ROME—Not since Pope Francis’s ill-advised meeting with gay marriage opponent Kim Davis has there been so much “he said, she said” controversy about the pope meddling in American politics.

On Friday, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders announced that he was “very excited” about having just received an invitation to speak at a small, invitation-only scholarly conference at the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences celebrating the 25th year anniversary of an encyclical, “Centesimus Annus,” written by Pope John Paul II on the evils of capitalism.

Francis is not expected to attend the conference, which will take place April 15 and 16 with around 30 participants, including Bolivian President Evo Morales and Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. Francis will be traveling to Lesbos, Greece, on the 16th to shed light on the Syrian refugee crisis there.

The Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, told The Daily Beast that it wasn’t the pope who personally invited the politician. “The invitation was made on behalf of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, not by Pope Francis,” he said. “There is no expectation that the pope will meet Mr. Sanders.” He then added that he could not completely exclude the possibility, but that nothing was on the agenda at the moment.
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Obviously, Clinton carries with her more than 25 years in the white-hot public spotlight that Sanders doesn't -- despite his career in the Senate -- and over that length of time people have been able to form opinions of her and they're ones not likely to change at this point. What you know about Hillary is what you know about Hillary. There aren't a lot of surprises. Maybe you figure this is bad for her, but in truth it can be argued that this is a positive rather than a negative because there's nothing the Republicans can throw at her that we haven't already been fed to death. And when you take a step back and look at Clinton objectively -- which is admittedly difficult for many, even, or maybe particularly, on the left -- that's exactly the point. Hillary Clinton's reputation is largely the result of a quarter century of visceral GOP hatred.

With the exception of maybe Barack Obama, whom they've irrationally loathed with the fire of a thousands suns, it's tough to name anyone conservatives have more vigorously derided throughout the years than Hillary Clinton. Even her husband, as much as they tried to take him down at every turn, earned a begrudging respect from many in the Republican party. Beating him up for, say, his sexual proclivities was the height of Beltway hypocrisy and they knew it, but politics demanded they grab onto any potential scandal they could with both hands and ride it as far as it would take them. While it's true many were bitterly jealous of Clinton's seemingly depthless charisma and sorcerer's way with voters, for the GOP leadership at the time it wasn't personal -- just really dirty business. Hillary on the other hand has always been cast as an arrogant bitch, a soulless bête noire, an irredeemably corrupt and fundamentally dishonest political hustler. From the very beginning of her time in the national political limelight, she was vilified for refusing to simply sit back and be an ornament on the White House Christmas tree, as she was apparently supposed to. And when she ventured out into her own separate political career, what was considered calculating but somehow forgivable from her husband became merely calculating -- and nefariously so -- from her. Bill was allowed to be Slick Willy. Hillary was just a rotten to the core.

The Clintons' political enemies were never shy about manufacturing every kind of conspiratorial scandal under the sun to attempt to hang around the couple's necks. As The Atlantic wrote just a few days ago, no other political figures in American history have spawned "the creation of a permanent multimillion-dollar cottage industry devoted to attacking them." (And this is noteworthy in and of itself when we consider the viciousness with which the right despises any Clinton.) But Hillary always got the worst of it, because, again, she lacked the boyish, "aw-shucks" charm of her husband and because she was seen as the nakedly ambitious one in the Clintons' rocket ride to political stardom, someone who engineered her own political climb through her merely practical marriage to Bill. Whereas we normally think of presidential political scandals as involving the person in office and no one else, Clinton-haters made sure that Hillary was not only lumped in with the president but that she was part of whatever "scheme" they had seized upon and inflated -- so Whitewater and Bill's wandering eye during those early years weren't simply a crisis of character within Bill himself but were also Hillary's problem. They made sure to highlight her involvement in the land deal the GOP attempted to turn into a high crime within the White House and it was her fault her husband was a serial philanderer, as she either caused her husband's infidelity or was corrupt enough to stick by her man amidst the allegations (always cynically and only for the sake of her own political gain).

The list goes on and on: Vince Foster was Hillary Clinton's personal friend, so of course the truth about his suicide in 1993 has given way to myth and conspiracy theory from those who believe Hillary was somehow involved in the death. The more unscrupulous on the right have always peddled that nonsense as proof Hillary has a "body count" attached to her (of which Foster was only one). There was the haranguing over Hillary's "missing law firm records," which was a lot of nothing piled on top of even more nothing. There was "Travelgate," in which routine staff changes in the White House were transformed into accusations of cronyism and in which Hillary was lambasted by Republicans for allegedly using the FBI and IRS to harass the former head of the White House travel office. (Comparable to the modern right's obsession with a phony story about "Obama's IRS" auditing conservative groups.) There was "Filegate," which saw Republicans pillory the Clintons, Hillary in particular, over a minor bureaucratic mix-up in which a Hillary hire at the Office of White House Counsel accessed files he didn't have the authority to. And of course, at the tail end of their time in the White House, Hillary was accused of helping to "loot" the White House on her way out, supposedly shipping materials to the Clintons' new home in Upstate New York.

All of this was investigated and all of it was found to be crap. But Hillary Clinton's ongoing political career only gave her GOP adversaries more alleged controversies to gin-up. She engaged in dirty dealings and then covered them up. She sold secrets to China. Her long-time adviser Huma Abedin was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and her parents had ties to al-Qaeda. She was involved in the Watergate scandal, for Christ's sake, and had ties to right-wing boogeyman Saul Alinsky. And of course, she personally got four Americans killed in Benghazi and endangered the safety and security of the United States by way of her personal server and e-mail account. She's a lying liar and a cheating cheat. She's a political Cthulu who drives men to madness by sheer force of her inhuman will and absolute malevolence. This is the caricature version of Hillary Clinton the right has carefully cultivated and hammered into the national consciousness for decades now. And if you're a liberal who believes these things about Clinton -- if you see her as anything other than a liberal Democrat who's guilty of nothing more than being a politician with faults and with a plethora of enemies like every other on this planet, including Bernie Sanders -- you've proven that the protracted smear campaign against this woman has worked. You prove that the GOP won a long time ago.
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Many of us rely on polls and pundits when it comes to presidential prognostication. But your best bet for accurate and reliable political predictions, it turns out, is actually the marketplace.

Political prediction markets like PredictIt incorporate all available information — including polling data and political analysis. “The markets have really been ahead of the polling and ahead of the pundits,” says David Rothschild, who studies them for Microsoft Research. Rothschild told PBS NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman that evidence clearly shows that markets where you can bet on — or “invest in” — political outcomes are “more accurate than any collection of pundits or statistical polling averages — and extremely well calibrated.”
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German Lopez points out today that the 1994 crime bill wasn't responsible for mass incarceration:


States preside over the great bulk of the US justice system. So it's actually state policies that fueled mass incarceration....Federal criminal justice policy, including much of the 1994 crime law, focuses almost entirely on the federal system, particularly federal prisons....In the US, federal prisons house only about 13 percent of the overall prison population.

That's true. And there's one other thing to add to that: by 1995, when the crime bill took effect, state and federal policies had long since been committed to mass incarceration. Between 1978 and 1995 the prison population had already increased by more than 250 percent. Between 1995 and its peak in 2009, it increased only another 40 percent—and even that was due almost entirely to policies already in place.




That said, whatever else the 1994 crime bill did, it didn't create the carceral state or even give it much of a boost. That had happened many years before.

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And Sanders’ shortcomings are actually bigger than the screenshot above would suggest. The 2014 filings Sanders released consist of just the first two summary pages of his Form 1040 and the equivalent summary pages from his home-state Vermont tax form.

Why does this matter? Unlike most of the other candidates, Sanders has not released the succeeding pages -- the nitty gritty detail of things like charitable donations and other types of itemized deductions. For instance, Clinton’s release for tax year 2014 is 44 pages long, or more than 10 times the length of Sanders’ for the same year.

It’s worth noting that Sanders, as a member of Congress, files annual financial disclosures, which are accessible online back to 2012. And as a presidential candidate, he also files financial disclosure documents to the Federal Election Commission.

But tax returns are much more detailed. And despite what Sanders said in the exchange with Tapper, his campaign did not provide PolitiFact with any earlier, publicly available tax forms. The campaign told the Post that it has not released any other tax returns prior to 2014. (The campaign did tell PolitiFact that they would release his 2015 returns once they are filed.)

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Our ruling

He’s only released information for one year, which pales compared to most other recent presidential candidates, and even that year’s release only includes a summary page, not the full return. We rate his claim False.

Lonnie Phillips is filing for bankruptcy because he owes $203,000 to the company that sold his stepdaughter’s killer 4,000 rounds of ammunition over the Internet.

A federal judge threw out his lawsuit against Lucky Gunner, and now the Phillips family must pay its legal fees under Colorado law.

As the Democratic primary race turns to New York, where the gun issue looms large, Hillary Clinton will seize upon their story and those like it. The Phillips’ daughter, Jessica Ghawi, died in the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo.

Lucky Gunner was shielded from prosecution under a 2005 law that grants gun makers and sellers immunity from prosecution for crimes committed with their products. Bernie Sanders voted for the law while a member of the House, though he’s recently wavered over whether he supports it.

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Phillips believes the bill Sanders is co-sponsoring falls short. “Bernie wants to throw us a bone, he knows it’s not going to go through,” he said.

“He has not come out full-force against this law,” said Phillips, who’s pressing Sanders for a meeting.

The big discussion in the Democratic presidential primary today is about Bernie Sanders’ remarks last night that Hillary Clinton is not qualified to be president. As this thing gets spun by the candidates, pundits, campaign staffers and surrogates, it has the potential to lose touch with what has/hasn’t actually been said. So let’s ground ourselves in the facts.

It all started with Clinton’s appearance on Morning Joe yesterday. Here is the entire segment. Her response to the Sanders interview with NYDN goes from about 1:20 to 3:40.



Notice that at least three times, Scarborough directly asked Clinton whether or not Sanders is “qualified” to be president. But she consistently refused to answer the question on those grounds.

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Perhaps responding to media reports rather than what Clinton actually said, here is Sanders at a rally last night:



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In the end, a challenge to Clinton’s qualifications to be president is perhaps more damaging to Sanders’ credibility than it is to hers. So perhaps he would do well to address the problem posed by his own interview rather than simply launch a rather Rovian attack on her.[/font]