If you haven’t seen RFK Jr’s State of the Union Speech do so now. It you’re under 40 it’s likely the greatest political speech you will ever hear in your lifetime.
This is the type of speech that changes votes, and the reason it’s that type of speech is that is:
It’s Positive
It’s aspirational
It challenges us to be better than we are
There is absolutely no question, at least in my mind, that he believes this and means it
For someone like me it reminds me of my youth when such beliefs were the norm, Donald Trump vowed to make America Great Again and he pretty much kept that promise as President, Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. in this speech reminded us WHY America was great in the first place and has done so at a time when we as a nation have forgotten it. In my youth Americans believed this, not republicans, not democrats AMERICANS believed this as the base belief of the country, before we allowed the Marxists into the schools.
If I thought for one moment that Kennedy would act wisely on the culture war issues: Abortion, Transgenderism and DEI, then I would have let myself be carried away by this speech to the days of my youth and change my vote in the general. Frankly given that I live in blue Massachusetts it might be strategic to consider such a vote as Kennedy would be more likely to win this state than Trump.
But in the end Abortion “Trumps” all with me because that’s a question of the soul plus I don’t believe personally in strategic voting so barring something like Trump dropping dead (he is in fact very old) and being replaced by Haley or Noam (who has been a not so much closet supporter of pushing Transgenderism until the VP talk came) I’ll have to pass on RFK Jr.
But if you choose not to I completely understand.
Closing thought: If you think the Obama team (Let’s stop pretending it’s the ‘Biden’ team) was determined to keep Secret Service Protection away from RFK Jr. before they’re damn well going to make sure he doesn’t have it now. Unless of course the primary job of said team was to either kill him or allow him to be killed.
I’m old enough to remember when that final sentence would have been unthinkable to me.
The vast majority of the people I work with have Spanish as their first language. They came here a decade or more ago. I don’t know if they came legally or not at the time but many if not most are now American citizens and they are scared for their jobs, their managers are scared for their jobs and as a guy about to hit 61 who had planned to work till 70 I’m scared for my job.
Even with COVID four years ago we were not.
And let me note, we are scared for our jobs after our company closed two warehouses in our area and laid off every temp we had.
Without a turnaround of the economy I don’t see how we avoid either further layoffs or a reduction of our workweek to below 40 hours.
That the democrats are polling over 40% is beyond me and I would bet real money that a lot of the folks were I am are going to vote for Trump because they know who was in charge when they were able to make a living and who was not.
They don’t care about mean tweets they care about feeding their kids and virtue signaling stuff like this
DeSantis supporters:
Are there any conditions under which you would vote for Trump in the 2024 general election?
I’m curious to hear responses because I’ve seen a split on this topic amongst the pro-DeSantis crowd.
— Cryptid Politics (pro-DeSantis) 🇺🇸🐊 (@CryptidPolitics) March 2, 2024
doesn’t enter their radar.
The only reason why I have no idea who will win in November is:
I don’t know that Biden will be the Dem standard bearer no matter what happens in the primary
I don’t know if Trump can win beyond the margin of fraud or if the GOP is taking steps to prevent it
14 years ago this January Robert Stacy McCain was in Fitchburg Massachusetts with me covering the Scott Brown Race. Way back then he was a contributor to the HotAir GreenRoom and filed this report available now only through the wayback machine:
Annie DeMartino served 20 years as a city council member here before retiring from office last year. An Irish immigrant, she turned out in the snow to vote this morning in Ward 6 at St. Bernard’s Catholic School. A self-described “diehard Democrat,” DeMartino voted for Martha Coakley, but listen to what she says about the Senate election:
Alas the adobe video is not available but Annie’s key quote was: ‘Mr. Brown Has the Edge Today’
Well it’s almost fifteen years later and today at the supermarket I was in line waiting to order a sub for DaWife and who comes over to see me pushing her carriage but Annie DeMartino. She’s 87 years old but still helping those in need picking up a meal for a shut-in and volunteering at the senior center, which I am now old enough to go to if I wished.
The subject of the coming election came up with Super Tuesday two days away and she asked my opinion. I told her:
I have no idea who is going to win
It’s my opinion that the Democrats will replace Joe Biden on the ticket because now the media is ridiculing’s him in public
At that point I asked her what her contacts were saying as she was deep into democrat politics since the 1970’s and she answered: “All my contacts are dead.” This is what happens when you live long enough and she talked about how hard it can be when you outlive everybody you know.
I have no doubt that she will still pull the lever for Biden on Tuesday. There are a lot of people who have left the Democrat party as I did but no matter how much they talk “white privilege ” this Irishwoman who knows what poor really means and still carries her brogue isn’t about to be pushed out of HER party no matter who comes in saying what.
If the Democrat Party was still populated by folks like Annie rather than the loonies who run it now I suspect a lot of people who left might still be there.
Illinois is a corrupt state. Rankings of the 50 states usually place in Illinois within the top five in the union in regard to public crookedness.
Surprisingly, as bad as Chicago is, the city’s inner southern suburbs, are even worse in regard to political corruption. It’s the sewer of Illinois.
Sharp-eyed readers will recall I wrote a similar post here at Da Tech Guy several years ago, but the WordPress wormhole seems to have swallowed that entry up.
So here I am again documenting south suburban Chicago sleaze, mainly because of the antics of Tiffany Henyard, the mayor of Dolton (rhymes with “Walton”), who has been accused of widespread corruption by her own village council.
But you’ll find graft in nearby communities. More on them later.
Henyard is a double-dipper, a time-dishonored ILL-inois scam. The self-described “Super Mayor” collects $224,000 as a Thornton Township supervisor. But last year, the township’s board passed an ordinance that if voters remove her from office, her successor will earn just $25,000.
Henyard’s salary as mayor of Dolton is $46,000. The village has 21,000 residents. As for her haul as a township supervisor, 49 of America’s 50 governors have a lower salary than hers.
Henyard, a Democrat, is accused of wasting village money on expensive trips to Atlanta and New York with village staff, wasting money on billboards with her picture. There is even her image in front of Dolton’s village hall. Yep. And I don’t care if you call me racist, it sounds a Third World-like cult of personality. I don’t care–because I’m not racist. Not surprisingly, Henyard is not above using the race card to deflect well-earned criticism. “You all should be ashamed of yourselves because you all are black. You all are black,” Super Mayor said recently in a livestreamed meeting. “And you all [are] sitting up here beating and attacking a black woman that’s in power.”
Henyard has only been mayor of Dolton for three years. She was defeated in a recall election in 2022, but a Cook County judge invalidated the results.
Speaking of donations, the Illinois attorney general’s office has ordered Henyard’s charity to stop collecting contributions, citing a lack of transparency and more.
Last month Super Mayor visited the White House and met President Joe Biden.
In the 1990s, nearby Dixmoor’s Park District, which at the time had only one tiny tot lot under its jurisdiction, employed 80 people as police officers. Harvey, a poverty-stricken town has a long tradition of graft. While he has not been accused of wrongdoing, Eric Kellogg, who as mayor of Harvey until being voted out in 2019, Kellogg allegedly accepted kickbacks from a strip club that was offering prostitution. His brother was convicted for his role in that scheme. In Calumet City, which borders Dolton on the east, has recent sleaze to answer for. Its mayor is Thaddeus Jones. His wife, Saprina, collects $92,000 in a job working with state grants involved with Cal City. And the mayor’s son, Thaddeus Jr, collects $32,000 from the suburb.
Whose responsible for this debacle? Voters are. Yes, in the invalidated election Dolton voters chose to recall Henyard, but there were many red flags that should have been a sufficient warning to vote otherwise.
As the cliché goes, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” Barack Obama famously said, “Elections have consequences.” Indeed they do.
Finally, there is speculation that if Joe Biden backs out of the 2024 presidential election, Illinois’ governor, JB Pritzker, will jump into the race. On X, Pritzker, who of course earns less in public money than Henyard, regularly rails about the evils of “MAGA Republicans.” But Pritzker is silent about Super Mayor.
