Archive for October 6, 2024

Nixon had his Saturday Night Massacre, Chicago’s mayor has his Friday Afternoon Massacre

Posted: October 6, 2024 by John Ruberry in education, News/opinion, politics
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Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson

By John Ruberry

While he’s only 17 months in his first term in office, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson is on pace to be remembered as one of America’s worst big city mayors. The competition to be inducted into that shameful club includes some real rascals and incompetents, such as New York’s Jimmy Walker, Detroit’s Coleman Young, Cleveland’s Dennis Kucinich, and Chicago’s Big Bill Thompson. 

The insufferably incompetent and complicit Chicago media, once among the America’s best, rarely mentions that “Branjo,” prior to his election as mayor, was a longtime paid organizer–that means agitator–for the far-left Chicago Teachers Union. The CTU was the largest donor to his mayoral campaign, and it supplied ground troops to get Johnson elected. Yes, I know, Johnson was also a Cook County commissioner. While in that job he authored no memorable legislation.

Johnson, in short, is in the pocket of the CTU. 

Why can’t you say so, Chicago media?

Chicago is essentially broke because of massive unfunded pension obligations, and so is Chicago Public Schools. 

On Friday afternoon, all seven members of the Chicago Board of Education resigned because they refuse to fire CPS CEO Pedro Martinez, who was appointed by Johnson’s predecessor, Lori Lightfoot. Johnson has called on Martinez to resign, the mayor supports the fiscally anemic CPS to take out what’s widely being called a “payday loan” to pay for pension obligations and big raises for CTU members. 

Martinez opposes that, and clearly, so do the former board members. Unlike Martinez, the board members who just quit aren’t Lightfoot holdovers. Johnson appointed all of them.

Richard Nixon, who Johnson has blamed for Chicago’s problems, had his Saturday night massacre. Johnson has his Friday Afternoon Massacre.

The president of the Chicago Teachers Union is Stacy Davis Gates. She’s an ill-tempered leftist who is possibly crazier than US Rep. Rashida Tlaib. Gates, it’s important to know, sends her son to a private school. Of course she is against school choice for everyone else, as is Johnson.

Besides its money problems, Chicago Public Schools do a horrible job educating students. Even though CPS spending continues to soar, student test scores continue to be quite low. Roughly three-quarters of CPS students are unable to read at grade level—and math scores are even worse. 

Can this story get any worse? 

In Chicago, getting worse is the normal.

As part of a transition to a fully elected Board of Education, ten seats for a new board are up for election this fall–voting has already begun. Johnson will appoint the remaining 11 seats. 

The new members that Johnson will appoint will be out of office in a few months. Branjo will task them to fire Martinez, approve the “payday loan” for those pension obligations, and approve a big raise for Chicago’s unionized teachers. 

Good government types in Chicago—amazingly, they really exist–condemned Johnson’s pro-Chicago Teachers Union power play. Surprisingly a large majority–over eighty percent–of the Chicago City Council, including aldermen who are members progressive caucus and two of the six socialists, have expressed opposition to Branjo’s move.

Johnson has been particularly cozy to some of city’s socialist aldermen. They were among his staunchest protecters after Branjo cancelled the city’s gunfire protection contract with ShotSpotter.

As Barack Obama famously said, elections have consequences. Chicago voters choose poorly.

Crime, despite laughable denials from Crain’s Chicago Business, also known as Crain’s Chicago Anti-Business, is a serious problem Chicago. The office and retail vacancy rate downtown are over 25 percent. For 2025, Chicago faces a $1 billion deficit.

Sadly, there is not recall mechanism in place for Chicago mayors.

Meanwhile, Johnson has other priorities. Today’s he’s campaigning for Kamala Harris in Las Vegas. Next week, ostensibly to bring business and tourism to Chicago, the mayor will be in London for the Bears game against the Jacksonville Jaguars.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Israel Passes the Test: A thought about the “Don’t Fear the Beeper” Attack

Posted: October 6, 2024 by datechguy in Israel, middle east
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Troi: Run programme.
Simulated Worf: The control system for the primary containment field is not functioning.
Simulated LaForge: Something’s severed the ODN conduit between here and the antimatter storage deck.
Troi: Geordi, could you repair the ODN conduit if you went into the crawlspace?
Simulated Worf: Sir, that crawlway is in a warp-plasma shaft. He would never survive the radiation.
Troi: I know that. Geordi, could you repair the conduit?
Simulated LaForge: Yeah, I think I could.
Troi: Then do it. That’s an order. (He exits)
Riker: End simulation. Something told me you wouldn’t let this go. Congratulations. You passed.
Troi: That’s what this was all about, wasn’t it? To see if I’d order someone to their death.

Star Trek TNG: Thine Own Self 1994 (Via Chakoteya.net)

Something hit me when I was reading this tweet by Yashar Ali

Particularly this bit of it:

The Mossad already got walkie talkies in the hands of Hezbollah back in 2015. The walkie talkies contained an extra large battery and also gave the ability of Mossad to eavesdrop on ALL Hezbollah communications, which it did for nine years.

Now while Hezbollah has been hitting Israel bigly over the last year, at least till operation “don’t fear the beeper” finally was launched they have also launched plenty of rockets and various attacks over the 9 years that Israel was collecting data.

That means that in order to keep Iran and their proxy terrorists in the dark during that time they would have had to allow some of those attacks to get through over that time as if they were unexpected because they could not risk them assuming their communications were being intercepted.

In hindsight of course this decision may in fact lead to the destruction of Hezbollah as anything resembling an effective fighting force and possibly to the freedom of the Lebanese from under the Iranian proxy’s thumb.

But to achieve that Israeli citizens were put at risk and some likely died.

It was a tough call, the time of call a person who has the lives of thousands or millions has to make or to quote the TNG episode above before Troi figured it out: “My first duty is to the ship.”

I’m old enough to remember when the US had leaders able to make those hard calls.