The agreement to restructure the island’s $70 billion in debt fulfills a promise the Speaker made to Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Democrats during spending talks last December. And it shows that Ryan’s approach to the leadership job — empowering committee chairmen — can work, to a certain extent.

"Many of you were in elementary school when you learned the toughest lesson of all on 9/11," he said. "There are no walls big enough to stop people from anywhere, tens of thousands of miles away, who are determined to take their own lives while they target others."

If you're like most people, you probably shampoo your own hair several times per week—hell, maybe even every day—and have since you were a very young child. Shampooing hair is something that takes no particular skill and bring no particular safety concerns, save for getting a little suds in your eye. But in Tennessee, people who would like to shampoo hair in professional salons must receive hundreds of hours of training and fork out thousands of dollars before they're legally allowed to lather, rinse, repeat.

The Beacon Center of Tennessee is trying to change this. The libertarian-leaning think tank is suing the state cosmetology board over its onerous occupational-licensing requirements for people who want to wash hair. At present, obtaining a government permission to shampoo hair requires taking two exams, at a cost of $140, plus a $50 annual fee. On top of that, someone must take 300 hours of training "on the theory and practice of shampooing," at a cost of upwards of $3,000 for the tuition.

What happened to Ted Cruz? A month ago, he won the Wisconsin primary in a landslide and was poised to combat Donald Trump with a fresh burst of enthusiasm. Now he's out of the race and Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

Things happened in two cycles, some in recent weeks and others that plagued his campaign from the beginning. As Trump said last night, Cruz is tough and smart. But he made big mistakes as a presidential candidate.

Cruz thought he could skip primaries in states that looked unpromising. He made a weak effort in New York on April 19 and finished third in the primary. That had an immediate impact on the primaries a week later in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Rhode Island. He lost all five and finished third – that is, last – in four of them.


In primaries late in a presidential race, winning is everything, says Scott Reed, the political adviser to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "Second doesn't matter. Third is a joke." Reed ran Bob Dole's successful campaign for the GOP nomination.

"It's a sequential process," according to Jeff Bell, a campaign adviser to Ronald Reagan in 1976. Voters are affected by the success of a candidate in earlier primaries. Trump's victory in New York led to the five-state sweep and to his triumph over Cruz in Indiana primary yesterday.

Cruz decided to make a stand in Indiana, brushing off the five Northeast states. He believed they "wouldn't make any difference in voters' minds in Indiana," says Rich Danker, who ran a pro-Cruz super PAC. But states "don't have to be all alike" for voters to be influenced by their outcome, he says.

After Cruz came in a distant third in New York, his poll numbers began to drop. Over ten days in late April, Cruz went from six percentage points behind Trump (WTHR/Howey Politics) to 15 points behind (NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist). Trump won Indiana by 16 points. On Monday, Gallup's editor in chief Frank Newport disclosed that "after a holding period of sorts in March and early April, Cruz's image began to deteriorate significantly in the last two weeks."

Two other factors contributed to his demise. He accused Trump of being a liberal like Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential nominee. The charge wasn't credible. Trump may not be a conservative, but he's hardly a liberal.


And Cruz talked incessantly about process. He and his campaign aides boasted about how well he was doing in putting Cruz backers in delegate slots pledged to Trump. They pointed to their success in winning all 34 delegates in Colorado, though neither a primary nor a caucus had been held.

 

Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) has run a brilliant campaign, and if it were not for Donald Trump, he'd probably be on the verge of wrapping up the Republican nomination by now. The Texas firebrand knew long before others that the party's primary schedule and delegate allocation rules played to his advantage, not to an establishment candidate like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. From his arrival in the Senate, Cruz has bent the political space-time continuum around himself by demonstrating GOP leaders' inability to govern effectively or deliver on their promises to conservatives.


But he has made a fatal mistake. After excoriating the GOP establishment in the Senate and on the campaign trail, Cruz has now made common cause with the party in a desperate attempt to stop Trump. Wisconsin marked the turning point. Initially, he was coy about accepting the party's support. He did not court it, but Wisconsin was crucial to slowing Trump's momentum. And it worked. The Texan took 36 of the state's 42 delegates and appeared to have dealt a setback to the New York real estate mogul. But by cooperating with the party in Wisconsin, Cruz crucially altered the narrative of the campaign. The core of his electoral value proposition has been fierce opposition to the party's leaders. Once he tacitly accepted the party's embrace, he began to morph from a conservative stalwart to an opportunist.

Down in the polls and with zero margin for error heading into Tuesday’s crucial Indiana primary, Ted Cruz could be forgiven for seeing a silver lining in his apparent strength with unbound Republican delegates. Until Donald Trump’s romp through the Northeast last Tuesday abruptly changed the subject, the political world was captivated — and Trump supporters were infuriated — by the Cruz campaign’s successful effort to elect large blocs of friendly delegates at a series of state-party conventions. But friendly delegates are as subject to shifts in the race’s momentum as anyone else, and Cruz’s strength with some of these crucial first-ballot convention voters may be overstated — particularly in North Dakota, where his campaign declared victory after filling 18 of 25 unbound delegate slots with its chosen candidates at the April 3 convention. Those delegates are vital to Cruz’s quest to deny his rival the 1,237 delegates he’ll need on the first ballot in Cleveland. But as they’ve watched Cruz struggle to tread water in a primary increasingly dominated by Trump, many of them, wary of a bitter convention battle that could rend the party at its seams, are rethinking their commitment to the Texas senator.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has badly underperformed in 2016 compared with her first run for president in 2008, a new data analysis done exclusively by Breitbart News shows.

It’s particularly telling that she’s gotten less votes in 2016 than she did in 2008, especially because of the fact that the 2008 race was a three-way race for some time between Clinton, now President Barack Obama, and ex-Sen. John Edwards. She was, despite being the frontrunner for some time, the ultimate loser of that race—and she got more votes that year in a much more competitive primary that she ended up losing than she has this year against a devout, proud socialist in Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
 of Vermont.

Clinton is widely expected to be the Democratic nominee in 2016, but her poor performance in the primaries—which many believe she should have wrapped up long ago—may drag her down heading into the general election, as even many Democratic voters seem to distrust her. To win in November, Clinton will need a strong showing from the Democrat base. This data seems to suggest that she has significant problems with her own party’s core voters, meaning that if whoever wins the Republican nomination is able to woo these disaffected Democrats into the GOP camp, there could be a blowout in November for the Republican nominee.