Selectively applauding first-amendment user.

As he applauded Tea Partiers and others nailed by his Internal Revenue people. What a guy.

Spunky fellow, vs. our professorial disapprover.

“Who does he think he is? I am no American puppet. I am the president of a sovereign country and I am not answerable to anyone except the Filipino people,” Duterte scoffed in a speech Monday. “Son of a bitch, I will swear at you.”

Hmm. Look out, spunky fellow, he will draw a red line in the sand about you.

Source: Philippines leader curses Obama; meeting canceled – CNNPolitics.com

It’s about “youth” being un-hireable because they have been so put upon.

Front page stuff in hard copy, 2,700+ words (!), way down the “breaking news” screen on the web.

It’s the bland entertaining the bland.

Has stuff like:

* “a failure to invest in its low-income neighborhoods and the people who live there”

* “The system has pushed them to the back of the hiring line.”

* “The problem is not new, but it has taken on renewed urgency as violence surges in some of the city’s neighborhoods, often claiming people — as victims and perpetrators — in their teen and young adult years” — that old demon violence, in this case “claiming” perps. Murderers are victims too!

* “executive director of the Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance” is first-quoted source, is followed by dozen or so non-profit quotes or citings or references. Not an economist among them. This is a puff piece, folks — no, a public service announcement. You are warned. Feel-good copy.

* “neglect of low-income neighborhoods,” tried and true OK phrase.

more more more

Michelle the anti-obesity champion is blowing up.

Writer says no, presenting statistics.

Reader Ted Ternes rebuts. Go to the Sacramento Bee piece to check on what he rebuts, argument by argument. Three rebuttals seem relevant to overall understanding of the issue:

“Immigration and crime have had an inverse relationship over the years”

implies that an increase in immigrants reduces crime. That is absurd since the reduction in crime is a function of numerous factors, the economy being chief among them. . . .

“Immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated in California than U.S.-born adults are”

. . . ignores the fact that many illegal immigrants that commit crimes . . . are deported, rather than incarcerated. . . .

“Immigration offenses, not violent crimes, account for most federal immigrant convictions, at 31 percent”

 is. . .  flawed because it only deals with convictions; again, many illegal immigrants are deported for committing crime, and as such are never convicted. . . .

The Ternes comments, here edited for relevance, serve to outline the argument.

via Do immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally commit more crimes? | The Sacramento Bee

Give the lady a break, ok? She just doesn’t recall. How many times does she have to tell you? Us?

Campaign no spikka da English when it comes to candidate with maybe two husbands.

Ditto intimidated Somali community, whose objectors speak only anonymously because not safe in Minnesota or for their people back in Somali-land.

Immigrants who ought to be vetted Trump-style? It would seem so.

(BTW, Dem candidate, in case you feared to ask. Say it ain’t so, you know.)

. . . the gymnast who wouldn’t stand for a TRULY oppressive regime.

She don’t know, she don’t know, she don’t know NOTHIN’.

It was at a Wood Dale, IL, town hall meeting 7/23/13, when he typically framed the problem purely as one of meeting retirees’ payment schedule. Never as fiscal issue threatening everyone in the state.

Asked why there had been no urgency in solving the pension problem, he denied the need for urgency. The state was in crisis “according to a tough standard . . . assuming pensioners live to 90.” And even by that standard, the state had 32 years before the money would run out.

He harked back again to Democrats’ 2010 pension solution — a staple of his crisis-talk rebuttal — that raised retirement age and reduced benefits for new hires. However, a 1995 Republican solution, re-amortizing the debt, he called inadequate.

They both were inadequate, said the fiscally cautious Illinois Policy Institute. There had been “perhaps no bigger fake reform” than the Republicans’ of 1995, which had done nothing but allow Governor Jim Edgar and others “to stand tall” for having “solved” the problem.

But “even more” fake reforms were to come, perpetrated by Democratic governors Blagojevich and Quinn, “with their large Democrat majorities,” including “issuance of pension obligation bonds and Tier 2 reforms that fix nothing,” the institute said. The band-aids had an inglorious history.

Being bi-partisan Illinois style.

From Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters— available in paperback, epub and Amazon Kindle formats.