Archive for the ‘elections’ Category

If the Choice is between Motivating the Left and Saving Kids or De-Motivating them and Letting Kids Get Slaughtered I’ll take the former Every Time.

Posted: April 10, 2023 by datechguy in abortion, catholic, culture, election 2024, elections, politics

Look, If I’m going to hell, it’s not going to be over a peanut

Mother Angelica when told if she didn’t give a kickback her sisters would lose their peanut concession

I seem to be noticing a lot of articles like this one on Abortion and the electoral map.

They’ve been polling on abortion since forever, and the evolution of American attitudes toward the issue of abortion can be clearly tracked here and here. Lately, a significant shift in those polls has occurred and voters are now tilting decisively in favor of permitting abortion in most circumstances.

This shift has taken place after last spring’s Dobbs decision, which left abortion up to individual states. This suggests at least some abortion opinion was moved by many states making abortion illegal. Some women didn’t know what they had until it was gone.

America used to be a 50-50 nation on abortion. Not anymore.

Yeah who knew that women were dying for the right to kill their kids right up until the day they were born. That’s what we’re seeing getting passed in blue states all over.

Moran ends thus:

There is no substitute for that kind of motivation. And unless Republicans can come up with a dynamite solution to their abortion problem, they’re going to end up in the minority — perhaps permanently.

Well let me remind Mr. Moran and the GOP why a person whose first vote for President was for Walter Mondale. It was the very first CPAC back when it was in DC proper. I had interviewed a bunch of Tea Party types and bloggers ad thought it would be a cool thing to talk to Democrat about what they believe and why. During the interview they asked me why I became a republican and I was asked by them: Why did you want to be a republican.

!function(r,u,m,b,l,e){r._Rumble=b,r[b]||(r[b]=function(){(r[b]._=r[b]._||[]).push(arguments);if(r[b]._.length==1){l=u.createElement(m),e=u.getElementsByTagName(m)[0],l.async=1,l.src=”https://rumble.com/embedJS/u17hbct”+(arguments%5B1%5D.video?’.’+arguments[1].video:”)+”/?url=”+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+”&args=”+encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify([].slice.apply(arguments))),e.parentNode.insertBefore(l,e)}})}(window, document, “script”, “Rumble”);
Rumble(“play”, {“video”:”v1hrpo4″,”div”:”rumble_v1hrpo4″});

I suspect I’m not alone among people of faith who went to the GOP because they were no longer welcome with the Democrats as faithful Christians.

We voted this way and worked this way for a purpose. The purpose was to end the evils of abortion and the other cultural evils that have come from it.

These purposes, not the power of elected office is what this has been all about .Did the GOP drop anti-slavery because they lost in 1856? Did they drop anti slavery when there was pushback from the army and some of the populace over the Emancipation proclamation?

I’m sorry but the principle of not slaughtering kids in the womb is more important than polling from an individual election and it will remain so.

If the GOP doesn’t want to provide a home for the faithful, if power trumps principle and if the goal is not to advance our beliefs but to advance people careers then I wish them the best of luck.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again. If the choice is between a pro-life democrats who actually means it and a pro-abortion republican whether they mean it or not, I’ll choose life every single time.

Brandon Johnson, the elected official who still collects big checks from the Chicago Teachers Union, will be a disaster as Chicago’s mayor

Posted: March 5, 2023 by John Ruberry in crime, elections, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

For all of you cynics who says there is no real choice in most elections, next month’s runoff race for Chicago mayoral election proves you wrong. 

The unpopular and incompetent incumbent, Lori Lightfoot, finished third in last week’s first round of voting, collecting an anemic 17 percent of the vote in a nine-candidate field. Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas took first place with 33 percent of the vote and Cook County commissioner and Chicago Teachers Union organizer Brandon Johnson in second with 21 percent of the tally.

Chicago’s municipal elections are non-partisan, but the remaining candidates are Democrats.

Vallas has been largely successful in other education jobs, including posts in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Bridgeport, Connecticut–but he has butted heads repeatedly with teachers’ unions, most notably the far-left Chicago Teachers Union, which has strongly backed Johnson’s candidacy. And that’s not all. Johnson, who earns over $100,000-a-year as a Cook County commissioner, also has collected nearly $400,000 as a legislative coordinator for the CTU over the past five years.

So not only is Johnson in the pocket of the Chicago Teachers Union, the CTU is in Johnson’s pocket. 

As of this writing, Johnson has not said if he will quit his CTU post and stop cashing that paycheck. 

According to the Illinois Policy Institute, over the first two months of 2023, Johnson’s campaign was the recipient of over $4 million in contributions. Over half of that came from the Chicago Teachers Union and its affiliated unions. Of the rest, most of that cash was contributed by other unions, while just five percent of his campaign funds came from other sources.

Watch out, taxpayers. 

Johnson favors, as does the CTU, an array of anti-business and anti-consumer taxes and fees, including the hated employee head tax that Mayor Rahm Emanuel eliminated in 2014, although Johnson only wants large companies to pay for a new head tax.

The 2020 riots devastated Chicago’s main shopping and tourism district, North Michigan Avenue. Johnson supports “new user fees for high-end commercial districts frequented by the wealthy, suburbanites, tourists and business travelers.” Such fees will finish off North Michigan Avenue and similar areas. I used to work in the hospitality industry, and Chicago’s hotel taxes, the highest in the nation, were frequently used by officials in other cities to lure conventions away–Johnson wants to hike those hotel taxes by 66 percent. The COVID-19 has devastated ridership on Metra, the Chicago metropolitan area’s public train system, Johnson wants to institute a suburban commuter tax for Metra riders.

Johnson also backs a real estate transfer tax on high-end homes, a financial transaction tax, and maybe, a 3.5 percent municipal income tax on wealthy Chicagoans. In regard to the city income tax, which the Chicago Teachers Union supports, he said that it was a mistake by another far-left group, presumably United Working Families, to wrongly says he backs it.

Fine, that very well may be true. But late last month, on his Fox Chicago Flannery Fired Up show, host Mike Flannery asked Johnson five times if he backs a city income tax. Johnson deflected–he refused to answer “Yes” or “No.”

Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and St. Louis are among the failed cities with a municipal income tax.

Most Chicagoans believe that crime is the biggest issue in the city. Where does Johnson stand on crime and the police?

“I don’t look at it as a slogan,” Johnson said of the defund the police movement in 2020, “it’s an actual real political goal.”

Since then, Johnson has waffled, he says many 911 calls are over domestic disturbances. Quite true. But the day after Election Day, a Chicago Police officer, Andre Vasquez-Lasso, was murdered by an 18-year-old gang member. Vasquez-Lasso was responding to a domestic disturbance call.

Last week, when former Chicago Police superintendant Garry McCarthy was asked by Amy Jacobson on WIND’s Morning Answer about Johnson’s support for sending social workers to respond to such domestic altercation calls, he replied, “We’re gonna end up with some dead social workers.”

And if Chicago elects Brandon Johnson mayor next month–remember, Vallas only received only one-third of the vote last week—get ready for an emptying city. The Detroit-doom scenario for Chicago is not far-fetched.

I’ll end with an apocryphal story about an Illinois governor, Adlai Stevenson, who twice was the Democratic nominee for president.

“Every thinking person in America will be voting for you,” someone remarked to Stevenson. The governor replied, “I’m afraid that won’t do—I need a majority.”

Let’s not go Brandon.

John Ruberry regularly blogs five miles north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

The Best Move for Trump on DeSantis: the Pappy O’Daniel Gambit

Posted: February 23, 2023 by datechguy in election 2024, elections, elections, politics, primaries
Tags: , , , , ,

I’ve written both about Donald Trump’s attacks on Ron DeSantis as being a bad idea and I further wrote that if DeSantis wants to strike back all he needs to do is invoke Fauci.

So that still leaves the question: How does Donald Trump counter a popular governor like DeSantis with a strong record and a reputation for fighting the fights conservatives need fighting.

The answer can be found in Lyndon Johnson’s first senate campaign where his primary opponent was a fellow named Pappy O’Daniel.

Pappy O’Daniel was an entertainer who parleyed his radio show act into a a fortune selling flour into the governor’s chair in Texas. One of the things he constantly pushed was the idea of a pension

He’d sing, tout Hillbilly Flour, quote scripture, and declare he was fed up with “crooked politics” and “scheming professional politicians.” He promised to pay every Texan over 65 a $30-a-month pension. He didn’t say how he’d fund those pensions, preferring to sell the idea singing lyrics he’d written to the tune of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”—“Thirty Bucks for Mama.”

Smart types scoffed. Politicians and reporters said Pappy’s crowds came for the circus. But battered Texans yearned for something new. In the Democratic primary, against 11 rivals, Pappy got 51 percent, taking the nomination in a state where Republicans didn’t count. 

When the sitting US Senator Morris Shepard died in office Pappy O’Daniel appointed the 87 year old son of Sam Houston to his seat pending a special election. Lyndon Johnson seeing this as an opening promptly announced his candidacy and Pappy wasn’t far behind.

Johnson as a sitting congressman had a problem. O’Daniel was an immensely popular governor with the voters and while he was happy to be in bed with the various lobbyists (expect for the liquor lobby O’Daniel’s one unshakable principled belief was that booze was a tool of the Devil) an attack on his as corrupt was useless not only because Johnson’s own associations were not all that clean but because of the people still listening to his radio show now done from the Capital wouldn’t buy that the person fighting so hard to get them a pension didn’t care.

So Johnson took a different path. He painted O’Daniel as the indispensable man of Texas the man who was needed in the statehouse to fight for you and your pension here while he (LBJ) could fight for you in the Senate.

It was a stroke of brilliance. O’Daniel has talked about his fight for Pensions in his re-election campaign just six months before and Johnson’s praise of him and his work in Texas made direct attacks on him almost impossible.

In the end it paid off, at least until on election night Johnson let down his guard and allowed his key districts to report which gave an opening for the folks in the Liquor lobby, who wanted Pappy, out of Texas who did this:

Suddenly “late” returns from counties in East Texas where Congressman Martin Dies, another candidate for the open Senate seat, had previously run strong with 46% of the vote with O’Daniel getting 34% and Johnson 11% and a 4th candidate Mann 9%. As Robert Caro put it on paged 738-739 of his 1st volume on Lyndon Johnson:

But Dies did not do as well as he had done earlier. He received only 82 of these “new” votes — not 46 percent but 32 percent, Johnson and Mann didn’t do as well either: Mann received 6 votes or 2 percent; Johnson did particularly badly; he received 3 of the new votes : 1 percent. O’Daniel, who had received 34 percent on the first returns, received 64 percent on these later returns.

This pattern was repeated in county after county in east Texas where O’Daniel’s “Magic Ballots” kept turning up. Johnson manged to get a few “corrected” returns from a few spots but as official returns had been sent in such things were few and far between. He contacted George Paar known as the Duke of Duval who was the power there and bluntly asked for more votes. Duval’s reported reply: “Lyndon I’ve Been to Federal Penitentiary and I’m not Going Back For You” was logical. Because the official numbers had not come from East Texas no matter how many votes he agreed to provide O’Daniel’s folks would simply create more in counties that had not yet reported. In the end his 5000 vote lead became a 1311 vote loss 175,590 to 174,279.

Sound familiar?

Bottom line until O’Daniel’s foes in big Booze stole the election for him Johnson’s plan worked.

If I was advising Donald Trump, I would use the same tactic as LBJ did.

I would point to what was done in Florida and point out that there are plenty of people on the left who want DeSantis out of there. Who want to stop his innovations from spreading to other states. I’d point to his reforms on voting, his strong attacks on the sexualization of children and his taking on woke education and say that America NEEDS DeSantis in Florida to keep it a shining example for the entire nation.

I would compare this to his own reforms on the federal level, and suggest that DeSantis moves are much like his own but on the state level, it’s a great opening for Trump to tout his own record which is without question the best overall record of any 21st century president, from Tax Cuts to prison reform and beyond.. This way he can point to his own initial endorsement of DeSantis in his first campaign and even to some degree take credit for those accomplishments made possible by his own support in his initial election win that was by a small margin. Suddenly DeSantis’ success becomes derivative of his own.

I’d even go one better. I’d point out that Disney would LOVE to get DeSantis out of there and have the chance to try to influence a different perhaps weaker governor who would appoint people of their choosing to boards and commissions to slowly undo all that has already been done. I’d suggest that DeSantis needs at least one more term to solidify these changes and to make sure that the woke legions, led by Disney can’t reverse what has already been done. He owes it to the people who sent him back to make sure the job is done.

It’s the type of argument that has the best chance of not only preventing a DeSantis 2024 campaign but would make attacks on him by DeSantis very difficult.

Anyways that would be my play and I submit and suggest to the Trump campaign that it’s the one most likely to put the nomination in his hands.

DeSantis Trump and the Fauci Card

Posted: February 20, 2023 by datechguy in election 2024
Tags: , , ,

Clarissa Saunders: Diz, Don Quixote with bill will get to his feet in a minute and speak two important words: “Willet Creek”. When that happens, the sliver knight will fall off his tightrope and puss will jump outta his boots.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 1939

In a campaign with a lot of memorable moments one moment during the 2016 campaign stood out to me.

It happened on May 16th 2016 on Morning Joe, the Panel was discussing Trump and Women and the attacks the Clinton campaign was making on him and they turned to Donny Deutch who said something that ended the conversation quickly:

Here’s the tennis game, Donald Trump kissed a woman in a bathing suit. Trump hits back: Tell me about the president’s relationship with a guy named Jeffrey Epstein. That’s your tennis match.

I was watching when he said those critical words and wrote about the reaction:

two things become immediately clear.

Everybody at the Table knows who Jeffery Epstein is, and what the story is

Nobody at the table wanted to talk about it

And elaborated further:

Mind you Trump hasn’t even bothered to say a word about Epstein yet and the table does its best to spin this in a different direction, but the very fact that Trump is who is forced MSNBC to deal with the story even if most of dealing with it was talking about Trump’s willingness to go there.

Take a look at the set of dejected faces on that video, remember those faces are being broadcast on MSNBC to liberal viewers who would never do a web search of the words “Jeffery Epstein + Bill Clinton”

This was written in May of 2016 when Jeffrey was still free as a bird and the thought of not killing himself wasn’t even in his mind.

Bottom line the mere mention of Epstein was something the left/media was desperate to avoid during that campaign.

And that brings us to election 2024 and Trump vs DeSantis.

For move than half a decade the MSM/Left has tried to link Donald Trump to something remotely Epsteinish and despite their best efforts they have failed miserably. Nor do I expect Ron DeSantis to join in such an effort if he decides to run, but while there is nothing Epstein like in his past to use against Donald Trump there is a name, known to all Americans that Ron DeSantis can deploy at any time if he wants to give Donald Trump fits in a GOP primary:

That name is Anthony Fauci

During the COVID crisis Donald Trump repeatedly deferred to Anthony Fauci rather than firing him. He allowed Fauci to advance policies that hurt the American public both physically and psycologically. We as a nation are still recovering and counting the costs of the reign of terror that Anthony Fauci let loose upon us with little restraint from the President. It was the single most critical mistate of his four years in office.

Now in fairness this was to be expected, at least early on. Donald Trump grew up in an era where Doctor’s were respected, where the Hippocratic Oath still emphasized “Do no Harm” and the science of virus and medicine was not something that was within Trump wide range of expertise. It is possible, even probable that Donald Trump could not picture a medical Doctor deceiving the public during a time of crisis to advance an agenda.

There are a ton of people, particularly in the medical field who lost their jobs because of the policies that Anthony Fauci pushed. There are people who have lost loved ones due to the policies that Anthony Fauci pushed.

It would take very little effort for Ron DeSantis to link Trump and Fauci and the Donald knows that. It’s no coincidence that he no longer pushes the COVID Vaccine at rallies as he discovered quickly.

To say this would be disaster for Trump in the primaries is the understatement of the year, this is why the attempt to play hardball with DeSantis is at best foolish and at worst reckless.

So what should Trump DO about a potential DeSantis run? Well I have a thought on that but that’s for another time.

Older Entries
Newer Entries