Two crucial statistics jump out at me about the pandemic.
The nation is recording about 50,000 COVID cases a day, roughly the same as before the election.
The daily average of deaths stood last week at 610, which compares with 817 in the week before the November election.
Despite all the mask-wearing, lockdowns, and vaccinations, the numbers are roughly the same after Joe Biden took over.
Sure, the numbers are better than January and February. Still, the country is roughly at the same place after the Democrats repeatedly attacked Donald Trump for his incompetence in handling the pandemic.
That then leads me to the rather obvious question: Wasn’t the pandemic more about politics than science?
The COVID coup was successful in getting rid of Donald Trump. Now it’s time to return to the mask-less, feckless, and reckless job of ruining the country.
I’m more than happy to rid myself of the rather useless mask and return to the restaurants and shops without a face covering.
But isn’t it somewhat disingenuous of the Democrats to declare victory?
The Democrats, combined with their friends in the media, used the pandemic to get Trump out of office. Although the talking points convinced many to vote for Biden, the reality is that Trump did a pretty good job of dealing with a crisis no one had faced for a century.
The Democrats and the media scared people almost to death or at least to vote against Trump. Without the pandemic, Trump would have been easily elected based on the country’s economy alone.
I won’t get into the idiocy of wearing masks because of the “science.” We’ve gone from the scientists telling us that masks were ineffective to the need to maybe wear two masks to the CDC announcement that masks weren’t needed anymore for many people.
The most damaging part of the coup was to lock down almost everyone across the nation. Not only did the lockdowns, which were mainly the decisions of state officials, tank the economy, but the actions also exacerbated the disease for many people.
For example, the CDC has determined a reason for a higher percentage of Blacks and Hispanics dying during the pandemic. “[P]ersons from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups might be more likely to live in multigenerational and multifamily households.” Therefore, more Blacks and Hispanics died BECAUSE of the lockdowns. See https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e1.htm
That findings are even worse for those 65 and older. From May 1 to August 31, 2020, 78.2 percent of those who died were 65 and older. That’s three out of every fourth death was a senior when they represent only 16.5 percent of the population.
Simply put, the lockdowns made life deadlier for many seniors who died during the pandemic.
Although it’s unlikely, I hope some people realize that they got played by the “scientists,” the media, and the Democrats. The numbers don’t back up the “science.”
Lake Shore Drive is between the skyscrapers and the lake
By John Ruberry
“And it starts up north from Hollywood, water on the driving side Concrete mountains rearing up, throwing shadows just about five Sometimes you can smell the green if your mind is feeling fine There ain’t no finer place to be, than running Lake Shore Drive And there’s no peace of mind, or place you see, than riding on Lake Shore Drive.” Aliotta-Haynes-Jeremiah, “Lake Shore Drive.”
As I’ve stated many times before Chicago is a city in decline. Decades of rampant corruption and fiscal malfeasance, particularly with woefully unfunded public worker pension plans in regards to the latter, have placed Chicago in a bankrupty-in-name only status. The bleak future is now. Chicago can’t keep kicking the can down the road, whether that road is Michigan Avenue or Lake Shore Drive.
Chicago’s woke mayor, Lori Lightfoot, who is halfway into her first term, has made Chicago’s situation worse with her overreaching lockdown response to COVID-19 and her feeble response to two rounds of summer rioting in 2020. The city’s murder rate is high. The quality of education provided by Chicago Public Schools is low and has gotten worse because the Chicago Teachers Union keeps pushing more convenient, for the teachers of course, remote learning lessons.
Politicians, particularly liberals, are adept at adopting symbols, as author Tom Clancy pointed out to Bill O’Reilly in an interview shortly after the 9/11 attacks. “The general difference between conservatives and liberals is that liberals like pretty pictures and conservatives like to build bridges that people can drive across,” Clancy said to O’Reilly. “And conservatives are indeed conservative because if the bridge falls down then people die, whereas the liberals figure, we can always build a nice memorial and make people forget it ever happened and was our fault. They’re very good at making people forget it was their fault.”
Okay, no bridges have collapsed in decline-and-fall Chicago. But some City Council members are lining up behind a proposal to rename Lake Shore Drive for Chicago’s first non-indigenous resident, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. He opened a trading post at the mouth of the Chicago River at Lake Michigan around 1790.
Little is known about DuSable although it’s believed he was born in Haiti around 1750. In 1800 he sold his home and the land around it; the property ended up in the hands of John Kinzie, the first recorded European-American to live in what is now America’s third-largest city. One of Chicago’s first streets was named for him, but DuSable was forgotten, wrongly in my opinion, for many years. But his legacy caught up and surpassed Kinzie’s. There is the DuSable Museum of African American History on the city’s South Side, DuSable High School, a DuSable Park near the site of his former home, and a bust of DuSable on Michigan Avenue, even though because there are no known contemporary renderings of DuSable–no one knows what he looked like. Oh yeah, we were talking about bridges. The Michigan Avenue Bridge downtown was renamed for DuSable in 2010.
There are some urban streets that are iconic. Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, Fifth Avenue in New York, and Bourbon Street in New Orleans. And Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.
Lake Shore Drive–it has had that name since 1946–is a fantastic driving road. Fifth Avenue, for instance, is a better walking street. Chicago’s early leaders, post-Kinzie, made the wise decision to keep the Lake Michigan waterfront open, and most of it is park land–with Lake Shore Drive. When I have out-of-town guests I always make a point of taking them on a trip up and down Lake Shore Drive. The response I usually receive is from them, “I had no idea Chicago was so beautiful!”
Of course if the road is renamed for DuSable, the views will be just as pretty and Lake Michigan will be equally blue. But Lake Shore Drive is in essence a brand name. An iconic one. Why mess with that?
The Chicago Tribune editorial board has suggested a sound alternative–renaming Millennium Park, which abuts Lake Shore Drive, for DuSable and merging it with DuSable Park. Mayor Lightfoot has a good idea too, renaming the Chicago Riverwalk, which arguably has no name, for DuSable. But Lightfoot has gained, many say earned, a lot of enemies in her short time as mayor. They oppose the Lightfoot’s proposal because of their dislike for her. Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, the only reason in my opinion to subscribe to that paper, offers a superb knockdown of the Lake Shore Drive renaming proposal, which brings up many of the same points I have mentioned. Also, Kass, as I have done, has excoriated Lightfoot’s woke Chicago Monuments Project, which has placed, among other items, five Abraham Lincoln statues “under review.” Yep, right here in the Land of Lincoln.
Destroying symbols is important to liberals too.
Those against the renaming Lake Shore Drive find themselves in a trap. In this cancel culture environment opponents of DuSable Drive will be called racist by the virtue signalers–even though they are not. Sears Tower, when it opened four decades ago, was the tallest building in the world. The naming rights of it were purchased by a British firm and it’s official name is now the Willis Tower.
No one I know–and I have a large circle of relatives, friends, and acquaintances–calls this iconic structure anything but the Sears Tower. No one. A DuSable Drive faces the same fate. Except nobody has ever called a Willis Tower-denier a racist.
I’m with the Tribune and Lightfoot on this controversy. Rename Millennium Park, which has only been open since 2004–because of delays and cost overruns it opened well after the millennium began–for DuSable. And rename the Riverwalk too for DuSable. It’s another relatively new city attraction, it opened in stages beginning in 2001.
And I have my own idea. The former Meigs Field, a small lakefront airport abruptly closed by the midwife of Chicago’s pension crisis, Richard M. Daley, is now known as Northerly Island Park. I suspect that Daley wanted that space named for him. If Millenium Park keeps its moniker–then rename Northerly Island Park for DuSable. Call it DuSable South–a twin of the other park.
Don’t mess with success Chicago. But the city, like the state of Illinois, has a habit of making bad decisions. Call it tradition.
The rather amusing piece from the NYT via Redstate saying that the GOP risks losing 100 prominent republicans over Trump and start their own party is great fodder for the Time’s readership that wouldn’t know a conservative if it bit them.
The problem for these brave intrepid rebels is that they’re caught between two fires.
If there goal is to be the next Lincoln project and make a bundle for themselves and their family then it’s easy. They can form a party, they can get financed by the left and they can make proclamation that will get some coverage but unfortunately will not be all that newsworthy because they will in fact be a party with no actual voter base, no candidates running anywhere and no people actually bein led.
No what they really want to be are the unfaithful nuns that I wrote about years ago back in April 2013 when the Pope backed up the findings of the investigations (begun under Benedict) on Catholic Nuns in America:
The LCWR will not choose to leave the church, they will go along, slowly, struggling and resisting but they will go along. The moment they leave the church, they change from brave dissenters within the church to just another splinter group with their own set of beliefs and while the media will make a fuss the first day and maybe the first week, they would no longer be worthy of the pulpit that they would raise them on
And a year later I wrote about what Fr. Z said about what happened to one such group that did in fact leave:
Consider if you will the group NCAN, an even more radical splinter group of the LCWR, which has fulfilled Sr. Joan’s dream of being without canonical structure. Their site is HERE, though it has not been updated since 2009 when they gave their coveted Margaret Ellen Traxler Award to Sr. Louise Lears, SC, whom then-Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis placed under interdict for her support of the ordination of women and her attending a fake “ordination”. These days the NCAN types are reduced to holding chat sessions in gated communities for three cats and a tumbleweed rather than in hotels for hundreds of sisters. For example, HERE is the flyer for a May 2012 meeting with the pro-choice Sr. Donna Quinn. (See my post NUNS GONE WILD!)
As long as the NYT 100 remain in the GOP, they can speak as party members, attend GOP events and even CPAC with the tag (R) next to them. , you can have them on CNN or MSNBC or quote them as “Republican officials” when they hit the party or Trump or conservatives or any other GOP member who you know actually pushes the agenda that GOP voters want.
They will be the LCWR until they like them begin to die out.
The moment they leave that is no longer the case.
So it remains to be seen if they choose the former or the latter, I suspect they will choose the later because the leftists who would pay them to form their new party can still pay them sub-rosa for speaking engagements or phony book sales to have the money flowing.
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.
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.
