On Friday afternoon, just blocks from Chicago’s City Hall, two students–Robert Boston and Monterio Williams–were shot to death on a crowded street outside Innovation High School. It was like a scene from the old Untouchables television show.
Yesterday on X, Chicago Progressive Staffers, which describes itself as a “coalition of progressive staffers from the Mayors [sic] Office and [the] City Council, posted this troubling message. “WOW! Thousands of @ChiPubSchools students are organizing a walk out on Tuesday in support of @AldermanLaSpata & @RossanaFor33’s Ceasefire resolution that’s being voted on Wednesday Jan 31. The youth will always lead us.”
Yes, “The youth will always lead us.” That’s the messaging that was drilled into Mrs. Marathon Pundit when she was a Young Pioneer in the Soviet Union.
Like Washington DC, Chicago is built on onetime swamp land. Think of the Chicago Progressive Staffers as part of the city’s Deep State. As for the two alderpersons mentioned in that X post–Daniel LaSpata and Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez–the sponsors of the Gaza ceasefire resolution, both are members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Leftists nationwide, nearly to a person, are calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war because Hamas, which attacked the Jewish state on October 7, is losing.
And Gaza ceasefire resolution–or no ceasefire resolution–however Chicago’s City Council votes won’t make a difference. Just as the countless resolutions approved by the City Council condemning communism in Eastern Europe had no effect on America winning the Cold War.
Tuesday of course is a school day in Chicago, so essentially, Chicago Progressive Staffers, this anonymous group of city hall leftists, is cheering on students cutting class.
On the flipside, it’s easy to say that Chicago Public Schools students who play hooky on Tuesday won’t miss much. Not even one-quarter of them are proficient in reading or math at grade level. And nearly half of CPS students missed 18 days of class during the 2021-22 school year.
So, what’s one more day away from school, right?
Chicago might be a better place if the Chicago City Council plays hooky–indefinitely. Last month, Edward Burke, who was a Chicago alderperson for a record 54 years, was convicted on corruption charges. In the last five decades, 38 members of the Chicago City Council have been found guilty of federal crimes, which averages to one aldercritter heading to the House of Many Doors every 16 months.
Perhaps Hamas might reply, “Thanks, but no thanks” if the Chicago City Council’s Gaza ceasefire resolution passes. Hamas deservedly already has a very bad reputation.
But as bad as the Chicago Public Schools system is, its students belong in school on Tuesday. And the Chicago City Council needs work on improving life in the city.
You might recall that when ranking Donald Trump as the 4th best president of all time it was really a question of him vs Teddy Roosevelt who I consider Trump the most like in terms of temperament and effectiveness. TR also had a reputation for physical fitness and mental acuity which Trump also processes and was loved by the common people while hated by many of the elites.
That was best illustrated to me on a trip to Lancaster County PA a few years back for the a Catholic Marketing Network event when a waitress was simply enthralled by the idea that I had met Trump and he had publicly complemented me on my reporting (you’d be surprised at how many doors that closed for me over the years, I sure was at the time.) Given Trump’s success as president that type of admiration is not odd and even justified.
What I object to and still object to has been the almost messianic worship of Trump to the point where if you merely treat him as an effective ex-president or as a candidate to consider for re-election you are not considered sufficiently worthy.. I suspect this is one of the reasons why my friend that I wrote about this week has said in no uncertain terms that however bad Biden is he will not be voting Trump. (I strongly disagree with his position). Some of his followers take this to absurd lengths and frankly it’s reached the point were it’s a violation of the 1st commandment.
That being said let’s cut to the chase. I submit and suggest that a lot of people would not be treating Donald J. Trump as their messiah or a messiah and an object of worship if the left in general and the Biden Justice Department and the various deep blue states did not insist on treating some of his supporters like the early Christian martyrs and trying to publicly crucifying Trump himself for our sin of supporting him and electing him in 2016.
The treatment of Donald Trump has been beyond anything I’ve seen in my lifetime and the irrational hatred of him and the bending of judicial rules and changing of laws in an attempt to destroy him is a disgrace to the republic. The folks at flopping Aces who are declaring the Trump-Carrol case “The biggest miscarriage of Justice in Modern American History” are not far off. I’m rather sure if they could get away with killing him they would. Seriously we’ve reach the point were someone protesting his innocence is considered defamation? Please.
People see how Trump is being treated for his actions which have been in support of the American People and they react viscerally. If Trump was treated like the normal president that he governed as none of this would be the case and frankly if the last election had not been stolen we would be seeing the back of him at the end of this year and those who hate him would be done with him.
That is the source of the over the top Trump worship I see. I understand the source of it. Trump could have led an easy and comfortable life but he decided to fight because he loves America. He came at the right time at the right place to make a difference and the country should be grateful for it, but for me that doesn’t include taking a knee.
As I’ve already noted I’ll be happy to vote for Trump in the general and with DeSantis out will vote for him in the primary as he was my 2nd choice but if anyone expects anything beyond that let me repeat what I I already have already said to those who feel I am not sufficiently adoring of him: “I’m voting for a President, I already have a God.”
I have a lot of little things to say but not enough for an under the Fedora Day so today we’re going to give Don Surber the sincerest from of flattery and imitate his Saturday Link Fest with a few other thoughts:
First at Stacy McCain’s site we have a story about how thanks to a family squabble an iconic business will close:
The litigation later forced the family to change the name of its original location to Tony and Nick’s Steaks in 2022. Anthony Jr.’s two sons — Anthony III and Michael, who were also employed at the sandwich empire — followed him out the door, taking copies of the company’s financial records with them and turned them over to federal investigators. Those documents revealed that Lucidonio Sr. and Nicholas Lucidonio hid the success of their business from tax collectors by keeping two sets of books almost from the day the sandwich shop opened.
While one might have an opinion of members of an Italian (Sicilian?) family turning in another member of their family to the feds may I humbly point out that if they weren’t cooking the books it wouldn’t be an issue.
As my Sicilian parents who owned business taught me young, “Always pay the government first because they’re the only ones who can take from you before you go to court.”
2nd: Was at the bank today figured it would be an easy time since I needed to convert three $20 bills into two 10’s six 5’s and ten ones so I can make change if people at St Cecilia’s church want to buy tickets to the WQPH 89.3 FM Shrove Tuesday Brunch on the 13th (Details here). I figured it would take about 30 seconds invoving:
Opening the draw
Counting the bills
Giving them to me
Not anymore. Now a machine is involved so instead the teller has to
Take the last four of my social
Feeding my bills into the reader
Do tons of typing into the computer
Wait for the machine to spit out the bills when the typing is done
Print a receipt for the bills
Give me the bills and receipt
Machines don’t make everything easier
3rd: Over at Pirates Cove Mr. Teach notices climate folks trying to link “climate change” to ancient plagues. to wit:
While modern medicine has advanced considerably since the time of the Romans, this data offers insights into how diseases might change in our own changing climate. “Within the scope of the current climate change it is of major importance to understand the links between climate and human health and we unfortunately do not understand these links as well as we would like,” Zonneveld said. “Investigating the resilience of ancient societies to past climate change and relationships between past climate change and the occurrence of infectious disease might give us better insight into these relationships and the climate change induced challenges we are facing today.
One would have thought that an empire that could conquer so much of the known world, invent formalized sanitation, arches, pioneered early medical tools, concrete, the first bound book, and so much more, would have known not to use fossil fuels, hair dryers, ice makers, and plastics
It never ceases to amaze me that tens of millions have absolute faith in the never ending predictions of doom to come in 30 years when my own local forecast for Sunday has changed three times in the last 72 hours.
4th: I’m told the Doctor that I’ve had for the last 30-40 years or so is about to retire. Baring a major accident/incident before July I will likely not see him again.
This means I will likely have to get a new doc who doesn’t know me or my family or my past. This is normal but I’m not looking forward to it. If there was one thing I had no doubt about with my old doc it’s that he cared if I lived or died. Given what we’ve seen from the medical profession the last few years it will be very hard to get that impression from a stranger.
Of course as I’m in the back nine it more a question of what do I want to die from because in the end I have to die of something.
5th: The New Neo has some thoughts about the Jean Carroll defamation case and the type of precedent it sets:
I don’t think lawsuits like this one should be actionable, whether they be against Trump or anyone else. It should not be legally actionable defamation to say your accuser is lying about you and that you’re not sexually attracted to her. Nor was Trump ever found criminally liable for raping her, because the statute of limitations had run out by the time she made her accusations. I doubt her rape case would have held up in a criminal court anyway – unless it was a court composed of jurors or a judge who hated the defendant.
I predict that once leftists and left leaning institutions like universities are charged with defamation for insisting on their innocence in cases and have judgements made against them the injustice of this will suddenly become clear to the left.
Unexpectedly of course.
6th: If anyone is interested we have some openings in both the 1972 and the 1997 league for Dynasty Baseball.
If you’re up to it and have an interest give me a shout because the window for all of this is closing.
7th: Since I quoted Don Surber for the title of this post it behooves me to mention an interesting twist to the old “learn to code” crowd:
ITEM 14: What the nation needs is coders who learn to mine.
CNBC reported last month, “The U.S. is running out of miners. More than half the nation’s mining workforce, about 221,000 workers, is expected to retire by 2029, according to the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration, and the number of candidates willing to fill those slots is shrinking.”
Smart people are urging and/or putting their kids into trade schools where basic “manly” skills are taught as it’s becoming increasingly clear that the American left has basically evolved into the passengers of the B Ark of the Golgafrinchan fleet
8th: Since we mentioned the need for coal jobs it’s worth noting more layoffs of Journalists: First this week at the LA Times (Via Legal Insurrection):
As a general rule, most people are sympathetic when they hear about others who have lost their jobs due to layoffs, company closings, and the like.
But in the case of the now-former employees of the Los Angeles Times, that sympathy is in short supply among conservatives and others who were frequent targets of the paper’s agenda-driven news and opinion divisions.
On Sunday, Legal Insurrection reported that the left coast newspaper had announced that staff cutbacks were imminent, with around 100 people set to be let go. In response, unionized employees staged a one-day walkout and demanded, among other things, “to swap traditional seniority protections for those related to diversi
In an internal email this morning, Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng announced that the company is laying off 8% of its staff pic.twitter.com/VY6HIt7ktc
I look forward to the plethora of articles from those journalists remaining insisting that the economy is better than ever. Perhaps AI can write them at the LA Times and Business Insider.
The NFL league championships are this week and from the NFC we are guaranteed a great story of overcoming adversity no matter who wins, either Detroit FINALLY making it to the Superbowl with a rejected QB or San Francisco making it led by the very last pick in the draft born the year Brady was picked and drafted 63 places later than him (262nd).
In the east you have Lamar Jackson the pre-emptive MVP facing Patrick Mahomes who now has made the AFC title game in his first six seasons as a starter. Comparisons to Tom Brady and questions if he will beat Brady’s six titles and ten Superbowl appearances are already flying but in the end no matter what he achieves when people ask who was better the record will show that when facing Tom Brady in the AFC Championship game or the Superbowl he was 0-2 against a Tom Brady at age 40 or over.
10th and last at Elder of Ziyon which is a must visit during the Israel Hamas war they note a rather amazing phenom at the UN, collective memory loss:
Q: Given the UN’s big role in Gaza, UNRWA, has there ever been any indication to the UN that tunnels are being built under the city?
UN: Not to us. I mean… it seems to me that all this infrastructure was built in a highly secretive way. I mean, I see it just as an observer… To think that the UN had any understanding of what was… any information about those operations, I think, is… No is clearly the answer to that.
This is even though the UN has admitted in previous years that tunnels were found underneath their own schools.
In fact, former UNRWA Gaza director Matthias Schmale admitted that it is a “safe assumption” there were extensive tunnels under Gaza, in a 2021 interview:
If it wasn’t for the fact that Hogan’s Heroes was a fictional show I’d swear that the UN was recruiting heavily from descendants of the guards at Luft Stalag 13 for their uncanny ability to know nothing and see nothing.
There were a lot of people surprised when the Atlanta Falcons hired Raheem Morris as their new head coach after bringing in Bill Belichick for a 2nd interview for the position.
Once Jim Harbaugh was hired by the Chargers as their head coach after Jerry Jones surprised everyone by keeping Mike McCarthy in Dallas it became an article of faith that Belichick had the Atlanta Job. In fact they had actually reached a point were at least one person was arguing that the Atlanta Job is beneath him.
And then new news came that Morris is out and Bill is in the out in the cold. In fact the only head coach positions left are Seattle (Unlikely because they just got rid of an old coach who won a Superbowl) and Washington (A bad team that Bill would be lucky to turn into a playoff team in three years).
The radio hosts were amazed, shocked, outraged. They went on about the number superbowl appearances he had. How people didn’t appreciate him, how much he was a big reason why Brady was Brady.
I couldn’t believe my ears.
For the last four months all you heard on Boston Sports Radio was a loud chorus either calling for Bill Belichick to be fired. Bill was too old, Bill was out of touch, Bill’s methods were out of date, Bill Drafted poorly, Bill didn’t spend wisely, he picked the wrong coaches, etc etc etc. The only question thing in dispute was should he be fired at the end of the season or should he be fired today.
And yet now after months of saying this every single day they are shocked SHOCKED , angry and outraged that no NFL franchise wants to hire Bill Belichick.
But I suspect the real outrage is due to something that was said on one of those networks a few days ago. The host talked about how once Bill gets a job they will have something to talk about to catch the listeners attention other than a losing football team that is going nowhere, which is what they believe the Patriots sans Bill will be.
So spare me the outrage that NFL organization around the nation took your words to heart.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 