention in July and is already making moves to secure the nomination: 

The campaign could obtain signed, public commitments from those delegates in June —signaling to the rest of the party that Trump will be the nominee....

The math shows that this is an achievable path. There are now 323 delegates currently up for grabs on the first ballot. These are delegates who backed [Marco] Rubio and [Ben] Carson or hail from states that don’t bind their vote, (such as Colorado and North Dakota).

If Trump falls short by 100 delegates, he could close the gap by locking in one out of three of those unbound delegates. 

This could be trickier than it sounds—if the GOP is serious about #StoppingTrump, there’s no reason to expect that Trump will easily win over a third of these unbound delegates. But that makes it all the better for Trump, whose entire campaign is predicated around the idea that he is a dealmaker—every “policy” he has, whether foreign or domestic, comes down to his belief that America is getting a bad deal and that he can get a better one. These unbound delegates give Trump the opportunity to flex his deal-making muscles and, if it works, we’ll never hear the end of it. 

The Enquirer, which I am legally obligated to note sometimes gets things right, like the John Edwards mistress story, is reporting that Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz has had at least five extramarital affairs. Per the Enquirer’s report:

“Private detectives are digging into at least five affairs Ted Cruz supposedly had,” claimed a Washington insider.

“The leaked details are an attempt to destroy what’s left of his White House campaign!”

The ENQUIRER reports that Cruz’s claimed mistresses include a foxy political consultant and a high-placed D.C. attorney!

The Cruz story has all the hallmarks of the Edwards story: hypocrisy, a slimy politician who rubs a lot of people the wrong way for reasons they can’t quite explain, sex. What it doesn’t have yet is any hard evidence, like the John Edwards love child shot, though the Enquirer is following the money. 

But there are reasons to be suspicious beyond the usual Enquirer caveats. Donald Trump, who threatened to “spill the beans” about Cruz’s wife on Tuesday, has close ties with The National Enquirer. As New York’s Gabriel Sherman wrote in October of 2015, “Trump and Enquirer CEO David Pecker have been friends for years. ‘They’re very close,’ said a source close to the Enquirer.” Trump was reportedly the source behind a hit piece on Ben Carson, which claimed the surgeon left a sponge in a patient’s brain and regularly committed malpractice. The Enquirer also went after Carly Fiorina in the fall. 

So, Cruz may be having an affair or he might not. Conservatives have been referring to it on Twitter, using the hashtag #TheThing. But it’s also possible that Donald Trump—who, it should be noted, has regularly attacked Cruz for fighting dirty and lying—is behind this attack. 

(h/t Sarah) 

It’s a fascinating document. There’s the white knight persona he puts on for the camera: “I don’t get angry often. But you mess with my wife, you mess with my kids, that’ll do it every time. Donald, you’re a sniveling coward, and leave Heidi the hell alone.” Then there’s the real Cruz, a calculating, completely craven pol who can’t bring himself to say he’d oppose a Trump nomination literally five seconds after calling him a “sniveling coward.” The flip would cause whiplash if the original persona weren’t so transparently affected, which NBC News correspondent Hallie Jackson exposed with some excellent timing.