Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

Voting irregularities and worse in Cook County as the winner of the Dem Primary for state’s attorney remains unknown

Posted: March 24, 2024 by John Ruberry in election 2024, elections, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

“Let me tell you about Florida politicians. I make them. I make them out of whole cloth, just like a tailor makes a suit. I get their name in the newspaper. I get them some publicity and get them on the ballot. Then after the election, we count the votes. And if they don’t turn out right, we recount them. And recount them again. Until they do.” Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) in Key Largo. 

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Johnny Rotten, at the end of the last Sex Pistols concert of their 1978 tour.

Last night a bombshell broke as votes are still being counted in from last week’s Illinois Primary in Cook County. Cook, where I live, is Chicago and its inner suburbs. It’s as Democratic as Manhattan. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden collected nearly 75 percent of the vote.

As I noted in my DTG post two weeks ago, the Cook County state’s attorney race was collecting most of the attention of voters. Jussie Smollett’s protector, the pro-criminal and George Soros-funded Democratic incumbent, Kim Foxx, after two tumultuous–for law-abiding citizens–terms in office, is retiring. Running on non-specifics, Clayton Harris III–Rod Blagojevich’s last chief-of-staff–received the endorsement of the extreme-left Chicago Teachers Union. The CTU is arguably the most powerful political force in Chicago. It placed Chicago’s leftist mayor, Brandon Johnson, one of their former organizers, in office. If CTU is behind Harris, you can assume he’ll continue the failed legacy of Foxx.

The other candidate, who I endorsed, is a traditional Democrat Eileen O’Neill Burke, who has promised to dial back some of the extreme pro-criminal polices of Foxx. Violent crime, theft and more has soared under her misrule

On the morning after Election Day, O’Neill Burke was leading Harris by 51-49 percent–about 10,000 votes–with votes from a few stray precincts and many mail-in ballots uncounted. Per Illinois law, any ballot postmarked on Election Day or earlier that is received at the local board of elections by April 2 must be counted. It’s believed that most of the mail-in ballots have been received and already counted, and not surprisingly, O’Neill Burke’s lead has shrunk to 4,000 votes. The far-left has embraced alternative forms of voting.

Illinois has drop boxes for ballots too. 

Yep, just like in the Dinesh D’Souza movie, 2,000 Mules. Yep, Mark Zuckerberg boxes.

Last night, Alderman Brian Hopkins, who represents downtown Chicago, dropped a bombshell on X. His original post was deleted, here’s what he had to say last night:

Correction: after counting what was stated as most of the remaining mail-in & dropbox ballots, EOB [Eileen O’Neill Burke] holds a 4,000+ lead. BUT…election staff told me they misstated the total number of remaining ballots, and 14,710 more (most are dropbox, so not postmarked) still must be counted.

It gets worse. Because the Chicago Board of Elections may have had these ballots since last Monday.

Why weren’t these votes counted Tuesday night? Or heck, Wednesday morning even? By the way, decades ago, when I was a Little Marathon Pundit, even in the closest elections, we knew who won an election a day to two later after polls closed–at the latest. We’re declining as a society even as technology has greatly progressed.

It gets worse. Here are a couple posts from Max Bever of the CBOE earlier than Hopkins’ second X post last night. Bever apparently found some ballots he “mistakenly left out.” If you call his move a “Bever hunt,” then shame on you. Anyway, to refresh your memory, the alderman said the “found” ballots are drop box votes.

Statement from Max Bever, Director of Public Information, Chicago Board of Elections: “In adding up the total number of Vote By Mail ballots the Board had received back so far, I mistakenly left out additional ballots that had been received back via USPS the evening of Mon, 3/18.

I traded speed for accuracy in reporting out numbers this week as quickly as I could. I truly regret this error on my part and for the confusion that it has caused the voters of Chicago. I will share updated numbers only when they are accurate and verified.

The vote counting continues this afternoon.

I am crossing my fingers and praying that EOB holds on to her lead. With the crime high rates in the Chicago area, my life may depend on it. For real. I’m at vulnerable age that thugs view as a target.

At the very least, you call what is happening in the Cook County vote count irregular and incompetent.

Except for verifiable reasons, such as a military deployments and temporary out-of-state work assignments, absentee and early voting should be abolished. Drop boxes should be unconditionally dropped.

Whatever happens in the state’s attorney race, supporters of both candidates are probably going to cry “foul.”

And if there is credible evidence of a stolen election in the Cook County state’s attorney race, then we have an even more serious problem. Because if large numbers of citizens don’t trust the election results, it calls into question the legitimacy of government–and of American society.

There were lot of “irregularities” and then some in the 2020 presidential election. But Democrats were silent four years ago because they liked the result.

Yes, there were certainly many Republican crossover voters, but about half of Cook County voters backed O’Neill Burke in last week’s primary. Many Democrats, at least in Cook County, might soon have a different opinion on mail-in voting and drop box ballots soon.

It’s quite likely that updates to this post are coming.

Oh, for the days when we only had Election Day, not Election Season. Oh, for the days when votes were counted in one night–not for a whole week.

UPDATE 7:40pm EDT:

Election Week County continues, as NBC Chicago’s Mary Ann Ahern tells us. Oh, some background. The Cook County Clerk counts suburban votes, the Chicago Board of Elections tallies city votes. Why not just one agency? The public sector is rotten to the core. Ahern in the first X post appears to be referring here to suburban votes.

The Cook County Board of Elections tonight says it will count the remaining Vote by Mail votes on Monday. There are a little more than 1 thousand County votes not yet counted. The bulk of their VBM ballots, 7 thousand were added to the County totals on Thursday. #StatesAtty

But what about the county-wide total? Well, Eileen O’Neill Burke’s lead continues to shrink, as Ahern reports.

NEW: @EileenCookCnty lead now ist [sic] 2015 over @ClaytonforCook#StatesAtty.

Update March 29 9:30 EDT:

After ten days–yes, ten days–of vote counting in Crook County, Clayton Harris III, the Kim Foxx candidate, has conceded, about an hour after AP called the race for Eileen O’Neill Burke and after EOB declared victory. The retired judge won by 1,500 votes out of over 500,000 cast.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Chicago Teachers Union molding Soviet-style Young Pioneers

Posted: March 17, 2024 by John Ruberry in education, election 2024, elections, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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Mrs. Marathon Pundit, third from left, at Young Pioneers event in Sece, Latvia, in 1976.

By John Ruberry

On Friday, the far-left Chicago Teachers Union organized a rally for voting age Chicago Public School students, during school hours, the “Student Power Forum.” 

They might as well have called it the Young Pioneers march.

The event was co-sponsored by Bring Chicago Home, which is working to pass a referendum, also called Bring Chicago Home, that will increase Chicago’s real estate transaction tax on properties selling for more than $1 million.

Election day in Illinois is Tuesday.

Proponents call Bring Chicago Home a “mansion tax,” but many retail storefronts and apartment buildings, and probably all skyscrapers, are worth more than that. I call it a jobs killer and a rent raiser. Funds from the tax hike, if voters approve it, will aid the homeless. No specifics are given as to how the homeless will benefit from Bring Chicago Home.

Of course, Chicago’s leftist mayor, Brandon Johnson, enthusiastically supports Bring Chicago Home. Johnson, who prior to his election as mayor, had no executive experience, but he’s a former CPS teacher and a longtime Chicago Teachers Union organizer. 

The rally, argues the center-right Illinois Policy Institute, likely violates CPS ethics rules, and the group quickly filed an ethics complaint. CTU called that move “racist.”

Now that Johnson is mayor, it’s difficult to ascertain a difference between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union. Johnson, besides being a former CTU employee, appointed six of the seven members of the Chicago Board of Education. Johnson is a mentor of CTU president Stacey Davis Gates–she has a son attending a Catholic high school–and she recently suggested, as collective bargaining between the two “separate” entities could end up costing taxpayers $50 billion. I hope she was joking.

CPS and CTU will be negotiating against itself. Let’s call them CPS/CTU.

Let’s return to the Young Pioneers. Regular readers here and my own blog know that Mrs. Marathon Pundit was born in Latvia when it was part of the Soviet Union. Enrollment in the Young Pioneers was mandatory after children turned nine. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Vladimir Lenin’s wife, was a driving force in the creation of the Young Pioneers. Similar groups were founded in most of the other communist states. 

Krupskaya recognized that young minds are malleable and vulnerable to manipulation. So does the Chicago Teachers Union. 

Some of the Young Pioneers activities were similar to what the Girl Scouts enjoy, Mrs. Marathon Pundit told me, but there was some communist indoctrination that she had to endure.

These are the four leftist education Rs: Reading, writing, arithmetic, and radicalism. 

CPS/CTU is heading in that direction in regard to kids.

As for the first three Rs, CPS/CTU is doing a wretched job in addressing them. In both reading and mathematics, only about 20 percent of CPS seniors perform at grade level.

There is some good news. Chicago conservatives–yes, they exist–found some surprising allies in opposing CPS/CTU pulling voting age students out of school to attend the Bring Chicago Home rally. Former Chicago alderman Dick Simpson, as well as journalists Eric Zorn and Laura Washington–all liberals–have decried the move.

As I mentioned earlier, there are no specifics on how Bring Chicago home revenue will be spent, assuming the referendum passes. But the Chicago Teachers Union has an idea. According to a leaked document obtained by the Illinois Policy Institute, CTU will be making a not-so-surpising demand as part of its focus on housing, which it says, “begins now with Bring Chicago Home on March 19.” At the top of the CTU list is this shakedown, “Financial assistance for CTU members to live & work in the city.”

Are there homeless CPS/CTU teachers?

Chicago’s high school “Young Pioneers” are what Lenin called “useful idiots.”

There could be five Rs in Chicago schools soon, rent assistance for teachers would be the fifth.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Don Surber and Lara Trump Get It Does the Donald?

Posted: March 11, 2024 by datechguy in election 2020, election 2024, elections, elections, politics
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For months now, I’ve been looking at this and going “They have a coup planned. The fix is in.” And everyone told me oh, no, I was seeing things.
Tonight we watched states called for Biden before votes were counted, while states that Trump has a solid lead in, stop counting.
And if you need help seeing what’s before your eyes, the left has for weeks now claimed Trump was going to attempt a coup. How many years have you known they accuse you of what they’re doing? What are you? Stupid?

Sarah Hoyt November 2020

The unexpected victory of Donald Trump in 2016 was a giddy time for conservatives. There were a lot of memes celebrating and a classic set of youtube videos of the calls of the various states that got a ton of views as they upset the MSM to no end.

A lot of people in their joy forgot that when Trump was on the verge of victory things just seemed to stop when it came to vote counting, particularly in in PA, and Wisconsin. For some reason it took hours for the final states to put Trump over the top. Furthermore once Trump went up to give his victory speech all those states together suddenly got called.

I have maintained for years that the reason for this was the Democrats who thought the election was in the bag were trying to steal the election on the fly and eventually found they could not. Once they realized they weren’t prepared the states were called expect for New Hampshire where there just happened to be a key Senate race where democrat fraud squad was ready and able to save said seat and give the state to Clinton as a consolation prize.

So while most were still celebrating the defeat of Hillary Clinton I gave the conservative movement in general and Donald Trump in particular one of the best pieces of advice I had ever given in my life:

Democrat Bosses in Wisconsin Michigan and Minnesota had no inkling that the election was close, that being the case there was no reason why, in an age where proof of a federal offense is a cell phone video away, Dem bosses in Detroit or elsewhere felt the need to take any risk.  They figured those states were won (and they were right about Minnesota) and by election night it was too late to change it.

However that won’t be the case in 2020,  I’ll wager that in 2020 the bosses in Milwaukee, Detroit, Madison and elsewhere will be ready, we’ll see plenty of mail in ballots and absentee ballots that we didn’t see before in those states and plenty of voters looking to go for the GOP will be in the same spot that Steven Kruiser was on election night.

We have four years to prepare for this so we’d better get ready because as our friends on the left have demonstrated in the past, they play for keeps.

After all you don’t think Soros has been quietly sinking millions into AG races, you know the people who would be protesting election fraud on a local level, just because it’s fun?

You have all been warned

Well this warning about election fraud and Soros and DA races was completely ignored and thus Election 2020 was stolen, Americans were and are still being imprisoned and the worst four years this country has gone through since World War Two has been the result.

However there is a glimmer of hope that people are finally getting it and one of this is one of the new co-chairs of the GOP Lara Trump:

“Unfortunately, we don’t have one day of voting, we don’t have paper ballots, we don’t have voter ID everywhere. So we have to play the hand that we’re dealt,” Trump said, noting the importance of early voting and mail-in voting where possible. “That way, we have votes banked as we head into Election Day, and we’re not playing catch up on Nov. 5 with the Democrats.”

“We need to be doing legal ballot harvesting — something that has never been done by the RNC, but I can promise you will be a huge part of what we’re planning to do,” she added. “And then come Election Day, and you’ll see that, I think, it’s not just about having poll watchers. It’s about having trained poll watchers and lawyers at locations around the country as necessary. And these are people who will be trained and able to physically count how many ballots are coming in. And how many ballots are going out.”

Trump said her goal is to “have people’s trust restored in our electoral process.” 

Via Citizen Free Press

If you want to know why little miss Romney needed to be replaced, this speech is it. Don Surber has noted this and has given the Trump train a warning:

But the election comes down to Trump stopping a second steal. He rightly has bitched about it for years. Now it is put up or shut up. My tough love for him is to dare to remind him: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Don Suber has some clout with the Trumps that I don’t perhaps they will listen. If they don’t it’s on them but the primary consequences will be on us.

I’ll give Sarah Hoyt the last word from election night 2020:

A second Trump term means a good chance that they go down hard and don’t get up again.
ALL OF THEM from the left politicians to the so called “tech lords” are fighting for their lives.
They’re cornered rats. There’s nothing they won’t do.
And all we have against them is Trump.
Stop calling Trump names.  Put on your big boy or girl pants.
They’re fighting for their lives.  And we are too. Because — look at Venezuela — socialism kills.

We have been warned, AGAIN!

On Illinois Primary day I’m choosing a Democratic ballot so I can vote for Eileen O’Neill Burke for Cook County state’s attorney

Posted: March 10, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, election 2024, elections, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

I’m going to do something that I haven’t done since I moved from Chicago to the suburbs. On Illinois Primary day next week I’ll be taking a Democratic ballot so I can vote Eileen O’Neill Burke for Cook County state’s attorney.

When I lived in the city, I did so for a couple of reasons. For starters, much like the rest of the Chicago area now, there were no competitive Republican political races to vote in. Secondly, if I needed a “favor,” nothing illegal mind you, but let’s say, I wanted the loud garbage pickup at the condominium across the alley from my apartment to take place after 7:00am, it was my belief that a call to the alderman’s office–true story, by the way–would carry more weight if I was on the list of registered Democrats in the ward.

Eight years ago, voters made the disastrous decision to elect George Soros-funded Kim Foxx as Cook County’s states attorney. As the county’s chief prosecutor, Foxx has acted more like a woke social worker than someone who should be protecting the people of America’s second-most populous county. In one of her first moves as state’s attorney, Foxx said she would ignore state law and only prosecute thefts as felonies if the value of what was stolen exceeded $1,000, rather than $300.

The message was clear to Chicago and suburban career criminals. Steal less than $1,000, then move on to your next target. 

Crime of all types have soared since Foxx became county prosecutor. Sure, COVID hurt, but the pandemic has been over for over three years–crime remains high. That includes shoplifting, carjackings, and murders.

Foxx should have resigned in shame years ago–and not because of her mishandling of the Jussie Smollett race attack hoax. Once again, I have to say it. The primary duty of government is to protect its citizens. Foxx has failed to do that.

There are two Democrats running in the state’s attorney race: retired Illinois Appellate Court judge Eileen O’Neill Burke and University of Chicago lecturer Clayton Harris III, who previously was best-known as the final chief-of-staff for disgraced Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. O’Neill Burke is not related to the recently convicted Chicago alderman and Democrat power broker Edward Burke. When running for office, she has always used both of her surnames, but Harris, who has been endorsed by Blago in this race, simply refers to her as “Burke.”

Harris has the backing of the woke chair of the Cook County Democratic Party, Toni Preckwinkle. The longtime president of the Cook County Board enthusiastically backed Foxx in both of her runs–Foxx is a former chief-of-staff for Preckwinkle. Chicago’s inept leftist mayor, Brandon Johnson, was endorsed by Preckwinkle in last year’s runoff election. Harris has only four years of experience as a prosecutor, whereas O’Neill Burke, as a judge and an assistant state’s attorney, has 25 years of experience.

Harris has all but said that he’ll continue the pro-criminal failed prosecutorial approach of Foxx. 

As for O’Neill Burke, while yes, she has received large contributions from donors who usually back Republicans, including Citadel’s Ken Griffin, she is not a conservative or even a moderate. Sadly, she supports Illinois’ toxic SAFE-T Act, which abolished cash bail. But she’ll be an improvement over Foxx. As for Griffin, he was a major financial supporter of a super PAC backing Nikki Haley. Harris is trying to make an issue with O’Neill Burke over the financial support of these Republicans, but his big-name Democratic support leans on the party’s far-left, starting of course with Preckwinkle. O’Neill Burke’s Dem endorsement base is more centrist, or what passes for centrist in Illinois. Her most prominent supporter is Illinois treasurer Susana Mendoza.

Voting for safety is one of the best reasons to select a candidate, perhaps the best one. That is why I’ll be choosing a Democratic ballot in the Illinois Primary election on March 19 and voting for Eileen O’Neill Burke for Cook County state’s attorney.

And no, I won’t be voting for Joe Biden.

The Republican running for state’s attorney is Robert Fioretti. He’s an acquaintance of mine, and I think he can do well in that office. But Cook County voters haven’t elected a Republican county-wide–yes, it was for state’s attorney–in over 30 years. Since then, Cook has become much more Democratic.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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