Boone County to reject bids, revise animal-control facility plans - News - Rockford Register Star - Rockford, IL

By Ben Stanley
Rockford Register Star

Posted Jul. 7, 2015 at 9:16 PM

BELVIDERE — Boone County finally has money to replace its antiquated animal-control center, which for years has relied on patch repairs to address a litany of sanitation and infestation problems, but construction will be delayed months as a county committee searches for ways to shave costs.

Two weeks ago, the Boone County Roads and Capital Improvements Committee received bids from three local contractors for the project. Each bid exceeded the county's $800,000 budget — funded entirely through a small property tax increase voters approved in November — by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The bids came as a surprise to committee members, who were given a cost estimate of roughly $800,000 by architect Mark Schmidt in July 2014. Schmidt's estimate influenced the county board's decision to seek that amount in the tax-hike referendum, but several changes were made to building plans before bids were opened in June.

At a special meeting on June 22, the committee voted to recommend the county board accept the low bid from Larson & Larson Builders on the condition that the design could be tweaked to keep costs within budget. However, the committee voted unanimously tonight  to reverse its recommendation after Boone County State's Attorney Michelle Courier warned the county board that making nearly $300,000 in alterations to the building's design after the bid has been accepted could undermine a state statute that regulates the competitive bidding process for county projects.

"The architect has indicated that in order to reduce the cost, he will need to redraw his plans, the same plans on which the project was bid upon," Courier wrote in a letter to the board. "This is a material change from the original project. ... giving the current lowest responsible bidder an unfair advantage."

The county board is expected to reject all three bids at a meeting on July 15. Now the committee must go back to the drawing board and work with Schmidt to draft a much simpler and cheaper design, then re-open bids to local contractors.

"You get so much money to work with, you want to get the best building you can," Schmidt said. "Every time you go to one committee, one group wants one feature, another group wants other bells and whistles and pretty soon it gets bigger ... and then you've got to start shrinking it again. The main goal is, what can we do to get the building built?"

Schmidt estimated late August is the earliest that revised building plans could be released to bidders.

Page 2 of 2 - "I know it's going to get done," Boone County Animal Services Operations Supervisor Roger Tresemer said after the meeting. "It's just, I don't want it ... to get to the point where the integrity of the building is not much different than what we have now." 

Above is from:  Boone County to reject bids, revise animal-control facility plans - News - Rockford Register Star - Rockford, IL

How Dick Portillo built a hot dog stand into an empire - DailyHerald.com

Anna Marie Kukec

Dick Portillo was facing a lonely Thanksgiving as a U.S. Marine in 1957.

At 17, the Chicagoan had gone through boot camp, learned to march and slept in a Quonset hut in California. Other new recruits had already left with invitations from the officers to enjoy a holiday meal. But young Portillo was somehow forgotten and was about to go to the mess hall.

Portillo's milestones and facts

Company: Portillo's and Barnelli's Italian food.
Founded: 1963 by Dick Portillo
Headquarters: Oak Brook
Business: Fast casual restaurants, catering and shipping
Locations: 39 Portillo's in Illinois, Indiana, Arizona and California. Portillo's also planned for Homewood, Gurnee, and Tampa, Fla. Barnelli's is inside nine of the Illinois Portillo restaurants.
Owners: Boston-based Berkshire Partners since 2014
Employees: 4,000
Website: www.portillos.com
Other businesses: Dick Portillo also founded Honey-Jam Cafe in Downers Grove, Batavia and Bolingbrook, and Luigi's in Naperville, which were sold. He also owned Key Wester fish and pasta restaurant, which closed in 2011.
Portillo's milestones
1963: The Dog House opens in a trailer on North Avenue in Villa Park by owner and founder Dick Portillo.
1967: The trailer gets a new look, is renamed Portillo's and moves to a new building.
1983: Portillo's gets its first drive-through in Downers Grove.
1993: The Barnelli's Pasta Bowl is introduced.
1994: Portillo's opens at Clark and Ontario streets in Chicago. Many items inside are purchased from the original Chicago Stadium, including the original Chicago Blackhawks 1938 Stanley Cup banner.
1999: Portillo's Home Kitchen Catering begins.
2000: Portillo's starts nationwide shipping to all 50 states.
2005: Restaurant opens in Buena Park and Moreno Valley, California. 2006: Portillo's opens in Merrillville, Indiana.
2013: Restaurant opens in Scottsdale and Tempe, Arizona.
2014: Dick Portillo sells the restaurant group to Boston-based Berkshire Partners.
2015: Portillo remains as a consultant and manages the real estate for the restaurants. More restaurants planned for Tampa, Florida, and Gurnee.

Then 1st Lt. Barney Brause walked in and ordered Portillo to come with him. Brause took Portillo to his home to meet his family and enjoy a home-cooked meal. "They treated me like a rock star," Portillo said.

The memory of that holiday meal and the officer's kindness stayed with Portillo for years. The experience influenced how Portillo treated his own employees, used a Marine's discipline to pursue his dream and, ultimately, built the Portillo Restaurant Group, headquartered in Oak Brook.

"I learned a lot from him on how to treat people," Portillo said of Brause. "He was a tough son-of-a-gun, but he still treated people well. I watched him a lot after that and saw how he spent a lot of time in training. But if you screwed up, you were in big trouble. Yet, his company would jump off a roof for this man."

That's how Portillo wanted to lead his business, which he sold last year for reportedly $1 billion to Boston-based Berkshire Partners. The company has been renamed Portillo's Hot Dogs LLC and has 39 locations, including nine Barnelli's restaurants, in Illinois, Indiana, California, Arizona and, soon, Florida.

Dick Portillo now has an office in Oakbrook Terrace where he manages his own real estate investments, including the land under many Portillo's, Barnelli's, Honey-Jam Cafe and Luigi's restaurants. He leases the land back to the new owners of those brand names.

He also has invested in the RPM Restaurant opening later this year in Washington, D.C., several apartment buildings, and shopping centers in Bolingbrook, Oswego, Elgin and Indianapolis.

All of this has helped to make a comfortable life for himself, his wife, Sharon, and their three sons, Michael, Joseph and Tony. He has a home in Oak Brook and another in Naples, Florida. He has a Westport yacht that he takes on long excursions to trace historical routes, including those of Christopher Columbus. At 75, Portillo wants to spend more time with his family and see his namesake restaurant chain expand to all 50 states. He didn't have the resources to do that expansion, and instead, passed the dream onto Berkshire Partners, which is unaffiliated with Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.

"We had to know enough about the restaurant business to know how incredibly important this is," said Michael A. Miles Jr., Berkshire Partners advisory director.

Berkshire Partners has ramped up the expansion slowly, "so it doesn't threaten the quality, delivery and the service," Miles said.

Portillo's restaurants recently opened in Rockford and Homewood, while others are planned for Tampa, Florida, and Gurnee this year. Five more are set for next year.

​"This has been a very emotional thing for me," Portillo said of the sale.

Portillo said he received numerous calls from potential buyers over the years. But he felt many just wanted the name, or would change the business radically, or even expand it too quickly. He didn't build the business for more than 50 years to have someone ruin it.

"I had to decide who would take care of my baby," Portillo said.

Blue-collar roots

Dick Portillo was born and raised in Chicago, first living on West Van Buren and then at a row house on Mohawk Street at the Mother Cabrini Housing Project, later called Cabrini-Green Homes. His father, Frank, worked for the railroad, sold insurance and later gave driver's license tests. His mother, Bea, was a stay-at-home mom, then worked in an office. Dick's brother, also named Frank, was president of Brown's Chicken & Pasta Inc., which was not associated with Portillo Restaurant Group. Their sister, Carmen, has died.

As a strong young man, Portillo did mostly blue-collar jobs -- drove a truck, factory work, whatever he could find. He married his high-school sweetheart, Sharon, and they moved to Villa Park.

He looked around the suburb and felt it had a lot of nice homes, but there were no places to buy a hot dog.

"I couldn't figure out why there wasn't a good, quick place to get a hot dog," Portillo said.

He also knew he couldn't do manual labor forever, and with a family, he wanted to settle into a good job for the long haul. That's when he came up with a plan to open his own hot dog stand.

There was a problem: Portillo didn't know how to cook. But that didn't stop him.

At first, his wife "hit the ceiling." She wanted their $1,100 savings used as a down payment on a house, not a hot dog stand. She was so upset, she went to her mother and told her about Portillo's plan.

"Her mother said, 'Sit down. He's working his behind off. At least he has ambition. You should back him up,'" Portillo recalled.

Sharon followed the advice and the couple never looked back.

In 1963, Portillo set up a small trailer, called The Dog House, on North Avenue in Villa Park. It didn't have running water, so he ran a garden hose from another building. He bought his hot dogs and condiments from the local National Tea grocery store. But the customers weren't flocking to his window. He was failing.

While Sharon worked to keep the business going, Dick took their two young children to visit other local hot dog stands and restaurants. He wanted to know where they bought their hot dogs, how they steamed their buns and, most of all, how they lured back customers.

At one restaurant, Portillo purposely walked into the "employees only" door and saw cases of products with distributor names. He quickly jotted down those names before a worker noticed he didn't belong there. Portillo jokingly said he was looking for the bathroom and left.

"That's how I learned," he said. "Everything I did was because I learned about it from somewhere else."

He went to another restaurant and leaned over the counter to see how they steamed their buns or asked how hot the water had to be.

"That's how bad I was, I would try to steam the buns and they would become hard as rocks," Portillo said.

Learning curve

While he admits a fear and panic of losing everything could have stopped him cold, he kept going. He wanted to learn more. He walked into more restaurant storage rooms and jotted notes with a pen and paper until someone discovered him or told him to "jump in the lake" when he asked questions, he said.

His hot dog stand "started to grow, and the more knowledge that we got, the better it became," Portillo said.

He was so eager to please people, he sometimes sacrificed his own health. One day he became so sick with the flu that he passed out in the trailer. A concerned customer leaned in and thought Portillo had been robbed and was dead on the floor.

Another time, he ran to a customer's car to get an order -- two hot dogs, two fries and two root beers. The customer gave him $20 and needed change. But Dick tripped, fell and everything scattered. He quickly got up and got the change for the customer. When he returned to the trailer, he realized his knees were badly cut.

Still, he didn't close. He didn't go to the emergency room. He kept working. Running out to that car actually led him to create his first drive-through.

"I just wanted to please people so bad," he said.

As his confidence grew, so did his business. He started thinking about opening three or four more places. But he was managing everything by himself and needed to hire some supervisors. That's when he started to build the organization.

"I spent an enormous amount of time training them and the more I did that, the easier it got," he said.

Expansion, payback

As he expanded the Portillo's brand, he created Barnelli's and Luigi's, and Key Wester in Naperville. But with expansion came some hard lessons. Key Wester was built in 1996 on a concept Portillo developed from his travels through Key West, Florida. But Key Wester was physically too big and overhead costs ballooned. Fish became too expensive. So he closed Key Wester in 2011.

But it didn't stop his dream to continue building the company.

At his new California Portillo's restaurant, a Marine officer asked Portillo to provide a discount for meals served to those from the Wounded Warrior Battalion at Camp Pendleton. Portillo said instead of a discount, he would provide them with free meals -- with a string attached.

Portillo, a former Marine lance corporal, wanted to see his old barracks. Arrangements were made and a sergeant accompanied Portillo to his former barracks. But a security guard stopped them. They were told it was a restricted area and Portillo needed special clearance. After the men talked further, the guard went inside. When Portillo was escorted in, all the Marines stood and snapped to attention.

Surprised, Portillo told them, "At ease."

About five years ago, Portillo wondered what became of 1st Lt. Barney Brause, who was so kind to him during that first holiday meal away from home about 50 years ago.

Portillo and a staffer tracked down Brause and learned he served two tours of Vietnam, retired as a full colonel and lived with his wife in California. Portillo got in touch with Brause and offered the retired officer and his wife an all-paid trip to the Solomon Islands. They met in Fiji and Portillo escorted them on a private boat with a crew.

"When someone is kind to you, it sticks in your mind," Portillo said. "You learn certain things in life, and I learned a lot from him

Above from:  How Dick Portillo built a hot dog stand into an empire - DailyHerald.com

Ending Greece’s Bleeding - The New York Times

Paul Krugman 

Europe dodged a bullet on Sunday. Confounding many predictions, Greek voters strongly supported their government’s rejection of creditor demands. And even the most ardent supporters of European union should be breathing a sigh of relief.

Of course, that’s not the way the creditors would have you see it. Their story, echoed by many in the business press, is that the failure of their attempt to bully Greece into acquiescence was a triumph of irrationality and irresponsibility over sound technocratic advice.

But the campaign of bullying — the attempt to terrify Greeks by cutting off bank financing and threatening general chaos, all with the almost open goal of pushing the current leftist government out of office — was a shameful moment in a Europe that claims to believe in democratic principles. It would have set a terrible precedent if that campaign had succeeded, even if the creditors were making sense.

What’s more, they weren’t. The truth is that Europe’s self-styled technocrats are like medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more bleeding. A “yes” vote in Greece would have condemned the country to years more of suffering under policies that haven’t worked and in fact, given the arithmetic, can’t work: austerity probably shrinks the economy faster than it reduces debt, so that all the suffering serves no purpose. The landslide victory of the “no” side offers at least a chance for an escape from this trap.

But how can such an escape be managed? Is there any way for Greece to remain in the euro? And is this desirable in any case?

The most immediate question involves Greek banks. In advance of the referendum, the European Central Bank cut off their access to additional funds, helping to precipitate panic and force the government to impose a bank holiday and capital controls. The central bank now faces an awkward choice: if it resumes normal financing it will as much as admit that the previous freeze was political, but if it doesn’t it will effectively force Greece into introducing a new currency.

Specifically, if the money doesn’t start flowing from Frankfurt (the headquarters of the central bank), Greece will have no choice but to start paying wages and pensions with i.o.u.s, which will de facto be a parallel currency — and which might soon turn into the new drachma.

Suppose, on the other hand, that the central bank does resume normal lending, and the banking crisis eases. That still leaves the question of how to restore economic growth.

In the failed negotiations that led up to Sunday’s referendum, the central sticking point was Greece’s demand for permanent debt relief, to remove the cloud hanging over its economy. The troika — the institutions representing creditor interests — refused, even though we now know that one member of the troika, the International Monetary Fund, had concluded independently that Greece’s debt cannot be paid. But will they reconsider now that the attempt to drive the governing leftist coalition from office has failed?

I have no idea — and in any case there is now a strong argument that Greek exit from the euro is the best of bad options.

 

Imagine, for a moment, that Greece had never adopted the euro, that it had merely fixed the value of the drachma in terms of euros. What would basic economic analysis say it should do now? The answer, overwhelmingly, would be that it should devalue — let the drachma’s value drop, both to encourage exports and to break out of the cycle of deflation.

 

Of course, Greece no longer has its own currency, and many analysts used to claim that adopting the euro was an irreversible move — after all, any hint of euro exit would set off devastating bank runs and a financial crisis. But at this point that financial crisis has already happened, so that the biggest costs of euro exit have been paid. Why, then, not go for the benefits?

Would Greek exit from the euro work as well as Iceland’s highly successful devaluation in 2008-09, or Argentina’s abandonment of its one-peso-one-dollar policy in 2001-02? Maybe not — but consider the alternatives. Unless Greece receives really major debt relief, and possibly even then, leaving the euro offers the only plausible escape route from its endless economic nightmare.

And let’s be clear: if Greece ends up leaving the euro, it won’t mean that the Greeks are bad Europeans. Greece’s debt problem reflected irresponsible lending as well as irresponsible borrowing, and in any case the Greeks have paid for their government’s sins many times over. If they can’t make a go of Europe’s common currency, it’s because that common currency offers no respite for countries in trouble. The important thing now is to do whatever it takes to end the bleeding.

ABOVE IS FROM:  Ending Greece’s Bleeding - The New York Times

East St. Louis paid big legal fees to state senator's firm - News - The State Journal-Register - Springfield, IL

 

Posted Jul. 4, 2015 at 5:01 PM

EAST ST. LOUIS — A published report says cash-strapped East St. Louis paid state Sen. James Clayborne's law firm more than $775,000 in its first year as the city's corporate counsel.

The Belleville News-Democrat reported in a story published Saturday that it's more than twice the amount nearby Belleville paid for similar legal services.

The newspaper cites treasurers' reports in its story.

Clayborne is a Belleville Democrat. He did not respond to the newspaper's request for comment.

He's a founding partner at Clayborne, Sabo and Wagner in Belleville.

Some East. St. Louis officials say the fees paid for legal fees are a concern. The total for East St. Louis in 2014 was $902,450, compared with Belleville's $461,985.

Questions about the fees come as East St. Louis' finances are already under scrutiny

East St. Louis paid big legal fees to state senator's firm - News - The State Journal-Register - Springfield, IL

Letter: Cheers to Supreme Court, boos to Rauner's real agenda - Quad-Cities Online: Letters

Posted: Saturday, July 4, 2015 11:00 pm

Letter: Cheers to Supreme Court, boos to Rauner's real agenda

If you were to listen to the rantings of some people, you would think that the Supreme Court overthrew the government of the United States. One letter writer went so far as to say that it was our country's darkest hour.

Really, get a grip. If our county's darkest hour was a week that gave every single person in the Ccountry access to health care and anyone the right to marry, then this is one fantastic country. No lives are lost, no one is hurt, and in fact lives will probably be saved due to everyone now having access to health care and all those on the right can do is complain.

 

Also it is getting tiring listening to those on the right try to paint Gov. Bruce Rauner as being the adult in the room during the ongoing budget negotiations.

The governor's budget was further out of whack than the one he was presented with. The issues that he is holding firm on have nothing to do with the budget process but are only intended to gut collective bargaining.

To all of you slow learners out there, these issues pertaining to collective bargaining and prevailing wage are subject to legislation, not the budget process.

The truth is plain and simple, the governor has no social conscience and is willing to inflict collateral damage on the states most vulnerable in order to serve the interests of his wealthy friends and destroy collective bargaining in the State of Illinois.

Gregg Johnson,

East Moline

Letter: Cheers to Supreme Court, boos to Rauner's real agenda - Quad-Cities Online: Letters

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner vetoes lawmakers' pay raise - Blogs On Politics - Crain's Chicago Business

 

With no agreement near on a new state budget, Gov. Bruce Rauner today sent lawmakers an unmistakable message: He vetoed their pay raise.

Rauner used his amendatory veto to eliminate from a budget implementation bill the money needed to pay for annual cost-of-living raises for legislative salaries and per diem expenses that automatically are adjusted up with inflation.

Unless overridden, the action will cost every legislator on both sides of the aisle $1,356 to $1,905 in pay for fiscal 2016.

The amendatory veto also applies to elected statewide executive officials, agency directors and other top state personnel. But I guarantee you it's the message to lawmakers that will make the news.

Rauner put a little bit of extra oomph in his action.

"The state is suffering from a debt burden well in excess of $100 billion. Instead of acknowledging this reality, the General Assembly passed an unbalanced and unconstitutional budget for fiscal year 2016," he said in his veto message.

"A balanced budget requires shared sacrifices. My administration has reduced state personnel costs among agencies under my jurisdiction by $4 million. . . . Under these circumstances, the state cannot afford to give legislators a raise."

Besides, he added, with a little bit of spit that might not go over well with GOP lawmakers either, "Illinois legislators are already among the highest paid in the United States, earning $68,000 to $95,000 per year for part-time service."

Somehow, I think we'll be hearing more about this. If you'll recall, former Gov. Pat Quinn a few years ago tried to put a brick on legislative paychecks, but his action was overruled in court.

Update — Illinois Senate GOP Leader Christine Radogno is being a loyal lady about the veto, though I suspect she didn't appreciate the suggestion that she's overpaid.

"It is a fact: Illinois lawmakers are among the highest-paid in the nation,” she told me in a phone interview. "And I'm not sure that, in this budget environment, any raises are appropriate."

What is regrettable, she added, is what majority Democrats have done. "A person looking at this situation from outside would scratch their head that the Democrats passed this (unbalanced) budget."

So there

Above is from:  Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner vetoes lawmakers' pay raise - Blogs On Politics - Crain's Chicago Business

Why Bernie Sanders Will Become the Democratic Nominee and Defeat Any Republican in 2016 | H. A. Goodman

Bernie Sanders is down by just 8 points in New Hampshire and has gained tremendous momentum in Iowa. If the Vermont senator wins both the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, the odds will favor him getting the Democratic nomination. What was once thought of as a long shot is becoming a reality, primarily because Bernie Sanders has energized his base while Hillary Clinton has been forced to defend against email and foreign donor scandals. However, this isn't the first time in recent history that a challenger to Clinton was once thought of as a long shot.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton finished third in Iowabehind Obama and John Edwards and eventually lost the Democratic nomination to the first African-American elected as president. This eventuality was once described as "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen" by Bill Clinton, when the former president was asked about Obama's record and chances of winning the presidency. Even Hillary Clinton's "It's 3:00 am" advertisement, described by Harvard Professor of Sociology Orlando Patterson as having a "racist sub-message," couldn't prevent history from taking place and a more progressive electorate from deciding their own destiny at the ballot box.

Therefore, if you're a person who says, "I'd vote for Bernie Sanders, but he can't win," then compare the world in 2015 to another time period in American politics. Imagine in 1972, shortly after Nixon won reelection in a legendary landslide, that in 2015 The New York Times would read, Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide. Imagine just a decade ago, what you'd think about Strom Thurmond's son calling for the removal of the Confederate flag, or the Supreme Court ruling favorably on a national healthcare program. Even before Caitlyn Jenner, transgender Navy Seal Kristin Beck decided to run for Congress and Barney Frank came out publicly in 1987. Therefore, Bernie Sanders isn't George McGovern and this isn't 1972; Americans are willing to vote for any candidate they feel will make a positive change.

Dwindling symbols of the past and social advancements aren't the only hallmarks of this new era in American politics. In addition to President Obama being our first African-American president, William H. Frey of Brookings published a report titled Minority Turnout Determined the 2012 Election, highlighting profound demographic changes in the electorate:

What this tells me is that turnout will be less important for Democratic victory as demography changes in their favor, though they must maintain their strong voting margins among blacks, Hispanics and Asians. For Republicans, the latter projections show that they cannot count primarily on white support to take the White House. Even assuming high 2004 turnout rates and 2012 Republican voting margins for whites, they cannot win unless they also peel off more votes among minorities. In this regard, demography indeed becomes destiny.

Therefore, even if minorities vote at the same rate for any Democratic nominee, including Bernie Sanders, Republicans will still have an uphill battle for the White House in 2016.

He voted against the Iraq War, championed gay rights and other issues before they were popular, and works against unfair trade deals and Wall Street greed, so there's no denying the appeal of Vermont's senator to millions of voters. As for his appeal to minority voters, Professor Cornell West posted a message on Facebook stating, "Senator Bernie Sanders is one of the few elected officials who is fundamentally devoted to dealing with the plight of poor & working people." In contrast, Twitter grilled Hillary Clinton for waiting close to three weeks to address Ferguson, and Ebony published a piece titled, Is Hillary 'Ready' for Black Voters?.

As for the Electoral College and Bernie Sanders, a closer look at the numbers and the electoral map shows that Vermont's senator is indeed a pragmatic choice (no email scandals, voted consistently on progressive issues before they were popular, energized a base of Democratic supporters) for Democratic nominee. Also, Sanders has a better chance than Hillary of defeating Jeb Bush or any other GOP challenger. According to a POLITICO piece titled The 2016 Results We Can Already Predict, Democrats across the nation simply have to vote in a similar manner to 2012 for Sanders to win:

That leaves just seven super-swingy states: Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia, all of which backed Bush and Obama twice each, and Iowa and New Hampshire, which have voted Democratic in three of the last four elections.

For the Democrats, a victory in 2016 entails zero expansion of the blue map, merely the limiting of blue-to-red transformations. Assuming the lean, likely, and safe Democratic states remain loyal to the party, the nominee need only win 23 of the 85 toss-up electoral votes. And if a lean Democratic state such as Wisconsin turns red, it is relatively easy to replace those votes with one or two toss-ups.

On the other hand, Republicans must hold all their usual states plus find a way to stitch together an additional 64 electoral votes, or 79 if they can't hold North Carolina. To do this, the GOP candidate will have to come close to sweeping the toss-ups under most scenarios--a difficult task...

What gives Hillary Clinton a better chance of winning states like Ohio (Brookings has a study titled Did Manufacturing Job Losses Hold the Midwest Back) than Bernie Sanders? Unlike Sanders, Hillary was for the TPP and voters weary of China and Vietnam taking jobs away from Americans will think twice about Hillary Clinton.

Also, communities around the country hit by the repercussions of American counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where close to 7,000 Americans died, over 50,000 wounded in combat, and over 900,000 injured, will think twice about voting for Hillary Clinton after her Iraq War vote. Bernie Sanders, however, was on the right side of history with Iraq and Afghanistan, he's always against horrible trade agreements, supported gay marriage and marijuana legalization (Hillary was against even the decriminalization of marijuana not long ago) and championed a range of other issues.

In other words, the electoral map shows that Bernie Sanders is not only a realistic candidate for president, but his record on a number of issues speaks to a wide range of voters. If Democrats simply vote based on their value system (considering demographic shifts favor Democrats), Bernie Sanders can easily win the presidency. If they nominate Hillary Clinton out of despair, thinking this is still 1999, then email scandals and an Iraq War vote could mitigate any advantages a Democratic challenger has over Jeb Bush or another Republican.

These aren't the days where Karl Rove can tap into a well of homophobia (Hillary was also against gay marriage at the time, stating "I don't support gay marriages, but I do support extending benefits to couples...") and gain millions of GOP votes by pushing for an amendment banning gay marriage. While "Moral Values" once carried GOP candidates into the White House, our outlook on social issues has changed as a nation. Americans care more about wealth inequality nowadays than marching with Mike Huckabee against the recent Supreme Court decision on gay marriage.

Ultimately, the only way for the GOP to win the White House in 2016 would be to campaign against a Democratic candidate who most resembles the Republican platforms on Wall Street, war, trade, and other issues. Hillary Clinton voted for Iraq, she's amassed $328,759,064 over the years (three of her top five donors are Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan), and she was against gay marriage up until recently. Bernie Sanders is actually the only hope Democrats have of winning the White House without a controversial email showing up days before people line up at the voting booths. While the GOP is ready for Hillary Clinton, Sanders represents a real challenge to union busting Scott Walker and Jeb Bush's support for the Iraq War. In today's political environment, Hillary Clinton winning the presidency is the "fairy tale," while Senator Bernie Sanders is the most realistic choice for president in 2016.

Why Bernie Sanders Will Become the Democratic Nominee and Defeat Any Republican in 2016 | H. A. Goodman