Ted Cruz will seek the Republican nomination for President. Here's a place to discuss him and the 2016 Presidential race.

The art of the clown:

Donald Trump will launch a presidential exploratory committee Wednesday, the eve of the business mogul’s return to New Hampshire. [. . .] According to Lewandowski, “Apprentice” producer Mark Burnett personally called Trump to offer another season of the “Apprentice” but Trump turned him down. “Nobody in the history of television has turned down a renewal,” Lewandowski said in a phone interview with the Union Leader. “But Mr. Trump can do that.” [My emphasis]

This CNN poll has to be confounding for the Media:

The two candidates who currently top the GOP field, Bush and Walker, match up equally against Clinton, with each carrying 40% to her 55%. Huckabee gets 41% to Clinton's 55% and Carson has 40% to Clinton's 56%.

[Clinton's] prospects in 2016 appear largely unchanged compared to polls conducted before news broke about her use of a personal email address and home-based server while serving as secretary of state.

In the primaries, Bush leads the GOP pack with 16% to Walker's 13%. Not that that matters much as national polls don't tell you anything about Iowa and New Hampshire, where the stage is set. On the Dem side, Clinton holds a 50 point lead over Biden and Warren.

10 months to Iowa.

So Dan Metcalfe is back at it again. The former FOIA person for the Justice Department, with an assist from Politico, continues to spout uniformed nonsense on eGhazi. Some examples:

We now have former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton being revealed as someone who took the unprecedented step of arranging to use her personal email account for all of her official email communications.

But didn't Colin Powell do the same thing? I'm sure I read it somewhere. Why yes, here it is in, um, Politico:

Media Matters points us to State Dept Reg. 5 FAM 443.2:

E-mail message creators and recipients must decide whether a particular message is appropriate for preservation In making these decisions, all personnel should exercise the same judgment they use when determining whether to retain and file paper records.

We already know there was no prohibition until 2014 regarding the use of private e-mail accounts. We now know that, as a formal matter, even e-mails sent or received on State Department email account were not automatically preserved. Instead only those e-mails designated for preservation, by the determination of the individual holding the e-mail, would be preserved.

Hillary Clinton should have made these determinations in a timely manner. When she did not, after the effective date (in 2010) of the 2009 NARA regulation, she failed to comply in my opinion. (I do not accept her argument that she could rely on the determination of the recipient or sender from a .gov account.)

But in terms of laws and regulations, this has become "The Incredible Shrinking Scandal."

DC press now pretty much see itself as Hillary's Democratic primary opponent.

— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) March 11, 2015

As Laura Clawson deftly describes, the Media is turrible on its best days, but when the Clintons are involved, they reach seemingly impossible nadirs, and stay down there.

There's a lot to question about Hillary Clinton's policy positions, especially, in my view, on foreign policy. But those questions will never get asked by the Media on its own.

The Media doesn't actually care about policy. Partly because it's hard to report on policy. Partly because they don't really care about policy. The only way they do is if a political opponent raises the issue.

More on the flip.

The latest (PDF) in a string of polls showing Hillary Clinton would defeat all GOP challengers in 2016:

The national survey finds 53 to 56 percent support for Clinton among registered voters against each of these potential Republican candidates, while they get 39 to 41 percent.

One of the most interesting findings is Clinton's performance among white voters:

In November 2008, this was posted at TalkLeft:

Ezra Klein thinks: "Presuming that Hillary Clinton will remain one of, if not the, central actors in Democratic life from the year 2000 to the year 2016 displays a certain poverty of imagination about the path of Democratic politics. With every passing day, her singular political position erodes. In 2004, she would have won the nomination in a walk. By 2008, there was a new politician who better tapped into that particular moment in the party's life. By 2016, there will be many politicians like that, most of whose names we don't know. It's very hard to imagine that eight years in the future, the party will want to move back to Clinton."

One thing for sure, Ezra is not suffering from a poverty of imagination in this post. The entire post seems a figment of his imagination to me. [...] I think the complete opposite of Ezra - If Hillary wants to be the Dem nominee in 2016, she will be the Dem nominee in 2016.

Told you so. Of course Ezra got the Vox money tho.

Oregon and Alaska have become the third and fourth states to legalize the personal use of marijuana for recreational purposes. In the District of Columbia, residents will face no legal repercussions for growing marijuana for personal use.

On tap for 2016: Legalization initiatives are planned for California, Massachusetts, Maine, Nevada and Arizona.

On the medical marijuana side, Guam approved it while Florida did not. Overall, legal marijuana advocates had a big night.

The headlines are all over the place on why Republicans made so many gains in yesterday's elections and what it means for Democrats. I'm going to keep it simple: We get the government we elect. If Democrats don't come out and vote, they won't win.

This is a thread for all election-related topics.

Senator Mark Udall has lost the U.S. Senate race to Cory Gardner. The media called the race for Gardner early, but Udall waited a few hours before giving his concession speech, which you can view here. The Post says he "held back tears" but he didn't look very upset to me. He smiled a lot and made some jokes. Gardner reminds me of a throwback to his lookalike predecessor, Gov. Bill Owens. I muted the TV for his speech. In Denver, Gardner only got 26% of the vote to Udall's 69%.

Both Udall and Gardner ran relentless negative ads on local TV for what seems like months. They were both like one trick ponies. Udall harped on Gardner's stand on abortion while Gardner attacked Udall as a clone of Obama. It's a shame Udall didn't focus more on his record of accomplishments, particularly since Gardner has none.

Gov. Hickenlooper and Republican challenger Bob "Wrong Way" Beauprez are still battling it out. With 89% of the vote counted, Beauprez has 5,000 more votes, but it's too close to call. [More...]

Results are coming in from today's elections. Here's a thread to discuss them, and your take on their significance.