Archive for the ‘elections’ Category

Another front in the Boss Madigan scandals is something for Illinois voters to remember on Election Day

Posted: October 23, 2022 by John Ruberry in crime, elections, News/opinion, politics
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Madigan graphic courtesy of the Illinois Policy Institute

By John Ruberry

In March, after years of investigation, Michael Madigan, the decades-long speaker of the Illinois House and chairman of the state Democratic party, was indicted on corruption charges. The heart of that indictment was centered on northern Illinois’ principal electric utility, Commonwealth Edison, in what the indictment termed a “years-long bribery scheme” involving contracts, jobs, and of course favors, such as legislation favoring ComEd. Earlier this month, Madigan was indicted again, this time AT&T Illinois, a subsidiary of the much-larger AT&T, was the company involved. 

ComEd’s parent, Exelon, is a publicly traded company, as is AT&T. 

In return for AT&T Illinois paying a $23 million fine and admitting guilt, charges will be dropped by the local U.S. attorney’s office in two years, according to the paperwork filed in federal court in a deferred prosecution agreement. ComEd agreed to a similar settlement, while paying a $200 million fine. 

Madigan, 80, entered public life in 1969 as a delegate to the Illinois constitutional convention. He was elected to the Illinois General Assembly from a Southwest Side Chicago district a year later. He became House Speaker in 1983. 

As I’ve remarked many times before, Illinois is in serious need of term limit laws.  

While he was running what the U.S. District Attorney of Northern Illinois later called “the Madigan Enterprise,” the Boss managed to expand his power even more by becoming chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party. Perhaps the most devious gerrymanderer ever, Madigan used that post and the speaker’s office to create supermajorities in both chambers of the General Assembly. Oh, Madigan’s daughter, Lisa, served four terms as Illinois’ attorney general during dad’s reign. 

During Madigan’s reign-of-error, Illinois’ pension bomb was created. The fingerprints of the Boss were on every state budget from 1983 until his departure from public life.

The Madigan Enterprise fell apart early last year after–on Illinois Democrats’ standards–a lackluster 2020 general election. The Boss, finally visibly tainted by the drip-drip of the ComEd scandal, was unable to win reelection as speaker. Madigan, bereft of the linchpin of his power, quietly resigned not only as state party chairman, but he also resigned his House seat. He even quit as Democratic committeeman of Chicago’s 13th Ward, where presumably he is still revered. Madigan was never interested in student council-style pretend-power, he only relished the real thing. 

AT&T Illinois sought out Madigan because it wanted to ditch its landline telephone business, which it did in 2017. The General Assembly overrode the veto of Governor Bruce Rauner, a Republican, to get the job done. 

According to the indictment, Edward Acevedo, a Madigan crony and former state representative, received $22,500 for an allegedly no-work AT&T Illinois consulting job. Acevedo is now serving time in prison for tax evasion tied to his role in the Commonwealth Edison scandal. 

Also indicted by the feds this month was AT&T Illinois’ former president, Paul La Schiazza, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

Many of the minions of Boss Madigan are still in the General Assembly, most prominently Chris Welch, the current Illinois House speaker who, Brutus-like, turned on Madigan last year. 

Who is still in office is something for Illinois voters to think about when they make their election choices this autumn. Especially since, I suspect, it’s hard to fathom that ComEd and AT&T Illinois were not the only companies that tried to illegally curry favor with the Madigan Enterprise.

I recently read Matt Rosenberg’s What Next, Chicago? Notes of a Pissed Off Native Son—my review is here. In it, Rosenberg recalls a conversation with a former Chicago alderman, Dick Simpson, who told the author, “We have a rule about bureaucratic crime, that if one person is convicted there were probably ten people involved with that particular crime or that general pattern, that were not caught.” 

When Madigan was sworn into office as a state rep in 1971, Illinois had 26 electoral votes. In 2024 it will only have 19. 

Surprised?

Disclosure: The author of this entry worked for AT&T Wireless for over a decade.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Jezebel and the Democrats

Posted: October 18, 2022 by chrisharper in elections
Tags: ,

By Christopher Harper

If you know your Bible history, you’ll recall that Jezebel was one of the most ruthless women in the ancient world.

The website, named after the all-around bad girl, was launched in 2007 with the tagline: “Celebrity. Sex. Fashion. Without airbrushing.” Emma Goldberg of The New York Times described the site as “feminist cultural criticism, with an edge.”

Now Jezebel has become the lynchpin of an attack ad against Mehmet Oz that he tortured animals.

I discovered this tidbit in an advertisement in the middle of a baseball game between the Atlanta Braves and the Philadelphia Phillies. Not exactly the red meat time for “feminist cultural criticism.”

The ads are part of a $33 million campaign sponsored by the Democrats Senate Majority PAC, the top outside group looking to keep the legislative chamber in Democratic control.

The ads stem from Oz’s time as a researcher in the Columbia University Institute of Comparative Medicine labs. Oz’s research involved dogs, pigs, calves, rabbits, and rodents between 1989 and 2010.

The ads use videos labeled as generic footage of animal testing – including dogs in cages and other lab settings – not videos specifically taken from inside Oz’s lab at Columbia. Moreover, the Super PAC apparently couldn’t find any photos of Oz in the lab.

I’m not a big proponent of using animals in medical research, but is this issue a critical one before the electorate of Pennsylvania and the nation? I would wager that many medical researchers use animals to test drugs and other treatments.

Jezebel has offered a variety of attacks against Oz, including his couples counseling and appearances at celebrity bashes during his TV days.

All this mishegoss wouldn’t be noteworthy except that the Democrats are playing it back in prime time, and other “media outlets” like CNN are running it as truth.

Maybe it’s time to send this Jezebel to the dogs, too.

The Tell on Democrats/Media/Tech and Stolen Elections

Posted: October 17, 2022 by datechguy in elections, elections, politics
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Romney didn’t win did he?

Harry Reid Justifying his blatant lies concerning Mitt Romney after election 2012

Detective Gregory: Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?

Sherlock Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.

Detective Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time.

Sherlock Holmes: That was the curious incident. Arthur Conan Doyle: The Adventure of Silverblaze 1896


Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Adventure of Silverblaze 1896

As I contemplate my soon to be banning from Youtube for daring to say and maintain publicly that election 2022 was as Crooked as the Houston Astros last World Series title I’d like to mention one more give concerning not just the last presidential election but the next one.

You might recall that I said and still think the biggest give concerning the last election was the sudden stop of the vote count in five states at once:

The Democrat bosses in Nevada, in Michigan, in Wisconsin and in Pennsylvania each knew that they were capable of stealing their own state but each of them also knew that their own state would not be enough. What’s the point of stealing Nevada and or Wisconsin with it’s 10 electoral votes or even Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes if it just meant narrowing the margin of the Trump victory, especially if such a victory was followed by a federal investigation that could put them away for a very long time?

No each of them had to have blood on their hands so to speak. Each of them had to be sure that the other bosses necks would be on the line. Each of the had to be sure that they would be all in on the steal (and I suspect each of them had to be sure that the media and the tech giants would back them up, I would not be surprised if there was coordination with those folks during the pause in the count.) and I suspect only when they agreed to hang together rather than risk hanging repeatedly did the counts resume.

Now we all know how this ended, with state courts playing jurisdictional games and SCOTUS punting because, in my opinion nobody wanted to deal with the consequences of the truth being known, but there is one other consideration that hasn’t been touched.

Right now there is at worst there is a majority and at best a sizable minority or even a plurality of people who think the election systems are either compromised or dishonest.

That being the case what is the obvious thing to do.

Well the media/government/tech have taken steps to address this

  • They’ve labeled them “election deniers”
  • They’ve had them suspended on social media
  • They’ve had them shunned and berate

They’ve done all these things but not the obvious thing that one would do in the face of skepticism of the honestly of the election process::

Make the system transparent to demonstrate that it is clean

Now if you are running clean elections and you want to reassure the public that the elections are clean this would normally be job one and if you’re running a clean election it’s not hard:

  • You’d demonstrate a clean chain of custody of ballots
  • You’d have an open and livestreamed count
  • You’d make sure that observers to the count and the ballots from all sides were present to make sure things were clean
  • And you’d tout these steps so that all could see that the voting and the count are open, honest and clean.

These are all the type of things that you would do very publicly to demonstrate to the world that any suggestion that the results of our elections were being manipulated are hogwash.

Yet this has not been the case, you don’t see stories demonstrating the security of the ballot or the machines or all the safeguards out there. You don’t see the media or the pols touting them nor any attempt to give the skeptical voter reason to believe any fears are unfounded.

Why?

There is one obvious answer and I submit and suggest that the answer is the left/media/tech left are not doing these things because they KNOW the process in their enclaves can not stand up to any sort of scrutiny and to make the process transparent will only show the world that they’ve been cheating for a very long time.

The lack of such offers and reassurances is is a really big tell the bigger one will be fighting tooth and nail against them.

Update: Via Don Surber Emerald Robinson is on it:

5 Big Election Fraud Stories Breaking Just Before The 2022 Midterms The 2022 elections are going to be the least secure elections since 2020!

Democrats’ inflation attacks ordinary Americans as Washington insiders are unaffected

Posted: October 16, 2022 by John Ruberry in business, economy, elections, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics, trade
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By John Ruberry

Every time Americans shop at a supermarket, they are reminded of a de facto tax on their spending power–inflation. The classic definition of inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods, which, President Joe Biden and his apologists, jumped on last year when they deemed inflation as “transitory,” pointing at the supply-chain crisis and the backlog of freighters at America’s major seaports. Left out of Biden and Company’s explanation was his $1.9 trillion stimulus package, which the president signed into law in early 2021, when the economy was clearly already recovering from the COVID lockdown.

But the supply-chain crisis was in fact a couple-months long hiccup. After all, if the supply-chain crisis was such a concern, why did we only find out after the media began asking questions on the whereabouts of the person in charge of our ports, secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg? Only then was it revealed that Buttigieg was on paternity leave. 

The semiconductor chip shortage has driven up the price of new automobiles. The lack of chips is tied to the worldwide COVID lockdown. I’ll discuss cars in a bit. 

Over the past 12 months, according to the September figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation soared, again, to a level not seen in four decades, at a rate of 8.2 percent. Despite what appears to be, for real, a transitory drop in gasoline prices. But fuel prices are dramatically higher than when Donald Trump was president because of the Biden administration’s anti-fossil fuel polices. Food and housing prices are way up. Agriculture is a major user of energy, and many fertilizers are derived from fossil fuels. And those increasingly expensive loaves of bread you see on the shelves of your local supermarket don’t arrive there by way of osmosis, nor by electric trucks.

But don’t worry, Biden recently signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. Insert The Simpsons’ Nelson Muntz “haw-haw” here.

The new car shortage has led to a used car shortage. All vehicles are more expensive. To fight inflation, the Federal Reserve, continues to hike its key interest rate, which drives up all lending. Most people don’t pay cash for cars, they finance. 

Then there is housing. Maria Bartiromo, on Fox and Friends this morning, laid the truth on the line when she said, “People who are going to buy a home are realizing that their mortgage payment now going to be going to be hundreds and hundreds of dollars more than they thought every month.”

Okay, no big deal, you might say, “I can always rent a place to live.” But rents are up too.

Now, if you are a Beltway insider, then you need not worry. Washington is recession proof. And the capital’s response, particularly when Democrats are in charge, is always more government. If you are a DC insider, you are well paid. You’re not sweating about food prices going up and you can afford an electric vehicle and the expense of installing a car charger in your garage.

The only known cure for high inflation is a recession. Despite Democrats’ creative denials, we are in one already.

Expect our economy to get even worse.  

But to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, “Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Joe Biden loses his.”

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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