“Canny operator” can take Mrs. C.

It’s time to stop pointing and laughing at the Republican primary. For all the GOP front-runner’s flaws, many veteran Democrats are beginning to conclude, Donald Trump is a canny operator who just might end up in the White House if they’re not careful.

He appears to be cracking the code with white working-class voters who could help him put  in play against Hillary Clinton. He’s helping to fuel record turnout in GOP primaries and he’s mastered the media like no candidate in recent memory, with his constant feeding of catnip to cable TV and his 140-character missiles on Twitter.

Main point: He’s no dumbbell, is better campaigner.  Hmm.

Source: Democrats to Clinton: Don’t laugh off Trump threat – POLITICO

These guys:

Drop in.

And then some:

Rubio would be a far better President than Hillary Clinton (or Bernie Sanders), but he wouldn’t exactly shake up D.C. or the GOP establishment.

I would certainly vote for him if he became the GOP’s nominee, much the same as I have for several prior GOP nominees–without enthusiasm. But I wouldn’t expect anything to really change.

It would be business as usual: The same, tired faces populating the cabinet and political appointments within the agencies. The same, tired policies. The same, tired political gridlock and finger-pointing, but no real changes to the lives of ordinary Americans.

The GOP establishment in D.C. would be thrilled: They would have full employment, be appointed to high-ranking government positions, obtain lucrative consulting, lobbying and other government contracts, and generally have a sense of well-being because they are “back in power” (which is the most important thing to the D.C. elite).

But for the rest of us, the oppressive sense of Republican stagnation (both intellectual and economic) would continue unabated.

It’s oppressive, all right.

Source: Instapundit » Blog Archive » GONE ON AND BURY IT ALREADY: Laura Ingraham on “The Suicide of the GOP Establishment.” Here is some…

Watch it and weep.

Andrews was brought to tears Monday in a Nashville courtroom. The sportscaster is suing a local hotel as well as the man who took the video for $75 million in damages.

Tough stuff, telling her father about it.

Source: Erin Andrews Says ESPN Required Her To Do TV Interview About Nude Video – BuzzFeed News

Well, really, why the hell would he? If it was off record when he said it, why would it be on the record now?

Lot of faux naivete by NY Times editors, to in essence say we’ve got something here that’s off the record. If it was off record, why is saying you have it kosher? Clever, these newsies.

Lends credibility to Trump’s slamming (anonymously, in full cry as wounded bull) the press who he says get it wrong and lie about him. This is a classic case, not of Trump’s duplicity but of noosepaper’s.

The details? Release the transcript. UPDATE: Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have called on Trump to ask for the tape to be released.

Source: Donald Trump Secretly Told The New York Times What He Really Thinks About Immigration – BuzzFeed News

The more things change, the more they stay the same:

First among Florence’s leading citizens in the period after 1434, the Medici began to pilfer public funds in the 1480s and never looked back.

Their stealthy republican power peaked under Lorenzo the Magnificent (d. 1492), as they took control of the city’s complicated electoral machinery and filled the chief offices with their yes men.

Resentment against the family swelled explosively and they were twice compelled to flee from Florence, in 1494 and 1527, with the old republic storming back each time: noisy, dynamic, hopeful.

I refer, of course to the way a Ruling Party tends to act at least after a while.

We do have our Lorenzos in Illinois, do we not?

Source: Deaths in the family | TLS

It’s been done, and it was unwarranted, this “Hitler hype,” writes Ira Stoll.

“Steven Hayward, author of The Age of Reagan, recalls the rhetoric”:

Democratic Rep. William Clay of Missouri charged that Reagan was “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.”

The Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew a panel depicting Reagan plotting a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall.

Harry Stein (later a conservative convert) wrote in Esquire that the voters who supported Reagan were like the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.”…

John Roth, a Holocaust scholar at Claremont College, wrote: “I could not help remembering how 40 years ago economic turmoil had conspired with Nazi nationalism and militarism—all intensified by Germany’s defeat in World War I​—to send the world reeling into catastrophe. . . . It is not entirely mistaken to contemplate our postelection state with fear and trembling.”

You might say it’s a liberal meme.

Source: http://capx.co/calm-down-trump-isnt-hitler/

That’s an Ash Wednesday picture of the head alderman. Remember, alderman, dust thou art and into dust thou shalt return.

Goes for all of us. In the meantime, can the alderman and his fellow council members maybe save us some money by getting a little efficient in allocating workers comp payments?

Can this and the other dust-destined aldermen let us in on what the heck they are doing with our money?

Sun-Times is on their, especially his, case today with a swinging, stinging editorial.

Follow @csteditorials

For more than a century in Chicago, a mere City Council committee — now tightly controlled by a single powerful alderman — has called the shots on all worker compensation claims, in recent years shelling out what experts say is a “staggering” amount of money. Feel free to scream about that the … etc. etc.

Source: Editorial: Pull back curtain on Ald. Burke’s workers comp fiefdom | Chicago Sun-Times

Scene reminds one (me) of how heated has become the national political scene since 9/11 and the first Iraq war, culminating in the current overreaching Obama presidency.

Fort Worth, Tx.—Watching a Donald Trump rally on television doesn’t do it justice. That is not to say it’s not entertaining to watch on T.V.—I have enjoyed every second of the Trump speeches that have aired on cable networks—but hearing his rap while standing in the middle of a packed crowd of Texans who worship him is a whole different animal.

Young U. of Virginia grad, in foreign affairs and politics, gets with the groundlings and listens. Good stuff on the appeal of Trump, which is something held in contempt by — I hesitate to use the term — the elite.

More more more here: What I saw from the crowd at Trump’s Fort Worth rally

Nephew blew it.

It’s not what but whom you know. (Better not be what in these cases)

A real estate venture created by President Barack Obama’s onetime boss and a nephew of former Mayor Richard M. Daley squandered $68 million it was given to invest on behalf of pension plans for Chicago teachers, cops, city employees and transit workers, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.

The five public pension funds haven’t made a dime on the investments they made nearly a decade ago with DV Urban Realty Partners, a company created by Obama’s ex-boss Allison S. Davis and Daley nephew Robert G. Vanecko, records show.

In fact, the financially troubled pension plans have lost most of the money they gave DV Urban, which used the money to invest in risky real estate deals, primarily in neglected neighborhoods.

What lowers confidence in the Ruling Party more than stuff like this?

Source: THE WATCHDOGS: Pension funds lost millions on deals with Daley nephew, Obama pal