I watched a bit of Donald Trump’s speech this morning, but eventually got bored and went to lunch. I had only tuned in to listen to him insult Mitt Romney, but every time he started up he immediately veered off into some random Trumpism (Mexico will pay for the wall, Obamacare is a trainwreck, etc.) and it took him a minute or two to get back on track. After half an hour he’d basically said that (a) Romney lost in 2012, and (b) Romney begged Trump for his endorsement. That was it. Oh, and Trump is a lot richer than Romney.

Within that half hour, though, I saw no fewer than four protesters start yelling, only to be hauled away by police or Trump security guards. Obviously, this is becoming a thing, a set piece bit of political theater that both sides welcome. But will it remain theater? David French doesn’t phrase things quite the way I would (no surprise there), but he’s got the right idea:

Two sets of political and cultural arsonists are on a collision course — the angry fringe leftist who lives to disrupt versus the angry fringe Trump supporter who is begging for a fight. And when two sides are itching for a confrontation, they usually get it.

….It would be painfully easy for leftist activists to position themselves close to a group of strategically-chosen Trump supporters, initiate a disruption, and then resist the instant the crowd tried to push them out. A racially-charged brawl would be endlessly replayed on the nightly news, complete with injured, bleeding victims, and national tensions would start to boil over.

….So far, the far Left has trained most of its fire on its more moderate allies. That could soon change, and if it does…we could see the worst political violence since 1968.

I don’t really buy the “worst since 1968” line, but there’s not much question that both the protesters and Trump are eventually headed for violence. Trump wants it because it will make him look tough. His supporters want it because they hate the hippies. And the protesters want it in order to show just what a fascist Trump really is.

At this point, the game is to make sure the other side gets the blame when this happens. So the question is: who’s going to show the most discipline? Because in the public eye, whoever throws the first punch will be the one who started the violence. This is a high-stakes media game that depends on a rotating cast of completely random actors—and that makes it potentially pretty scary.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the Republican presidential candidates are holding yet another debate tonight. However, there’s a silver lining: this time around, the moderators can ignore Ben Carson without feeling guilty about it.

Anyway, it’s in Detroit, and it will be aired on Fox at 9 p.m. Eastern. Join me here for real-time comment, fact-checking, and all-around mockery.

Chris Christie a few minutes ago:

Christie clarifies his Trump presser apperance: “I wasn’t being held hostage. I wasn’t up there thinking, ‘Oh what have I done!?”

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) March 3, 2016

OMG. Can you imagine a supposedly serious politician actually having to say something like this? The humiliation just never ends.

Just checking in here. Donald Trump is now a week late announcing his “great team” of foreign policy advisors. Are we ever going to see these folks? Or have they fallen down the same black hole as the 25 news clippings, the open gun policy at Trump resorts, and all the other things Trump has promised us over the past few months?

From Rep. Marsha Blackburn, chair of the House Select Investigative Panel on Planned Parenthood:

No, sir, I am not going to answer that.

Fascinating! What exactly is it that Blackburn is so loath to answer—and so unable to defend? Well, it turns out that she wants to issue a subpoena to get the names of individual medical researchers who use fetal tissue, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler wants to know why. Steve Benen picks up the story:

The committee has no rules in place to protect the names of those subpoenaed — raising the possibility of Congress effectively painting targets on the backs of scientists and researchers for no particular reason other than the Republicans’ desire for a culture war.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), the top Democrat on the panel, described the investigation as a “partisan and dangerous witch hunt, and added, in reference to Blackburn, “The chair’s abuse of her position as chair to compel this information is reminiscent of Senator Joe McCarthy’s abusive tactics.”

Nadler himself was more pointed, suggesting that if the names get leaked, it would make the committee “complicit with any physical assaults or murders of these people.” But Blackburn forged ahead anyway. Why? Despite abundant evidence that there’s been no wrongdoing, she insisted that “there is something going on.” No doubt.

In 1995, the criminologist and political scientist John DiIulio was invited to the White House to attend a working dinner on juvenile crime. “President Clinton took copious notes and asked lots of questions,” he reported. So what did DiIulio tell him? In late 1995 DiIulio wrote a magazine article that gives us a pretty good taste:

The Coming of the Super-Predators

We’re talking about kids who have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future….And make no mistake. While the trouble will be greatest in black inner-city neighborhoods, other places are also certain to have burgeoning youth-crime problems that will spill over into upscale central-city districts, inner-ring suburbs, and even the rural heartland.

….“They kill or maim on impulse, without any intelligible motive”….The buzz of impulsive violence, the vacant stares and smiles, and the remorseless eyes….they quite literally have no concept of the future….they place zero value on the lives of their victims, whom they reflexively dehumanize…. capable of committing the most heinous acts of physical violence for the most trivial reasons….for as long as their youthful energies hold out, they will do what comes “naturally”: murder, rape, rob, assault, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, and get high.

It’s hardly surprising that this made an impression. A couple of months later, in early 1996, Hillary Clinton gave a speech about her husband’s anti-crime agenda. In particular, she noted his efforts against drug gangs:

We also have to have an organized effort against gangs, just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called “super-predators”—no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.

As we all know, DiIulio turned out to be wrong about the future of crime. Juvenile crime didn’t continue to get worse, it got better. But he didn’t know that at the time, and neither did Bill or Hillary Clinton. All they knew at the time was that DiIulio and many others were telling them about a growing number of kids who were impulsive, remorseless, violent, and had no conception of what their actions meant for their future.

Does this remind you of anything? It should, since I’ve been blathering about it for years now. This is a portrait of a lead-poisoned teenager raised in an already violent environment. Here’s what I wrote about them in my original article about lead and crime:

A team of researchers at the University of Cincinnati has been following a group of 300 children for more than 30 years and recently performed a series of MRI scans that highlighted the neurological differences between subjects who had high and low exposure to lead during early childhood.

….Exposure to lead during childhood was linked to a permanent loss of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex—a part of the brain associated with aggression control as well as what psychologists call “executive functions”: emotional regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning, and mental flexibility. One way to understand this, says Kim Cecil, another member of the Cincinnati team, is that lead affects precisely the areas of the brain “that make us most human.”

If you want to understand why Hillary Clinton used the term “super-predator” in 1996, that’s why. It may have been the wrong thing to do—DiIulio’s term was criticized by plenty of other criminologists, not least because of its racial subtext—but it was hardly invented out of whole cloth. At that moment in history, juvenile crime really was high, and many of the lead-poisoned teenagers responsible for it really were scarily impulsive, violent, and conscienceless.

Little did we know that we had already solved the problem years before when we banned lead paint and then leaded gasoline. By the turn of the century, juvenile crime was down dramatically, and it kept falling for the next decade. The super-predators faded away. But that doesn’t mean they never existed.

The Washington Post has gotten a copy of Mitt Romney’s exciting anti-Trump speech:

“Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud,” Romney will say, according to a speech prepared for delivery Thursday morning at the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics.

“His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat.”…According to Romney’s Thursday remarks, Trump’s “domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgement to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.”

Needless to say, Trump’s response is that Romney is a loser. But Romney has the ultimate comeback: “A person so untrustworthy and dishonest as Hillary Clinton must not become president. But a Trump nomination enables her victory.” That argument doesn’t seem to have convinced anyone yet, but I guess it’s worth a try.

Speaking of big lies, here is Donald Trump two weeks ago talking to Anderson Cooper about his health care plan:

COOPER: Will people with pre-existing conditions be able to get insurance?

TRUMP: Yes.

And here is Trump’s health care plan, released today:

The phrase “pre-existing conditions” appears nowhere. It’s just the usual mish-mash of Republican claptrap, including state lines, tax deductions, HSAs, “price transparency,” and block-granting Medicaid. Plus there’s one liberal idea just to keep everyone on their toes: allowing importation of pharmaceuticals. Why? “Though the pharmaceutical industry is in the private sector,” Trump says, “drug companies provide a public service.” I’m not sure even Bernie Sanders would have the nerve to say this.

I’m not sure why I bother, but here’s a non-exhaustive list of Donald Trump’s big lies. I’m not talking about all the little stuff that automatically dribbles out of his mouth whenever his lips are moving. I’m talking about the big, policy-level lies that he repeats over and over at rallies and on TV. Here’s a sample:

• The real unemployment rate is 42 percent. No it’s not. Depending on how you measure, the unemployment rate is currently between 5-10 percent.

• Americans are the most heavily taxed in the world. No. We’re about the least taxed major country in the world.

• Obamacare premiums are up 30, 40, 50%. Wrong. On average, premiums were up about about 9 percent in 2016. If you account for subsidies, the average premium went up about $8, an increase of 7 percent.

• Illegal immigrants are pouring across the southern border. Nope. For the past seven years in a row, net immigration across the border has been negative. More immigrants are going home to Mexico than coming to the US.

• Among Syrian refugees, there are very few women and children. It’s mostly “young, strong men.” False. According to the UN, something around 10 percent of Syrian refugees are males between the age of 15-25. The rest are women, children, and older men. Among refugees who have made the trip to Europe, probably about half are men, but for an obvious reason: it’s an arduous and dangerous journey, and the men hope to find jobs, get asylum, and then bring in their families later.

• When it comes to education spending “we’re number one per pupil by a factor of four.” Not even close. We spend about 5 percent of GDP on education. That puts us right in the middle of all major countries.

What makes this even more interesting is that Trump obviously knows these are lies and doesn’t care. I was browsing through the PolitiFact file on Trump, and pretty much everything they’ve written includes a sentence something like this: “We reached out to the Trump campaign but they didn’t respond.”

They don’t care. Trump knows it’s BS, and he doesn’t even bother making up bogus justifications, the way ordinary politicians do. He knows the media will never really call him on this stuff. Repeat it often enough, and eventually maybe the reporters covering him will even start to believe it themselves.

Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments about HB 2, a 2013 Texas law that requires (a) all abortion clinics to meet the standards of “ambulatory surgical centers,” and (b) all doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. Does this impose an undue burden on women seeking abortions? Hmmm:

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, whom both sides consider pivotal to the outcome of the court’s most important abortion case in a generation, wondered whether it was possible to tell if the changes in Texas law were responsible for the closure of nearly half the state’s abortion clinics. He wondered if lower courts might need to hear more evidence.

Yeah, that’s a chin scratcher. Maybe all those clinics suddenly decided to close because they got great buyout offers from a national chain of Tex-Mex restaurants. I mean, it’s possible, right? We definitely need more evidence.