I’m not surprised to hear a politician say anything at all
Trump Lawyer Michael van der Veen to Lana Zak of CBS
Now that Donald Trump has been acquitted in yet another impeachment trial I expect to hear the media, the left and the Democrats continue to make broad declarations as to the horrible, HORRIBLE things he said and did on January sixth 2021. They’ll be stories with anonymous sources, various pols making loud statements and all kind of shocked SHOCKING claims to be made.
When you hear them remember this quote from yes minister about such statements.
PM James Hacker: (On Phone): No, no, leave me out of it. A routine visit. (Listening) All right – a routine surprise visit. (Listening) Well, say they were invited earlier, but the NATO exercise got in the way. Now they’re not needed, they’re going anyway. (Listening) All right. Nobody knows it’s not true. Press statements aren’t delivered under oath.
Yes Prime Minister A Victory for Democracy 1986
and then remember this quote from the movie Class Action:
Jedediah Tucker Ward:It’s not hypothetical to Dr. Pavel, he wrote it
So when someone in print or on TV or online or even in casual conversation talks about how horrible the GOP was for not convicting Trump remind them that the Democrats forced and won a vote to call witnesses at the 2nd Trump impeachment trial and then decided not to call a single one of those witness who had written these stories, made those statements or appeared on TV to make claims about Donald Trump to repeat them under oath.
Last Monday the Justice Department asked 56 U.S. attorneys to resign. There were two exceptions, John Durham, the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, will stay on as the special counsel for the investigation of the Russian collusion hoax, and David Weiss, the prosecutor for Delaware, who is pursuing the probe into Hunter Biden’s taxes, and presumably, more.
Among the others are John R. Lausch Jr., the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, which of course includes that cesspool of corruption, Chicago and suburban Cook County. Appointed in 2017, Lausch has been methodically hacking away at the blighted forest that is Illinois government ever since. Among those indicted under Lausch’s term are a Chicago alderman, two suburban mayors (one of them was also Cook County commissioner), and two members of the Illinois General Assembly. They have one thing in common–all are Democrats. Lausch has chipped away at the political machine of state Representative Michael Madigan (D-Chicago), who until last month had been state House speaker for all but two years since 1983. Lausch uncovered an alleged scam involving Commonwealth Edison, Illinois’ largest electric utility, that has led to the indictment of four senior executives at that company, as well as a longtime lobbyist with decades-long ties to Boss Madigan.
Madigan is the midwife of the Illinois pension debacle and he is the man who destroyed Illinois. Sadly, those aren’t crimes.
Lausch seems to be closing the ring on Madigan, who remains as chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party, a post he’s held since 1998. Madigan maintains his innocence and he has not been charged with any crimes. But he’s a tough one to investigate–Madigan doesn’t use email and he doesn’t own a cell phone. There’s a lot of smoke surrounding the 78-year-old legislator–but so far no fire has been discovered.
It took a lot longer than it should have but Illinois’ insipid Republican Party, the Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Harlem Globetrotters, finally pursued tying other Democratic candidates to Madigan, which led to a pretty good, but not great, general election for conservatives last autumn. The best result was the resounding defeat of the so-called Fair Tax Amendent, which would have replaced Illinois’ flat rate income tax with one with graduated rates. As I’ve quipped a few times before, Illinoisans finally figured out that if the Democrats were given an unlimited budget they would exceed it.
After the general election Illinois’ two Democratic US Senators, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, called for Madigan’s resignation as party chairman. No, they didn’t suddenly realize that Madigan is toxic to Illinois; Durbin and Duckworth didn’t like the general election results here.
The state House took care of the speakership problem, the Democrats ousted Madigan last month but replaced him with a longtime ally of the Boss.
The day after the Justice Department announced those federal prosecutor resignations, in what the Chicago Tribune called “a lame news release,” those two party-line hack senators called on Biden to keep Lausch on the job. I am very suspicious of their motives. Duckworth is up for reelection next year and if the federal investigation into Chicago area corruption stalls she might get the blunt of the blame for not convincing Biden to keep Lausch in place.
Durbin is the new Senate Justice Committee chairman and prefers not to be accused of keeping corrupt Dems in power in his home state. Back to gerrymandering and Madigan: Aftet the 2010 census the state congressional map was redrawn to be much more favorable to Democrats. The 8th congressional district was transformed from a competitive one to a layout favoring Democrats. In 2012 Duckworth ousted the Republican incumbent, future never-Trumper Joe Walsh.
Remember, for many Democrats Madigan has been very good to them. His skills at gerrymandering have produced supermajorities in the General Assembly and have bolstered Democratic numbers among the Illinois US House delegation. There may have never been a Senator Duckworth had she not won that House race in 2012. Through government and compliant corporations like Commonwealth Edison, Madigan has been able to hand out contracts, favors, and jobs to those loyal to him–as well as their relatives.
Lausch needs to be kept on the job in Chicago.
Biden’s nominee for Attorney General is Merrick Garland, a Chicago area native who was nominated by Barack Obama to the US Supreme Court seat that eventually went to Neil Gorsuch. But he hasn’t lived here in decades. Yet my guess is that Garland has kept his eyes on the fetid muck in Illinois. Perhaps he can put in a good word for Lausch to Biden or whoever is making the calls in the White House on federal prosecutors.
Sorry to be repetitive, but I have to keep mentioning this fact. Illinois has lost population every year since 2014.
You might recall that I argued that four years ago that the reason why Donald Trump won is because the left believed their own polling and was sure that Hillary had it in a landslide thus didn’t bother to fix the election in their key strongholds.
Meanwhile 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.
All of this while prophetic might not be relevant expect for one point.
You’ll note I didn’t have New Hampshire on that list. This is because in 2016 there was a key race for the Senate. On the GOP side Kelly Ayotte was running for re-election against Maggie Hassan.
It was very close and it seemed to take an awful long time to call such a small state, but Hassan ended up winning 354,649 to 353,632 a difference of only 1,017 votes and by an odd coincidence despite winning the primary there by a wide margin Donald Trump managed to lose NH as well.
While a few of us raised the question of fraud in NH with President Trump having the majority in both houses and the left all in on swinging electors nobody bothered to audit the machine at the time.
Flash forward to today and we have this story out of Granite Grok.
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.
The Grok people being fair minded noted the following
It could be a machine error and unique to this town, but this is a troublesome event given speculation about fraud and Dominion machine counting hacks. And if it is an error what other errors occurred (see, at the top of the ticket).
But now I ask you this question. If this “error” (have you noticed all such “errors” always seem to go in one direction had been repeated in just four of the 221 towns in NH in 2016 then Mitch McConnell would be the Senate Majority Leader and the dynamic for the Georgia Senate races would have been dramatically different.
Unexpectedly of course
Closing Note: 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.
Yup nothing suspicious about that, nothing to see here, move along.
As I like to say I’ll believe there wasn’t a conspiracy to steal election 2020 when the people who insist there was no conspiracy to steal election 2020 stop acting like they were members of a conspiracy to steal election 2020.
I hit the road last week–to a regular stop for me–Detroit–my fourth visit there. Coincidentally last Monday, when I arrived, was the first day that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s lifting of Michigan’s ban on indoor dining, replaced by low-capacity dining, took effect.
Yet central Detroit was still nearly void of people last week.
During my first visit, in 2015, while I noticed a fair amount of bustle on the streets and sidewalks downtown, I also walked past empty skyscrapers. On my next trip, two years later, most of those same buildings were occupied or being rehabbed. And the city’s light rail line, the QLine, an expensive and impressive showpiece, had just opened. As I noted at the time on my own blog, these trolley cars ironically echo Detroit’s monorail, the People Mover, the 1980s Stalinist boondoggle championed by Coleman Young, the five-term mayor of Detroit who may have been a closet communist. Both the QLine and the People Mover serve only the downtown area. They look stunning though.
Also in 2017 Little Caesars Arena opened in the adjacent Midown part of the city. It brought the Detroit’s NBA team, the Pistons, back to the city for the first time in nearly four decades. The NHL team, the Red Wings, made the short jump from downtown’s Joe Louis Arena to Little Caesars too. Since the early 2000s the NFL entry, the Lions, and its MLB team, the Tigers, have been playing downtown. Which made the many gamedays in central Detroit a magnet for hungry and thirsty people with fat wallets. Now the teams play in front of no fans.
Quicken Loans has been based in Detroit since 2009 and is now America’s largest mortgage lender. While Detroit is still the Motor City it is the Mortgage City now too.
But meanwhile in the neighborhoods the decline of Detroit continued. For urban explorers like myself, that is, people who photograph or shoot videos of abandoned homes, factories, offices, churches—am I leaving anything out?–oh yeah, schools, there is no shortage of material to work with.
Things looked even better for Detroit when I spent a day there in 2019.
Then COVID-19 hit. Whitmer’s statewide lockdowns have been among the nation’s most restrictive. As I witnessed in Chicago last year, the streets were also eerily empty in Detroit in 2020 according to media reports, such as this one from AP in October:
Downtown Detroit was returning to its roots as a vibrant city center, motoring away from its past as the model of urban ruin.
Then the pandemic showed up, emptying once-bustling streets and forcing many office workers to flee to their suburban homes.
And if you work for Quicken and its Rocket Mortgage wing, many of your job responsibilities, perhaps all of them, can be done from a suburban home, as Quicken performs most of its transactions online.
But lets say you need to come downtown for your annual review. What else is there to do? On Day 1 of the partial-lifting of the indoor dining lockdown, it looked to me that about half of the restaurants there were still closed. Most retail outlets were shuttered. And all of the shops and eateries were closed at the Little Caesars Arena, where I hoped to buy a hockey souvenir for Mrs. Marathon Pundit. But of course there is always Amazon to fall back on for that. Oh, Kid Rock’s Made In Detroit restaurant at Little Caesars closed last spring, although that departure had nothing to do with COVID.
So in downtown Detroit last week you still had to struggle to find a place to eat. Yes, there were a few of those ludicrous tents outside some eateries–by the way temperatures were in the 30s all last week during our visit.
Story continues below photograph.
Diners last Monday in downtown Detroit
Part of the allure of big-city centers has been the array of shopping and cultural choices offfered. That’s mostly gone now in Detroit. Sure, New York, Chicago and other large cities are facing similar challenges under COVID lockdowns, but many of their eateries and shops have been operating for decades. And yes, such businesses usually have narrow profit margins but being a going concern for many years means there will be an established customer base that might remember you a few years later. What if you are a Detroit boutique that has been open only for a couple of years?
The QLine and the People Mover haven’t run since last spring. There aren’t a lot of people in downtown Detroit to well, move. Buses are still running, however.
Back to those cultural choices: The Detroit Institute of Arts is one of America’s premier art museums. I wanted to attend Wednesday but the DIA was sold out that day. I was able to purchase tickets, online of course, for myself and my traveling companion the following day for one of the available time slots. And do you know what? Outside of employees there couldn’t have been more than 50 people inside the sprawling museum when we were there. I’m confident that Wednesday’s “sold out” day wasn’t much different. On the positive side I was able to stand and stare in front of the DIA’s four Vincent van Gogh paintings as long as I wished–there was no one to push me aside and tell me, “You’re done, now it’s my turn.” Yes, we were forced to wear masks and we had our temperature taken at the museum’s entrance. Precautions were taken.
My companion visited Dearborn’s Henry Ford museum on Tuesday–a fabulous place that I experiended in 2015–and it was nearly empty too, I was told.
The Motown Musuem in New Center remains closed, it re-opens February 18. Man, oh man, we really wanted to see that place.
Will COVID-19 and Michigan’s lockdowns kill Detroit’s revival?
Many people have their life savings and their mortages invested in small businesses that have been closed for months in Detroit and other large cities.
The dominos will start falling. Which is something most Detroiters know a lot about.
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