Gonna be filled with runny-nosed urchins, I can see (and hear) it now.

The main attraction [in urban-forest Austin Gardens] will be the education center itself, a 2,100-square-foot multiuse center that will host children’s nature day camps, environmental education programs for adults and children in addition to other community events.

A “learning garden” will have birding scopes, nature imprints, native plantings and a social gathering area with game tables for group picnics.”While we are still working out the details, we will have both youth and adult activities planned for the day,” Park District of Oak Park Executive Director Jan Arnold said.

“We will have presentations by park district staff, including a ‘yard tips’ presentation by Travis Stephens and ‘tree tips’ by John Borland. We think the adults will enjoy this opportunity to get some advice for their homes.”We’ll also have some hands-on activities for children such as crafts and nature activities and yoga for adults.”

What about old farts who want to sit and watch the squirrels?

Source: Austin Gardens education center set for summer open | Articles | News | OakPark.com

It’s the Pacific trade pact and T’s isolationism. But hers too.

Funny how in Professor Summers’ hyperventilating about the risk that Trump could collapse the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he somehow neglects to mention that Hillary Clinton has also publicly come out against that deal, in a pander to labor and an effort to appeal to Bernie Sanders supporters.

Unless Professor Summers thinks Hillary is lying for political purposes about her opposition to the deal and will reverse position and support it once elected [huh?], there’s no difference — zero difference — between her position on TPP and Trump’s.

And she’s supposed to be the establishment grownup and he (Trump, not Summers) is supposed to be the nationalist populist authoritarian demagogue. Right?

Well, that’s what we hear.

Source: Summers on Trump and Trade :: The Future of Capitalism

, , , and a reader smiles.

The Bulls are giving up 102.8 points a game, and somewhere [former coach Tom] Thibodeau is laughing through his tears – laughing because he knew the Bulls made a mistake by firing him after last season and crying because he cries for every defensive lapse in every game anywhere. It’s quite a burden he carries.

Yes. And there’s no planning that. Open a vein and bleed, said veteran sports writer Red Smith about writing a column.

Source: Bulls got what they deserve with ‘No Defense’ Hoiberg | Chicago Sun-Times

“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/