Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

Chicago’s leftist mayor cancelling gunshot detection contract because he’s beholden to his ideology

Posted: September 22, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson

By John Ruberry

Chicago, in Brandon Johnson, has a leftist idealogue as its mayor. Not surprisingly, he’s failing. 

Take away his far-left beliefs, “Branjo” is a big empty suit, one tailored by his former employer, the radical Chicago Teachers Union.

As I discussed last week, Johnson was a backer of the Defund the Police movement, until after he made it to the runoff round of last year’s mayoral election.

Johnson’s approval rating is 25 percent. Crime was the biggest issue of the 2023 campaign. While murders are down slightly, the crime numbers remain horrible. People don’t feel safe, despite the minimalizing of lawbreaking by Chicago’s weak-kneed media.

Despite 33 of Chicago’s 50 alderpersons voting to continue the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, a gunfire detection system deployed in high-crime areas, Branjo is putting ShotSpotter on mute. 

While there are critics of ShotSpotter on the left and right, the general belief of people possessing open minds–meaning people aren’t extreme left-wingers–is that ShotSpotter works. A University of Chicago Crime Lab study said that there is a “3-in-4 chance that the technology saves about 85 lives per year.”

Besides those 33 alderpersons, Chicago’s two major daily newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune–both liberal publications–favor keeping ShotSpotter. As does Johnson’s pick for police superintendant, Larry Snelling.

Branjo has never explained why, other than fulfilling a campaign promise, his reasons for dumping ShotSpotter. Last week, Chicago’s man-child mayor dismissed ShotSpotter as “walkie-talkies on a stick.”

ShotSpotter, until Sunday night that is, is deployed in 12 of Chicago’s 22 police districts. The problem for Johnson and his far-left cop-hating base is that those districts are minority-majority. However, most of the alderpersons representing those areas voted to keep in ShotSpotter in place. The core of the support for cancelling ShotSpotter in the City Council are alderpersons–some of them are openly socialist–from progressive white wards on the North Side who put Johnson over the top in last year’s election.

This afternoon on X, Silvana Tabares, who represents a Southwest Side ward. bashed Johnson’s shortsightedness.

Experts and community member all know ShotSpotter provides a vital tool for first responders to render aid to victims of gun violence.

Beginning tonight, every gunshot victim bleeding in the streets of our city will be a worth sacrifice in the eyes of our mayor for his radical agenda.

Every single one.

Here are some headlines about ShotSpotter from CWB Chicago in just the last three days:

Branjo’s inner circle is comprised of fellow leftists. Earlier this month, on the Fran
Spielman Show podcast, a moderate downtown alderperson, Brian Hopkins, ripped the mayor.

“When you’re a democratic socialist who has some very extreme, left-wing views, that closes off a lot of opportunities to grow relationships with centrists or even moderate Republicans,” Hopkins said. “The city is suffering from that.”

A couple of, well, normal people were part of Johnson’s core staff early in his administration. Rich Guidice, the mayor’s first chief of staff, resigned his spring and he was replaced by a left-wing radical, Cristina Pacione-Zayas. Earlier this month, an office reshuffling ended up with an experienced and respected intergovernmental affairs officer, Sydney Holman resigning. Now in charge of lobbying the City Council and state legislators for Branjo is another extremist, Kennedy Bartley, who called police officers “f*cking pigs” in a 2021 podcast.

Chicagoans are only 16 months into Johnson’s four-year term as mayor.

As Barack Obama once said, “Elections have consequences.”

More murder victims will be one of those.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Five Thoughts on Trying to Assassinate Trump 2nd Attempt

Posted: September 16, 2024 by datechguy in culture, election 2024, elections, politics
Tags:

I’m old enough to remember when Democrats when an election loss was pending would try and figure out how to convince voters to consider them rather than encouraging people to murder their opponents.

Of course that was back in the days when I was a Democrat last century.

There have been a few humorous reactions to this event but nothing I’ve seen is funnier than this headline from the Daily Caller:

Trump Has Survived More Assassination Attempts Than Harris Has Campaign Interviews

What makes it funny is that it’s true.

What really amazing about this story is that less that half a day before this 2nd assassination attempt Dana Bash was grilling J. D. Vance, Trump running mate trying to blame his and Trump rhetoric for various bomb threats in Springfield.

This begs the obvious question:

https://x.com/DaTechGuyblog/status/1835458201313001654

Question to

@DanaBashCNN As you attempted to assign responsibility to

@JDVance for phone threats in Springfield does that mean you will be assigning responsibility for #trumpassassinationattempt2 to

@KamalaHarris , Waltz and

@DavidMuir for their incendiary words?

For some reason the base tweet won’t embed, not sure why.

While the tech giants were very quick to scrub Ryan Routh’s very left leaning social media it’s going to be rather hard to scrub all the various interactions he had with left media over the years.

What’s really interesting is that once Ron DeSantis announced that Florida would conduct it’s own investigation suddenly the FBI became talkative about Mr. Routh’s ahem “interesting” past.

Finally my worry concerning all these attempts at murder is pretty much the same as Robert E Lee worry on the Union Generals being swapped out.

He famously said he was afraid that eventually they’d put in charge someone who he didn’t understand.

Me I’m afraid that one of these attempts will eventually succeed.

Of course I’m reaching the point where I think it it gets close enough to election day and the result seems a forgone conclusion and all these attempt keep failing someone in authority in government will just bite the bullet and do it himself.

That the country has fallen so far that I actually contemplate this is amazing to me and extremely sad.

Presidential election warning from Chicago: Media malpractice gave the city its failed leftist mayor, Brandon Johnson

Posted: September 15, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, election 2024, elections, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

Last year’s mayoral election in Chicago presents a media deja vu moment with national implications.

Yes, I’m talking about Kamala Harris.

Brandon Johnson, an organizer for the far-left Chicago Teachers Union while serving as member of the Cook County commissioner–a rubber stamp body controlled by board president, Toni Preckwinkle, a leftist like Johnson.

Paul Vallas, a centrist Democrat, ran a wonky white-paper dominated campaign that was centered on hiring more police officers and prosecuting more misdemeanors. He lost. 

Johnson campaigned largely on platitudes. His political career is a creation of the Chicago Teachers Union, and aggressive campaigning by the CTU, including door to door work, identifying Johnson’s supporters, and getting them to the polls, pushed “Branjo” over the top. 

Republicans? Are we doing that? 

Back to my point.

As a commissioner, Johnson could only point one accomplishment in office, the non-binding “Justice for Black Lives” resolution that passed in 2020, which called for diverting funds from law enforcement to social services.

The extreme left loves symbolism. It also hates the police.

Also in 2020, Johnson said of the Defund the Police movement that it was “not a slogan, it’s an actual real political goal.”

Chicago’s mainstream media, Fran Spielman of the Chicago Sun-Times is a notable exception, are compliant lapdogs for the left. If at all, they barely challenged Branjo on his thin resume and his far-left beliefs.

Before the first round of voting for mayor, Johnson was asked about his support of Defund the Police and cutting law enforcement, Johnson flippantly replied, “Ask better questions.”

Finally, at a law enforcement forum before the second round of balloting, Johnson was asked about his backing of the Defund movement. “I said it was a political goal,” Johnson replied, “I never said it was mine.”

So the media, even though crime was the biggest issue of the 2023 Chicago mayoral campaign, dropped the Defund issue. 

The Chicago media barely vetted Johnson. Just as the national media didn’t do so on Joe Biden’s senility in 2020–and it all but ignored Hunter Biden laptop story. A year later, the national media elite is ignoring or minimizing the far-left political position of Kamala Harris, and her politically convenient flip-flops on them.

Last week, in her weekly podcast, the aforementioned Spielman interviewed centrist Chicago alderman Brendan Reilly, who supported Vallas in last year’s election.

Reilly, who may be candidate for mayor in 2027, said that Johnson was en route to becoming a “one-termer” who was “woefully unprepared” to lead America’s third-largest city, and a mayor who is a beholden to the “radical left.”

Johnson, who has blamed Richard M. Nixon for Chicago’s violence epidemic, is rumored to have suffered from panic attacks. The mayor regularly points his finger at white supremacy when his discussing city’s many ills.

The warning signs were there on Johnson for anyone who did some digging. But the Chicago media barely reported on them. Last week, a Fox Chicago reporter revealed that his City Hall staffer in charge of working with City Council and state legislators to advance the mayor’s agenda, Kennedy Bartley, made vile anti-police comments in a 2021 podcast, including calling law enforcement officers “f*cking pigs.”

This is Johnson’s inner circle. The mayor has resisted calls to fire Bartley.

As for crime, while Johnson has not defunded the police, his choice as police superintendant, Larry Snelling, says the CPD is short nearly 2,000 officers. 

Chicago faces a $220 million budget deficit for this year and a nearly $1 billion for 2025. In response, Branjo announced a hiring freeze, but two days later, he exempted the fire and police departments from that freeze. 

Crime is still sky high since Johnson took over. Murders are down, but only a little bit.

Johnson has driven the Chicago train off the rails. Ironically–and the Chicago media ignores this other story–the mayor has a massive polite detail, said to number anywhere from 125-150 cops. Johnson clearly doesn’t want to defund his police protection.

Back to Harris. 

Will the mainstream media drop its biases and finally vet the vice president?

Or will they wait, until a year or so after she’s sworn in, when another “woefully unprepared” office holder, one who is beholden to “the radical left,” fails again, for so-called journalists to finally sound the alarm about Harris? Maybe not. The media was all-in on Biden until his cognitive decline couldn’t be explained away after his June debate with Donald Trump.

Biden, whose mind was clearly slipping in 2020, is arguably a tool of the far-left. 

Will Harris, arguably an intellectual lightweight, end up in the same position if she wins the presidency?

John Ruberry regularly blogs from just north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

Springfield: Another Game of 4D Chess Won By Trump vs the MSM

Posted: September 15, 2024 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, election 2024, elections, politics
Tags: , , ,

Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!

C. S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters Letter #1

In the days when I was doing Computer Technical Support (which is why this blog is DaTechGuy blog and why I’m DaTechGuy online) one of the things I ran into a lot were people who focused on a particular problem while losing sight of what their actual goal was. You could fix a bug but if you aren’t addressing what the actual goal was you weren’t doing the customer much good. I always established what they were trying to do and if there was a better way of doing it suggest it as I fixed the bug so that the underlying problem, the goal, could be achieved.

Even at my current location which is as far as you can get from tech support when I was occasionally given a new person to train on a simple process like picking items ordered, I never started there. I took them to every part of the warehouse from the receiving docks where the product came in, to the receivers to processed and recorded it, to the group putting to the stations where they were being shipped to the lines where the shipped items were put in their respective bins and back to the docks. The idea was to make people understand that while the task seemed mundane it was a vital cog that worked with all the others to the ultimate goal of getting a product ordered by a customer to their door.

One of the best attributes of Donald Trump is one he shares with both Ron DeSantis who I supported in the primaries, is that the sees things in this way and the entire Springfield business is an excellent example of how this works.

The media/left reacted with glee at Trump bringing up the of pets in Springfield and spent days bashing him over it.

This put the entire countries’ focus on Springfield and while the left was decrying memes showing Trump protecting cats and dogs and stuff like this hilarious image:

The reality was that it became excellent fodder for doing two things, first showing the left for what is it to wit:

And this is classic:

All that is fun but is misses the bottom line which is that now everybody is talking about how the Biden Administration dumped tens of thousand of foreign nationals on a small town doubling it’s population with no support for the town in coping with it.

That’s a subject the left doesn’t want to discuss but it’s the cat and dog business that gave the opening to J.D. Vance when the media tried to play “Gotcha” with him on it:

Or as Ace of Spade put it after posting a NY Times story which included (emphasis Ace):

Mr. Trump’s debate remarks have themselves become a meme on the left since Tuesday, as musical remixes of his comments have ping-ponged around Instagram, TikTok and other social platforms, mocking the pet-eating claims while also prolonging their stay in the news cycle.

The attention has been unwelcome in Springfield, where tensions over immigration have flared since an 11-year-old boy was killed last year when a Haitian immigrant driving without a valid license crashed his minivan into a school bus.

Which caused him to quip

“They’re killing 11-year-old boys, not cats” is not the winning message you think it is, New York Times.

Kurt Schlichter nailed it:

And if Trump ends up going to Springfield and highlights the issue it will be spiking the ball.

Update: JD Vance again:

and again

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