SINGLE-PAYER: Is Nevada All-in with Medicaid-for-All?

PLUM LINE‘S PAUL WALDMAN: Everybody Needs to Stop Telling Hillary Clinton to Shut Up.

You’ve seen the headlines, begging Joe Biden to just give it up and get out of our faces already. “Dems want Joe Biden to leave spotlight,” says The Hill. “Dear Joe Biden, please stop talking about 2016,” says a USA Today columnist. “Joe Biden is back. Should Democrats be worried?” asks The New Republic. “Can Joe Biden please go quietly into the night?” asks a column in Vanity Fair. A Daily News columnist begins his missive with, “Hey, Joe Biden, shut the f— up and go away already.” Folks sure do hate that guy. And all he did was give a couple of commencement speeches and an interview or two.

OK, you’ve probably guessed: Joe Biden wasn’t the subject of all those headlines. In fact, when the former vice president has made noises suggesting he still yearns to sit in the Oval Office, reporters treat it as at worst the understandable desires of a beloved uncle who may have lost a step or two, and at best a tantalizing possibility—despite the fact that Biden ran for president twice, and could barely have performed worse if he had punched out the mayors of Des Moines and Dixville Notch on national television.

No, the target of all that anger and contempt is Hillary Clinton, who has dared to be seen in public on a few occasions since last November, violating some unwritten rule that says that unsuccessful presidential candidates must never be heard from again.

Everybody? The columns cited by Waldman were either written by or were quoting Democrats and lefties. Here on the right, many of us have been encouraging Clinton to make another run at the White House in 2020 — maybe not with the best of intentions, but we certainly aren’t telling her to shut up.

So when did the Left become such a cesspit of misogyny?

MUELLER? ANYONE? MUELLER? Liz Sheld has the latest on Bob Mueller, rapid FOIA responses, and more.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Don’t Fall Prey to This IRS Phone Scam (But Do Have Some Fun at Their Expense)

TAMMY BRUCE: WaPo Remembers Pulse Nightclub Victims Who ‘Died’, Omits *Murder* by *Terrorist*

Then they remember nothing.

RETAIL BLUES: Retailer Gymboree files for bankruptcy, to close up to 450 stores.

We always had good luck with Gymboree clothes, which are well-made enough that our younger son’s Gymboree hand-me-downs don’t look like hand-me-downs.

HEZBOLLAH, IRAN, AND THE BRONX: What on God’s Earth was going on?

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: James Comey Has A Long History Of Questionable Obstruction Cases.

Let’s begin with the case of one Frank Quattrone, a banker who Comey pursued relentlessly on banking related charges without fruition. But while he couldn’t find any wrong-doing on criminal conduct, he went after him for supposed “obstruction of justice” because of a single ambiguous email. Sound familiar?

Before he was indicted, Comey made false statements about Quattrone and his intent. The first trial ended in a hung jury but the second one got a conviction.

That conviction was overturned in 2006. Quattrone was so scarred by the harassment, he began funding projects designed to help innocent people who are victims of prosecutorial overreach or other problems. He said his motivation for supporting such projects was that at the very moment he was found guilty in the second trial, he realized there must be innocent people in prisons who lacked the financial resources to fight for justice. He also started the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Quattrone has noted with interest the disparities in how he was treated by Comey for a single email compared to his handling of the Hillary Clinton email server scandal.

You might remember Martha Stewart being sent to jail. You might not remember that James Comey was the man who put her there, and not because he was able to charge her for anything he began investigating her for. The original investigation was into whether Stewart had engaged in insider trading. They didn’t even try to get her on that charge.

In Comey’s case, the Peter Principle has proven practically Panglossian.

BUILT ON SAND: Merkel’s G-20 Climate Alliance Is Crumbling.

I once had high hopes for Merkel, thinking that someone who had experienced East German socialism firsthand would have developed a healthy skepticism for utopian statism. But that was a long time ago.

THE RUMORS WON’T STOP, BUT REINCE IS STILL THERE: Is Reince on his way out?

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: “Tear Down This Wall”

I visited West Berlin just weeks after Reagan’s speech, and it was a thrilling time to be an American in that place.

FASTER, PLEASE: Can a Single Injection Conquer PTSD? The Army Wants to Find Out.

The $2 million Army study constitutes the first large-scale randomized control research into use of the shots—called stellate ganglion blocks—to treat PTSD. The injections have been used for decades for arm pain and shingles.

In recent years, some military doctors have begun treating PTSD patients, particularly Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets, with the injections. The shots interrupt messages along nerve fibers that control the fight-or-flight response.

That early clinical experience has produced promising results, with troops experiencing near-immediate relief of anxiety, hyper-vigilance, social withdrawal and other symptoms, said military doctors who have administered the treatment. They include Col. Jim Lynch, command surgeon at the joint Special Operations Command-Africa, which deploys elite troops to train local forces and conduct missions in Africa.

“Once people have the shot, they get dramatically better immediately,” Dr. Lynch said. The shot isn’t a cure, he said, but eases symptoms enough to allow talk therapy, pharmaceuticals and other approaches to achieve long-term improvements.

I wonder if this treatment could also help military service dogs who often suffer PTSD, too.

WE MAY NEVER KNOW HIS REAL MOTIVE: Pulse gunman’s motive: Plenty of theories, but few answers.

Fortunately, we have Patrick Poole on hand to provide the necessary corrective.

IT ISN’T ALWAYS A NICE PROBLEM TO HAVE: The Air Force’s Overkill Problem.

The United States Air Force seems to have finally recognized that it will have to operate in permissive airspace fighting against poorly armed insurgents for the foreseeable future.

In perhaps a breakthrough of sorts for the service, the Air Force also seems to recognize that high performance fourth and fifth-generation fighters such as the Boeing F-15E Strike Eagle and Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are not the best weapons—being massive overkill—to use against such groups.

Instead, the Air Force seems serious about pursuing options that would give it a low-cost platform that could perform that mission in a much more cost effective manner while reserving its higher-end capabilities to counter rival great power threats.

Even the beloved A-10, whose 30mm Gatling-type autocannon was designed to rip open Soviet main battle tanks, is overkill for taking out jihadi jeeps.

JIM GERAGHTY: The Outlook on the Seemingly Eternal Georgia Special House Election Runoff.

One of the reasons that the race as grown so expensive is that this is a high-stakes race where the runoff is well into its second month. Republicans have controlled the seat for nearly four decades, but Ossoff fell just short of winning the 50 percent necessary to avoid the runoff on April 18. More than 75,000 early votes have been cast in the runoff so far; that’s ahead of the roughly 55,000 early ballots cast in the first round. That may reflect voter exhaustion with the runoff, as the television advertising has been relentless.

Reed said that his organization aims to contact roughly 100,000 voters in the district — twice by mail and three times by phone, and by the time the runoff is done, they expect to have knocked on 22,000 doors. The Faith and Freedom Coalition will also disperse 100,000 voter guides to churches in the district.

“It’s not Trump country,” Reed said of the district overall. “North Fulton, that’s our sweet spot: mega-churches, strip malls, and office towers. If we get our 100,000 voters out, we’re fine. The Left is coming; the question is, do our voters come out?”

Maybe the best thing for GA06 residents would be to turn off the TV and put the phone on Do Not Disturb and just show up on election day.

HMM: Republicans are closer to killing ObamaCare than you think.

But are they any closer to actually repealing it?

MARKETING: Heineken’s in the can for open borders.

BUT OF COURSE: CNN’s Fareed Zakaria Hails Trump Assassination Play as ‘Masterpiece.’

And: “Last week The Daily Wire broke the news that Zakaria’s employer, Time-Warner, parent company of CNN, is one of the sponsors of Trump’s nightly assassination.”

CHANGE: Trump’s renewable energy cuts alarm former officials.

Trump wants to gut a key division of the Department of Energy designed to accelerate the development of clean energy like solar and wind power. The administration’s 2018 budget would slash funding for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy by a stunning 71.9%.

Those deep spending cuts are alarming the last seven Senate-confirmed individuals who led the renewables office, including three who served under Republican presidents.

“We are unified that cuts of this magnitude…will do serious harm to this office’s critical work and America’s energy future,” the former officials wrote in a letter to members of Congress on Thursday.

When there’s money to be made in renewable energy, then money will be made. Until then, DOE money is just a slush fund for the well-connected.

CHANGE: Feinstein Calls for Probe of Loretta Lynch’s Handling of Email Investigation.

MARGARET SULLIVAN: Is media coverage of Trump too negative? You’re asking the wrong question.

Harvard professor Thomas E. Patterson, the study’s author, sees trouble on that last point.

“The press is focusing on personality, not substance,” he said recently on public radio’s “On the Media” program. And that reflects “not a partisan bias but a journalistic bias,” the tendency to seek out conflict. (No mystery there — it’s more interesting.)

“It’s the press in its usual mode, and that erodes public trust,” Patterson said.

And then there’s the dirty little secret that every journalist knows — Trump stories drive ratings and clicks. The word “Trump” in a headline vastly increases its chances of getting attention. (We’re all guilty; see above.)

Say what you will about the president, he continues to have one thing dead right: Donald Trump is a ratings machine.

Thus, home pages of news organizations or hour upon hour of cable news are relentlessly focused on the president — not always because of solid newsworthiness.

“Democracy dies in darkness,” indeed. But there’s a difference between shining a light and starting fires.

THOMAS LIFSON: A vast conspiracy of silence kept the ‘Russia collusion’ story alive.

American democracy has been corrupted, and if not cured, the disease will be fatal. There is no other conclusion to be drawn when the public is deceived on the scale that was revealed (but ignored) by James Comey. The stunning truth is that the American political and media establishment allowed a phony story – that they knew was phony — to dominate our political discourse for months. When James Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week, he revealed that he had informed many important Congressional leaders that there was no investigation of President Trump and the Russians underway, even as MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, and the Washington Post daily carried stories alluding to an imaginary investigation.

None of these informed leaders spoke out! They allowed a make-believe tale intended to harm the legitimacy and therefore political power of President Trump to dominate mindshare in the nation’s collective political conversation.

Worst. Political class. Ever.

And that includes our media, which in this century (at least) has gone from merely biased to openly partisan.

FASTER, PLEASE: GOP Senator Slams Pace of American Infrastructure Projects.

Logistics — and the infrastructure necessary to move lots of things and people quickly and efficiency — used to be an American speciality.

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: Pakistan man sentenced to death for blasphemy on Facebook.

A court in Bahawalpur handed out the verdict, the harshest yet for such a crime, after finding Taimoor Raza, 30, guilty of insulting the prophet Muhammad.

Raza was arrested last year after a debate about Islam on Facebook with a man who turned out to be a counter-terrorism agent. He was one among 15 people arrested by the counter-terrorism department last year, accused of blasphemy, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

The verdict is part of a wider crackdown on perceived dissent on social media in a country where unfounded allegations of blasphemy can lead to mob vigilante justice.

Raza’s brother, Waseem Abbas, said the family was “poor but literate”, and belonged to Pakistan’s minority Shia Muslim community. “My brother indulged in a sectarian debate on Facebook with a person, who we later come to know, was a [counter-terrorism department] official with the name of Muhammad Usman,” he said.

Raza’s defence attorney said his client had been charged with two unrelated sections of the law to ensure the maximum penalty.

The story also notes that “authorities have asked Twitter and Facebook to help identify users sharing blasphemous material,” but doesn’t indicate if they’ve agreed to comply.

COMEY’S BURNING PANTS, NEWT’S MODEST PROPOSAL, AND THE DEEP STATE GOES TO COURT: Liz Sheld’s morning brief has it all.