Hillary Clinton has won the Pennsylvania primary, and something akin to formal permission to continue campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.

With most of the Pennsylvania vote counted, she's ahead 55-45.

That's a credible victory, if not perhaps so dramatic a finish as would have been needed to fundamentally change the reality that the senator from New York is unlikely to win the Democratic nod.

Clinton will keep campaigning. This race will continue for at least two more weeks, and probably longer. That will excite Clinton backers, just as it will disappoint Obama backers.

It's messy. It's frustrating. But this is what democracy looks like. And it will keep looking this way until Obama beats Clinton in a state she's supposed to win -- or until Obama finally wins not just a plurality but a majority of delegates. 

The Republican establishment is taking all this in with mixed emotions—part confusion, part exasperation. Talk to them about the black vote and you'll get history books stuffed with anecdotes about how Republicans pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, how Democrats take blacks for granted, how George W. Bush has given an administration job to every black official with a resume, how black home-ownership numbers are way up under the GOP.

If they really want to court the African-American vote, Republicans must first acknowledge—if only to themselves—that they spent the '70s and '80s alienating, and in some cases demonizing, black voters; that their policies (school choice, Social Security privatization) haven't sold with blacks as well as the GOP hoped they would; and that the last decade of outreach has been wasted. Of course, this isn't the quick-fix Republicans want. It's more like a surgeon's advice to the victim of a botched facelift: multiple expensive operations over many, many years. Let the healing begin.

I have to say that all the environmentalists I know -- and I tend to hang out with the climate crowd -- care about stopping global warming because of its impact on humans, even if they aren't so good at articulating that perspective. I'm with them.

The reason that many environmentalists fight to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the polar bears is not because they are sure that losing those things would cause the universe to become unhinged, but because they realize that humanity isn't smart enough to know which things are linchpins for the entire ecosystem and which are not. What is the straw that breaks the camel's back? The 100th species we wipe out? The 1,000th? For many, the safest and wisest thing to do is to try to avoid the risks entirely.

What the day -- indeed, the whole year -- should be about is not creating misery upon misery for our children and their children and their children, and on and on for generations. Ultimately, stopping climate change is not about preserving the earth or creation but about preserving ourselves. Yes, we can't preserve ourselves if we don't preserve a livable climate, and we can't preserve a livable climate if we don't preserve the earth. But the focus needs to stay on the health and well-being of billions of humans because, ultimately, humans are the ones who will experience the most prolonged suffering. And if enough people come to see it that way, we have a chance of avoiding the worst.

Last May, the Supreme Court ruled in Ledbetter v. Goodyear that employees who have suffered years of discrimination can’t have their day in court, if they don’t discover the discrimination within 180 days of their employer’s initial discriminatory pay decision.

The Ledbetter decision not only reversed years of employment law, it also ignored the realities of a workplace. Often employees don’t know what their co-workers are paid. In fact, only one in ten private sector employers has adopted a pay openness policy and companies often prohibit employees from sharing wage information at all. An expectation that an employee learn that information within the first 180 days of a pay decision is unreasonable.

Unless Congress intervenes, companies will be able to discriminate for years and unjustly profit from paying women, minorities, the elderly, and people with disabilities less, as long as it keeps the discrimination secret for a few months.

In other words, if a company is discriminating in its wages and hides it for just a few short months, it can pay women less than men, blacks less than whites, older workers less than younger ones, and so on, and so on, with absolutely no accountability. Ever. They can hurt workers and their families, and just pocket the money.