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.

Advice to Dem staffers.

Probably good advice if you want their votes, assuming they vote. At least you want them to stay away from your microphones at rallies.

Not surprising either, in view of news reports in general of shootings in black ‘hoods, not murders. Never say murder, even though you are talking about citizens who shoot and kill other people.

Point is, don’t demonize black murderers, or any other kind, unless they are cops. Cops kill, no problem with saying that. They are even murderers, and sometimes are charged.

This though there are murder sprees in Chicago, where already this year the toll is at record annual level with four months to go. Never say murder. Say gun violence, as if violence were a disease, you catch it, you’re dead or at least sick.

Say shooting deaths, as if they just happen. Do not say black (alleged, if you must) gangster shot (murdered) black person. It will cost you the black-lives-matter vote and maybe lose you a microphone at a rally.

Got it? Get it. Good. Go forth.

Said well by an objector:

“I was in the Navy and I saw men and women bleed and die for this flag,” Uzcategui said. “If he wants to do something, go to some outreach program where he can do some good. And I get it, his First Amendment right. But you don’t sit during the presenting of the colors, and you don’t sit during the national anthem. That is not the way to do it.”

Unless you are not only soft-hearted but also soft-headed (a devastating combination) and maybe have a youthful-enthusiastic yen for limelight (a common-enough yen, for all that).

via Associated Press

This whole politics thing, yuck, has become one big yawn, he writes in Wall Street Journal. Yawn.

Hillary? You jest. Which celebrity? Guess who said this?

“We have a presidential candidate who has deleted emails and done things illegally and is a presidential candidate. That doesn’t make sense to me because if that was any other person you’d be in prison. So, what is this country really standing for?”

I don’t know, you say. Join the crowd. He’s the guy who slammed Trump, but we have not heard about this part.

One has to wonder why, in this age of hard-hitting unbiased journalism. What happened? 

via BIAS ALERT: Press ignores Kaepernick’s Hillary for ‘prison’ remark | Fox News

He has a new best buddy south of the border — or looks like he does.

Indeed, it was a big win — a very big win — for Trump. Going into a meeting with the potential for disaster — who knew how Pena Nieto would receive the world’s most controversial presidential candidate or what embarrassments might lie ahead? — Trump came out of the meeting looking very much like a potential President of the United States.

Standing beside the Mexican leader in front of a green-gray granite wall reminiscent of the United Nations, Trump presented the picture of a statesman.

Quick on his feet, he is. You have to give him that.

via Byron York: Mexico gamble a huge win for Trump | Washington Examiner

Not kidding, folks. It’s here in a C-SPAN2 clip from Jan. 14, 1998, a regular Jesse-loves-Donald moment. Yes!

The professor says it here:

I find it to be intensely maddening that so many intellectuals are so confident in their views about economic reality that they feel justified in recommending government interventions based upon the assumption that these views are accurate, but simultaneously refuse to risk their own time and money in seeking . . . the ready profits [which they imply] are there for the taking by private parties who have the information that these intellectuals insist that they have.

And you, Professor?

There are many beliefs that I have about reality – beliefs about which I merely write and pontificate and never, ever actually back with my own money, time, and sweat. But . . . I never use my beliefs as a justification for the state to restrict other people’s freedoms or to take other people’s property.

Good.

He’s different, you know. Of course you do. He goes on and on, sidetracking repeatedly, running a shtick.

We’re all in on his act, self-glorifying and the like. We know he’s doing that, he knows we know, so what? We are getting a showman (oh the pols who would love to be able to do that for us), someone who so obviously thinks he’s hot stuff that he has to know what he’s doing.

He’s instinctive, does not have to read a book about how to win friends etc., in his case how, I guess, how to make a deal. Con man? He knows we know. We are all in on it. And we who are sick of the smooth talkers love it, because he is not pulling a con if he’s so transparent about it.

He drives squares nuts. Squares, a ’60s term of abuse based on people who act never on instinct, are not naturals with an ‘s,’ and not . . . ah yes, the ’60s goal . . . natural.

They read about it in books but don’t know it first hand. Or know it, rejected it as not going to work for them.

Trump’s polar opposite is, guess what? Not Hillary, who is a case apart, but Bill Daley in his Chi Trib op-ed Sunday in which he supports a referendum to change how redistricting is done in Illinois, putting himself — carefully, with just the right amount of decisiveness and using all the OK words and phrases in the book — on collision with the chief herder of Democrat cats in Illinois, Crafty Mike Madden.

Whom he fights with The Carefully Chosen Word. Which so far wins nothing.

Black lives matter to him, he says, but in general he’s out of step with blacks in U.S., whose anthem he sits for. Thing is . . .

The stereotype of blacks wallowing in self-pity over historical wrongs is mostly a virtue-signalling white invention.

Hah! Well-meaning, badly informed whites are the problem.

via Colin Kaepernick, bench warmer | Washington Examiner