Just as a reminder for y'all, the Pennsylvania primary is April 26th, three weeks and change from today. The primary campaign is almost always decided by the time we vote, but not this year.  It's absolutely down to the wire this time, and trench-warfare at the convention itself.  Your vote matters this year.

So don't throw it away on a narcissistic idjit like John Kasich.  He has zero chance of winning the nomination, and is only running for the high and the off-chance that somebody might bribe him out of the race.  Nobody has time for that, and it's technically illegal, so he just keeps chugging away, feeding his ego and making messes.  To heck with John Kasich.

And Trump? How many times do you have to be told - Donald Trump is a con man, a grifter, a scammer.  He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. He's a terrible businessman, an awful human being, and doesn't bother to do his homework.  He recently bragged about how he liked to surround himself with losers, because the way they hang on his stories makes him feel like a winner.  His version of conservative pieties sounds suspiciously like a liberal's fevered imagining of what they think conservatives believe in their hearts of hearts.  He lies like he breathes, and generally can't be bothered to align any given set of lies with any previous set of lies he might have said on a previous occasion.  He divides the world into marks and fellow grifters.  He flatters his audiences that they're in on the con, they're going to be junior partners in his grand confidence game.  But remember - the heart of the con is to flatter your marks that they're your partners.  Trump's current set of marks is his prospective voters.

Don't be a mark.

Now, I know that for a lot of Pennsylvanians, someone like Ted Cruz is a bit of a stretch.  He's a strict-constructionist conservative, ideologically rigorous, and damn churchy.  But the wonders of strict-constructionist conservatism is that the Constitution, when strictly constructed, is all about *LEAVING YOU ALONE*. It's about limiting the damage that do-gooders and fussbudgets and post-modern Puritans can do to their fellow man through the strong arm of the government.  Are you a fussbudget, do-gooder, or post-modern Puritan?  Then the wonders of federalism means that you are free to pester your fellow citizens within your state, commonwealth or polity to the limits of the law and your state or commonwealth's constitution.  Laboratories of democracy!  But a republic at the national level, so that we your neighbors can always damn you to hell and move to Texas, without making a federal case of it.

We've had seven years and counting of intrusive, big-business corporatism with the Obama administration.  The big-government corporatists have had their day, and then some.  They've dragged the captive nations behind them while feeding borrowed money to their cronies, their clients and the corporations.  Everyone has fed deep at the troughs for seven fat years.  There is one true anti-corporatist small-government candidate on offer, and that's Ted Cruz.  Give the swine at the trough their seven lean years!

They could use the diet.