It never ceases to amaze me how many people are shocked at the acts of the Biden Administration concerning Israel, particularly folks like Jonah Goldberg (a nice guy in person) and friends.
It appears that the folks who could have made a difference but decided to let the steal of the last election slide presumed that the goal of said steal was simply to remove Donald Trump which they were completely on board with. They now appear shocked SHOCKED that said folks had an actual agenda they wanted to push and are using said power to do so.
You mean to say if you let a bunch of bought and paid for crooks have power they might just use it? Amazing!
Apparently the shock SHOCK of Joe Biden deciding to suspend arms to Israel over attempting to destroy a group of terrorists who tired to annihilate them and still hold Israeli (and American) hostages is too much for some US senators.
of the Democratic senators running for reelection, most are staying mum, including those running in swing states. They include, at the time of publishing, Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin, Montana’s Jon Tester, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, and Nevada’s Jacky Rosen. Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin—who is running to replace the state’s outgoing senator, Debbie Stabenow—has also remained silent, as have her fellow House colleagues running for Senate seats, Rubén Gallego of Arizona and David Trone of Maryland.
Oddly enough those who are shocked into silence are almost exclusively running in either red or swing states. Senators from deep blue states like Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut where even supporting the slaughter of Jews can’t hurt a democrat have no problem praising the move.
Unexpectedly of course.
One person who is incapable of being shocked into silence is James Carville who at 80 is just as loud as he has ever been. However while he is not silent he is in fact shocked.
He is shocked that nothing the Democrats seem to do in this campaign is working against Trump:
James Carville is frustrated that Trump is 'more ahead than he's ever been', and that Democrat tactics are 'not working': "It's going the wrong way. It's not working.Everything we're that throwing is spaghetti at a wall, and none of it is sticking, me included. We gotta try to… pic.twitter.com/OAMsDA37Ng
What you might note in this tirade is no mention of Biden’s policies or the overreaching of the left or the abandonment of Israel or the Economy that’s tanking faster than the Chicago White Sox. He might take a lesson from this old piece written on the day of the Scott Brown vs Martha Coakley election so many years ago: (My comment) in bold underline
If Brown wins today in Massachusetts, we’re going to hear all kinds of explanations. Misplaced voter anger is already being invoked. Coakley ran a horrible campaign. The incumbent party is unpopular when times are bad. It snowed. Or it didn’t. Whatever. The simplest explanation is that a majority of the citizens of Massachusetts oppose ObamaCare. Maybe they shouldn’t. Maybe they don’t realize how great it will be. (HA! DTG) But if Brown wins, the simplest explanation is that the most important issue, health care, was decisive. The voters don’t like ObamaCare and this is their chance to say so.
The actual performance of this administration or the state of the country is not relevant to Mr. Carville. It’s all about the game. He’s a salesman one might even say a master salesman and his product is Democrats any democrats no matter what they do, no matter what they say and after decades of selling a crappy product to a gullible public he is shocked SHOCKED that there doesn’t seem to be enough marks falling for the pitch.
So let me get this straight:
Bill Maher does an excellent eight minute monologue on the media covering irrelevant things for the sake of clicks and agenda:
And then leads the overtime segment of that very same with a story about a Virginia school district that had renamed two schools named after confederates restoring the original names.
Because on a weekend when Joe Biden is withholding military aid to Israel to the point where even Jonah Goldberg’s friends are done with him there is no issue bigger that needs to be addressed than a school named after Stonewall Jackson who died in 1863.
I can’t contain my degree of shock that he might just be another self serving liberal after all.
Finally I laughed aloud when I saw this story out on the Daily Wire:
Speaking on the support that RFK Jr. enjoys from some on the political right, Penn said: “I think that it will drop in half if Republicans learn the views, right now they don’t know these things.”
“And there’s a group of Republicans that don’t like anybody and he’s now the alternative to the alternative,” he continued. “So he’s got some votes, but I agree with you, he would lose a lot of Republican votes if this screen that you’re putting up there really got out and got broadcast.”
Here is the video
WATCH: Mark Penn on RKF Jr's base of support:
"I think that it will drop in half if Republicans learn the views, right now they don't know these things. And there's a group of Republicans that don't like anybody and he's now the alternative to the alternative. So he's got votes… pic.twitter.com/TjDhUXimaf
So let me get this straight, Republican votes are going to be shocked SHOCKED that a President Candidate:
Whose Father was AG in a Democrat administration and ran for President as a Democrat
Whose uncle was a Democrat congressman, Senator and President
Whose other Uncle was a Democrat senator for 40+ years
Who has been a democrat all his life
And who initially attempted to run for the Democrat nomination
Might have a bunch of opinions that are completely consistent with the Democrat party?
My degree of surprise can’t be understated!
Let me tell you something Mr. Penn, any republican who votes for RFK doesn’t care what his opinions are. They just want to be able tell their republican friends at GOP events they didn’t vote for Biden and tell their celebrity friends at events attended by all the “right” people that they didn’t vote for Trump.
Nationally, the leftist ideologue is best known for botching the Jussie Smollett case. Yeah, I keep bringing that up, largely because Foxx supposedly throws a fit whenever her name is attached to the hate-crime hoaxer.
Feel her rage.
By throwing his considerable weight around, both literally and symbolically, Illinois’ governor, JB Pritzker, who hopes to run for president in 2028, brought the 2024 Democratic National Convention to Chicago. This may prove to be Pritzker’s undoing. Chicago was hit hard by riots after the George Floyd murder, and the crime rate in Chicago and its core suburbs has soared since Foxx took office in 2016.
Fortunately, Foxx chose not to run for a third term.
The campaign to succeed her was essentially a referendum on her time as state’s attorney. The winner by a hair was Eileen O’Neill Burke, who said at the end of a debate, “If you like the way things are going right now, you have a candidate in this election. It isn’t me.”
Last week, the Chicago Tribune reported that Foxx will get a little tougher in prosecuting crime. “You may not be aware, but for the last four years the public policy of the Cook County state’s attorney’s office has been not to prosecute criminal violations tied to protests and demonstrations,” the Trib’s left-of-center editorial board wrote, “if the office deems those actions ‘peaceful.'”
“That means the office as a matter of policy won’t prosecute protesters arrested for disorderly conduct,” the op-ed continued, “unlawful gathering or criminal trespass to state-supported land, among other laws.”
As people with common sense–that is, non-leftists–know, small-time violators of the law sometimes become felons. Peaceful protests, or what liberal journalists laughingly call “mostly peaceful protests” sometimes become quite violent ones.
Foxx’s end-of-term conversion does not mean she’s been suddenly blessed with wisdom. Crime is a very serious problem in Chicago. Nationally, liberal apologists for criminality regularly tell us that the crime rate in major cities is going down, but not only do they use the COVID year of 2020 as a comparison point, they ignore Chicago. While murder the murder rate is down slightly in Chicago, other crimes are becoming more numerous. Foxx is largely to blame, but Chicago’s mayor during the pandemic, Lori Lightfoot, as well as her neo-Marxist successor, Brandon Johnson, should hold their heads in shame too.
Instead, Foxx has cynically, in regard to DNC protesters, decided to do her job.
Leftists are obsessed with history repeating itself. Looking past the calm 1996 Democratic Convention, they fear a repeat of the riot at Grant Park during the 1968 DNC, when Mayor Richard J. Daley’s angry cops beat up hippie protesters as millions of voters watched on television. Liberals blame that chaos for Richard Nixon’s victory that fall.
At a protest earlier this month Joe Iosbaker, a left-wing gadfly, offered an ominous warning with a couple of questions. “Have you heard that the Democratic National Convention is coming to Chicago? Are we going to let ’em come here without a protest? This is Chicago, goddamn it — we’ve got to give them a 1968 kind of welcome.”
Foxx doesn’t want to be blamed for Donald Trump defeating Joe Biden in November. She cares more about her political party than fulfilling the duties of her job.
Pro-Hamas and anti-Israel protests are regular disturbances in downtown Chicago. Protesting, both peaceful and “mostly peaceful,” has become a habit in the city. Throw into the mix Chicago’s violent crime epidemic, and the result will be a vile stew that is set to turn toxic in late August, when the DNC convenes at the United Center.
Foxx’s “conversion,” in my opinion, will prove to be too little–too late.
Let the bad times roll. History will repeat itself in Chicago.
After the DNC leaves, Foxx can return to not prosecuting protesters who break laws until Eileen O’Neill Burke is sworn in.
John Ruberry regularly blogs in Cook County at Marathon Pundit.
Chicago has a nasty mess on its hands with Brandon Johnson as mayor.
Crime rates remain high compared to the pre-pandemic year of 2019.
It’s common for big city mayors to claim that crime is declining, but they usually look back only a year for comparison numbers and then declare, “You see!” However, in March, the murder total in Chicago exceeded the killings in March of last year–by 28 percent.
Johnson suffered a major political loss last month. His Bring Chicago Home referendum, which would have raised the real estate on high-end property transactions, was defeated. Funds from that tax hike would have been used to battle homelessness, although Johnson and other key supporters of BCH provided no details on how that money would be spent. Supporters of BCH, utilizing a class warfare tactics, dubbed it a “mansion tax.”
Last week, to mark the anniversary of his narrow victory over moderate Democrat Paul Vallas, Johnson, a progressive Democrat who is a former Chicago Teachers Union organizer, granted two exclusive interviews, both with leftist news sources, Block Club Chicago and the Triibe.
As for the former, Johnson queried reporter Quinn Myers, “Name one thing that I said I was gonna do that I haven’t done. You won’t be able to.”
Johnson sees himself as a “movement politician,” and this political species tends to be fond of using hyperbole. Not surprisingly, the mayor used a troubling verb, “assassinate,” when he discussed his movement in the Block Club interview.
“That’s why they worked hard to disrupt it and destroy it, and have gone as far to assassinate it,” Johnson told Myers. “And so whether it’s literally or figuratively, the work to assassinate character or to assassinate our movement, we’re not going to allow that type of fear to disrupt what ultimately the people of Chicago wanted. And that’s why they voted for me.”
That’s not correct. There are many opinions on why Johnson won. For certain, his former employer and his chief financial backer, the far-left Chicago Teachers Union, outhustled the old-school campaign of Vallas. In my opinion, Chicagoans just wanted a less acidic version of his unpopular predecessor, Lori Lightfoot. So, voters chose the Lightfoot-esque candidate–but without the venomous fangs.
Let’s move on to the second interview, with the Triibe, which was conducted by Tonia Hill.
Wikipedia describes the Triibe as “an African-American online news and digital media company based in Chicago, Illinois.” Until last week I hadn’t heard of it.
Johnson let loose a missile with Hill. “Who expected me to defeat white supremacy in one year?” the mayor said. “There were individuals who did not know the full value of what I brought to the mayor’s office, and there were forces working to disrupt that.”
Whooah.
Johnson wasn’t elected to defeat white supremacy. Voters chose him to run America’s third-largest city, and his primary duty as mayor is to protect its residents–not to peddle far-left talking points.
This is not the first time Johnson has used the racism canard as mayor. He has not handled the migrant crisis well. In response to well-earned criticism of his response to the arrival of arrivals in Chicago, Johnson counter attacked. “Everyone knows that the right-wing extremism in this country has targeted democratically-run cities,” the mayor said. “It is abysmal, and it is an affront for everything that is good about this country for the extremism in this country to use people as political tools to settle political scores for something that happened over 400 years ago.”
Leftist Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson pushes ridiculous lies about supposed "far-right extremists."
Johnson concluded that Republicans are “still mad that a black man is free in this country.”
No, they are not.
The media in Chicago leans left as it does just about every place else in America. But Johnson expects hero worship from reporters, not objective criticism. Consequently, Johnson’s relationship with Chicago’s mainstream media has been rocky, because newspaper and television reporters have been mildly critical of him.
They need to be tougher. A good place for journalists to start is to ask Johnson what he meant when he said, “Who expected me to defeat white supremacy in one year?” In short journos–do your job.
Business leaders, and by the way, not all of them are white, dislike “us versus them” rhetoric. Because they are the “them,” the perceived enemy. But these “enemies” are the job providers. Corporate Chicago largely opposed Bring Home Chicago. After its defeat, Johnson called the opponents of the referendum “wicked.”
Chicago needs as many businesses as it can get. Downtown Chicago’s office vacancy rate is a record 25.1 percent. The downtown retail vacancy rate is 30 percent. Both are records. Downtown is the financial engine that powers Chicago. Kill it, and the city dies. The Detroit dystopia is not a farfetched future for Chicago.
While they had obvious weaknesses in their combined 30 years as mayor, Lightfoot’s predecessors, Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel, were tremendous salespeople for Chicago. Lightfoot, and even more so Johnson, not so much.
Cook County, Illinois is America’s second-most populous county. Chicago is its largest city. It’s deep blue, Cook hasn’t backed a Republican presidential candidate since Richard M. Nixon’s wipeout of George McGovern in 1972. In 2020, Joe Biden bested Donald Trump in Cook when he collected nearly 75 percent of the vote. However, in sheer numbers, over 500,000 people in Cook County voted for Trump.
Nearly two weeks ago, there was a primary election in Illinois. The most watched match up, which I wrote about twice here at Da Tech Guy, was the race for Cook County state’s attorney, the county’s top prosecutor. Two Democrats, Clayton Harris III, a former chief-of-staff for Rod Blagojevich and current university lecturer, and Eileen O’Neill Burke, a retired Illinois appellate judge, faced off.
For the last eight years, Kim Foxx, a George Soros-funded leftist, has misruled as state’s attorney. Crimes of all types, including murder, have soared since she took office. Catch-and-release is not an effective law enforcement strategy. Harris was vague in his campaign, but he did give Foxx an “A” for her tenure as state’s attorney. Even worse, the far-left wing of the Chicago area Democratic Party backed him, led by the radical Chicago Teachers Union. Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle, who is also chair of the Cook County Regular Democratic Organization, also endorsed Harris. Preckwinkle and the CTU were supporters of Brandon Johnson, now Chicago’s progressive mayor, in his first political race, a seat on the Cook County Board.
As for O’Neill Burke, it’s fair to call her a centrist Democrat, although the favors the odious no-cash bail SAFE-T Act. But she’s not an ideologue along the lines of Foxx, Preckwinkle, and Johnson. So, in the very likely event she prevails in the general election, I have hope that she can moderate further in the direction of protecting law-abiding citizens from the criminal class.
One of the center points of O’Neill Burke’s campaign was to–get this!–enforce state law, specifically, return to prosecuting retail thefts as felonies when more than $300 is stolen. Foxx, in one of her first moves as state’s attorney, raised that felony threshold to $1,000. Although, if an accused thief has ten prior felony convictions, Foxx finally, or so she says, will prosecute those under-$1,000 offenders with a felony.
Yes, for now, there is a ten-strikes-and-you’re-out theft policy in Crook County. Jean Valjean was born in the wrong century.
Criminals are emboldened here. And small time crooks often move on to commit more serious crimes.
After a painful and troubling vote tally, late Friday, after provisional votes were counted, AP declared O’Neill Burke the winner in the state’s attorney race. Harris conceded that night. As of now, the retired judge leads Harris by around 1,500 votes–out of over 500,000 cast.
Republicans, you put O’Neill Burke over the top.
Evidence is anecdotal, but it’s believed that many Republicans–certainly far more than 1,500–crossed over and took a Democrat ballot in the March primary election in Cook. I was one of them. Remember, in 2020, coincidentally, Trump received over 500,000 votes in Cook County.
There was no reason for Cook County GOPers to vote in the Republican primary. Because of decades of rampant Democratic gerrymandering, there were no competitive Republican contests in the county. Statewide, the gerrymandering sin almost ensures, for both parties, few if any competitive intraparty races.
There’s a lesson here for Republicans living in blue states. Take a Democratic ballot in primary elections, and vote for the least-leftist candidate. It’s a twist of Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos strategy to drag out the 2008 Democrat presidential primaries.
Have I given up on the Illinois Republican Party? Yes. While there a few good Republican politicians in the Land of Lincoln, none of them are within leadership roles. The state GOP apparatus is reminiscent of the two approved “opposition” parties in communist Poland, the United People’s Party and the Alliance of Democrats. The Illinois GOP knows its place, like those paid “Republican” contributors on CNN and MSNBC.
As I noted last week, crime in the Chicago area is a life and death issue, and by voting for O’Neill Burke last week, one of the lives I might have saved is mine. If there isn’t a better reason to vote a certain way than for personal safety–and for that of our loved ones–please let me know in the comments section.
Oh, while voting Democratic in a primary, don’t be afraid to cause some mischief while you’re trolling the neighborhood. For president, my choice in the Illinois Primary was Marianne Williamson.
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