Perhaps the news will break in The Kansas City Star some day that the Kansas City council, or a secret independent body, dispatched moles to the nation’s top magazines, newspapers, and websites.

Their mission was clear: find work in staff and editorial positions and begin a propaganda campaign. The glorification of Kansas City would lead to a mass migration of people and businesses, an economic and cultural renaissance, fame and fortune!

Hmmm, or maybe more Kansas Citians are simply finding national media jobs–completely devoid of conspiracy. Or perhaps the explanation for all this talk of Kansas City is even better. Perhaps this city, the geographic heart of America, really is that awesome.

Either way, let’s consider either how awesome Kansas City is or how well natives are peddling Kansas City propaganda. Up to you which one.

(Full list of KC honors here.)

HUFFINGTON POST

• Named Kansas City the #1 “coolest” city in the U.S. to “visit right now.” We’re an “it” city with “hip” neighborhoods. (2014)
• Put KC at #10 of the top cities for creatives. Called it “a creative hub to rival those in the northeast and on the West Coast,” cited 70 art galleries in the Crossroads Art District alone, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. But we ranked below Des Moines and @&#$ing Kalamazoo. Thanks, moles. (2015)
• Ranked KC #4 among the “most cultured cities.” That’s better. We don’t mind losing to New York. (2015)
• Other honors over the past few years include #4 for best cities for newlyweds, #7 for college grads, and more. (2012)

FORBES

• Forbes put Kansas City on its list of “Best Places for Business and Careers.” And who would know better than they? (2012)
• Named us one of the 10 best cities to buy a home. (2012)
• Called downtown one of America’s best. Forbes doesn’t seem to like specific rankings these days. (2011)
• Things used to be different. #9 in “Top 10 Best Cities to Get Ahead,” #8 for commuters, #6 for couples, #16 for the outdoors, #7 for pet-friendly cities, #7 for volunteering. (2007-2009)

TRAVEL+LEISURE

• Named KC #2 among “America’s Best Beer Cities.” Thank you, Boulevard. (2015)
• Honestly, the agents at Travel + Leisure need to chill out or they’re gonna get made. Between March 3 and April 24 of 2015, they included Kansas City in “America’s Most Charming Cities,” “America’s Best Cities for Sweet Tooths,” “American’s Best Music Scenes,” “America’s Best Cities for Foodies,” and “20 Quirkiest Cities in America.” Wow.
• Kansas City was America’s #3 favorite city. This one was by popular vote. We were voted #1 for good drivers, Christmas lights, affordability, flea markets, and BBQ. Hahaha, “good drivers.” They’ve been undercover too long. (2014)
• #7 for coffee. #9 for picnics. (2014, 2015)

BUZZFEED

• Some of what you find on Buzzfeed relating to Kansas City are “community member” posts–some random people made them, not the Buzzfeed staff. Still, the popular website is starting to take notice of the Paris of the Plains. Kansas City was included in their “29 Cities All Twentysomethings Should Pick Up and Move To” (admittedly, also determined by popular vote). Though KC was listed #1 (admittedly, they did use the phrase “in no particular order”). Still, we know why it was on top. Wink. (2015)
• I won’t name names, but it’s clear who the mole at Buzzfeed is. He wrote “An Open Letter to Kansas City” during the Royals’ World Series run. (2014)
• He also wrote “28 Signs You Grew Up in Kansas City.” Buzzfeed labeled it a “Top Post,” as it got over 367,000 views. (2013)
• His name is Dan Oshinsky.

EXTRA AWESOMENESS

• USA Today published Yelp’s ranking of the Nelson-Atkins as the #1 museum in the United States of America–it was the highest rated and most praised by visitors. #5 was the National World War I Museum. (2015)
• #2 for “Up-and-Coming Downtowns” by Fortune. (2014)
• #6 for friendliest cities by Men’s Health. (2014)
• #8 among best burger cities by USA Today. (2012)
• #5 among “Underrated Gay-Friendly Cities” by About.com. (2009)
• #3 for best NFL stadiums by Fox Sports. (2006)
• #2 for best NFL fan loyalty by American City Business Journal. Go Chiefs! (2006)

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On Super Tuesday 2016, Hillary Clinton dominated 6 Southern states and won one New England state, Massachusetts, with a 1% margin. Bernie Sanders won 4 states soundly: Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Vermont.

The delegate count now stands at Clinton’s 577 to Sanders’ 386 (superdelegates aside).

Despite the scoreboard–and immediate establishment media talk of his doom–Sanders still has an opportunity to win the Democratic nomination, should his popularity continue to grow and his supporters charge the polls in the next primaries and caucuses.

Consider that on Super Tuesday,

Even in the states where Clinton won handily, like Texas, Virginia, and Georgia, Sanders still won handily with his core constituencies–voters aged 18 to 29, first-time primary voters, and independents. According to NBC News’ exit polls, Sanders won young voters by a 30-point margin in Texas, 39 points in Virginia, 13 points in Georgia, and even captured the youth vote in Clinton’s home state of Arkansas, where Bill Clinton served as governor, by 24 points.

Among first-time primary voters, Sanders won by, again, 30 points in Texas and 8 points in Virginia. And Sanders captured independent voters by 16 points in both Texas and Virginia, 3 points in Georgia, 13 points in Tennessee, and 17 points in Arkansas.

Only 15 of the 50 states have voted. As Melissa Cruz writes, “Taking into account both delegates and superdelegates, about 75 percent of delegates are still up for grabs. If superdelegates are not accounted for, roughly 64 percent of delegates are left within the Democratic primary election.”

Though it will be a battle, Bernie Sanders can still win.

Importantly, Clinton’s national lead over Sanders has disappeared, and in some polls he’s beating her by a slim margin. That balance of support–made obvious in the first three Democratic contests–will likely become evident again as the race moves forward, out of the South and into states with the largest offerings of delegates.

Even before the crucial Super Tuesday victories, Sanders proved he could do well in blue collar, Midwestern states like Iowa (where he lost by less than 1%), New England states like New Hampshire (where he crushed Clinton), and in the Southwest (he lost Nevada by just a few percentage points).

Cruz writes, “Sanders still has a strong chance in many of the blue collar states coming up, such as Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania,” which offer 147, 182, and 210 delegates respectively. Ohio has 159 delegates, Indiana 92, and the highly progressive Wisconsin 96.

Even a Mother Jones writer who thinks “Bernie Sanders is in a whole lot of trouble” admits:

If he can roll with the punches, he just might make it to the sweet spot of the schedule, a four-week, 15-state stretch that represents his last best shot to turn things around, starting with Idaho, Utah, and Arizona on March 22.

This four-week stretch not only includes Southwestern states Sanders showed he can compete in but also the very liberal Washington, with its 118 delegates. Tom Cahill agrees that

…he faces a much more favorable electorate in states voting after March 15. If Sanders stays within 150 delegates by that benchmark, he can potentially narrow Clinton’s lead in the spring and overtake her in the summer as Sanders-favorable coastal states take to the polls.

Coastal states (Washington included) like the very liberal California, with its whopping 546 delegates awarded in June, could swing Sanders’ way and send him toward the White House. He has a good chance to win New England states like Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Delaware.

Like his passionate fan base, Sanders’ war chest is only continuing to grow. He’s raised $137 million in the campaign so far, and as the Mother Jones writer notes,

Sanders raised an absurd $42 million in February—$6 million of it on the Monday after the South Carolina blowout. Because he relies so heavily on small-dollar donors who haven’t hit the $2,700 limit, he can in theory keep circling back for more money to buy ads and build organizations in every state that comes up.

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On Wednesday, March 2, 2016, Donald Trump supporter and former Reagan administration official Jeffrey Lord shared a tense and heated exchange with CNN political analyst Van Jones for the second day in a row.

The previous day’s quarrel, sparked as the Super Tuesday election results rolled in, saw Jones criticize Trump for being slow to disavow supporters who belong to white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan (Lord insisted Trump disavowed them “many, many, many times.”)

Trump, Jones said, “is whipping up and tapping into and pushing buttons that are very, very frightening to me and frightening to a lot of people. Number one, when he is playing funny with the Klan, that is not cool.”

Lord quickly called the Klan “a leftist terrorist organization.”

Jones at first steered away from “playing that game,” but Lord persisted, saying, “It’s wrong to understand that these are not leftists…they were the military arm, the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party, according to historians. For God’s sake, read your history.”

Jones countered, “I don’t care how they voted 50 years ago. I care about who they killed.”

Lord then attempted to connect the Klan’s association with southern Democrats in U.S. history to liberalism today. After Jones pointed out offensive things Trump said of minorities, Lord replied: “Van, but what you’re doing right here is dividing people. We’re all Americans here, Van. You are dividing people. This is what liberals do. You’re dividing people by race.”

“The Klan kill people by race,” Jones said.

“And they did it–they did it to further the progressive agenda. Hello?” Lord exclaimed.

An incredulous Jones called that idea “absurd.”

On Wednesday, Lord and Jones were back on CNN for more.

Jones said:

You know, I don’t understand why the right wing is so obsessed with trying to point out that the Ku Klux Klan, you know, 50, 60, 70 years was a part of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party in that time was a racist party and there were violent elements. That is true because, obviously, the Republicans at that time were the party of Lincoln, who ended slavery. But we’ve had a reversal over these past 50 [years]–my entire lifetime.

Lord doubled down on his Tuesday comments:

My point is that race fuels the progressive movement and has always fueled the progressive movement. Whether it was slavery, segregation, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, to today’s racial quotas, illegal immigration by skin color. You know, groups like La Raza, the Black Panthers, Black Lives Matter, et. cetera, it’s always about let’s divide people by race and then here is the progressive agenda that we want to enact.

Jones quickly asked if “you are going to say that the people who are dividing America by race were progressives, were liberals?”

“Yes.”

“It was not progressives that were trying to keep slavery in place,” Jones insisted. “It was not progressives that were trying to keep segregation in place… There is this weird strain now on the right that tries to pretend that their hands are completely clean when it comes to race.”

After much bickering and crosstalk, Lord said, “The reason we needed those civil rights laws in the 1960s is because the Democratic Party went out of their way to undermine the civil rights laws.”

Jones drew a distinction between the southern Democrats of decades past and the Democratic Party today, echoing his previous comment on a “reversal” of ideology between the two major political parties:

There is something wrong with this particular view that because horrible racist Dixiecrats in the South did horrible racist things–and they did horrible racist things for a long time. In fact–

“For political reasons,” Lord interjected.

Jones continued:

Let me finish. For a long time they did horrible racist things. 50, 60 years ago. I say that is horrible. But guess what, those people left the Democratic Party and they joined your party. That is the problem. No, they literally left your party–

“No. That is simply not true,” Lord countered.

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On Thursday, March 3, 2016, Alabama State Representative Steve Hurst, a Republican, introduced legislation to the Alabama House that would require castration for some convicted sex offenders, male or female, before leaving state custody.

Sex offenders over 21 years old, who committed currently unspecified sex acts on victims 12 years old or younger, would be subject to surgical castration.

For men, this involves removing the testicles, in an attempt to eradicate testosterone and curb sexual appetites. For women, this means female genital mutilation or circumcision, the removal of external genitalia, a practice still seen in some Central African, Middle Eastern, and Asian nations to ensure women don’t have sex outside marriage.

“The punishment should fit the crime,” Hurst told reporters.

California, Texas, Wisconsin, Oregon, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Montana have laws regarding castration. Generally, repeat sex offenders in these states must undergo chemical castration prior to release. Artificial female hormone treatment is used to reduce testosterone levels.

Some states perform the surgical procedure on males if they desire it; a handful of sex offenders have undergone the surgery to reduce their prison time.

The Alabama proposal is unique in that it requires the surgery and addresses female convicts.

Studies suggest castration does prevent future molestation and rape, but opponents of the surgery, such as the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, argue medical treatment is just as effective, castration only addresses sex drive and not mental health issues, castration constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment,” which the U.S. Constitution bans in Amendment VIII, and that the falsely convicted will also be castrated.

Hurst has introduced this sort of legislation twice before, without success.

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Beware the Ides of March.

So said a fortune teller to Julius Caesar in William Shakespeare’s play, predicting Caesar’s impending doom.

While Hillary Clinton supporters and media pundits may view the results of the March 15, 2016, primaries as predicting doom for Bernie Sanders, events will likely play out quite differently.

Last night Sanders lost Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio by large margins, and lost Illinois by 2% and Missouri by 0.2% (about 1,600 votes). The delegate count now stands at Clinton’s 1,132 to Sanders’ 818. About half the states have yet to vote, and plenty of delegates are up for grabs.

Bernie Sanders fans can take heart: Clinton’s lead is not insurmountable, particularly since the states where Sanders is most likely to win come in the last half of this race — and offer huge delegate counts. One telling fact: most of the 10 largest cities in the U.S. that gave the most money to Sanders per capita thus far are in states about to vote, like Washington State, Oregon, New Mexico, California, and Arizona.

Sanders crushed Hillary by 20 percentage points in two-thirds of his victories: New Hampshire, Minnesota, Colorado, Vermont, Kansas, and Maine. This was not a fluke. He will likely have more big wins if young people, independents, and Latino voters register and cast their ballots.

Southwest and Western states with large Latino populations will likely flock to Sanders. He barely lost Illinois, but surveys the week before saw him with 64% of Latino support in the state, compared to 30% for Clinton. (Nearly half of Latino voters are millennials.) Of the 20 Iowa counties that have the largest Latino population, Sanders won 15 of them. He also may have won the Latino vote in Nevada, far better than expected, and Democracy Now reported after Colorado: “Latino vote helps Bernie Sanders surge to victory in massive Democratic caucus turnout.”

Upcoming states like New Mexico, Washington, Arizona, and California (with its whopping 546 delegates) with big Hispanic populations could cause Clinton’s lead to evaporate.

Now consider independent voters. 43% of Americans are independents, a steadily rising voting bloc.

Sanders is hugely favored by independents, for example winning 71% of the independent vote in Michigan, 73% in New Hampshire. He doubled Clinton’s support from independents in Massachusetts. He even won the majority of independent votes in states he lost: “Sanders captured independent voters by 16 points in both Texas and Virginia, 3 points in Georgia, 13 points in Tennessee, and 17 points in Arkansas.” Of the first 15 states that voted, 30-50% of the people who voted for Sanders were independents, according to The Washington Post, and of those contests it is likely Sanders won New Hampshire, Michigan, and Oklahoma because independent liberals swarmed the polls.

Many of the remaining states have large independent voting blocs. In two states that have more registered independents than registered Republicans or Democrats, Iowa and Massachusetts, Bernie lost by just 0.3% and 2%, respectively, but in Colorado, Maine, and New Hampshire, which also have more independents, Sanders had resounding victories. The remaining states with this registration pattern — Alaska, Idaho, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island — are coming up fast.

Finally, it should be no surprise to anyone that younger voters support Sanders over Clinton. On Super Tuesday,

Even in the states where Clinton won handily, like Texas, Virginia, and Georgia, Sanders still won handily with his core constituencies — voters aged 18 to 29, first-time primary voters, and independents. According to NBC News’ exit polls, Sanders won young voters by a 30-point margin in Texas, 39 points in Virginia, 13 points in Georgia, and even captured the youth vote in Clinton’s home state of Arkansas, where Bill Clinton served as governor, by 24 points.

Among first-time primary voters, Sanders won by, again, 30 points in Texas and 8 points in Virginia.

Voters under 45 certainly propelled Sanders to victory in New Hampshire (83% of 18-29 year olds, 66% of 30-44 year olds), helped him tie in Iowa (84% of 18-29 year olds, 58% of 30-44 year olds), and so on. In Illinois last night, Sanders won an astonishing 70% of Democratic voters under 45.

The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University pointed to 10 states this year that would have a “disproportionately high electoral impact in 2016.” While Clinton has won 6 of these and Sanders only 2, young voters could still deliver Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to Sanders, fairly significant prizes. Voters under 45 will have an impact in every contest, however, and may make more of an impact on certain states than others. Some key upcoming contests in the Southwest and West have younger populations.

What will be key for Bernie Sanders is not only that likely Latino, independent, or 18-44 year old Americans will vote in their states when the time comes, but also the ability to increase the number of likely voters — to turn unlikely voters into likely ones. Latinos make up only 16% of the U.S. population, many states have more party voters than independents, and younger citizens are still less likely to vote than older folks. Mobilizing those not planning to register and cast a ballot is necessary to strengthen Sanders’ advantages with those groups.

According to a respected pollster whose calculations have proven fairly accurate thus far, Sanders is poised to see a long stretch of victories.

A New York Times writer points out Sanders has had enormous success in caucus states:

He’s a strong favorite in the caucuses in Idaho, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington and Wyoming. Barack Obama won an average of 72 percent of the vote in these contests in 2008, and so far Mr. Sanders is running an average of four points behind Mr. Obama’s showing in caucus states. Mr. Sanders is also a strong favorite in the Utah primary.

Further, “He could win big in North Dakota, Oregon and Montana, or maybe in a few mostly white working-class states like Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky.” But Wisconsin, Arizona, and New Mexico will be close, while California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and the District of Columbia will be challenges.

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