Trump’s got it in the bag.

Trump hasn’t got much of a chance.

Take your pick. I tend to go with Trende’s analysis because he’s a really sharp observer of American politics and what he says agrees with my hopes. Oh, like the rest of you are never guilty of wish-casting…

Geezers will be an increasingly large segment of the population. That is in the nature of things these days – less risks in life, better medical care. One thing I’ve never got is those who seem to want to live forever…don’t smoke, don’t drink, spend hours exercising. I mean, I understand a wise desire to stay healthy…but, you know, eat right, exercise, die anyway. I’d rather, when the time comes, look back on the people and things I’ve enjoyed in life rather than having a long list of desperate efforts I made in the name of health. To each his own, of course, and you’re mileage may vary.

Jackson is to be off the $20 – and Harriet Tubman to replace him. Fine by me that we replace one of the founders of the Democrat party with a gun-toting, Christian Republican. I do wonder if our Progs know those details about Tubman?

Let’s Get it Over With: Hillary, ’16.

Related: Virginia Governor ok’s 200,000 felons voting – Hillary needs all the voters she can get, ya know?

Plusgood words prevent crimethink – How Democrats use words to control the terms of debate.

Obama does what Obama does best – threaten our allies. In this case, warning the Brits that if they dare to leave the EU, the USA won’t be in a hurry to conclude a trade deal with Britain.

New Independence Day trailer – looks pretty cool. Naturally, they’ve got a female President doing her best Hillary Clinton voice impersonation.

Muslim member of Sweden’s Green Party quits politics over the prospect of having to shake a woman’s hand. Have fun with this one, Progs.

Some facts about Earth Day:

Earth Day is celebrated every year on April 22nd, which, coincidentally, is Russian dictator V.I. Lenin’s birthday. Although Lenin was too busy being dead to directly participate in the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, visitors to his tomb that day swear they heard chuckling.

Chelsea Clinton – whom we can’t criticize because she’s A Child – babbles on about how her mother will get rid of guns by appointing a kook leftist to the Supreme Court. Methinks Bernie must still have a shot at it or Team Clinton wouldn’t be taking this line this late in the campaign season.

Hillary Clinton has no regrets about Libya. No, you’re not shocked, at all. In fact, you’re not even angry about it – this is just the way the Clintons are, all the time.

Today is the big New York vote. If Trump sweeps it, then he’s got a path to a first ballot majority. If he falls short, then his chances of getting that first ballot majority nearly vanish. Let’s hope the people of New York are wise enough to see that Trump is a disaster in the making.

Brazil, proving itself a wiser nation than the United States, is set to impeach their ultra-Progressive President.

Related: Politico wonders if Trump will be impeached shortly after taking office. I’m with Allahpundit on this – I’m already past that and wondering if we’ll be able to work up a decent primary challenge to President Trump in 2020.

A bit of loan chicanery on the part of Mrs. Sanders?

Related: Whatever you do, don’t buy the “Bernie is My Comrade” T Shirt…his lawyers don’t like it one bit.

A lot of the far left just doesn’t like Hillary. This is the joker in the deck for 2016 and no one is really talking about it. To be sure, against Trump one has to give all advantage to Hillary – but against either Cruz or Trump, we simply don’t know how many people Hillary can drag to the polls in November. Sure, there are still slightly more Democrats than Republicans in the country…but not that much more and the disparity continues to decrease. Beating Hillary might turn out to be just a matter of better GOTV…and in that, I think Cruz has a distinct advantage.

Lots of ISIS fighters come from the West. But, you already knew that.

Republican strategist sues Trump.

Trump wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal – at least, I hope he wrote it because if he paid someone to write it for him, then he was robbed. It is mostly just a whine about that mean, dirty, rotten Cruz and how (billionaire insider) Donald Trump will give Power to the People. I’ve had a lot to say about Trump, but now he’s just irritating me.

Related: Trump under 50% in New York?

Additional related: Trump protest in Colorado fizzles.

The lawsuit against gun makers in relation to the Sandy Hook massacre can go forward…as I said, the left will just keep going and going and going with this. Eventually they’ll find a jury to award billions to someone and then gun manufacturers will be out of business. So, do we pass a law immunizing gun makers? We already did. In 2005. But we don’t really have laws anymore – we just have whatever a judge says.

Obamacare continues its complete financial crash. It is a bad law which was stupidly written and bears no relation to reality. Democrats will go to their graves defending it.

Jonah Goldberg notes a bit of liberal silliness on the abortion issue:

The White House is asking for a lot of money to fight the Zika virus. “I think Democrats and Republicans in Congress are interested in making sure that pregnant women and unbor children in this country can be properly protected,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said in February. Unborn children? Yes, both parties want to protect unborn children from disease-carrying mosquitoes. But that bipartisanship falls apart when it comes to Planned Parenthood.

I can’t see how a Democrat can justify a single penny being spent to help an unborn child and then turning around and demanding money be spent to kill an unborn child. Either the unborn child is human – and thus can’t be killed – or it isn’t, in which case no one would give a darn what happens to it. Pick one, liberals.

Related: Liberals are thinking a bill which would prevent sex-selection abortions is racist. Don’t try to follow the logic folks, there isn’t any…its just a general liberal demand that abortion never be restricted in any way, shape or form…

When the United States built the Panama Canal more than 100 years ago – back in the days when we would actually build things, you know? – one of the main things which made our effort a success where the French failed was in eradicating Yellow Fever (along with many other diseases) from Panama. Certainly, 100 years later, Yellow Fever is just gone, right? Wrong. As I wrote some years back – to the complete lack of understanding of liberals – the Age of Science is dead. We are now benighted savages and worship our Earth Mother and must propitiate our goddess with the sacrifice of our Evil Science…you know, like banning DDT and stuff. I do think that some time in the next 20 years tens of millions of people will be wiped out by what should have been an easily containable disease…and they’ll die because we simply refused to apply science to the problem.

Sanders supporters – people who want free stuff, don’t want to pay for it.

Saudi Arabia says it won’t limit oil production unless Iran does. If this goes forward, expect a rapid drop in oil prices soon.

Ostensible Trump supporter Ben Carson is either a lot dumber than we thought, or he’s sticking the shiv in Trump with surgical skill.

Jay Cost – who knows more about American politics than 99.9% of us – says no one should fear a brokered GOP Convention.

King Abdullah II of Jordan proves conclusively that Christians and Muslims can be friends.

Obama is still the best gun salesman in human history.

Make people work as part of the welfare requirement and this happens:

In the first three months after Maine’s work policy went into effect, its caseload of able-bodied adults without dependents plummeted by 80 percent, falling from 13,332 recipients in Dec. 2014 to 2,678 in March 2015.

And that, my friends, is why Big Government liberals are opposed to welfare reform…and it’s not just that people will move off the rolls and become independent, but the additional horror that we’d need fewer bureaucrats…and that, in the end, means lower donations to the Democrat party.

Glenn Reynolds suggests a bit of punishment for Attorney Generals who try to criminalize dissent.

Ok, so a third or so of Wisconsin GOPers won’t vote GOP if Trump is the nominee…that is understandable…but about the same number won’t vote GOP if Cruz is the nominee. That makes no sense even in 100 parallel universes. I get it that Cruz has likeability issues. I get that he’s a bit far right for some even in the GOP. But this concept that “well, I’ll stay home or vote third party which ensures that Hillary is President if Cruz is the nominee” is just, well, absurd. Part of it is, I think, just passion-of-the-moment thing. There are still plenty of Rubio voters who feel betrayed their guy lost, and plenty of Kasich voters who are just officially sticking with their man to the bitter end. The balance would be made up of Trumpsters who simply won’t vote GOP, at all, if Trump isn’t the nominee. Most of the #NeverCruz people will, I think, come home in November.

Cruz does have a very high hurdle to jump – first getting the nomination; then uniting the party; then facing off against Hillary and figuring out a way to poach enough Rare Voters and disaffected blue collar Democrats. I figure his chances of beating Hillary are significantly less than 50/50…but he will have one magnificent asset in the quest: Hillary. She’s just terrible.

Related: Democrats shouldn’t underestimate Cruz.

So, a Dominican priest walked across a college campus – and the kiddies went into a panic thinking his white Dominican robe was a KKK outfit. College – it just doesn’t make any sense.

The Panama Papers scandal continues to cause a stir. If you ever wonder why rich and powerful people act like the laws don’t apply to them there is a simple reason for this: generally, the laws don’t apply to them. Certainly not like they apply to a poor or middle class person. If you’ve got enough money and enough pull, you can avoid prosecution; get sweet heart deals if prosecution is unavoidable; tie up the law in endless appeals if you can’t get a sweet heart deal; provide donations in return for an executive pardon if all else fails. But, mostly, you don’t even have to worry about that – Hillary isn’t the only easily indictable person out there walking around free, after all. The love of money is the root of all evil and power corrupts…people with lots of money tend to love money (otherwise, in almost all cases, they wouldn’t have made quite so much of it – and by “lots” I mean once you start getting into the billions of dollars of net wealth); people in power are always at risk of being corrupted by it and the longer a person has power, the more chance they’ll be corrupted. I have my solution for these problems – a wealth tax and term limits. Yeah, maybe not the best…but let’s hear yours.

The natural response to a $15 minimum wage. Spoiler alert: those making a minimum wage won’t like it.

State writes a confusing medical marijuana law. Small business owners decide to set up a marijuana dispensary which they believe has obeyed the law. Police disagree. Raid the place. Take everything they own. Charges get dropped. Small business owners still rather out in the cold. The biggest issue here is the asset forfeiture law – Michigan’s appears to be one of the worst, but all around the nation this sort of thing goes on…and one can’t help but feel that some of the incentive for the police to get a bit over-aggressive is the fact that many asset forfeiture laws allow law enforcement to keep the goods even if no conviction ever results. My solution: no seizure of assets until after conviction. And rather, period, end of story. Yep, this does mean some real criminals will be able to hide some of their ill-gotten gains, but that risk is worth it to me in order to ensure that innocent people don’t have their property seized.

Related: Juries should curb out of control prosecutors.

Merle Haggard, RIP

The non-war we aren’t fighting against ISIS could require more US troops.

The President of France – a Socialist much in tune with political correctness, it should be noted – said the Bad Words Islamist Terrorism while Obama was there…and so his people censored them. If a Republican President had done something like this, it would have been front page news for a month…

Glenn Reynolds – Instapundit – takes Hillary’s MSM toadies to task.

State Department has suspended it’s investigation into Hillary’s e mails because Reasons.

New military medal has a sword on it, liberals commence hand wringing.

Manufacturing jobs are going away, but bartending is having a boom year. Obamanomics!

Once upon a time, men were men – and could be warrior poets:

Safety

Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest
He who has found our hid security,
Assured in the dark tides of the world that rest,
And heard our word, ‘Who is so safe as we?’
We have found safety with all things undying,
The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,
The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,
And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.
We have built a house that is not for Time’s throwing.
We have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever.
War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,
Secretly armed against all death’s endeavour;
Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;
And if these poor limbs die, safest of all. – Rupert Brooke

Ever wonder what goes on in colleges? Here’s a sample:

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

This is what is known in polite society as “bullsh**”. But it is BS with a purpose – to pretend that people who don’t know anything must be listened to. Oh, and you paid for that with your tax dollars. Human-ice interactions? For normal people, that is when you pour the bourbon…

Did George Bush lie us into Iraq? Short answer: no. But check this video out.

The hacker Guccifer has been extradited to the United States – he’s the guy who, among other things, hacked Hillary Clinton…but you can bet your last dollar that the Justice Department won’t bring up that little detail.

A chance to turn New York red in 2016? There’s been a surge of Democrats re-registering Independent and Republican this year…and Democrat primary turn out is not just a bit low, it is disastrously bad. Things could get interesting.

Why we Catholics have to keep “Popesplaining” things to you:

1. Pope says that Europe is facing an “Arab invasion” and notes that Europe has been able to deal with such invasions in the past.

2. MSM reports it as “Pope says Europe is being invaded and it is a good thing”.

The other day I saw a bit of a joke on Facebook – three pictures. First picture is of a smiling Pope Francis with the caption, “we must love all men”. Second picture is of an MSM talking head saying, “Pope Francis has made homosexuality mandatory for all men”. Third picture is of Pope Francis with a WTF look on his face. Seriously guys and gals, the Pope is not a Commie and he’s not an agent of the Global Jihadist Conspiracy. He’s Catholic – he’s going to say Catholic things and he will try to give as little offense as possible because if you’re insulting people, it is rather difficult to convert them.

Related: mass baptisms of refugees in Germany.

Related, Related: number of Catholics continues to increase faster than global population growth. Still down in the Americas and Europe, but growing by leaps and bounds in Africa and Asia. Main thing, we’re eventually going to take over. Muhahahaha! You’ll all be doing Rosaries!

Reports that plenty of DC Republicans might vote Hillary is that is what it takes to stop Trump. Sorry, folks – but that is just another indicator if its Trump Vs Hillary, Trump wins. Maybe 10 or 20 thousand upper echelon GOPers might vote Hillary…but millions of Democrats will vote Trump. If we want to stop Trump, November ain’t the place to do it…he’ll have to be stopped in the primaries.