Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

Obama and Pritzker exposed as frauds on gerrymandering in Illinois

Posted: May 9, 2021 by John Ruberry in elections, News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

Last year former president Barack Obama called partisan gerrymandering “a sneaky way for politicians to consolidate as much power as they can. In the end, gerrymandering means that citizens’ voices are being diminished.” 

A year earlier the governor of Obama’s home state of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, had this to say after the US Supreme Court decided not to get involved in partistan remaps. “As I’ve said since I was a candidate, I will veto any map that is unfair,” Pritzker said. “It’s the right thing to do. We’re going to have to make sure that here in Illinois we’re not gerrymandering, that we’re drawing maps that are fair and competitive. That’s what’s best for the voters of the state, that they have choices when they go to the ballot.” 

Obama and Pritzker are of course both Democrats. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, state Senate minority leader Dan McConchie (R-Hawthorn Woods), pointed out that Obama, while at Illinois’ state capital late in his presidential term, denounced gerrymandering and called for reform. “And this needs to be done across the nation,” the 44th president said, “not just in a select few states. It should be done everywhere.”

Apparently not in Illinois becauses Obama has been silent about stacking the decks in favor of Democrats. The 2010 remap of Illinois congressional and state legislative districts was a travesty of democracy, as was the one after the 2000 Census, both of which were the work of longtime Illinois House speaker and Democratic party chairman Boss Michael Madigan, who was forced into retirement this year as scandals engulfed his inner circle. The state legislature, as mandated by the Illinois constitution, draws new General Assembly and US congressional district maps.

Late last month Pritzker appeared to be backtracking from his stance against gerrymandering.

The most blatant gerrymandering from the most recent remap is Illinois’ 4th congressional district, nicknamed “the earmuffs,” which is pictured above. 

But a quick look at maps won’t tell the whole story. Illinois three largest cities outside of Chicago, Rockford, Peoria, and Springfield, the aforementioned state capital, are each split between two congressional districts. This is not a case of these cities being too large for one district, the average size of a US congressional district is over 700,000, the largest of these municipalities is Rockford, with just under 150,000 residents. 

The current Illinois congressional delegation consists of thirteen Democrats and five Republicans. Mission accomplished, Democrats. That number will change because Illinois, again, will lose a congressional seat. As I’ve remarked before, Illinoisans are voting with their feet by moving out. They are fed up with rampant corruption, high taxes, and an unfunded public worker pension debt crisis that can be solved only by default or hyperinflation. Between the 2010 and 2020 Census counts Illinois lost population–the first time that has ever happened to the Prairie State.

The electoral results are predictable when politicians choose their constituents. Last year 52 of the 118 races for seats in the Illinois House had only one candidate. In the state Senate it was worse–10 of the 20 races had only one person running. The Democrats have veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly. 

Twice in the prior decade Republicans led efforts to allow voters to decide to amend the state constitution by having a non-partisan committee draw maps instead of the legislature. Both times what was called the Fair Map Amendment was ruled unconstitutional in a party-line state Supreme Court decision. The lead attorney in the lawsuit to block the amendment had ties to Boss Madigan.

Back to the US Congress. Illinois’ Democratic delegation is lockstep behind House Bill 1, which if made into law, in the process of nationalizing local elections, will mandate independent committees, not state legislators, to take charge of the decennial remaps in all 50 states. But why aren’t Illinois 13 Democratic members of Congress decrying the current remap process here? Because they are phonies, that’s why. Just like Pritzker and Obama. 

The current remapping in Illinois is being performed behind closed doors by Democratic members of the General Assembly using preliminary Census data. Hey Pritzker! Are you aware of this news?

Yeah, I know, in 1990 Republicans drew gerrymandered districts. It was wrong then too.

On Fox Chicago’s Flannery Fired Up this weekend, state Rep. Tom Demmer (R-Dixon) told the host, “We should draw fair, straightforward maps that use official [Census] data and give the people of Illinois a real choice in their elections so people are picking their elected officials and not the other way around.”

Tellingly, because Flannery strives to be fair, he had two Republicans on the gerrymandering segment of his program, but no Dems. I’m very confident that Flannery invited a Democrat to appear but they are either too ashamed to defend their non-transparent remapping–or they know it’s indefensible.

One more time for emphasis.

Six days before his election as governor a St. Louis NPR reporter, Jason Rosenbaum, asked Pritzker, “If you’re governor and they send you a map that is obvioulsy gerrymandered against Republicans would you veto it and why?”

Candidate Pritzker’s response? “I will not sign a bill that is gerrymandered,” adding, “I have been for independent maps for a long time.”

John Ruberry regularly blogs from Illinois at Marathon Pundit.

Yup this is how far California has fallen

Posted: May 7, 2021 by datechguy in elections, politics
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The verdict on the right seems to be unanimous on the Jenner ad as a devastating hit on the Democrat rule in California in general and the Newson administration in particular. Glenn Reynolds put it very well in his NY Post piece:

It’s rare for a single ad to determine the outcome of an election. But this Jenner spot has one enormous strength: It’s true. ..

…No matter how you spin the discarded needles and human feces littering the street, they’re still there.

t seems incredible to me that the GOP does not have a potential candidate in California who isn’t a walking billboard for mental hilliness, then again is California and the days when sanity rules are long gone, but to those who are thinking that if Jenner is the choice to challenge Newsom and are considering sitting this one out I cite Dr. Pierce from the classic1947 film Miracle on 34th Street:

Thousands of people have similar delusions living perfectly normal lives in every other respect. A famous example is that fellow, I can’t think of his name. For years he’s insisted he’s a Russian prince. There’s been much evidence to prove him wrong, but nothing has shaken his story. Is he in an institution? No. He owns a famous restaurant in Hollywood and is a highly respected citizen. 

Of course in America elections are a binary choice if it's a question of someone handing the wheel to someone who is delusional but understands enough not to drive off a cliff vs someone aiming for the cliff who insists all is well, the choice is obvious.

That California may have such a choice to make says everything about both about the left's prerogatives and skill at government but also speaks to the price of the establishment GOP spurned on by well paid consultant who insisted the culture wars were not worth fighting back in the days when they were easily won.  As a fellow named Spock once put it:

If we had not crossed the Neutral Zone, on your order, you would not now need our opinions to support a decision which should never have been made

Star Trek, The Enterprise Incident 1968

If nothing else it has been amusing so far and will be even more amusing to watch the left which lavished honors on Jenner when it suited their agenda to decide Jenner is the greatest evil known to mankind.

It’s a great lesson to the left’s useful idiots who follow their agenda that no amount of conformity to their radical political/social agenda will protect them from the full fury of their wrath once you are of no further use.

Unexpectedly of course.

Information on the Adam Toledo killing that the mainstream media is overlooking

Posted: April 18, 2021 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

If you receive your news only from mainstream media outlets then you probably don’t know that Adam Toledo, a thirteen-year-old Chicago seventh-grader, was likely a member of the Latin Kings gang, a criminial organization whose reach is worldwide.

Toledo was killed in a police shooting at 2:30am on March 29, It was a Monday, which is what my parents called “a school night.” That night the young teen was with a 21-year-old, Ruben Roman, who was on probation for gun crimes. 

Chicago’s former police superintendant, Garry McCarthy, places the blame on Toledo’s death on street gangs, not the cop shot who shot him. “They have the ‘shorties’ who they give the gun to,” McCarthy told WBBM-AM. Toledo apparently was one of those “shorties.” Youngsters such as Toledo, if caught, usually end up in the more lenient juvenile court system, although with Kim Foxx as Cook County’s prosector, the adult courts are quite lenient too.

Police officers were responding to a reports of gunfire in the Southwest Side Little Village neighborhood when they found Roman, who was quickly taken into custody, and Toledo, who ran. In a just-released police bodycam video, which is difficult to watch and contains profanity, it appears that about a second before he was fatally wounded, Toledo dropped his gun. 

There have been scattered local media reports about Toledo’s reputed membership in the Latin Kings. A British newspaper, News Corp’s The Sun, has been quite direct. Of the national media that has spoken up, left-leaning “fact-checking” site Snopes classifies such speculation as “Research in progress.”  But for the most part the big-time national media hasn’t reported about Toledo and his apparent Latin Kings ties.

To be fair the Chicago Sun-Times reported a few days after the shooting, “Chicago police leaders warned their cops that factions of the Latin Kings planned to retaliate following the fatal police shooting of a 13-year-old. Gang members were instructed to ‘shoot at unmarked Chicago police vehicles,’ CPD warned.”

The national mainstream media clearly has another of their narratives to protect, in regards to this one, it’s that racist police officers are indiscrimanetly shooting members of the minority community, particularly young ones. Meanwhile, the Hey Jackass! site says as of today, 165 people have been shot to death in Chicago so far this year–and 759 others have been wounded. Of those killed in 2021, again according to Hey Jackass, over 90 percent of the victims were minorites. And finally, yet again according to the same source, there have been only eight police shootings in Chicago so far this year–three of them fatal. 

Some people are unfairly blaming Toledo’s parents for his death. Good people sometimes raise kids who end up bad. Toledo was reporting missing by his mother on March 26, three days before his death, but he returned home the next day.

At 13 there was plenty of time for Toledo to turn his life around. 

The Chicago Teachers Union, which for months has stubbornyl blocked school re-openings despite the fact that children are the least harmed age group by COVID-19, said in a statement, “Adam Toledo was loved. He was one of ours.” While students have been truant since the first schools took in kids, remote learning leads to even more of it. Chicago’s elementary schools only opened, part time, for in-class learning a few weeks before Toledo’s killing. The high schools re-open in a similar fashion only tomorrow.  In February, the Centers for Disease Control, declared with safeguards, it was safe to re-open schools, even without vaccination.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

It Has Begun in NH

Posted: April 14, 2021 by datechguy in elections, politics
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John the Baptist: It has begun!

Nicodemus: What has begun.

John the Baptist: If he’s healing in secret now the public signs can not be far off!

The Chosen Episode 5 2020

Two days ago at Instapundit I saw this via Althouse:

“A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that 55% of Republicans falsely believe Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election was the result of illegal voting or rigging.”

“Additionally, 60% of Republicans incorrectly agree that the election was stolen from Republican Donald Trump.” 

CNN reports, aggressively inserting the view that the people who were polled are wrong. I believe that’s a very unusual way to report an opinion poll, with insistence that the opinion is wrong and apart from any factual reporting that makes it perfectly obvious that the opinion is mistaken. 

Glenn says: “THEY’RE VERY NERVOUS ABOUT THEIR ELECTION NARRATIVE, WHICH IS TOTALLY HOW PEOPLE WHO ARE CONFIDENT THEY WON FAIR AND SQUARE WOULD ACT:” but I think it’s a perfectly logical meme given how hard it is to keep a secret that so many people know:

I submit and suggest that given the sheer number of people involved the question it’s not a question of “If” the fact that the election was stolen will eventually leak out along with details and names. It’s a matter of “when” (That’s incidentally why I would not want to be the insurance company that issued policies on the lives of those lower level grunts who did the heavy lifting). Thus it becomes imperative to force as many people into the false narrative as possible so that when the facts do come up more people have a stake in ignoring, dismissing or outright denying them.

Maureen O’Hara knew that the only person who could betray her secret was herself. Kirschner and those who are openly (and quietly) backing him know that they don’t have the advantage O’Hara did. All they can do is continue is to do their best to manipulate the terrain so that when the facts eventually leak out as many people as possible will have pledged to look the other way. 

Well while everyone has been working doubletime to prevent or slow audits of ballots in AZ and GA something has been going on in NH:

You might recall a story from February about Windham NH where a Democrat who called for an audit of a local election that they lost by 24 votes had an unexpected side effect:

Hand Recount in Windham (Rock Dist. 7) Reveals “Machine” Shorted Every Republican by About 300 Votes

Ironically this hand count wasn’t called for by the GOP but by a Democrat looking to flip a local election

That is very strange. That is a large number, large enough that a Republican who lost by 100 to 300 votes would not ask for a recount. Of course, no Republican asked for a recount. It was a Democrat looking for lost votes (24 of them) to perhaps flip one seat in that local election.

And look at what they found. Something, unexpected. Something we were not supposed to see?

St Laurent (d) lost 100 votes, and their Republican opponents all gained 300, plus or minus three votes.

What was less unexpected was the reaction of Youtube to this news:

Gateway pundit noted this story and interviewed on camera the Belknap County GOP committee member Dr. David Strang M.D. on the subject:

David told The Gateway Pundit that the Republican candidates in Windham had 6% of their total votes removed by the Dominion-owned voting machines.

According to Dr. Strang, these same Dominion-owned machines are used in 85% of the towns in New Hampshire.

Youtube took down the video locked their account and gave them a “strike” for upload it.

Well while Youtube could keep the interview off their platform they couldn’t keep Granite Grok the leading conservative voice in NH from reporting on it and therefore local republican from hearing about it and in the NH state legislature in the house and senate acted:

In a HUGE WIN for We, the People, and for New Hampshire election integrity, the NH Senate voted 24-0 just minutes ago to concur with the House amended version of SB43.

This Bill was championed by Senator Bob Giuda and will validate election integrity in our state by mandating a forensic audit on Windham’s 11/3/20 general election ballots and voting machines as configured on November 3, 2020.

The forensic audit will determine the huge discrepancy between the election day results and subsequent recount of Windham’s November 3, 2020, State Rep. race where a difference of 1,363 total votes from just 10,006 ballots was uncovered.

There’s an advantage to having a state where the legislators only make $300 and are not dependent on political power for advancement in life. However the governor of the state is named Sununu his father the previous governor was also named Sununu and served with Bush 1. They were pushing Kasich in 2016 are not known as big Trump men so one might wonder if he would sign this bill.

Wonder no longer:

HUGE NEWS! I just received word that Governor Chris Sununu signed Senate Bill SB43 into law.  It mandates a forensic audit of the ballots that were cast, and the voting machines that were used, by Windham, NH during the November 3, 2020 election. The Bill became law because Senator Bob Guida and NH activists demanded answers as to why the results that were produced by Windham’s voting machines on election day for the State Rep race were drastically different from the results of a recount that was performed nine days later.

Now to be fair this only mandates an audit in this county vs statewide nor does it guarantee game over:

Now that SB43 is law, the responsibility shifts from the Legislature and Governor to the NH Secretary of State, the NH Attorney General, and the Windham Board of Selectmen.  They are now tasked with hiring the forensic auditors to ensure that no stone is left unturned.  All of the questions need to be answered, with no assumptions made.

The Windham Board of Selectmen will choose one team, and the Secretary of State and AG will jointly choose a second team. Those two forensic teams will jointly pick a third team, and together… they will need to complete the independent forensic audit process and solve the mysteries.

Who they pick will speak volumes.

I suspect that this story will get very little attention in the national media but it has the potential to be the leak before the deluge. The Baptist again:

Nicodemus: I should never have come here

John the Baptist: All your life you’ve been asleep: “Make straight the way for the King!” He is here to awaken the world, but some will not want to waken. They’re in love with the dark. I wonder which one you will be?

The real test will be if the Governor and the state will allow the audits to be expanded statewide if what we’ve already seen revealed is confirmed.

That’s when we find out if they are in love with the dark or not.

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