Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

Between the last day of Pintastic NE 2022, interviews, as much pinball as I could squeeze in before the machines were taken away, the drive home, and Mass last evening and uploading the final videos I didn’t get a post up yesterday nor did I comment on the Dobbs decision.

Now that I’m home with a night’s sleep let’s do a quick five thoughts about the Dobbs Decision.

  1. If there was ever a time to say: “Thank you Mitch we owe you one” it’s now. No Matter How much the GOP base might be angry with Mitch McConnell on other things no GOP legislator is more responsible for this result. None of this is possible without his willingness to:
    • Stop the Garland nomination in its tracks
    • Retaliate against Harry Reid for ending judicial filibusters
    • Push Judges including Trump SCOTUS picks
  2. Of course if we’re going to thank legislators we also have to thank Harry Reid who often claimed to be pro life and ironically turned out to be the single most important man in the Senate to get this going. Without out him nuking the filibuster for judicial appointment at the urging of Obama Mitch McConnell does not nuke it for SCOTUS allowing Trump to get through three justices that the left would have filibustered till the cows come home. Yes it meant that the left was able to seat Ketanji Brown “What’s a woman I’m no biologist” Jackson and perhaps other radicals like her but if that’s the price of killing Roe we’ll take it. Without his action Mitch’s prophecy never comes through, cue the video:
  1. Of course the primary person we have to thank is Donald Trump Not only did he push forward conservative Judges but when Ruth Bader Ginsberg died less that 50 days before the election he was ready to roll with Amy Comey Barrett getting her approved with only a week to spare. Can anyone think of any other GOP president who would have been willing to do so? If you had told me in 2000 that Donald Trump would do this, I would not have believed you, but the Hermit of Loreto would have. I guess Mitch’s Prophecy was not the only one that was fulfilled last Friday:

Capoverdi asked him in English if he was Thomas [Zimmer], and the two had a delightful conversation. When Trump was elected, Dr. Curran called and told him that, back in the 1980s, Tom Zimmer said he had received a “premonition” and that “a certain man would lead America back to God”—and that man would be none other than Donald J. Trump.

“The millionaire playboy from New York?” the incredulous doctor is said to have asked Zimmer.

“Yes,” the Hermit of Loreto responded, adding he was so sure Donald Trump would become a great spiritual leader of America that he wrote his name on a brick and had it placed in the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Holy Door after the Jubilee so Trump would receive blessings from the many Masses that would be said in the Vatican.

Ever wonder why the left’s hatred of Trump boarders on the demonically insane? This is why
  1. One can not stress enough how critical to this day the courage of Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch Barret and Kavanaugh in this ruling. The leak of Alito’s draft opinion was specifically used to try to intimidate them. The left openly threatened their lives (and are still doing so) with one person already facing attempted murder charges while protestors continue to harass them at home in violation of federal law. All the while Democrat leaders were either silent or encouraged such action and the Democrat AG who once was nominated to sit on the court did nothing to enforce the law. If they had caved not only would the rule of law be threatened in this country forever but it had the real possibility of turning our cold civil war into a warm one and generating an actual insurrection rather than the fantasy being advanced by the left in the house.
  2. Finally an odd thing that my family members have seen on facebook as been the incredible rage of people who loudly proclaim that they don’t want to associate themselves with anyone who is happy about this decision or posted anything to celebrate it. I actually find this amusing in the sense that my family members are all Catholics who regularly go to church and regularly receive the sacraments including confession. That there are people who are friends and associates of them who are shocked that such people who openly practice their religion actually believe what the the faith teaches seems a tad odd. In fairness if they only get their news from CNN & the MSM perhaps they figure that Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and all the other public Catholics who consider faith a coat to remove if it becomes uncomfortable or inconvenient to their power the norm.

By John Ruberry

The big political news from last week, unless that is, your only news sources are MSNBC and CNN, was not the prime-time January 6 show trial masquerading as a hearing, but the resounding vote by San Francisco voters to recall radical leftist so-called prosecutor Chesa Boudin. 

Oh, he is a piece of work, this one. Boudin’s parents were Weather Underground terrorists, both of whom served long prison terms for their crimes, including murder. Boudin’s guardians were two other ex-Weather Underground terrorists, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, he attended an elite private high school, and he is a Yale law school graduate. Boudin was served a translator for Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. In 2019, campaigning as if he was a woke social worker, Boudin was elected district attorney for San Francisco. “We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes,” Boudin the candidate said. “Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted.” Well, I’ll concede this fact to him. Boudin honored his campaign promises.

And criminals received the message. Shoplifting soared under Boudin, as well as what one Nation writer, Sasha Abramsky, called other “low-end crimes,” including burglary and car break-ins. To me, a low-end crime is littering or jaywalking, but I am not a leftist. For many people, particularly renters and the poor, an automobile is their most valuable asset. Low-end? Really? Abramsky, you are quite out of touch, but of course you are, you write for the Nation.

The murder rate went up under Boudin. His misrule was a validation of the Rudy Giuliani’s “broken windows” policy of policing. Notice that I didn’t call it the “broken windows” theory of law enforcement.

I’ve only visited San Francisco once, in 2010, which residents of the City on the Bay probably look back on as “the good old days.” I was appalled by the level of homelessness there, and by all accounts, there are now many more indigents sprawled out on San Franciso sidewalks. Tellingly, during my time there I noticed the strong smell of urine even in the best neighborhoods. Boudin couldn’t smell the pee?

I’ve heard there are Republicans in San Francisco, albeit very few. The two Republican opponents of Nancy Pelosi–her entire district is within the city–collected 11-percent of the vote in 2020. But 60 percent of voters in San Francisco voted to purge Boudin last week. Earlier this month, another Nation writer, Christopher D. Cook, warned of a “centrist uprising” against progressivism in San Francisco. And all of this time, particularly from the left, I’ve been told we need more moderation in our politics, which of course to them means conservatives veering over to their side. In fact, as Democrat policies, from Biden down to Boudin, prove toxic, it’s liberals who are heading to the center, which is best exemplified by Bill Maher’s regular attacks on the far-left. 

Over at the Washington Post, Perry Bacon Jr. warns of centrist Democrats attacking far-left policies on crime. Writing for the New York Times, Shane Goldmacher commented, “Centrists and former law enforcement leaders hailed the successful San Francisco recall as a crushing blow to progressives.”

Oh, those evil centrists, they are taking America down a treacherous moderate path.

Boudin, true to form for any leftist, blamed “right-wing billionaires” for his defeat. Oh, what’s this? Radical leftist billionaire George Soros contributed to an anti-recall political action committee.

The Democrats of course don’t possess the right side of the political spectrum. And they are losing the center. Or perhaps it’s already lost to them. Which leaves the Democratic Party with the extreme left, or to channel Biden’s insult on conservatives which ricocheted against him, the Ultra Left.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Was part of an interested twitter exchange that will make a better post than what I was going to write:

It started with my reply to a Mollie Hemmingway tweet:

A fellow (or lady) by the name of Still following took umbridge at my suggestion that the left would consider the murder of a justice who opposed them a good thing:

I’ll give him/her/it full marks for suggesting that the protests (which are illegal under federal law) are wrong but his attempt to pivot to “republicans support the murder of citizens is so weak and such a standard response by the left that it’s almost not worth fisking, but I had the time…

I then started to note this piece at powerline rather than the tweets quoting the piece let’s just quote it directly:

What do the Democrats think about attempted assassinations of Supreme Court justices? To my knowledge, neither Schumer nor Joe Biden’s handlers have commented. I surmise that the Democrats are hoping for one or more assassinations to take place before Biden is hustled out of the White House, so that his handlers can appoint a successor.

The attempt on Kavanaugh’s life has only emboldened the Democrats’ efforts to intimidate conservative justices. Thus, the dark money group called “Ruth Sent Us,” which has been behind much of the publication of justices’ home addresses and threats against their families, is calling for action against Justice Amy Barrett:

why not double down if there is no push back:

Barrett attends church “DAILY”? The horror!

What I would like to know is, who funds “Ruth Sent Us”? I hazard a wild guess that it is not some fringe group, but rather mainstream Democratic Party donors like, say, George Soros. I think the campaign to expose conservative Supreme Court justices and their families to the risk of assassination is not “extremist,” but rather has been orchestrated by the leaders of the Democratic Party–Joe Biden’s handlers, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and so on. And I think they hope that one or more assassins will succeed so that Biden’s handlers will be able to nominate one or more justices.

Let me remind you that this is the opinion of John Hinderacker. A lawyer who has a long steady record and not someone who just shoots his mouth off: He continues:

Does this speculation seem beyond the pale? Once, I would have thought so. But, apart from open advocacy of assassination by Democrats as in the tweet above, Democratic leaders haven’t done anything to rebut it.

And I can’t think of an alternative explanation of why Merrick Garland and other Democratic Party authorities have failed to enforce laws against demonstrating outside judges’ homes. I can’t think of another explanation of why leaders of the Democratic Party can’t bestir themselves to condemn an assassination attempt. I can’t think of another explanation for why the Washington Post buried news of the attempted murder of Justice Kavanaugh deep in their “local news” section.

The “local news” bit is of course in line with DaTechGuy’s 3rd law of Media Outrage but the Merrick Garland business reminds me of how lucky we were not to have this evil asshole on the court. My apologies for the language but I can’t think of something worse description to use that is printable. He concludes:

Nor can I think of another explanation of why leaders of the Democratic Party haven’t called off “Ruth Sent Us” in the wake of the Kavanaugh assassination attempt. Could they do so? I am pretty sure they could. But let’s find out! Who, exactly, is financing “Ruth Sent Us”? How do those people (or maybe just one person) relate to assassination-inciter Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Party generally?

Inquiring minds want to know. The effort to intimidate or, better yet, assassinate Supreme Court justices didn’t begin with marginal characters like Nicholas Roske, just like the idea of assassinating the House Republican baseball team didn’t originate with James Hodgkinson. The leaders of the Democratic Party are in the dock. Can they defend themselves?

So far, they haven’t even tried.

In fairness even if they wanted to speak I believe that there are two factors here preventing them:

  1. The people who are funding these guys have things on the left to shut them up
  2. They are afraid of they murderous loonies on their side because unlike us on the right they know they’re willing to kill

But there is one more reason while the argument of Still Following fails and this is it:

Nobody is claiming that the Uvalde shooter murdered those kids in protest over gun control o the fellow who shot up his surgeon did so because he objected to limits on magazine sizes or that the gang bangers in Chicago, Baltimore or Philadelphia are basically having a “national day of gunning down people in support of Heller”. For his argument to have the slightest bit of rationality that would have to be true.

But that’s the left for you. it’s all about the narrative and the political goals.

By John Ruberry

Now that New York’s Bill De Blasio has been term-limited out of office, America’s worst mayor is Lori Lightfoot of Chicago.

This week Lightfoot will announce she is running for a second term, from an unusual location, Chicago’s West Side, a largely overlooked part of the city, except in regard to violent crime. At her side, according to Fran Spielman of the Chicago Sun-Times, will be three West Side aldermen, each of them black. 

Chicago’s candidates for mayor will face off in a late February election. If none of them receives 50 percent of the vote, the two candidates who tallied the most votes face off in an April runoff.

In his most recent Chicago Way podcast, John Kass, as he interviewed former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, spoke of racial politics, which has plagued Americas’ third-largest city for decades. “Lori Lightfoot has gone from presenting herself as an agent of change,” the former Chicago Tribune columnist remarked, “to an able practitioner and player of the race card.”

A year ago, to mark the two-year anniversary of her inauguration, her office sent invitations to reporters for one-on-one interviews with a restriction–only reporters of “color” were requested.

But Lightfoot has another joker card up her long sleeve, the gender card. Last week, in what you would think should been an opportunity to offer a message of healing and unity–kicking off Pride Month–Lightfoot is a lesbian by the way, she and Governor JB Pritzker dedicated Chicago’s AIDS Garden. It was at that event where she dismissed criticism of her turbulent three years as mayor by her opponents.

“Another day, another man who thinks he can do his job better than me,” Lightfoot said.

As America’s worst mayor, there are plenty of men–and women–residing in Chicago who can do better. 

Crime has skyrocketed since Lightfoot moved into the fifth floor of City Hall. In 2019, according to Hey Jackass, there were 603 carjackings reported in Chicago. Last year there were 1,848. In 2021, AP reported, there were 797 homicides, 299 more than in 2019. 

Apologists for Lightfoot will blame the COVID-19 epidemic, but Chicago’s lockdowns were among the nation’s most severe. Infamously, in August of 2020, on the same day Lightfoot cracked down after a large group violated her ridiculous ban on entering the expansive Lincoln Park on Chicago’s beautiful lakefront by dispatching a heavy police presence there, looters that night mowed through the city’s Loop and Magnificent Mile shopping areas downtown. Those areas were still recovering from the late May riots after the murder of George Floyd. This led to a continuing exodus from that area that includes the Gap, Disney, and Macy’s. It will take decades for Chicago to recover from what another blogger, whose name escapes me, called “the Night Chicago Died,” referencing the 1970s pop hit by Paper Lace

The Loop, the Magnificent Mile, and the immediate surrounding area is the driver of Chicago’s economy. The rest of the city is simply along for the ride. 

The retail departure hasn’t escaped Paul Vallas’ attention. “I used to say a number of years ago,” he said in that Kass podcast, “when I ran [for mayor] last time, that Chicago was Detroit with a thriving downtown–now I can’t even say that.”

Back to the lockdowns. Lightfoot all but sanctioned the large outdoor celebrations in Chicago after Joe Biden was declared by the media the winner of the 2020 presidential election, which occurred a few days before she issued new lockdown orders in time for Thanksgiving–on top of the others that were already in place.

I wonder if knowledge that two years later gasoline would double in price would have muted those flash mob gatherings?

To be fair, Chicago and its Cook County suburbs are burdened with a Soros-funded politician, State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who is more of a woke social worker than a prosecutor. Lightfoot on occasion has spoken out against Foxx, but her criticism has been guarded. Foxx, a Democrat like Lightfoot, is of course best known for the special treatment she gave since-convicted race-hoaxster Jussie Smollett. Foxx deserves some blame for the fall of Chicago too, as does another wokester, Timothy C. Evans, Cook County’s chief judge.

Will Chicagoans reelect America’s worst mayor?

UPDATE June 7:

In a video that was released today, Lightfoot officially announced her reelection effort.

Yesterday, Lightfoot bizarrely attacked Kim Foxx, who she endorsed for reelection in 2020 in what should have been a tough Democratic primary for the radical prosecutor. “Given the exacting standards that the state’s attorney has for charging a case, which is proof beyond a reasonable doubt – when those charges are brought, these people are guilty,” the mayor said, but quickly adding, “and of course they’re entitled to a presumption of innocence.” Some more back story: Foxx is the former chief of staff for Toni “Taxwinkle” Preckwinkle was Lightfoot’s runoff opponent in the 2019 mayoral election–she’s a leftist too.

John Ruberry regularly blogs from suburban Cook County at Marathon Pundit.