This weekend Politico had a piece about some early Jockying among potential successors to the President for the GOP nomination in 2024.

It goes without saying that Vice President Pence will have the edge as the Vice President. Other logical candidates include Senator Ted Cruz (Assuming that President Trump doesn’t put him on the SCOTUS in his 2nd term) former Ambassador Nikki Haley, Senator Rick Scott, Senator Lindsey Graham. Perhaps we might even see a never Trump Favorite like Romney or maybe a technocrat like Charlie Baker try to jump in (if nothing else that would be amusing).

But no matter who is the eventual nominee no matter how wonky, how respectful, how proper, or anything else, I can guarantee you that the Media/Democrat/Left will define that person as WORSE THAN TRUMP!

It won’t matter if they never tweet, it won’t matter if they’ve been married once, loyal to their wife/husband. Regular church goers or with a history of good works and government experience behind them. The Democrats are going to define that person as the 2nd coming of Trump and thus the worst person in the world.

It’s going to be a lot of fun to try to turn the VP into Trump but I suspect it will be a lot more fun trying to see that played on someone else.

I know this is many years from now and there’s a lot to pay attention to but as it’s coming I thought I’d be the first to say it.

By John Ruberry

February was a nasty month in Chicago. Not the weather, as it was pretty good. Just a day or two of sub-zero weather and no major snowstorms.

No, I’m talking about crime. Just as there are contested primaries in Cook County for state’s attorney, which consists of Chicago and its inner suburbs, on both the Democratic and Republican sides. There are three challengers to Kim Foxx in the Democratic side, two GOPers are battling for their party not.

Bill Conway seems to be the leading Dem challenge to the incumbent prosecutor.

Foxx, best known for her still not-fully explained decision to drop charges against alleged hate crime hoax charges against Jussie Smollett. A grand jury empowered by a special prosecutor issued new charges against the former Empire star last month, 

Murders of have been decreasing in Chicago since 2016 when there were 762. But last month there were 34 murders–ten more than in February, 2019, a 41 percent increase.

In 2019 there were 123 shootings in February. This February there were 166.

Carjackings are up too. As with murders in Chicago, the clearance rate is abysmally low, year to year, according to Hey Jackass, hovers around ten percent. But that clearance rate is declining. 

There are no figures on gangs of shoplifters in Chicago, but anecdotal evidence seems to indicate there are more of these roving mobs. Twice last month the ritzy North Michigan Avenue was hit. Both times no one was arrested. 

Foxx, a leftist, refuses to charge shoplifters with a felony who are caught steeling less than $1,000 in merchandise. The Illinois threshold is $300. Crime seems to pay in Chicago and suburban Cook County as long as you don’t get caught and especially if you don’t get too greedy.

Northeastern Illinois seems to be part of the wave that I called here the Age of the Criminal.

Election Day is March 17 here. Of course I’ll be taking a Republican ballot. 

UPDATE March 19: Cook County voters proved to me just how dumb they are. Foxx easily was won renomination two days ago. The Republican nominee is Pat O’Brien, who has my support.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Levitical hand washing & the CoronaVirus

Posted: March 1, 2020 by datechguy in catholic
Tags: ,

I was speaking to a friend at church who teaches Theology at a Catholic High school a few days ago and one of the things that she usually opens with are ways to verify the existence of God.

One of my favorite arguments for the existence of God came to mind when I saw piece after piece reminding you that one of the easiest ways to retard the Corona or other virus and flu is to simply wash your hands.

When it comes to preventing viral infections — especially those that spread via droplets from coughs and sneezes — washing the hands is always the first-line measure.

Now, in the midst of the recent coronavirus outbreak, correctly washing the hands remains public health officials’ top advice when it comes to controlling infection rates.

In their guidelines on how to prevent infection with the novel coronavirus, the World Health Organization (WHO) state that people should “[w]ash [their] hands frequently with soap and water.”

My “chapter old/new/psalms/Gospel a day or seven of each a week” system recently had me in Leviticus and one of the things that you see all over the place is in Levitical law is WASHING.

Washing cups, washing clothes, washing utensils, washing washing washing. And if you did any of the things that made you “unclean” (and thus needing to separate yourself from others) from touching a dead body to women in their periods, one of the things involved in becoming clean was you guessed it, washing. I tell you whoever had the washing concession among the people of Israel was going to make a fortune.

Why does this matter? Well consider that these are bronze age people who had a bronze age knowledge of Virus, disease, infection and microbes, which means practically none.

Yet somehow they were given a set of laws that mirrors basic advice on how to avoid the spread of germs. As I wrote ten years ago concerning Moses, the author of these books acting as God’s Stenographer concerning these laws:

Imagine him in the 21st century. Explain germs to him. Explain microbes to him, Explain the internal combustion engine, heart transplants and the internet to him. To say they would go over his head is the understatement of the year.

Leviticus doesn’t have God explaining to Moses what a virus was or how the spread of germs works. Instead he gives Moses laws and he accepts them, not because he has the eyes of modern man and understands that all of these rules concerning washing, avoiding blood, being “unclean”, becoming “clean” and avoiding things like promiscuity will help avoid disease among the hundreds of thousands of people packed together that he is managing, he accepts them simply as God’s laws because he is God’s man.

I submit it’s no coincidence that the Jews are one of the few ancient people whose cultural existence as they were still survives. Furthermore it seems to me that this would be a strong proof of the existence of God, after all if you were going to “choose” a people through whom the world would be blessed might you not give those people laws that give them an edge on survival?

Not suspicious at all

by baldilocks

A mystery has taken hold of me.

Phil Haney was a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security – an agency that investigated him nine times and found nothing untoward. And this very same agency scrubbed its own records that Haney had been using to investigate Islamist terror networks in the United States.

Vaguely, I remember his name from my early days of blogging. He’s back in the news again; unfortunately for being dead.

From Carmine Sabia:

A man who had already exposed President Obama once and was about to do it again has been found shot to death in California.

Police originally labeled the death a suicide but now say that the initial reports were “misinformation” and the case is still open.

Haney blew the whistle on the Obama Administration for, he said, asking him to scrub the records of potential radical Islamists that the Department of Homeland Security was investigating prior to Obama’s election.

Last Friday he was found dead in his car less than three miles from his home from a single gunshot wound to the head, police said.

The initial reported said Haney “appeared to have suffered a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound” and “a firearm was located next to Haney and his vehicle,” Fox News reported.

A new press release from the Amador County Sheriff’s Office now says that the death was not a suicide and that the investigation is “active and ongoing.”

“On February 22, 2020 the Amador County Sheriff’s Office released initial details regarding Philip Haney being found deceased in our jurisdiction. Mr. Haney was located in a park and ride open area immediately adjacent to State Highway 16 near State Highway 124. Highway 16 is a busy state highway and used as a main travel route to and from Sacramento. The location is less than 3 miles from where he was living.

According to other reports I’ve read, Haney was a committed, active Christian. A widower, he was planning to remarry this year. Not exactly a prime candidate for suicide; I guess that’s why that angle was dropped.

I’m reading his book See Something, Say Nothing, published in 2016. It is an indictment of the Obama Administration as lackeys of global jihad and I’m look forward to reading about the San Bernardino and Orlando Islamist attacks, which could have been prevented, according to Haney.

Seems that a lot of highly placed people might benefit greatly by sending Mr. Haney into the next world.

I’m also planning to read Haney’s essay Green Tide Rising; suffice it to say that it’s not about climate change.

I’m a nobody, so it should be easy to explore this without becoming dead myself. But we’ll see.

By the way, I’m “reading” the book via Audible. It seems that dead-tree versions of it are unavailable — at least on Amazon.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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