A small update on Big Government Rauner, the Republican governor of the state of Illinois. Rauner, as you might remember, refuses to sign the state’s budget. At the same time, the number of insane and ridiculous regulations the state imposes on our university (and every other institution) has mushroomed during his short tenure.

Today, for instance, yet another mandatory training seminar was imposed on us. We are supposed to watch a training video that teaches us to use passwords to access our email accounts. We’ve been using these passwords for as long as we have been working at our university, but the Governor decided that it’s crucial to waste time and money teaching us to do what we already do every day. 

The seminar is followed with a mandatory survey that allows a fresh flock of bureaucrats to generate paperwork as to how many people have taken the seminar and who still needs to be badgered into taking it.

Can anybody explain to me how creating a bureaucratic structure to teach people with PhDs to use their email accounts can be justified in a broke state? Especially given that to access the training seminar people have to enter their email accounts. Meaning that the training is entirely superfluous.

In the meanwhile, a crowd of wide-eyed fanatics cheer the fellow who keeps introducing these bizarre and unhinged governmental regulations as a proponent of. . . a small government.

This is Alice in Wonderland type of absurdity.

Can you determine where a Spanish-speaking person is from based on their accent?

Take this test to find out.

I didn’t recognize people from Panama, Paraguay and Costa Rica. This is not surprising given that I never met anybody from these countries.

I’ve got to say, though, that in many cases I knew where people in the test were from based on their vocabulary and not pronunciation.

Is there a difference between saying, “Moishe Rabinowitz is a stupid fucker” and saying “all Jews are stupid fuckers”? The answer is obvious.

So what is the point of the idiotic commercial that keeps being aired and that says “Trump called women dogs, bimbos, and fat pigs”? He never said that all women are any of these things. His insults were always personal.

My point is not to defend Trump, obviously. I’m simply worried that all attacks on him so far miss the mark very badly. It’s time somebody found a way to discredit Trump effectively.

And in the most unsurprising news of the day:

Even Rubio’s last-ditch effort to paint Trump as “anti-Israeli” seems to have had no effect. Voters that think U.S. support for Israel should be stronger voted for Trump at a higher rate (48%) than those that think the level of support is “about right” (38%). The former made up 60% of the electorate. Trump’s Florida victory was made possible in large part by voters that want the U.S. to be even more “pro-Israel” than it already is.

Yes, what an inscrutable mystery. Why on Earth would these voters support a candidate who advocates for “a complete ban on Muslims”? How deeply shocking.

After that Univision debate, who’s surprised?

But did you, folks, see the drubbing Rubio took in Florida? This is painful to watch. The fellow totally lost face with his penis jokes and silly attacks on Trump. People who want this kind of thing already have a candidate. This was an unwinnable game for Rubio to get into.

Somebody called Kevin Williamson has written an article in National Review that everybody quotes but nobody can access in full. Here is an excerpt:

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

I don’t know who this Kevin Williamson fellow is but what a ray of sunshine he is among the idiot blabberers who analyze the rise of Trump. This is all very harsh but it’s honest. And ultimately, it’s a lot more kind than duping people some more with the lies that manufacturing jobs can come back and the lifestyles of the 1960s can be recovered. Everybody is terrified of speaking this unwanted truth but it’s got to be done.

Here is where I found the long quote but I wish I could read the whole piece.

Putin announced he’ll be withdrawing Russian troops from Syria because the war’s been won. It’s not like there’s anybody to contradict him or stop him. Of course, there is no guarantee troops will actually be withdrawn. There’s not a whole lot of connection between what Putin says and what he does. But his people adore him nonetheless, so why should he try to be consistent?

Bernie’s people are now going door to door in my area. This is the only campaign that has been doing door to door in our town. And the people who are knocking on doors are not all young, by the way.

It’s a very well-organized campaign, that’s for sure. I’m liking it a lot.

Trump is so winning the nomination. I just saw some top-tier Republican official on TV saying, “If we want to win back the voters who are supporting Trump, we need to listen to them and hear what they want. Our voters don’t want to see any more deficits, so they support reduction in government spending!”

Yeah, that’s precisely why people are flocking to Trump. They want less social security and Medicare because they are obsessed with budget deficits. Totally. That’s why Trump dedicates every one of his speeches to deficits. Not.

I’ve seen people in denial before but not to this extent.  

Part of the reason why Bernie Sanders is getting out the youth vote so effectively is that his campaign knows how to reach out to young people. I constantly get personalized text messages from the Sanders campaign. The Clinton campaign, on the other hand, never sends text messages. It only seems interested in old fogeys who still read emails.

Overall, the Clinton campaign hasn’t been effective either in reaching out to potential supporters or getting the campaign paraphernalia  (stickers, etc) to donors.