TAKE ME OUT TO THE SECRET PAYOFF

You gotta love this campaigning season. It's more refreshing than a frosty glass if iced tea on a sultry southern afternoon.

As a recent piece on Zerohedge.com so correctly put it: "...a bunch of stuffy establishment conservatives" are secretly gluing their heads together to try to stop the Trumpster. Their MO is really creative, run negative ads.

One is the family who reportedly owns the Chicago Cubs. Wow! Maybe some Trumpster supporters, a group the same WSJ recently referred  to as "lower middle class Republicans" in northern swing states in middle America, might want to think about boycotting the Cubs. But publicly not secretly.

This is how money runs American politics and it's rampant on the left and right. The left has it's Soroses and climate change dandies and the right these people. But you can bet your next raise on the job, if you ever get one, there are plenty more in the secret middle. Years ago something called payola entered the American lexicon. Disc jockeys got paid under the table to play the songs of certain artists.

That's what this is--political payola. It's sneaky, dishonest and it's contemptuous. The same WSJ recently published an article stating reasons why Trump, should he even get the nomination, can't beat Hilary come November. One of the major ones cited--get this--is Trump received less money from Wall Street than Hilary.

But the Journal, probably thinking it strengthened their point, left no room for guesstimating. They published frank, hardcore numbers. Dollar signs. What Hilary accepted 90 percent of America would love to have to retire in sailboat-Caribbean island luxury on. Trump's take wouldn't cover the cost of a five-day stay in New York City.

 Both sides routinely bus in paid supporters to buttress crowd size to sway the public during these jokes called presidential debates. And MSM is an implicit participator in the charades. A Trump versus Hilary runoff, almost assured to be a vitriolic one, would conjure up more MSM advertising revenue than their executives, on or off their staples of anti-anxiolytics, could ever dream up. They're probably counting their bonuses right now. Make the mistake of assuming that MSM has even a half-butt cheek of objectivity in these messes and you will live to rue the day.

Here's quote about the Cubs owners and more from the piece.
Earlier this month in “GOP Leaders, Tech Execs Plot Against Trump At Secret NeoCon Island Meeting,” we discussed the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum, an event held on Sea Island, Georgia.

It’s a notoriously secretive affair and is off limits to the press. “We can’t even get a snow update,” Bloombergjoked last year.

Among those who have contributed: Warren Stephens and his brother, Jackson "Steve" Stephens Jr., Paul Singer, and the Ricketts family. Here’s more:

Warren Stephens and his brother, Jackson "Steve" Stephens Jr., gave a total of $3.5 million last month to two of these groups, according to filings Sunday with the Federal Elections Commission, on top of $500,000 last year.

The filings show only one other family, the Ricketts clan of Omaha, Nebraska, that's a bigger funder of the stop-Trump campaign, having given $5 million since January. Other backers of the effort revealed in the filings were Paul Singer, the New York hedge-fund manager, who gave $1 million; and William Oberndorf, a San Francisco investor, who gave $500,000.

During the current race, Stephens has handed out total of $300,000 to super-PACs supporting Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Chris Christie, all of whom have since dropped out.

Most of the Stephens' giving in recent years has been to a super-PAC run by Club for Growth, a powerful conservative group that pushes for limited government and lower taxes, and which has been one of the biggest spenders against Trump.

None of this is lost on Trump. He has responded with his own twitter to the Ricketts.

"Sometimes I just can't comment other than, I have an active family who cares deeply about our country," Pete Ricketts said in February. "My family is very politically active on both sides of the aisle and so we have folks that get involved in different things. I'm not involved with what everyone's doing."

"Our Principles PAC, a group set up to highlight Mr. Trump’s past liberal positions, took in $4.8 million last month, with a roster of donors that shows it has significantly expanded beyond the Ricketts family, which provided the group’s early funding," The New York Times wrote late Sunday night in a piece that carries the snarky title "Donald Trump Is Finally Uniting Top Republican Donors." Here's a bit more color from The Times:

Mr. Stephens and his brother also gave $2.5 million last month to a super PAC connected to the Club for Growth, a free-market activist group that was one of the first outside organizations to take on Mr. Trump. All told, the group, whose members met last week to discuss how to escalate their efforts against Mr. Trump, raised $4 million in February, three times as much as it had raised any other month this election cycle.

Richard Uihlein, an Illinois shipping-supplies manufacturer and conservative activist, who backed Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign last year, gave the Club for Growth $500,000. Several other donors with ties to Republican also-rans gave large contributions as well, including Richard Gaby, who gave $50,000 to a super PAC backing former Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, and Robert Arnott, a California-based investor who has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into groups backing Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.

Its a ballgame alright, but it ain't about peanuts and crackerjacks. It's about keeping you and me in our places and ditto for the status quo.