Rush is reading from this right now on air: It must be the OxyContin part that finally ticked Rush off

Materialist Kevin Williamson for National Review, here:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale [Trump] communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

Ted Cruz brags about his "poison pill" amendments to Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, says higher Gang of 8 bill cap on H-1B visas was "not nearly high enough"

Here: "It's my hope to put in place common sense immigration reform".

Ken Blackwell of Club For Growth is delusional: 47% of Trump's supporters won't vote for Cruz if he's given the nomination by the convention

There's that number again, 47%.

Of Trump's popular vote to date, that's only 3.7 million Trump voters rebelling against the Republicans.

Remember Rush's Limbaugh's "4 million stayed home in 2012"?

Ken Blackwell, quoted here:

“As far as my objective of forcing this into a contested convention, I feel very optimistic about it," said Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state who is working with a pair of anti-Trump groups, including Our Principles PAC, which paid for the Wisconsin billboards. ...

Blackwell said he wasn't concerned about a Cruz convention victory splitting the party, as long as the process was “transparent.” He also said the party could afford to alienate new voters Trump is bringing to the party—Blackwell referred to them as “undocumented Republicans”—because the traditional base would be motivated to stop Clinton.

“Folks will get over it,” Blackwell said. “The prospects of Hillary Clinton naming a liberal justice to the Supreme Court, expanding our welfare state and furthering our incompetence in international affairs will drive out the old base that didn't come out for Romney.”

Monmouth poll finds 54% of Republicans say Trump should be nominee even without the necessary 1,237 delegates

Here:

"A majority of all Republican voters (54%) say that the party should get behind Trump as the nominee if he has the most delegates but not enough for a first round ballot victory. Another 34% would like to see the convention nominate someone else in this case."

Germany has a bigger "NPR" problem than we do

From the story here:

. . . the [ironic] message of the video appears to be that critics of multiculturalism must be shut down.

Regardless of equipment, or radio and television usage, all households in Germany must pay a blanket fee of €215.76 per annum which funds public broadcasters ZDF and Deutschlandradio, as well as the nine regional broadcasters of the ARD network.

Now that fascist Trump has kids pledging to HIM never to take drugs or smoke cigs, and go easy on the alcohol

The horror.

Here.

I wish Gavin McInnes would tell us what he really thinks about Michelle Fields

Here:

For the record, I think Michelle Fields is full of shit. I think Ben Terris placated her because she’s pretty and he’s a horny beta male. I think her bruises are self-inflicted. She didn’t look down at her arm in the video, which is the first thing you do when someone inflicts pain. I think she’s an attention whore who wants to dominate the news more than she wants to report it. She has a book coming out and all this hype is good for sales. She also has a history of histrionic complaints.

What, she's not a psycho?

Ted Cruz: "We should expand legal immigration, double the caps, and increase high-skilled workers"

Here.

Byron York walks the line of those waiting to see Trump in Wausau: 5 minutes of video later he hasn't reached the end of it

See it here.

And the venue was already half full.

Wisconsin's and Ohio's middle classes have shrunk the most since 2000, don't expect establishment types who support free trade and open borders like Cruz and Kasich to fix it

Wisconsin heads the list of states where the middle class has shrunk the most since 2000:

Wisconsin (Gov. Scott Walker 2011-), down 10.4%

Ohio (Gov. John Kasich 2011-), down 10.2%

New Mexico, down 10%

Georgia, down 9.8%

North Dakota (despite the oil!), down 9.7%

Vermont (Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders), down 9.5%

Maine, down 9.1%

Nevada, down 9%

Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Ted Cruz both stand for more disastrous wage-leveling job-destroying trade agreements

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.