Marco Rubio defied expectations by ending strong and beating out Ted Cruz for second place in South Carolina — just ten percentage points behind Donald Trump. This is a big deal, because if Rubio had come in third place, he would have received no delegates. Instead, because he finished in second place, he received no delegates. You see, South Carolina is a winner-take-all state. So Donald Trump, who got 32.5% of the vote, ended up with all 50 delegates. But Rubio’s strong second place finish (beating Cruz by 0.2 percentage points) will doubtless make many Republican establishment types thrilled that their boy still has a shot at the big kahuna.

There’s a theory for all this. Jeb Bush just dropped out of the race. If you hadn’t heard that, don’t be ashamed. Within 12 hours of his announcement, it wasn’t even listed on the front page of Google News. For months, the only real question was when he would drop out, not if. According to the theory, as people drop out, Rubio will get more and more votes, eventually pushing Cruz out of the way and finally eclipsing Trump.To the Republican establishment, all those Bush votes will go to Marco Rubio. But that’s not true. The Republican base doesn’t make that much sense. Anyway, when Ben Carson drops out a lot of his votes will go to Ted Cruz. And the rest will go to Donald Trump. So it isn’t a great theory, but it’s at least a theory.

A big issue here is that Rubio has largely been given a pass. He was attacked by Christie and failed. Then he was attacked by Cruz and failed. But he’s never been attacked by the real big kahuna: Donald Trump. It will be very interesting to see how the world’s least liked Eagle Scout deals with Trump and Cruz hammering on him at the next debate. I’m thinking something like, “Can I have a bottle of water? Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. Can I have a bottle of water? Let’s dispel…”

Marco Rubio Isn’t a Good Candidate

This gets to something that I’ve been thinking for a long time now. The Republican establishment thinks that Rubio is their best chance in the general election. But they seem to think this because he takes orders well. I don’t see it at all. Imagine for a moment, a general election debate between Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton. Even people who hate Clinton have to admit that when she’s up there on stage, she commands it. If nothing else, she seems competent. You might not like what she would do as president, but there is no doubt at all that she could do the job.

And next to her would be little ol’ Marco Rubio. He’d be all prepared just like any high school student on the debate club. The distinction would be horrifying for conservatives because they would have to admit that all their belief in authority and strength should make them support Clinton. Because Rubio is a wimp. What’s more, if Clinton is a self-serving politician willing to say anything to become president, then Rubio would join ISIS if it gave him a better chance of becoming president.

It’s been fascinating to watch the Republican nomination thus far. When it all started, we were told what a deep bench the Republicans had. (Am I wrong, or is this something that is said every election — and never about Democrats?) But in the end, there were only two people who were actually good candidates: Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. And they are both hated by the establishment. Interestingly, they are also both hated by the American people. But if either of them ran against Hillary Clinton, you can imagine an actual fight. If Marco Rubio runs, it is going to be a slaughter. I’m thinking the Republican establishment better start praying that their theory for Rubio’s success is wrong.

There are big happenings down in southern California. The Los Angeles Rams are demanding the local area people build them the City of Champions Stadium. Oh my! Here we go again. A big sports team owned by billionaires is demanding that the people pay for their luxury accommodations and acting like it is a grand favor. Oh the money that the team will bring in! Oh the jobs that will be created! A city would have to be a fool to pass up such a great opportunity!

We know about this con from David Cay Johnson’s wonderful book, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill). These deals never make monetary sense. Localities spend a whole lot more than they get back. The local economy is not improved. It works like this. They build a big stadium. They build a big parking lot. People drive to the stadium. They spend money at the stadium. And then they drive home. Stadiums are often surrounded by squalor. But they do create jobs inside the stadium, right? Well, a little bit.

But remember: this is a zero sum game. Teams roam around from town to town looking for the best deal. So the jobs are going to be created somewhere. These are not new jobs. So the teams will go where the taxes are low, where the locality will pay for their stadiums, and where the minimum wage is low. Hooray! It’s the perfect environment for the billionaire who doesn’t feel that he is getting enough attention.

Michael Hiltzik wrote a good article last week, The Truth About Football Stadiums: Those Supposed Great New Jobs Are Bogus. In proposing the new stadium, its proponents claimed that it would created “10,465 full- and part-time jobs.” It sounds impressive, but those last three words create a semantic loophole so large you could push Aristotle’s Organon through it.

Most of the article deals with the fact that even those who get to work at stadiums are usually screwed out of their pay. For example, they aren’t able to park near the game, so by contract, they must take shuttles, but are not paid for this part of their jobs that clearly (and legally) should be paid. And the pay? Well, we don’t know if workers at the City of Champions Stadium will be paid beyond the going rate, but at this year’s Super Bowl, a typical worker was paid just $12.25 per hour. For one day. Think about that: one day!

Things are obviously different for baseball and basketball, but for football, there are a total of 8 games regular season played at any given stadium. Sure, there are occasionally other events, but they wouldn’t employ as many people and anyway, how many people are we talking about? Well, at Levi’s Stadium, there are a total of roughly 4,500 people employed on any day when the San Francisco 49ers are playing there. As Hiltzik noted: “mostly low-wage cooks, waiters, janitors, security guards, parking attendants, and ticket takers.” As for the high wage jobs, “Permanent stadium jobs in departments such as marketing and sales number only about 60.”

Where does the 10,465 number come from? It’s just a fantasy. But then it all is. Football (or any other form of entertainment) is a fungible — easily replaced by another commodity. Sure, if football were taken away, people would miss it. But they would find other ways to entertain themselves. I have a lot of ideas for how to improve professional sports. But the first step we should take should be one we make for all businesses. No locality in the United States should be allowed to give any business any incentive whatsoever. It is unfair. It gives billionaires advantages that the rest of us have to pay for. It’s an outrage.

It looks like this election is going to be between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. In general, I’ve thought that Bernie Sanders would have been the better candidate against Trump. Now I don’t especially think that. For one thing, I’ve noted of late that Sanders doesn’t have the greatest campaign. He is right to say that he’s just the figurehead of a movement. And that movement is made up of people like me — people who feel the the Democratic Party has moved way too far to the right. And in that way, Sanders is a supporter of me, not the other way around.

But now, I’m thinking that Hillary Clinton really will be hard for any Republican to beat. I was very impressed with both Clinton and Sanders Thursday night. But I have to admit, every time I see Clinton she makes me think what I thought of Bill Clinton: there’s someone who the American people can think of as a president. She’s extremely good at all this. She walks a fine line that wouldn’t be necessary if she weren’t a woman, and she does it brilliantly. As I’ve stated from the beginning, she’s not my first choice, but she’s a fine choice.

Meanwhile, last week, BuzzFeed reported, In 2002, Donald Trump Said He Supported Invading Iraq. In September 2002, Howard Stern asked if he was in favor of the Iraq War, and Trump said, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.” This isn’t a surprise at all. The vast majority of people supported the war at that time. What’s more, a vast number of people today who did support the war back then claim that they didn’t. And you can say a lot of things about Trump, but the truth is that he is a typical American:

I don’t think this is much going to hurt Donald Trump in the Republican primary. Nothing seems to hurt him in the Republican primary. But the opposition research on Donald Trump has to be so ridiculously extensive that he would be dead meat in the general election if he weren’t already deeply disliked. I understand that he was deeply disliked in the Republican Party before he started winning. But the truth is that he is still still deeply disliked in the Republican Party. Of course, they will all fall in line behind him eventually. But the only reason he is popular is because he willing to be deeply offensive to the one demographic group that the Republicans absolutely must get 30% to 40% of the vote from : Latinos.

So I have to provide my standard disclaimer: if the economy tanks, the Republicans have a really good shot at giving the Republicans the White House. But barring that, I don’t see them winning the election. Their only hope on that front would be to make this election on national security. (That would be ridiculous given how safe we are here at home, but stranger things have happened.) On that front, Bernie Sanders might be vulnerable. But Clinton wouldn’t be. If this is a national security election, Clinton is the best candidate there is. (That’s one of my biggest concerns about her!)

So the election is shaping up to be one that the Democrats win by default. If they don’t, it is because they screwed it up. But assuming Clinton is the candidate, I just want to say a word to my fellow Sanders supporters: you have to vote for Clinton. There never was going to be a political revolution. If you want to see real change in this country, then you have to fight for it, not this election cycle, but for the next four, five, six election cycles. Imagine how different things would have been in young people showed up at the polls in 2010 and Obama had had another two, four, or six years with a Democratic Congress? Whether Clinton or Sanders, or even Trump or Cruz, wins on 8 November 2016, the work doesn’t stop. It continues on and on until some things like universal healthcare and guaranteed income are truly taken for granted.

The other day, I was working for a hate radio fan and I got to listen to hours of conservative pundits go on and on and on about how it was totally unacceptable for Obama to nominate a replacement of Antonin Scalia. It’s amazing to listen to these guys, because they are amazingly angry — 100% of the time. I can see why Rush Limbaugh is such a star. Compared to these freaks, he is nuanced and smart. But all of them think that the next president should nominate a replacement and their reasons are all the same: there must always be conservative do-overs.

It isn’t a surprise. This is the way it is among the power elite. Look at George W Bush. He was useless at business. But given enough chances, he eventually made his fortune — just as anyone else would. I’ve always found it hilarious to hear conservatives talk about how people should be rewarded for “taking risks.” These people don’t take risks. There is no risk of failure if you will simply be given another chance. And so now it is just accepted among conservatives that they too should get do-overs.

Think back to George W Bush’s second turn. The only reason Sandra Day O’Connor retired from the bench was because she got assurance from William Rehnquist that he wouldn’t retire. And then he died. So Bush got the opportunity to replace two judges, when he would have only gotten one, had Rehnquist just died a few months earlier. But the Democrats didn’t demand that they get another bit of the apple — hoping they would win the next election. It doesn’t matter if Rehnquist had died at the end of his term. And it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been the liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg who died.

Scalia Did the Same Thing!

This isn’t new at all. Last year, I wrote an article, Conservatives Want Obamacare Do-Over. In that I discussed how Scalia and Alito were making points about King v Burwell that were effectively asking for a do-over. They were saying, in effect, “There are problems in the law and Congress can fix them.” So what they were really saying is that the Democrats should have to pass Obamacare twice. That the Republicans should get a do-over. But it wasn’t just any do-over. It was a do-over in an environment where Obamacare was doomed. It’s like half a team badly injuring itself to score a final goal, and giving the opposite team the opportunity to play the game over against the half a team.

The same reasoning has gone on with regards to the Voting Rights Act. In that case, the Supreme Court noted that all Congress had to do was effectively re-litigate the Voting Rights Act. This is because it is always right and proper that liberal policy should have to be defended again and again and again. Conservatives should get endless chances to stop any kind of legislation they don’t like. It just wouldn’t be fair not to give them a do-over. And another. And another.

When I write about procedural politics, I try not to be like Charles Krauthammer. As you may remember, he was totally in favor of getting rid of the filibuster when the Republicans were in the majority. But later when filibuster abuse was much worse and the Democrats were in the majority, then he was totally against it.

I know that if things were reversed — a liberal had died and a Republican was in the White House — then conservatives would be making exactly the opposite argument. I believe if things were reversed like this, Democrats would be in despair, but they wouldn’t be arguing that there was some kind of historical precedent. It’s just ridiculous. These people don’t even try to make sense. They just know that the Republicans should be given another bite at the apple — a do over. We should all just pretend that Scalia didn’t die.

At the same time, let’s assume that Clinton is the next president of the United States. Well, these people will have been given their do-over. But they will want another. They know they can’t argue that Clinton shouldn’t be allowed to replace Scalia. So they will argue two different things. First, some will argue that the Justice must be conservative, even though they had no problem when the moderate (by today’s standards) Sandra Day O’Connor was replaced by a radical. Second, others will argue that 8 members of the Supreme Court is just great. After all, it was 6 when it first started.

The main thing is that nothing will satisfy them. It was fine for Obama to replace liberal justices with moderates. But there is just no way that they will accept Scalia being replaced with another moderate. They want do-overs until they get another George W Bush in the White House to replace Scalia with someone even worse.