Scott Walker has no fire in the belly for tougher immigration enforcement in Wisconsin

Reported here:

Gov. Scott Walker says he doesn't think the state Senate will pass a controversial "sanctuary cities" bill, and he says he's "just fine with that."

The bill, which passed the Assembly last week, would prohibit local ordinances or policies that keep police from asking about someone's immigration status.

Same as he ever was, except when he was running for president against Donald Trump. 

Since the 1990s 144,000 manufacturing and related jobs lost in Wisconsin due to free-trade agreements

Reported here:

Wisconsin has lost more than more than 68,000 manufacturing jobs since the mid-1990s and the first of several controversial trade pacts with Mexico, China and others took hold.

Additionally, the U.S. Department of Labor has certified about 76,000 Wisconsin workers in various fields as having lost their jobs due to either imports or the work they do being shipped overseas. ... 

Caterpillar has laid off about 600 of its 800-plus workers over the past two years because of a business slowdown. ...

Wisconsin’s heavy manufacturing sector, once one of the country’s strongest, has been taking a lot of punches in recent years. General Motors, General Electric, Chrysler, Joy Global Surface Mining and Manitowoc Cranes have all cut jobs or closed operations in recent years for a variety of reasons.

Hometown companies such as Kohler, the plumbing supply manufacturer; and Trek Bicycles have offshored jobs to India, China and Taiwan.

Meanwhile, Madison, the state capital, will lose 1,000 jobs over the next two years as the 100-year-old iconic Oscar Mayer meat processing plant shuts down. And just east on I-94 in Jefferson, Tyson Foods will cease operations at its pepperoni processing plant, cutting 400 jobs.

Grand Rapids, Michigan, experienced a temperature anomaly of 5.0 degrees F above normal in March 2016

Temperature averaged 40.6 degrees F, according to the preliminary monthly climate data. The cumulative reported anomaly year to date is +9.3 degrees F.

The very long term mean average temperature in March, however, is 34.0 degrees F using the full NOWdata, so NOAA is saying the normal average is 35.6 degrees F based on a smaller data set which does not incorporate the full record available. Otherwise the anomaly would be 6.6 degrees F, not 5.0. For the year to date, the anomaly from the long term mean is +13.9 degrees F.

Precipitation was 2.57 inches above normal, coming in at 4.94 inches. The very long term mean precipitation average is 2.46 inches in February, however, not 2.37, meaning precipitation was 2.48 inches above the long term normal.

Snowfall was 10.1 inches, 0.9 inches above the mean average of 9.2 for the month calculated going back to the beginning of the record. January is typically the snowiest month at 18.5 inches, followed by December at 15.9 and then February at 13.1. For the season so far, which is effectively over, snowfall has come to 51.7 inches, 11.8 inches below the long term mean average for the season so far (63.5 inches), or 18.6%. Snow is still expected in April.

Heating degree days in March at 749 were 21.4% below the very long term mean of 953. Cumulatively for the season HDD are running 1031 below the normal of 5857, about 17.6%, thanks to the El Nino.

Erick "kamikaze" Erickson attacks Trump's voters

Not unlike Romney attacking the 47% "takers" and Obama attacking the "bitter clingers".

Hey Erick! Try PERSUADING the voters instead of writing them off.

GOP delegate race update: No one can win except Trump, which is why the GOP should embrace him instead of fighting him

According to Breitbart here, it's going to take until about April 15th for the Missouri GOP primary results to be certified by the Secretary of State.

The Missouri GOP shows here that Trump won 37 delegates. Real Clear Politics credits Trump with only 25 from Missouri.

Add those 12 to Trump's current 736, and you get 748, which is 48.5% of the 1541 already allocated:

Trump: has 736 + 12 (48.5%)

Cruz: 463 (30%)

Rubio: 171 (11.1%)

Kasich: 143 (9.3%)

Carson: 9 (0.6%)

Bush: 4 (0.3%)

Fiorina: 1 (0.1%)

Huckabee: 1 (0.1%)

Paul: 1 (0.1%).

That leaves just 931 available, of which Trump needs 489 to get to 1237, or 52.5%:

Trump: needs 489 (52.5% of 931 . . . 1.1 times his current level of support, still very likely)

Cruz: needs 774 (83.1% of 931 . . . 2.8 times his current level of support, nearly impossible)

Kasich: needs 1094 (117.5% of 931 . . . 12.6 times his current level of support, impossible).

The only thing Cruz and Kasich are doing is possibly keeping Trump from making it to 1237.

If they want a needlessly and horribly divided GOP going into the convention, they should continue to play the spoilers. If they do that, they'll be to blame for the catastrophe.

But if they really want to have a chance against the Democrats in the fall, they should unite NOW around Donald Trump.

If Wisconsin is so critical in the GOP race, why have all three candidates traveled away from it this week?

Byron York wants to know, here:

MILWAUKEE — The Wisconsin Republican primary is so critical to Donald Trump that, after having pledged "I'll be here all week" to his supporters, Trump promptly departed to Washington and other destinations for a couple of days off the trail prior to next Tuesday's vote.

The Wisconsin GOP contest is so critical to Sen. Ted Cruz that he took off to California for some fundraising and a guest spot on Jimmy Kimmel, in addition to a stop in North Dakota for its delegate convention, before returning to Wisconsin for a few more days of campaigning.

The Wisconsin primary is so critical to Gov. John Kasich that he headed to New York, where his highest-profile accomplishment was to be photographed eating pizza with a fork.

Students for Trump has 200 chapters in 38 states, began with a Rand Paul supporter

The LA Times reports here:

Students for Trump began as a Twitter account in October in a dorm room at Campbell University in Buies Creek, N.C. Ryan Fournier, a freshman and early supporter of Rand Paul, was drawn to Trump's blunt rhetoric and policies on border control and employment. ... More than 5,000 students in 200 chapters in 38 states are publicly on board. Fifteen chapters have taken hold in California, on campuses including UC Santa Barbara and USC.

Rush has a daydream: The energy out there for Cruz is equal to Trump's

Today's narrative on the show, which is designed, like some of the polling, to make it so, not measure it.

Brad DeLong pretends that taxing the crap out of people isn't an ideology, and blames the voters for disagreeing

Here, where you observe a liberal economist admitting that there is a price to be paid for free-trade:

It is not difficult to see where the blame lies [for what ails America]. As Mark Kleiman of NYU’s Marron Institute points out, the Republican Party’s rigid and die-hard ideological opposition to “taxing the rich [has] destroyed, on a practical level, the theoretical basis for believing that free trade benefits everyone.” ... The responsibility lies instead with politicians peddling ideology over practicality – and thus with the citizens who elect them, as well as those who don’t bother to vote at all.

Now if we could just get the libertarians to admit it.

Erick Erickson's Israel-firster pal Steve Berman thinks everyone who supports Trump should be shunned

Here, where the cultist projects his own cultism onto the real estate magnate:

"Every Trump supporter should be ostracized–especially those in politics, the media, and leadership. Failing to stop the cult of personality is as bad as swearing allegiance to it. Those who play for influence, cater to the Trumpkin crowd to acknowledge their anger, or otherwise make nice with the budding despot must be shunned and called for what they are: cult-enablers. Those who support Trump must be treated as cultists."

Here is an example of the fever from which Steve Berman suffers:

"As Christians, we have a calling to support Israel because it’s God’s desire. As Americans, we have an obligation to support Israel because they represent a free society in a part of the world dominated by oppressive dictatorships. Most importantly, we must support Israel because doing so is walking in the light.  We must walk in the light because we are in Christ."

Mollie Hemingway decides Trump is intentionally sabotaging the pro-life movement

Here.

A version of the argument that Trump is working for the Democrats to get Hillary elected.

Mollie views those who kill their unborn children as vulnerable, weak, victimized mothers:

If Trump knew anything at all whatsoever about the pro-life movement, he would know what the movement thinks about abortion and whether mothers should be punished.

Don't you have to give birth and mother a child to be a mother?

This sentimental view of women in an age of equality insulates women from criticism and consequently from responsibility for their actions, a view most recently on display in the case of Michelle "Corey pushed me almost to the floor" Fields.

Hillary the fascist: Trump's kind of "inflammatory, destructive rhetoric is on the outer edges of what is permitted under our constitution"

Here at 1.37.

Trump is inflaming her in order to collect such statements for later.

The extent of the culture of death is now so deeply ingrained . . .

. . . that conservatives who call into Rush Limbaugh can't even bring themselves to say that the woman who gets an abortion bears any responsibility for killing her own child.

Update:

The caller was Ron in Ft. Wayne, Indiana:

"You wouldn't go after the woman in that situation.  You go after whomever performed the abortion itself."

Yeah right. The drug dealer should be prosecuted, not the addict.

Ring any bells?

The disadvantage Trump has by not being a robot

Looks like we've got another Republican robot folks: Rep. Steve King caught standing behind Ted Cruz delivering lines and gestures they rehearsed

Here:

Ann Coulter correctly says Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election because he lost the white vote

Here yesterday:

[Stuart] Stevens says Romney tapped out every last white voter and still lost, so he says Republicans are looking for “the Lost Tribes of the Amazon” hoping to win more white votes: “In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 56 percent of white voters and won a landslide victory of 44 states. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 59 percent of whites and lost with 24 states.”

Apparently, no one’s told Stevens about the 50-state Electoral College. ...

Romney lost the white vote to Obama in five crucial swing states: Maine (42 percent of the white vote), Minnesota (47 percent), New Hampshire (48 percent), Iowa (48 percent) and Wisconsin (49 percent). He only narrowly beat Obama’s white vote in other important swing states — Illinois (51 percent), Colorado (52 percent), Michigan (53 percent), Ohio (54 percent) and Pennsylvania (54 percent).

Increasing the white vote in these states gives Trump any number of paths to victory.

I made similar observations here at the end of February, noting how Romney averaged under 50% of the white vote in 21 states, losing them all to Obama.

The opposition finally figures out that Trump will use eminent domain to build The Wall

We told you he would weeks ago.

Randal John Meyer, in "The Great Wall Of Trump Would Be the Ultimate Eminent Domain Horror Show":

The Government Accountability Office reports (PDF) that “federal and tribal lands make up 632 miles, or approximately 33 percent, of the nearly 2,000 total border miles.” What of the remaining 66 percent? “Private and state-owned lands constitute the remaining 67 percent of the border, most of which is located in Texas.”

That means that if Trump’s plan to build another 1,000 miles of wall is carried to fruition, thousands more homeowners will see their property destroyed or partially walled-off. ...

The fence built so far goes extends [sic] to Texas, which ... means it mostly covers land that was already federally owned. Trump’s new fencing would be built primarily on state-owned and private lands.

The author never tells you Trump beat Texas home boy Ted Cruz in several of the border counties, and reduced his victory to single digits in others.

The Wall has support in Texas.

Washington Post graphic

Rush Limbaugh thinks Trump's too unpopular to win, but forgets how unpopular Reagan was in 1980

Gallup presidential polls 1980

Composite of polls by John Sides

Reagan sweeps with 90% of the electoral college vote

On March 11th, Rush Limbaugh bought Michelle Field's version of the story hook, line and sinker, but today . . .

"Me and my big fat mouth"

. . . he's going to clam up about it.

You can't unfire the gun, Rush.

Ralph Kramden Limbaugh, March 11th, here:

"She was nearly thrown to the floor and told to essentially to be quiet, no questions, get out of the way, Trump is leaving, what have you.  And she claims that it was Trump's campaign manager who did it, a guy named Corey Lewandowski.  There are witnesses.  There's audio.  There's video.  She's got the bruises on her arms. ... So it happened."

Marco Rubio proves he's a bad faith Republican just like John Kasich

Kasich, who has no chance to win, remains in the race to prevent Trump from getting enough delegates.

Rubio, who "suspended" his campaign after losing to Trump in Florida, might as well be doing the same thing because, contrary to standard practice, he's trying to bind his delegates to himself instead of releasing them.

From the story here:

"No one has ever really tested this, the idea has always been that when you suspend, you're out," said a senior Republican in Washington, D.C., who did not want to publicly discuss a contested convention.

"No candidate has ever said, 'I want to suspend — but I also want the delegates,'" according to the source. ...

While Rubio is going to great lengths to hold onto his delegates, there is no doubt he has stopped competing in future primaries. This week he sent a signed affidavit to have his name removed from the ballot in California, which awards 172 delegates on the last voting day in June.

Roger in Detroit runs circles around Rush Limbaugh, gets him to admit he doesn't think Trump can win

Here:

I don't think it's possible for a candidate's negatives to be as high as they're reporting Trump's to be and the guy winning. 

Hence Rush's ongoing, thinly veiled support for the closest thing to Reagan, which is Ted Cruz, who can't win enough delegates outright but will have to win enough delegates to be an acceptable alternative to Trump at a brokered convention. Which is why Roger in Detroit opened his attack on Rush by accusing Rush of wanting a brokered convention. That goes hand in hand with support of Cruz at this late stage of the game.

A brokered convention is what Rush is really hoping for, otherwise Rush wouldn't keep emphasizing Kasich's self-absorbed spoiler role in bleeding away the anti-Trump vote from Cruz. Kasich isn't stopping Trump, he's stopping Cruz from making a respectable enough showing to warrant the establishment taking the nomination away from Trump and giving it to Cruz at convention.

Trump's the winner no one with a microphone has the courage to want.

Flashback to Romney in 2013 taking the opposite position he takes now: Let the people decide the nominee, not conventions and caucuses

Quoted here:

“I’m concerned that there’s an effort on the part of some to move toward caucuses or conventions to select nominees. I think that’s a mistake. I’m concerned that that kind of approach could end up with a minority deciding who the nominee ought to be. And that I think would be a mistake. I think we should have a majority of the party's voters decide who they want as their nominee."

Battery charges against Corey Lewandowski "utterly pathetic"

Hey Rush! Scott Walker's endorsement won't much help Ted Cruz in Wisconsin where Walker's approval has fallen 20% since 2014

Reported here at the end of February:

The poll found 39 percent approve of [Scott Walker's] job performance, compared with 55 percent who disapprove. ... In a composite of the four Marquette polls taken before his 2014 re-election, his job approval rating was 48.6 percent. In a composite of the last four polls since August, excluding Thursday’s, his job approval level was 38.2 percent.

Hey Rush! America is trying to destroy Trump like Wisconsin tried to destroy Walker . . .

. . . and you're helping them.

Best comment on Trump interview with Wisconsin's Cuckservative Charlie Sykes: "Jeffrey Dahmer was from Wisconsin"

Here.

Yeah, "neighbors heard the sound of sawing at all hours".

Call it the Robert La Follette effect: socialism you can really sink your teeth into.

Hey Levin, forget Trump, TED CRUZ isn't growing HIS support

1528 delegates have been allocated. Cruz has just 30% of them, Trump 48%.

Wake up and support the leader, or you will be just as responsible for a debacle as #neverTrump.

Rush Limbaugh, expert in European history: "Belgium has never been a real country"

Here.

Belgium seceded from the Netherlands in 1830 and has been an independent country ever since. My father helped liberate it from the Germans in 1944. Idiot.

This guy lost his job because of NAFTA, along with 4.5 million other Americans since 1993: He just voted for Trump

From the story, here:

Randall Williams and his wife, Brenda, were two of those workers. For three decades, they helped assemble the hermetically sealed motors that power air conditioners sold all across America. At the end, they were each making $16.10 an hour. That kind of money’s just a dream now: Randall fills orders at a local farm supply store; Brenda works in the high school cafeteria. For a while, he said, their combined income didn’t even add up to one of their old factory wages. ... He voted for the billionaire in Kentucky’s Republican caucus this month. So did many of his neighbors. In Allen County, a collection of eight towns strewn along the Tennessee border, Trump dominated his rivals, racking up 42 percent of the vote on his way to a narrow victory that night in Kentucky.

Gaydar alert: Fag for Trump gets over 11,000 comments on his op-ed, reminds us Liz Mair is "mannish"

Here:

The first point to be made is that Trump didn’t start the wife-baiting. Make America Awesome, a Trump-opposing PAC founded by the mannish Liz Mair, started circulating a particularly raunchy image of Melania Trump, urging GOP primary voters to back Cruz.

If I want to be lectured about my religion by Glenn Beck, I'll answer the doorbell

These are your manufacturing jobs lost under Bush and Obama

4.331 million lost under Bush and Obama still net down 523,000

P. J. O'Rourke was more right about John Kasich than he knows

According to careful vote counting by FiveThirtyEight, "Kasich could lay off winner-take-all states where only Cruz has a chance to beat Trump: Wisconsin, Indiana, Nebraska, Montana and South Dakota" in a last ditch strategy with Cruz to divide and conquer Donald Trump's march to 1,237. "Kasich and Cruz’s choice is simple: wage war on Trump on two separate fronts, or lose."

But Kasich is having none of it, in keeping with his previous refusal to work with Marco Rubio in Rubio's quest to keep Florida out of Donald Trump's column. John Kasich is "all in" to the convention, convinced he's the party's savior from the so-called outsiders Trump and Cruz. Kasich already has four events planned in Wisconsin between now and April 1 leading up to the primary there on April 5.

The reason? He is convinced he's a better candidate everywhere than is Cruz, but especially in the Midwest, insisting he wants the presidency and is not interested in "a parlor game of who gets this or who gets that". And as Rush Limbaugh has observed, John Kasich takes himself way too seriously. The man is delusional.

"We don't want to work with those people [Democrats]. We want to defeat them politically, and here comes Kasich! It's all about him. That whole thing, saying that he would be way open to choosing a Democrat? Kasich is taking the occasion here to try to sell himself as something unique and special."

Of course Kasich's not unique and special. The party's problem is that it's given us such Republicans too many times before, candidates whose vision of politics is nothing more than white flag bipartisanship. John McCain was infamous for it in 2008, and his lackey Lindsey Graham also puked out that line this time around, before ignominiously crashing and burning.

It's conventional wisdom out there that Donald Trump is destroying the Republican Party as we know it. But the truth is closer to what P. J. observed last fall, that it has simply killed itself.

John Kasich is just the Republicans' two word suicide note.

Small animals like him

Some endorsements for president are all about the money: Scott Walker to support Ted Cruz?

Scott Walker's spendthrift ways campaigning for president infamously put him more than $1 million in debt, according to The Wall Street Journal, here:

Mr. Walker’s FEC report shows he spent $6.4 million between the mid-July launch and the end of September. But those figures don’t include $200,000 in Mr. Walker’s reported outstanding bills or debts the campaign pushed past Oct. 1 – a number that raises the Walker debt to more than $1 million more than his cash on hand, according to the people familiar with Mr. Walker’s campaign finances. ...

When Tim Pawlenty ended his presidential campaign in August 2011, his campaign was $435,000 in the red. Mr. Pawlenty endorsed rival Mitt Romney, whose family and top campaign supporters and aides helped the former Minnesota governor retire his campaign debts by the next April.

Candidates who lose races can owe debt for years. Newt Gingrich still owes $4.6 million from his 2012 campaign. Al Sharpton owes $925,713 from his 2004 White House run.

Hillary Clinton infamously took until the end of 2012 to pay off $12 million she owed from her failed 2008 run for president. The $13.2 million she borrowed from herself she had to eat.

The John Kasich vote is the Rorshach for the "Obamacon" vote, owns about 14% of the GOP primary vote so far

"I ought to be running in a Democrat primary", he said in New Hampshire.

"Just because someone happens to be a Democrat doesn't mean they're disqualified", he said about his possible choice of a vice presidential running mate.

"Well, you know, he received you know overwhelming support, I think even from Senator Hatch, so of course we'd think about it," he said about possibly naming Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court himself, Obama's current pick to replace Scalia.

The Daily Beast reports Marco Rubio camp is source, not Trump, for Ted Cruz cheatin' regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays story

Here:

Breitbart News, the notoriously Trump-friendly conservative outlet, was also pitched the story of Cruz’s extramarital affairs, according to a source close to the publication. That source said an operative allied with Marco Rubio—but not associated with his official campaign—showed the publication a compilation video of Cruz and a woman other than his wife coming out of the Capitol Grille restaurant and a hotel on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But the outlet opted not to report on the video, which demonstrated no direct evidence of an affair.

“We got it from a Rubio ally,” said the source. “It was too thin, so [Breitbart’s Washington political editor Matt Boyle] decided not to run it. There was no way to verify the claims.”

"Trump Spokeswoman Katrina Pierson: Media Ignores That Cruz's PAC Started Fight Over Wives"

Uh, yeah.

Here.

Hey Mexico! Let's see some effigies of El Chapo, or Enrique Peña Nieto, or Vicente Fox!

Cowards.

Hey Mollie Hemingway! Why aren't you demanding that Ted Cruz denounce the anti-Christian statements of his supporter Glenn Beck?

[L]et’s spend some of that energy persistently asking Trump allies to denounce his statements against Heidi Cruz.

Hey Rush! Why did Ted Cruz' surrogate think a wife photo was fair game in the race in the first place?

Melania Trump isn't running for anything.

Hey Lyin' Ted Cruz! It's a TED CRUZ ad, dummy!

"The sleaziest dirty tricks campaigner of modern American history." -- Conrad Black

Hey Vinnie from Long Island! Cruz supports TPP and massive expansion of H-1B visas and green cards!

Don't tell me he's not establishment!

Ted Cruz is a phony conservative, which is why Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney and Lindsey Grahamnesty are now lining up behind the guy.

Obama still can't get it up: Seven years without GDP even close to 3.0, lags Bush average by 33%

Bush average 2.1125% v Obama average 1.4%

John McCain proves once again what a P.O.S. he is, salutes a commie in The New York Times

Here.

Are there so few communists left that they need the help, Senator?

Man up, Liz!

Scammer Alert: Calls from Utica, NY (315)-327-2778 trolling for donations for Trump campaign gotta be a scam

He's got a website folks, if you want to donate or buy a hat. He doesn't need to call you for money.

Trump's low favorables today match Reagan's exactly in March 1980

2016 candidates' current favorables averages, according to Real Clear Politics:

Sanders: 48.7

Kasich 43.2

Clinton: 40.7

Cruz: 33.4

Trump: 30.4

Like Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan 36 years ago tomorrow was very unpopular in this country

L.A.Times poll 3/25/80 Favorables:

John Anderson 68% (0 electoral votes in November, Independent party)

Teddy Kennedy 60% (lost primary to less popular Carter even though winning 11 states & DC with 7.3 million popular votes)

Jimmy Carter 51% (49 electoral votes in November)

Ronald Reagan 30% (489 electoral votes in November). 

Republican establishment desperately endorses "outsider" Ted Cruz, including Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney

From the story here:

“These guys look like all desperation and as if they have really no means, or ability, to speak to the core constituents who are supporting Donald Trump,” said Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “At this last minute, it’s, ‘Now we support Ted,’ after you spent the best part of a year telling America how much you hate him.”

“It’s disingenuous,” Steele added. “People aren’t stupid. They see it for what it is.”

Neocon Iraq war enthusiast and Bush adviser Eliot A. Cohen to vote for Hillary Clinton if Trump is the GOP nominee

Go ahead!

Quoted here:

“What’s happening is you have a lot of people who are desperate to get anybody in there other than Trump. ... People are going to go for Cruz, because at the end of the day they think he’s considerably less bad than Trump,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a former Jeb Bush adviser who also served in the George W. Bush administration.

Cohen, along with Bryan McGrath, organized an open letter opposing Trump that was signed by more than 120 members of the Republican foreign policy establishment. The letter declared that Trump is unfit to be president because his views of American power are “wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle.” ...

“I’ll never support Trump, period. If the only choices I’m offered is between Hillary and Trump, I’ll go for Hillary,” said Cohen, who said he’s hoping for a third possibility or a write-in. 

Romney adviser Bryan McGrath, CDR USN (ret.), of the Hudson Institute trusts Hillary's judgment on foreign and defense policy, you know, like at Benghazi

Quoted here:

“Donald Trump is not a Republican. ... He is a caricature of classless wealth. ... He is a caricature of the ugly American,” said McGrath, the deputy director at the Center for American Seapower at the Hudson Institute who is now working with the Cruz campaign. ... 

McGrath said he would vote for Clinton if he “got a gun held to my head” and was forced to choose only between her and Trump. He added that in reality, however, he would write in a name. 

But, he added, “on foreign and defense policy, I at least trust Hillary’s judgment.” 

---------------------------------------------------------

Do you think he'd like Trump better if Trump had high class wealth? Or how about just normal classless wealth? Kinda giving it away there, Bryan.

McGrath served as Navy Policy Team Lead, Romney for President (2011-2012).

Laugh of the Day: If Reagan were president, ISIS would be . . .

. . . WASWAS.

Emerson poll is showing Cruz by 1 in Wisconsin, but . . .

. . . Emerson got Iowa wrong by 430%, predicting Trump by 1 when it was Cruz by 3.3.

In New Hampshire Emerson got it wrong by 30%, predicting Trump by 15 when it was Trump by 19.5.

And in South Carolina Emerson got it wrong by 41%, predicting Trump by 17 when it was Trump by 10.

Laugh of the Day: Ted Cruz actually lifted the lines from "The American President"

Here.

Maybe Ted's not as smart as everyone makes him out to be.

Time for Ted to release his transcripts.

Matt Cover thinks Donald Trump is talk radio's Frankenstein

Here, saying Trump is the by-product of an ignorant expectations farce deliberately played on the public by the scheming, self-serving jibber-jabberers Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin:

However, by organizing the GOP base around this fictional system of legislative combat, Movement leaders would lay the groundwork for the ignorant populism of Donald Trump.

Voters, having been told that Congress just lacked strong leaders willing to fight for principle, would flock to a figure who embodied exactly the kind of fiery machismo they had been told was needed.

That's almost amusing, but blindly discounts the "non-ideological" character of the Trump phenomenon's success with the illegal immigration and trade issues. These are conservative issues with a long and storied history but, unfortunately, are not granted legitimacy by today's current crop of so-called conservatives, for whom "principles" and ideology are paramount because they are at heart libertarians, not conservatives.

Trump's immigration and trade crusade may eventually come a cropper, but it won't be because he and the people don't believe in it. It'll be because it has no support from the establishment which runs a "system" organized around antithetical ideas, but also because it has no support from the "anti-establishment" either.

Represented by Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin on the radio, the preferred element of the contemporary demagogue, the anti-establishment has been just as much for open-borders and free-trade as the establishment has been. None of them can even imagine a limited, small American federal government starving from its very beginning on the measly tariffs, excises and land sales with which the founders stuck it. And none in the establishment even wants to.

Laura Ingraham has been waging the lonely battle against illegal immigration almost single-handedly for years on her little radio program in the mornings, with great success, while Michael Savage has had to beat the dead horse for almost twenty-five years as a misunderstood New York Jew.

But the cool thing about 2016 is that New York values are finally getting some respect in the rest of the country for a change, thanks to one Donald John Trump.

"Anti-establishment" talk radio has yet to catch up.

Rush Limbaugh says things are still fluid for Ted Cruz

Wake up conservative talk radio: After yesterday, Trump needs just 52.8% of remaining delegates, Cruz 81.8%

And Rush Limbaugh keeps saying, among others, that it ain't over for Cruz.

Explain to us how Cruz goes from winning 30% of delegates so far to 82%.

Tea Party class action against the IRS certified, goes to discovery stage

From the story here:

Certifying the class allows any of the more than 200 groups that were subjected to the criteria to join the lawsuit. But until the IRS complies with the appeals court’s ruling this week, the list of those groups is secret.

Now that the class has been certified, the case moves to the discovery stage, where the tea party groups’ lawyers will ask for all of the agency’s documents related to the targeting and will depose IRS employees about their actions.

The lawyers hope they’ll be able to learn details Congress was unable to shake free in its own investigations.

Reports that Utah caucus results are a complete sham

Here:

Again, no credential check, no ID check, NOTHING.

Caucus system, more or less over after North Dakota on April 1, has been favoring Cruz over Trump 1.5 to 1

I'm counting 148 delegates awarded to Cruz in Iowa, Nevada, Alaska, Minnesota, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Hawaii, Wyoming and Utah.

For Trump I show 99 delegates in Iowa, Nevada, Alaska, Minnesota, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Hawaii, Wyoming and Northern Mariana Islands.

Colorado has 37 delegates yet to be allocated, the US Virgin Islands 9, Wyoming 18 and North Dakota 28.

Hey Ted, you dumbass! Forget Utah, even Sanders beat you in Arizona!

161,720 to 130,762

Hey Ted, you dumbass! Forget Utah, Clinton just beat you like a drum in Arizona!

234,713 to 130,762

But Trump won with 248,383

Ted Cruz accepted Jeb Bush's endorsement as easily as . . .

. . . George Herbert Walker Bush accepted the Democrats' Profile in Courage Award for breaking his 1988 No New Taxes Pledge.

Speaking of the failed GOP administrations of the past, Jeb Bush endorses Ted Cruz

Shut your big fat pie hole, Nancy, you've never paid for doodly squat

Good news: Trump foreign policy team excludes those in senior positions from previous GOP administrations

Cruz wins big in Mormon Utah, but Trump still gets more votes in AZ and UT combined than Cruz in UT and AZ combined

Trump: 246,543 + 23,984 = 270,527

Cruz: 118,904 + 129,429 = 248,333 (Cruz actually received more popular votes in Arizona than Utah)

Dead ringer for Erick Erickson

In 2013 Ted Cruz wanted 1.35 million green cards issued per year, 325,000 H-1B visas per year

Plans pushed by GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz under the immigration reform debate in 2013 would have jumped the number of immigrants, including those from Muslim nations, by doubling green card caps and boosting temporary worker visas five-fold.

Read the rest here.

Sanders hits new high 43.8% nationally in Real Clear Politics poll average

Your choice America: Donald Trump and The Wall or open borders and a Brussels-style police state

Trump hits new high 40% nationally in Real Clear Politics poll average

Trump never shared the lead with anyone except Ben Carson last November.

John Kasich voted for the assault weapons ban in 1994

The Roll Call is here.

click to expand

By the way, Queen Noor of Jordan never renounced her US citizenship

Discussed here.

This perfect running mate for Ted Cruz will be 35 in June, so he's just as qualified too, no?

Prince Hashim of Jordan

Educated at St. Mark's, Fay School and Maret School, he's probably got the needed residency of 14 years. Throw in his time at Duke and Georgetown if there's any doubt, and I'd say he's a lock.

If true Politico story means Ted Cruz is soft enough on illegal immigration to unite with Gang of Eighter Marco Rubio

Politico reports here that Cruz' people have been pursuing an alliance with Marco Amnesty Rubio for weeks, and more than that:

Over the last week, according to a person familiar with the Cruz team's internal deliberations, the campaign has conducted polling in forthcoming contests — including ... the one on Tuesday in Utah — in which questions are posed about the two running side-by-side.

Trump delegate total rises to 680, which is really 692 at minimum with 12 from Missouri not yet distributed

bloomberg.com/politics

That means Trump now needs 52.2% of the remaining 1044 delegates to get to 1237. See the latest Missouri delegate story here.

A number of other delegates also are not yet distributed from races already held, among them:

Oklahoma: 3

Louisiana: 5

Mississippi: 3

Illinois: 2.

With 424 delegates, Cruz now needs almost 78% of the remaining 1044 to get to 1237.

Conservative talk radio won't tell you Cruz is finished, but he was finished already a week ago.

John Kasich, Supreme Court squish, would consider Obama's nominee Garland

Quoted here:

"As someone who's talked about unity, would you take a look at Mr. Garland...if you were elected president?" host John Dickerson asked Kasich.

"Well, you know, he received you know overwhelming support, I think even from Senator Hatch, so of course we'd think about it," Kasich replied.

In other words, expect more liberals on the court from President John Kasich.

So winter's over . . . where are the indictments of Hillary Clinton?

Hm?