What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

Newly-disclosed details about the sex abuse charges filed against former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert caught my attention. As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall explained here, “Without the unending hunt into Bill Clinton’s sex life, you never would have heard of Denny Hastert. It also seems highly unlikely he ever would have had to answer, even in this limited way, for his own past.” While the Monica Lewinsky scandal unfolded, I was covering Russian politics and had many Russian colleagues. They were astounded by the Republican effort to remove Clinton from office. I remember some joking, if only our president (the rarely-seen-in-public Boris Yeltsin) were healthy enough to have an affair.

The big Iowa politics news of the weekend came out of the GOP district conventions on Saturday. Repeating a storyline that has played out elsewhere, Ted Cruz’s campaign destroyed the competition with superior organizing in every part of the state. Cruz didn’t entirely shut out other candidates here the way he did in Colorado, but his supporters took eleven of the twelve Republican National Convention delegate slots. Although Donald Trump has belatedly started to build a serious RNC delegate strategy, his campaign’s efforts leading up to this weekend in Iowa were remarkably incompetent. Cruz’s team have been preparing for a prolonged delegate battle since last summer and have executed the strategy well lately.

Trump still hits the magic number of 1,237 delegates (an overall majority) in most of the scenarios guest author fladem played out this week (most recently updated here). Sam Wang showed at the Princeton Election Consortium that current polling still indicates Trump could clinch the nomination on June 7–though Cruz has been over performing his poll numbers lately, which increases the chance of a brokered convention. The Cruz sweep of Colorado delegates and near-sweep of Iowa’s GOP district conventions are a reminder that the first ballot at the RNC in Cleveland may be Trump’s only chance for the nomination.

More links and commentary about the district conventions are after the jump.

With Democrats defending 19 of the 25 Iowa Senate districts on the ballot next fall, we don’t have many opportunities to make gains in the upper chamber. However, I’ve long felt that Democrats should make a serious play for Senate district 41 in Scott County. Dave Hartsuch is far too conservative for a district that was long represented by Maggie Tinsman, whom Hartsuch defeated in the 2006 GOP primary. Historically, the Bettendorf area has been strongly Republican, but Democrats have made gains in recent years. Senate district 41 now has as many registered Democrats as Republicans.

As I’d hoped, a Democratic candidate has stepped up to the plate, and Hartsuch will also have to fend off a primary challenge in the spring. More on this race after the jump.