Indiana may vote for Trump on May 3rd, but most of the 57 delegates are already anti-Trump

So reports Politico, here:

Republican Party insiders in the state will select 27 delegates to the national convention on Saturday, and Trump is assured to be nearly shut out of support, according to interviews with a dozen party leaders and officials involved in the delegate selection process. Anti-Trump sentiment runs hot among GOP leadership in Indiana, and it’s driving a virulent rejection of the mogul among likely delegates. ... Pete Seat, an Indiana GOP consultant whose firm was recently retained by the Kasich campaign, said he would be “shocked” if there were more than a handful of Trump supporters in Indiana’s delegation.

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump should be the candidates for president: The rest are tools for outside interests

Ranked from biggest tool to outside interests to smallest, based on percentage of PAC money to the total raised through February 2016, reported here:

Rick Perry: 91%

Jeb Bush: 78%

George Pataki: 71%

Chris Christie: 69%

Scott Walker: 61%

Carly Fiorina: 54%

Mike Huckabee: 53%

Marco Rubio: 50%

*Ted Cruz: 46%

Lindsey Graham: 44%

Rand Paul: 42%

Bobby Jindal: 41%

*John Kasich: 30.2%

Rick Santorum: 30%

*Hillary Clinton: 28%

Martin O'Malley: 15%

Ben Carson: 14%

Jim Webb: 13%

*Donald Trump: 5%

*Bernie Sanders: 0.1%

*still in the race

(watch the gif here)

Rigged party system is leaving both Trump and Sanders supporters feeling voiceless: What's the point of voting if delegates are going to do what they want?

Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box

From the story here:

[T]he sense of futility is building among supporters of Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders, both of whom have strong appeal with people who already believe that a rigged political system leaves them voiceless and disenfranchised. ...

“It’s people who are in charge keeping their friends in power,” said Tom Carroll, 32, a union plumber who lives in Bethpage, N.Y., summing up how he viewed the electoral system. Mr. Carroll, who was at Mr. Trump’s rally on Long Island on Wednesday, expressed irritation at a system that does not always abide by the one person, one vote concept. “In other countries, we pay to fix their election systems and they get their fingers colored with fingerprint ink when they vote,” he added. “What’s the point of everyone voting if the delegates are going to do what they want?”

Colorado GOP establishment systematically de-credentialed Trump voters at convention: "Removed and replaced because I voted for Trump"

Here.

I dunno, I just work here

Mark Levin is a hot-headed radical who doesn't have the temperament to host a radio show let alone lead an Article V convention

"We are rapidly approaching a moment of truth for the life of our nation!"

He goes from ripping #NeverTrump on April 7 here to joining it on April 9 here.

Just think what he might do at a convention. He's proposed only eleven amendments to the constitution. That's not exactly the slow, incremental change usually supported by genuine conservatives. Can you imagine him suddenly changing his mind and proposing twenty-two? forty-four? Well, I exaggerate, but now we see how quickly it could get out of control with someone like him at the helm, or advising it. He reminds me of General Buck Turgidson more and more everyday.

Forget nuking the Russkies, Levin wants to nuke the constitution!

A constitutional convention would be a disaster in the age of Obama. Unfortunately, Mark Levin also has no check upon his appetites, including for vengeance.

Marlene Ricketts of Chicago Cubs/TD Ameritrade fame is funding #NeverTrumper Erick Erickson, spending nearly $15 million so far against Trump

Reported here with FEC documentation here:

So it perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise to find out that Erick Erickson’s media venture “The Resurgent“, is taking Super-PAC money from the (formerly Scott Walker advocates and financial backers) Ricketts family of Wisconsin who fund OUR PRINCIPLES PAC to the tune of $3,000,000 in February alone.

OpenSecrets reports here that Our Principles Pac, organized to oppose Donald Trump, has spent $14.8 million so far in the 2016 election cycle.

Last I checked Joe and Marlene Ricketts live in Wyoming, not Wisconsin.

Diana West concludes that wankers Rick Wilson and Kevin Williamson far exceed the Roger Stone standard for offensive rhetoric set by the sanctimonious Brent Bozell

Here:

What it is with these two men and masturbation is not, Glory Be, our concern; rather, it is their hellish level of discourse. I am wondering whether [L. Brent Bozo] will be issuing another righteous statement, as [he] did regarding Roger Stone, calling for "the media to shun" this noxious pair (and others, as you will see) and "denounce [them] in no uncertain terms"?

Repeat after me: Building a wall is impossible, building a wall is impossible, building . . .

And the right is paranoid, too, this week: Michigan's Steve Gruber repeats hysterical Yellowstone supervolcano story

Yesterday on his show Michigan's Steve Gruber uncritically read from this dark story, which has several iterations on the internet featuring a lurid "sea of red" map of earthquakes in Yellowstone, from which this claim:

So why are the public seismographs from the US Geological Survey (USGS) OFFLINE (to the public) today?  No one is providing any answers.

Even more peculiar, the privately-funded seismographs from the University of Utah . . . are also OFFLINE (to the public) right now.  No one is providing any explanation for this either.

The USGS page here showing earthquakes as recent as yesterday in Yellowstone features this box, with dead links to the University of Utah Seismograph Stations page here:

So what's up with that?

Well, just click "home" and the University of Utah Seismograph Stations page tells you:

UUSS has launched a redesigned website! Please visit us at http://www.seis.utah.edu  (http://quake.utah.edu ) to check out the new features.

Obviously, the government page at USGS hasn't been updated yet. Government moves slowly, and often incompetently. No news there.

Also at the Univ. of Utah home page you'll see this map of reality:

Not this scary beast, which appears to be an historical map of all events over a long period of time:

Paranoia will destroy ya.

Salon post on Michael Savage fizzles at the end

The piece by Robert Hennelly does a fair job of laying out the Savage oeuvre, only to show exhaustion at the end and descend into dark speculation that Savage wants part of the country to secede.

Paranoia will destroy ya.

Rush Limbaugh seriously wants you to believe Obama is trying to help Trump by attacking him

Here.

Call it the Claire McCaskill strategy: Make sure Hillary's got someone to run against that she can beat, like Claire beat Todd Akin.

That, folks, is how much Rush Limbaugh wants Ted Cruz to be the candidate, not Trump.

Marist poll finds 53% think the middle class is dead

Here and here:

[A] majority of Americans, 53%, believe the middle class is dead. There are now only those who are struggling and those who are not. 44% disagree and believe a strong middle class remains in the United States. Racial differences are seen here, as well. When it comes to the state of the nation’s middle class, a majority of non-whites, 52%, think the middle class is still strong while only 40% of whites agree.

Hey Ted, a dinosaur communist beat you in Wisconsin!

Bernie Sanders: 567,936

Ted Cruz:           531,129

Cheating Trump of the nomination and discriminating against his supporters is Republican suicide

So says Conrad Black, here.

Trump support mirrored by the growth of the 1099 worker as corporate greed turns the Buchanan Brigades into Trump's FU Army

From David Dayen in The New Republic here:

But The New York Times’s Neil Irwin might have found an answer [to the anger out there] last week, when he pointed to eye-opening new research from Princeton’s Alan Krueger and Harvard’s Lawrence Katz on Americans in alternative work arrangements, which they defined as “temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers.” This cohort of the workforce grew from 10.1 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent at the end of 2015, representing an increase of 9.4 million workers. That’s all of the growth in the labor market over the past decade. ...  “Angry” voters may simply be angry workers tossed into the Darwinian world of the modern economy, operating without any fallback support from their employers or their government. This was bound to find its way into our politics, but though solutions for these workers exist, nobody is talking about them.

At 8.2 million after 32 contests, the popular vote for Trump alone with 16 states yet to vote is set to surpass 12 million.

Rush makes a ring composition of today's lyin' show, featuring at the end Ted Cruz lying about the last four contests

Claiming Trump has lost them all.

If Cruz can't count to four, he's not qualified to be president.

North Dakota doesn't count because delegates are unbound with 18 uncommitted, and Trump won Arizona.

Lyin' Rush Limbaugh repeats the false narrative to shape perceptions more favorably for Ted Cruz

He just repeated the false narrative that Trump hasn't won anything in a month, that Trump has lost the last four or five contests.

In the last month Trump has lost two to Cruz: Wisconsin and Utah. But Trump won Arizona and the Northern Marianas.

Prior to Utah, the only thing Cruz has won outright was Idaho, way back on March 8. North Dakota was not a win.

Liar.

The number of Democrats crossing over to vote Republican yesterday in Wisconsin appears to have been relatively small, unmoved by Trump's trade stand

From Politico here:

While 65 percent of those voting in the Republican open primary identified as Republican, another 29 percent said they were independent and 6 percent said Democratic.

Turnout in the Republican primary in Wisconsin was enormous.

In 2008, barely 403,000 voted in the primary which picked McCain over Huckabee.

Yesterday, 1.06 million reportedly voted in the Republican contest won by Ted Cruz, with some votes still remaining to be counted.

Six percent of that is 64,000 Democrats.

In the Democrat contest won by Bernie Sanders, 993,000 votes were cast, about 120,000 fewer than in the 2008 contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. So only half of the no-shows might have gone Republican.

The voters worried about free-trade whom Donald Trump hoped to attract went instead to Bernie Sanders in Wisconsin:

Demonstrating Sanders’ unusual strength, he ran competitively with Clinton, 51-47 percent, in who’d be the best commander-in-chief. And he won by particularly wide margins among those very worried about the economy’s direction, those who expect life for the next generation of Americans to be worse than it is today and those who think trade with other countries takes away U.S. jobs. Finally, he won 78 percent of those who favor more liberal policies than Barack Obama’s; Clinton won those who want to continue Obama’s policies, but by less of a margin. ...

Trade was a potent issue for Sanders in his surprise win in Michigan and helped him make Missouri and Illinois agonizingly close, though, Clinton turned things around in Ohio. In Wisconsin, more than four in 10 think trade takes away more American jobs, while fewer than four in 10 think it creates more jobs.

As with Michigan, ARG poll got Wisconsin massively wrong, predicting Trump +10 when it was Cruz +13