Coping With the Brexit Blues Ten Years On

I've been blogging long enough to honor 10-year anniversaries like Brexit. What I wrote back then:

It was supposed to be a throwaway moment: it was something Prime Minister Cameron promised to do last year during the Parliamentary elections as a way to keep voters from bolting to the anti-EU, anti-immigrant UKIP (aka British Trumpshirts) during a potentially tight run. The expectations - and the polling - kept pointing to a tough but clean win to Remain with the EU, because honestly most of the elites in politics and the media believed the voters wouldn't be stupid enough to commit economic suicide.

And then they counted the votes...

The British Pound dropped to a 30-year low compared to the US dollar. In about an hour it dropped faster than a blue whale without a parachute.

To say that the global markets went into panic mode AT THAT MOMENT and remained so well into today would be an understatement.

And so here I was, sitting at home watching all of this on an Internet I swore I wasn't going to pay attention to, and this was pretty much the one thought bouncing through my head:

YOU TOSSERS! YOU HAD ONE JOB!

You Brits could have retained some stability in all three major areas of public concern: your economy, your culture, your government. All three are now burning in the dumpster fire...

Prime Minister David Cameron went in one hour from being one of the most powerful men on the planet - Prime Minister ranks somewhere below President of the United States and slightly above t.e Actor Currently Playing The Doctor - to resigning from office in utter humiliation. Few Prime Ministers fell so low so fast. The resulting battle among Conservatives for the new leadership spot will likely spill over into a broken government, forcing a new round of elections sooner than the required five-year cycle...

Ten years on, we can see it got worse than that for the Tories: a revolving door of PMs - Teresa May who resigned in disgrace, to Boris Johnson who resigned in humiliating disgrace, to Liz Truss who resigned in utter humiliating disgrace, to Rishi Sunak who oversaw the Conservatives' worst electoral defeat since the 19th Century - as none of them could figure out a smooth exit from the European Union even if they wanted to (and in Boris' case, he eagerly pushed Britain out the airlock).

Brexit as an economic fiasco for the UK is so deep a problem that the Labour Party taking over in 2024 still hasn't figured out their own solutions for it, and became one of several factors in the recent resignation of their Prime Minister Keir Starmer just yesterday.

During my write-up for that article, I didn't have much to say about Brexit's effects as most of the coverage on Starmer's imminent departure focused on other woes. However, I did refer to an article from The Atlantic, a deep dive into the aftermath of Brexit and how it's sunk the UK's economy to the level of... well, the state of Mississippi (article by Idrees Kahloon):

Who broke Britain? Someone—or something—must have. The past 18 years, enough time for a whole lost generation to be born and brought up, have yielded nothing but stagnation and mass disillusionment. In 2007, before the global financial crisis, Britain was at its postimperial zenith. Median household income had just surpassed that of Germany. A pound was worth more than $2, and London was arguably displacing New York as the center of international banking.

But since then, Britain has been left behind. The country’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state—and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London...

One generation ago, Britain was a major global power; today, it is a middling one, gripped by sclerosis. Taxation is at the highest level since World War II, yet public services have deteriorated. The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one...

Some in Britain blame rotten luck—the 2008 financial crash, the coronavirus pandemic, an energy crisis after Russia invaded Ukraine. But other countries endured these challenges too. What differentiated Britain was its self-sabotaging responses to these and other problems. Brexit is the most famous example, but hardly the only one. Bad choices, beginning just after the financial crisis, begot worse ones...

The country’s downward slide has been consistent in one respect: As Britain has become more and more aware of its diminishment, it has retreated ever more fully into a defensive crouch. Politics have become zero-sum, descending into fights over who has robbed whom. Suspicion has fallen, above all, on immigrants, whom both major parties have turned against. There is still an enduring strain of British exceptionalism, quieter and more understated than the American version, which suggests that by retreating inward, Britain can make itself great again. Astonishingly, or perhaps predictably, it is growing stronger as the country’s problems get worse.

In fairness, the 2008 financial crisis hit Britain especially hard. In the 1990s, both the Tories and Tony Blair’s “New Labour” Party made the same bet: Britain was to be a postindustrial, services-based economy, anchored in finance. Tax receipts from a booming London would be redistributed to lagging regions in the old industrial heartland, helping to renew them. Then came 2008, and London’s financial industry cratered.

But the government’s actions during and after the crisis compounded the damage. Rather than increase spending to revive depressed demand, as modern Keynesians would counsel, the government, then led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, opted to slash budgets as revenue plunged. The theory was that fiscal discipline—cutting spending more sharply than Britain’s peer countries—would inspire confidence and spur growth. At the time, deficits and debt were seen as immoral; unlike profligate Greece, Britain would manage its affairs prudently.

The promised growth did not materialize, and austerity left scars that linger still...

Conservatives, if one looks back to moments like the Great Depression, do not buy into Keynesian policies. The problem is, even when their austerity measures clearly falter they refuse to change tactics, and instead double-down on the blame-shifting.

Austerity was felt most harshly by those who were already suffering after deindustrialization. The welfare state had partially compensated the losers from globalization. When it abruptly shrank—because the masters of the universe had miscalculated—anger erupted upward, at British elites, and also outward, at European migrants, who were competing for jobs and public services. It was because of this political pressure that Cameron made another fateful decision: to hold the Brexit referendum in 2016. This was a gambit; Cameron expected the vote to fail. He did not want to leave the European Union, but he wanted to arrest the rise of figures such as Nigel Farage, the longtime gadfly of British politics, who had been campaigning for withdrawal from the EU for decades. Left-behind Britain, the places especially harmed by austerity cuts, voted overwhelmingly to leave. The morning after he lost the referendum, Cameron resigned, ushering in a period of political instability that has now lasted a decade, and shows no sign of ending...

I recommend you go and read Kahloon's article in full, because he goes into a lot more detail about the decline of industry in the more remote parts of England - everything outside of London - as well as the rise of Farage's latest political farce Reform (he abandoned UKIP when it got too overtly racist) even as much of the Brexit destruction is due to Farage's efforts.

So how does this all relate to Mississippi?

If you don't know, Mississippi is one of the poorest and most broken-down states in the Union. The roads and bridges are some of the worst in terms of safety and condition. Half the state suffers from sustained poverty for longer than 20 years. It's in the bottom five of worst states to live in.

A good example is the condition of the state's own capital Jackson, where infrastructure has broken down completely and there's no clean water (via Drew Costley and Emily Wagster Pettus with AP News, published through PBS Newshour):

But the crisis in the city of Jackson isn't over, even if its boil-water advisory was lifted on Thursday (in 2022). While the state plans to stop handing out free bottled water at sites around the city Saturday night, the city said water pressure still hasn't been fully restored, and state health officials said lead in some pipes remains so worrisome that pregnant women and young children should still use bottled water...

Other residents told The Associated Press on Friday that their water remains too discolored to count on, so now they'll have to rely on water distribution by community-run charities or buy water again themselves, adding insult to injury.

Jackson had already been under a state health department boil-water notice for a month when torrential rain fell in August, flooding the Pearl River and overwhelming the treatment system. Water pressure abruptly dropped, emptying faucets for days.

How did this happen? Residents, politicians, experts and activists say systemic racism is the root cause.

Jackson's population has declined since 1980, a decade after the city's schools began integrating. Many white families left for the suburbs, leaving less revenue to maintain the infrastructure. Middle class Black people then moved out to escape urban decay and rising crime. State and federal spending never made up the difference.

"The legacy of racial zoning, segregation, legalized redlining have ultimately led to the isolation, separation and sequestration of racial minorities into communities (with) diminished tax bases, which has had consequences for the built environment, including infrastructure," said Marccus Hendricks, an associate professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland.

Heather McTeer Toney worked to clean up discolored tap water as mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, before serving as the Environmental Protection Agency's southeast regional administrator from 2014 to 2017. Now she works on environmental justice issues nationwide for the Environmental Defense Fund. She said many majority-minority communities lack consistent access to clean water.

"Any community that is suffering from lack of infrastructure maintenance is dealing with the same problem, maybe just on a different scale," Toney said. "But across the nation, with .... poor communities that are often Black, brown, Indigenous and on the frontlines of the climate crisis, we see the same thing happening over and over again."

There have been studies over the decades highlighting how pervasive racism is when it comes to dealing with poverty, improving living standards, and community developments. I can't find it now, but one of my coworkers at the North Regional Library back in the 1990s showed me a survey where they polled white folks asking if they preferred taking a five percent pay increase if it meant blacks would get a two percent increase, or taking a two percent pay cut if it meant blacks would get a five percent pay cut... and a majority of whites went with the pay cut. I'd love to find the source for that again, because it highlights the viciousness and irrationality of racism: Under normal rules of economic theory, everyone would take the pay increase; but because of racism, whites will take the pay cut if it means blacks get it worse.

The racism holding down Mississippi is now the racism holding down the United Kingdom, and it was recognized even as the Brexit vote blew up everything (via Leah Donnella at NPR):

So why did the U.K. vote for something so politically and economically disruptive? Some say race has a lot to do with it — specifically, the racial tension that has resulted from the U.K.'s recently welcoming in record numbers of immigrants. In 2015, 630,000 foreign national migrants came to the U.K. from both inside and outside the EU. This year, the U.K. has ushered in an additional 333,000.

The campaign to get the U.K. to leave the EU (also known as the "Leave" campaign) was spearheaded by the right-wing, populist UK Independence Party, or UKIP. The party, led by Member in the European Parliament Nigel Farage, says that the EU "means the end of the UK as an independent, self-governing nation with its own government and its own borders."

For months, UKIP has fought for the United Kingdom's independence from the EU — some say by capitalizing on racially charged animus toward immigrants. In the Washington Post, writer Anyusha Rose points to the Leave campaign as evidence that in the U.K., "racism is no longer racism — it's legitimate opinion."

By 2019, the effects of racism in the Brexit decision were more clear (via the BBC):

Racism and race-related hate crime has increased since the 2016 Brexit referendum, with officers appointed to deal with resultant "tensions".

Three of the four Welsh police forces reported rises in the last five years, figures released to the BBC show.

Eryl Jones, from charity Show Racism the Red Card, said he believed Brexit had been a "major influence".

It comes as 24 community cohesion officers are being appointed by councils across Wales...

"Incidents of racism have gone up throughout the UK as well as in Wales since the campaign to leave the EU, " Mr Jones said.

"It's fairly obvious that Brexit has been a major influence..."

Home Office figures show hate crimes in England and Wales rising over the past five years - with a spike, it says, since 2016...

It's a simple equation: The racism spurs more poverty, and the poverty spurs more racism.

The only way the UK can break the cycle - to avoid the fate of Mississippi, which devolved into one of the poorest states as far back as the American Civil War, and which fought with gun and noose for decades to keep itself poor and racist - is to wake up to the horrors that anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence inflicts upon themselves, recognize where poverty is at its worst and spend like hell to undo the damage it leaves on families across the board, and look at rejoining their neighboring nations in an economic deal that would reinvigorate their dying industries at home.

Don't end up like Mississippi. Don't end up the trashy trailer park of nations on the European continent.

Mississippi Stealing

Political corruption, sad to say, is as old as politics itself. If you go back to the time of Hammurabi, you'll likely find court officials taking bribes from stone masons to avoid getting punished for racing their chariots through school zones. It doesn't matter which political party, doesn't matter which nation, doesn't matter which gender, doesn't matter the religion of the corrupt official or the race they identify. Greed is universally understood: It gets into anything where money and privilege is involved, and may God have mercy on the victims who suffer when the powerful get greedy.

One of the things in American politics is how the corruption plays out between the federal level and the states. As the dynamics of the Constitution shifted from states having more of the political might and wealth to the federal - it started under the Reconstruction era post-Civil War but by the time of the New Deal (and the Second World War) all the money (and the power) flowed from Washington DC - you saw the shift in corruption as well. If not the federal agencies and elected officials getting caught stealing from the till, it was the state-level officials who were funneling federal aid away from the citizens (who needed that aid) into the officials' own pockets.

A particularly ugly example of that just got revealed to the public this week, when federal and state investigators revealed that almost 77 million dollars meant for welfare programs to the state of Mississippi were diverted to other projects or organizations that directly profited either those state officials or their wealthy benefactors/allies. The story gained national attention from the revelation that famed sports star Brett Favre - football Hall of Famer from Southern Miss - was in on part of the theft. This is one of the few times on this blog I've ever linked to a story from ESPN:

An investigative report by Mississippi Today revealed Tuesday that former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant helped former NFL quarterback Brett Favre obtain welfare funds in order to help build a new volleyball center at the University of Southern Mississippi.

The news organization reviewed text messages from 2017 and 2019 that were filed Monday in the state of Mississippi's civil lawsuit over misspent welfare funds. The texts were filed by an attorney representing Nancy New, who has already pleaded guilty to 13 felony counts of bribery, fraud and racketeering for her role in the welfare scheme. New was the founder of the Mississippi Community Education Center, which was tasked with spending tens of millions in federal welfare funds to help the state.

State auditors determined nonprofit leaders misspent at least $77 million in welfare funds in the largest case of public fraud in Mississippi history.

The texts show Favre, New and Bryant discussing how to divert at least $5 million in welfare funds to build a volleyball stadium at Southern Miss. Favre played football at Southern Miss, and his daughter was a volleyball player there at the time some of the texts were sent.

"If you were to pay me is there anyway the media can find out where it came from and how much?" Favre asked New in 2017.

After telling Favre that "we never have that information publicized," she circled back to him the next day.

"Wow, just got off the phone with Phil Bryant! He is on board with us! We will get this done!" New told Favre...

Favre not only understood how bad this story would look if it got out, Favre expressed relief in a follow-up text - "Awesome! I needed to hear that for sure" - that he was going to get political cover from Mississippi's governor.

If you need context to understand why this is so disgusting and horrifying an act by Nancy New, Phil Bryant, Brett Favre, and several others: You need to understand that the not-so-great state of Mississippi is one of the poorest states in America. For a little more analysis, let's take a look at this (via Stephan Bisaha at NPR):

This is a tale of two Jackson, Mississippis.

There's Jackson, the state capital, run historically by white conservatives. Then there's Jackson, the 82 percent Black city, run by a mayor wanting to make it "the most radical city on the planet."

February's winter storm and water crisis provided just the latest high profile example of the two Jackson's clashing. State and local governments have made a pastime out of pointing fingers at each other for the city's woes, from crime to potholes to urban blight.

Mississippi leaders say Jackson is just one city and can't hog resources to fix problems found elsewhere in the state too. Jackson leaders say they need more state support and that Mississippi can't thrive while its largest city suffers.

For Jacksonians, it can feel like Jackson the city versus Jackson the capital.

"I don't see this legislative body as representing me," said Jackson State University Professor D'Arby Orey, referring to the Mississippi Legislature. "I don't really expect it to provide support for Jackson..."

That's usually how the relationship goes. Jackson requests state dollars, Mississippi says it will help, but other parts of the state need those resources too.

"We had 78 different systems throughout the entire state that were having and experiencing challenges," Reeves said at a press conference in March. "This is not an issue that is unique to our capital city."

State politicians also often say city leaders need to take more responsibility.

"The prime mover needs to be the city itself. It's the city of Jackson, Mississippi," Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann told the Mississippi Free Press. "How much money is it going to take, and how do you even pay for it? I haven't seen any of that."

Mississippi often places last on state lists for everything from health to income. Jackson also struggles with the same problems, with 23 percent of the city falling below the poverty line.

Jackson's mayor says the fate of the city and state can't be separated – more support from Mississippi for its largest city would mean growth for the rest of the state.

"Without question it can't change without a significant alteration in the relationship with the city of Jackson" Lumumba says. "Ultimately it is not just a Jackson problem. It is a state of Mississippi problem..."

That article was published in 2021. Just this past month August 2022 Jackson Mississippi went into full crisis as their water became too toxic for anything. And the state - which has all the money and power at that level - still doesn't seem to be doing a damn thing to fix it.

What is happening here is racism: Yes, I am going there.

Jackson is Mississippi's largest population center. You would think, rationally, that as the major center the state legislature and governor's office - which work there! - would care more to fund that metro and keep its infrastructure working well, make its schools better, make sure the workplaces are safe, the homes are well-built, the roads working, the pipes flowing. You want your major city to attract good business, keep families living there, grow and expand into a major metro the way southern cities like Atlanta and Orlando and Charlotte grew.

But the state legislature - through decades of political gerrymandering, open hostility to civil (and voting) rights, and constant corruption of social conservatives (who flipped from Democrats to Republicans during the post-60s realignment) - as noted in Bisaha's article is mostly White at 68 percent, while the city of Jackson is 82 percent Black. This is in a state of Mississippi with 58 percent Whites and 38 percent Blacks. Mississippi has the largest percentage of Black residents among all the states (The District of Columbia is higher but doesn't count as a state (yet, which may also explain why DC statehood remains undone)).

The mostly White Mississippi state legislature doesn't care about taking care of their own state, because God forbid any attempts to improve their education, health care, business startups, and/or overall economy may go to "those people". Jamelle Bouie noted this years ago at Slate:

Driven by its high poverty rate, Mississippi ranks low on health and wellness. It has one the highest rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes in the country, as well as the highest mortality rate for infants and adults. These ills are worst among its black residents: 43.2 percent of Mississippi blacks are afflicted by obesity and its associated problems and 44 percent live at or below the poverty line, compared with a—still high—30.2 percent obesity rate and 16 percent poverty rate for whites...

We know why Mississippi Republicans refuse to work with the ACA: A hyper-ideological, small government conservatism that disdains social programs and public investment. But it’s worth a look at the history behind that conservatism, which lives strongest in Mississippi but exists throughout the Deep South.

Mississippi has poor social outcomes and a threadbare safety net. It also has—and has long had—the largest black population in the country. And it’s where slavery was very lucrative, and Jim Crow most vicious. This is not a coincidence...

Where they existed, public services were sparse and utterly segregated. Anything public had to be kept separate from blacks, or degraded, if that wasn’t possible. To get a sense of the scale of white resistance in Mississippi, consider this: During the civil rights movement, white supremacists built a network of state and private agencies to wreak havoc on black activists with surveillance, economic reprisals, and extreme violence. One of them was the Mississippi Citizens Council, and it, writes historian Joseph Crespino, “[P]oliced a white racial authoritarianism that ran roughshod over the civil and political rights of white and black Mississippians both. Because of the Council’s influence, no place in the United States … came closer to resembling the repressiveness of apartheid South Africa than did Mississippi.”

More than a half-century later, and all of this is dead. But the ideas and culture it built are not. And why would they be? For nearly 100 years, Mississippi was a white supremacist police state. Of course this made a mark on its culture. Of course these ideas of exclusion—and specifically, of racial hostility to outside interference and public goods—are still embedded in the structure of its politics.

Today, Mississippi is politically polarized along racial lines. Whites are Republicans, blacks are Democrats, and the former controls state politics. Public investment isn’t just disdained, it’s attacked as racially suspect. “The Republican Party has never been the food stamp party, or the party of pork until desperation set in with Thad Cochran’s re-election bid,” said state Sen. Angela Hill during the Mississippi Senate Republican primary, in reference to Sen. Cochran’s outreach to black voters. The state is harshly carceral—jailing more people per capita than almost anywhere in the country, the majority of them black—and has a huge number of all-white private schools while the public school system is largely segregated...

Even after the Civil Rights era brought an end to Jim Crow, Mississippi's power structure merely realigned itself to the task of "Well, if we're supposed to make Them equal, let's make it so shitty there's nothing good about it for Them to enjoy." And so the corruption ignores the needs of the state's biggest city, ignores the need to improve the schools to let children - White and Black (and Latino and Creole and Cajun if you got 'em) - get educations that could make them smart enough for good jobs at decent wages, and ignores the reality that poverty hurts a majority of state residents regardless of race while the rich play around at the Biloxi casinos and whatever upper-class country clubs they have upriver. 

Mississippi has been one of the poorest states for generations, and the actions of these grifters - who I'm willing to bet will tell you that "poverty is a character flaw" instead of it being pressed down upon the poor to keep them poor - are keeping Mississippi broken and impoverished for their own greedy ends.

Every elected official past and present who had a hand in this $77 million dollar ripoff should be in handcuffs facing juries, every millionaire who got money they didn't need off these schemes should be in handcuffs facing juries, even Brett Favre - who was $100 million in net wealth already and could have easily used his celebrity to raise more - needs to hang his head in shame in front of a judge reading back to him the charges of stealing from the poor to make the rich richer.

Racism is at the root of a lot of our nation's sins. Don't be at all surprised Greed and Racism go happily hand-in-hand as we beat down the impoverished for our sins (and not theirs).

There Is No Word for a Child's Fear... But There Is a Name For That Fear Now And It Belongs to trump

A few weeks back, trump and his ICE thugs had openly talked about raiding ten major "Sanctuary" cities to "arrest" (actually kidnap) thousands of "undocumented illegals" (anybody with dark skin and no paperwork to prove who they are), but those raids either never happened or fizzled out. The understanding post-panic was that it was trump and the anti-immigrant bastards doing their upmost to scare Hispanic-Americans into fearing the worst.

Well, yesterday, the worst finally happened in Mississippi (via Sarah Fowler at the Clarion Ledger):

A Scott County child started kindergarten Tuesday. Wednesday, while the child was at school, their parent was arrested by federal agents, one of 680 people taken into custody after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted seven raids at food processing plants across Mississippi.

Superintendent Tony McGee said, as of Wednesday afternoon, he knew of at least six families within the district that had a parent caught up in the raids. The students range from kindergarten to high school.

McGee, who met with ICE officials after the raids, said he expected the number to increase. 

The raids happened in small towns near Jackson with a workforce made up largely of Latino immigrants. The towns hit include Bay Springs, Carthage, Canton, Morton, Pelahatchie and Sebastapol.

Reports from the scene of the raids mentioned children waving goodbye to their parents as the adults were taken into custody. It is not publicly known how many children are being impacted by the arrests.

In Scott County, teachers and staff are on standby. To make sure a child doesn't go home to an empty house, bus drivers have been given strict instructions to have a "visual reference to a parent or guardian" before they drop the student off. If there is not a parent home, the child will be taken back to school, McGee said... 

This wasn't an attempt to rein in street gangs. This wasn't a law and order situation.

They arrested families. They attacked people who worked for a living (and likely paid more in taxes than any rich man ever would). They attacked mothers and fathers (on the first day of school in the state, no less. THEY KNEW what they were doing). They abandoned children to empty homes without meals, without supervision, without answers.

The goddamn wingnuts wanted scalps.

The racists wanted to terrify Latinos (and other ethnics).

And now children are scared. And now parents are locked away, terrified about what might happen to their kids. I wouldn't be surprised if ICE personnel started forcing mothers and fathers to sign away their lives on any form shoved in their face if they were promised the safety of their children. Any coerced confession to Gods knows whatever the hell the bullies want out of their victims.

This is a nightmare.

This is exactly what trump and the goddamn Republicans want.

For everyone not White to be afraid.

Face It, RNC: Rubio's Not Going to Happen

Just even saying that Marco Rubio is having a bad night doesn't really highlight how bad it is. If I could demonstrate with an animated cartoon of a wily coyote falling fifty-thousand feet off a cliff with an anvil dropped on his head with an ACME nuclear bomb for good measure, that STILL would not convey how bad a night he's having tonight.

There's two key primaries this Tuesday, one in Michigan and one in Mississippi, and while Trump has handily won both - much to Kasich's chagrin over Michigan who was hoping for a lead-in win before trying to secure his home state of Ohio next week - the big news has been how BADLY Rubio is failing in both.

In Mississippi, Rubio is not even breaking the five percent mark, hovering around 4.7 percent. Granted, we're talking about a state so Conservative that even South Carolina makes jokes about them being too Far Right. Still, there should be respect for the "sensible Establishment Republican" that the party leadership in-state would give Rubio more to work with. There is no damn way Rubio can go on camera tonight and claim even a moral victory here. C'mon. KASICH is in Third Place at double Rubio's count at 8 percent, and Kasich is the freaking token MODERATE - comparatively speaking - in this race.

In Michigan, hmm, let's see... Here, Rubio is STILL in Fourth Place behind Trump, Kasich and then Cruz. And whereas the top three are in double-digits, Rubio's becoming the pinata at 9 percent.

I can't even rightly joke about Rubio being the THIRD PLACE guy tonight. That's how bad he's losing.

This is the moment in the Primary cycle where the really delusional candidate - the one who'd been propped up by party and media elites as "Our Guy" and the one who Can Save Us From Trump, and has kept crowing about "winning" when he keeps showing up as a runner-up with too few delegates to show for it - is going to have to face facts.

Right now, Marco Rubio's not winning in Florida where the polling has Trump in the lead by at LEAST 8 points and in most polls by double-digits. All the momentum is for Trump: all the organization as the anti-Trump choice seems to be in Cruz's favor. Kasich isn't long for this campaign either, and he's got a better chance of winning Ohio - which can keep him afloat for one more week - than Rubio has of winning the Sunshine State.

Right now, Rubio's not winning a damn thing. If he thinks he's going to be in any position to force a contested, brokered GOP convention in Cleveland, he's crazier than I am. I know, being from Florida does explain for a lot of the blinkered thinking in the Rubio camp, but at some point sanity has to prevail.

I doubt Rubio will drop this week, although getting out before he can get humiliated in Florida is the smart play. He needs that vindication, something and anything to be able to come back for the next election cycle to say "I almost did it before, and I can do better this time in 2020."

Rubio's got few options left in a political career. Due to the vagaries of state law, Rubio had to drop out of running for re-election as a Senator this year in order to run for President. His disdain for actual service is going to make it hard to run for another elected office, even for the Governor's seat that's opening up in 2018. Being the Mayor of Loserville is going to stink up his vitae. His only option is to pray for a Republican Presidential win - OH GOD NO - and beg for a Cabinet position (and if it's Trump winning - GOD HELP US NO - a lot of begging in front of television cameras will be the thing).

His next career is likely going to a think tank or lobbyist firm to earn a fat paycheck telling billionaire donors all the fantasy stories of what could have been if only Rubio won it all. It's the least those billionaires can do for Rubio, after all...

And so, here's one more screenshot of the Honest Bumper Sticker I've been so proud of making this election year: