Illinois red-light camera probe provides convincing evidence why they should be banned

Posted: January 26, 2020 by John Ruberry in crime, News/opinion, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Chicago’s Northwest Side

By John Ruberry

There is a lot of red-light camera news in Illinois. As part of an overall corruption investigation in the state, federal authorities are into looking into the activities of Chicago firm, SafeSpeed, LLC, which installs red-light cameras in some Chicago suburbs.

Last week the mayor of west suburban Oakbrook Terrace, Tony Ragucci, resigned. He is part of that SafeSpeed probe. Federal agents have also have raided the municipal offices of the villages of McCook, Summit, and Lyons in conjunction with this investigation. A state senator who is part of the red-light camera probe, Martin Sandoval (D-Chicago) has since resigned.

Last year federal authorities seized $60,000 from Ragucci’s home, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, and $51,000 from a safe from Cook County Commissioner Jeffrey Tobolski’s residence. Tobolski is also the mayor of McCook.

SafeSpeed’s CEO denies any wrongdoing and no charges have been filed regarding the firm.

In 2017, the Forest Park Review called SafeSpeed a “clouted company.”

Something stinks in Illinois. Actually, something new stinks in the state.

Red-light cameras are a cruel cash cow. At best their record in preventing accidents, the prima facie for them, is mixed as evidence shows out of fear of a $100 ticket–the charge in Illinois–motorists often abruptly slam on the brakes but then end up getting rear-ended.

As the nation’s most corrupt city, it shouldn’t be surprising that Chicago has more red-light cameras than any other municipality. Nor should it be surprising that it has endured a bribery scandal involving red-light cameras. John Bills, a former precinct captain in Michael Madigan’s political organization, is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for accepting $2 million in bribes and gifts from a different red-light camera company, Redflex.

Madigan has been speaker of the Illinois House for thirty-five of the last thirty-seven years and he’s been the chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party since 1998.

Three paragraphs ago I called red light cameras a cruel cash cow. How much cash? From 2008 through 2018, drivers forked over $1 billion to municipalities. Not a major reason, but I suspect the proliferation of red-light cameras, most of which are concentrated in the Chicago area, as among the causes of Illinois’ six-years-and-counting population decline.

Here’s a personal take on red-light cameras. Thursday night Mrs. Marathon Pundit, who is a limousine driver, called me. “You have to pick me up at O’Hare Airport.” I replied, “Why?” She answered, “There is a boot on my limo.” Yes, one of those wheel boots. When I picked her up at O’Hare she supplied more details. “The city says there are four unpaid red-light tickets, two of them are from 2018, but the office says they were never told about them.”

Okay, you may answer that one of her co-workers could be covering up inaction at the office. But in order for her employer to receive a city vehicle sticker for the limo she drives, all red-light camera tickets must be paid off. But the limo she drives has the latest Chicago vehicle sticker.

Those four tickets cost her employer $988, which included late charges and sending someone out to the car to remove the boot. Not knowing what was coming next, Mrs. Marathon Pundit parked her limo in a short-term lot, so her fee–which we have to pay–was a staggering $77. As it took all day Friday to sort out this debacle, my wife missed a day of work. She’s not on salary.

I’m certain hundreds of thousands of Illinoisans have similar stories.

There is some good news regarding red-light cameras. Last year Texas became the eighth state to abolish them. And in a rare bipartisan push, there is a movement in Illinois to ban them. And Illinois drivers now have a new friend, Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza. The Chicago Democrat says she’ll no longer assist municipalities in collecting red-light camera tickets. “As a matter of public policy, this system is clearly broken,” Mendoza said in a statement, “I am exercising the moral authority to prevent state resources from being used to assist a shady process that victimizes taxpayers.”

Good for her. 

Red-light cameras should be banned. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Cindy McCain Explains why she (and other elites) don’t deserve our respect (and an interesting coincidence)

Posted: January 26, 2020 by datechguy in crime, culture, News/opinion, oddities
Tags: ,

Cindy McCain the widow of Senator John McCain confirms something that all of us have already known:

note that she says that a girl from her daughter’s high school was a victim of him and she hopes he’s in hell but consider, it didn’t outrage her enough to speak out aloud and make a fuss about it, five years, or ten years ago back when it might have made a difference when the odd blogger or two was writing about it.

Remember this is the wife of a US Senator, a Former Presidential Candidate supposedly one of the most respected people in the political world, a “Maverick”.

Nope not a word.

When it comes to Jeffrey Epstien or Harvey Weinstein, or Matt Lauer et/al as far as our elite betters in cultural or political world the actions of these men were not a crisis in their eyes until the general public found out what all of them already knew.

Closing thought. Something hit me when I was writing this piece. I went back and checked the historical stats for my site.

From 2010 to 2013 My site was on a roll, I was growing in traffic, I was being credentialed for national campaigns covering Presidential, Senatorial, Congressional and other campaigns all over the country and able to do it via Datipjar. I had an oped run in the NY Post and even had an appearance on Boston’s fox station (I brought cannoli naturally). In late 2013 I brought on the first batch of my Magnificent Seven added several popular nationally known bloggers as paid members of my team. My Radio show was going strong and was expanding. I attended CPAC in 2014 confident that this was going to be my future.

On April 14 2014 I wrote an article titled

Private Islands, Orgies, Bill Clinton? Nothing to see here

The kicker was this:

What could the media do if this story involving the former father of the year? They would call it old news, not relevant, dirty tricks from a salacious lawsuit that doesn’t even involve him and an attack on Hillary that crosses the line. In fact the left will deploy a plethora of adjectives to discourage further discussion of this story from antiquated to zany, but there is one adjective that could not come out of their mouth to dismiss this story:

Unbelievable

The last few years have proven that the left can convince a low information voter of a lot of things, but even the full power of the mainstream media and the strongest zealots from the War on Women® brigade would not be able to convince the American public that Bill Clinton would have no interest or business on a private island where orgies took place.

2014 ended as my worst year in the Blogs history until last year’s technical issues kept us from posting and updating. Despite the addition of popular well known writers my traffic crashed over 67% in one year. The Tip Jar revenues likewise dropped. My radio show which had been adding stations never grew further and ended. By 2015 I had picked up an overnight temp job to pay the bills which eventually became a full time job in 2018. I dropped the podcast and I resigned myself to the fact that where I am in the blogging/writing/reporting world would never be more than what it was.

I never noticed the timing until today.

House Democrats are Trying to Californicate the Country

Posted: January 25, 2020 by julietteochieng in business, economy, war
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Cassandras and Dead Canaries. You figure it out.

by baldilocks

As I indicated here, I had been lazy about the leftward descent of California and it took the outrage of California Assembly Bill 5 to get me up off my duff, so to speak.

It began yesterday when I attended a rally in West LA to repeal the bill. It was sparsely attended but the two hours went by very quickly due to several eloquent, fiery and informative speakers like Kira Davis and freelance writer and novelist Kirsten Mortenson. Kira says that the rally had only been planned a few days before it happened.

And, in addition to advising us to contact Gavin Newsom’s office, along with our state senators and assembly critters, one of the speakers provided us with some hair-raising information, which Kira talked about a week ago at Red State:

By now you’ve probably heard at least a little something about California’s shocking new “freelancer” bill that went into effect January 1, 2020. Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) is sweeping and vague but basically it redefines the relationship between employers and employees, effectively ending independent contract work and killing the “gig economy”.  The bill – sponsored by a defiant Lorena Gonzalez (D-80) – was aimed at getting to Uber and Lyft, essentially forcing them to unionize. It is no accident well over 35% of Gonzalez’ (reported) campaign donations come from California unions. With a Democrat supermajority in Sacramento and a feckless state GOP, there was almost no opposition. The bill sailed through and against the hopes of independent workers across the state Governor Newsom signed it into law. (…)

Independent contractors across the nation could soon be suffering the same fate as their California counterparts. A federal version has passed through committee and now sits in the House of Representatives waiting for a floor vote. This is not a drill. This is real. (…)

Somewhere between September of 2019 and December of 2019 someone added an amendment to [H.R. 2474] that was a simple copy and paste of California’s AB5. In fact, it is so awkwardly jammed into the text that it can be nothing other than a literal copy and paste.

We should have known that the U.S. House of Representatives wasn’t just playing Impeachment Inquiry Games during the time in question.

Interesting thing about the rally: there were several entertainment freelancers there who I am almost certain are not conservatives and are definitely not fans of the president.

Did that matter? Of course not. And if there’s anything that can bring left, right and middle together, it’s politicians overreaching directly into pockets. But they are doing more than that.

They aim to hinder free and lawful capitalism. Think about what that will do for the economy should H.R. 2474 see daylight.

Kira:

SURPRISE!

A letter from sponsoring Democrats has already been signed and is sitting on Nancy Pelosi’s desk right now. The date? January 9, 2020. This bill is on your doorstep and no one has said a word. [JAO: See letter at link above.]

If they can cripple the Trump economy, they will do so by any means necessary and as fast as they can.

People from other states heap a lot of scorn on us California conservatives for what we let happen to our state over the decades. But this – and Virginia, and, no doubt, countless other forms of tyranny are happening in your state and our country while you laugh at us.

You better wake up and smell the tyranny. We here in California will fight our version of it; yes, belatedly. But what good will our push-back do if the whole flocking country is AB5’d?

Yeah, the U.S Senate will probably kick it down, but the question remains …

What are your sweet and pristine state legislators up to?

If I were you, I’d find out. Don’t wait around like we did.

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.

Follow Juliette on Facebook, Twitter, MeWe, Patreon and Social Quodverum.

Hit Da Tech Guy Blog’s Tip Jar !

Or hit Juliette’s!

 

The Pro-Life movement needs to expand

Posted: January 25, 2020 by ng36b in Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,
President Trump at the 2020 March for Life. From denvercatholic.org

The March for Life, despite featuring President Trump as the main speaker, was nearly buried in the Google News Feed this morning. While I was digging details out of the different articles, it became very obvious that different language was used by different sides to describe each other.

For example, NPR’s headline reads:

Trump Speaks At March For Life, An Anti-Abortion Rights Demonstration

A local ABC station out of Pennsylvania had:

Locals Head to Historic March for Life in Washington D.C.

It wasn’t hard to see why. The NPR article linked Trump and being “anti-abortion.” Its deliberately linking him to opposing something, which is a negative. We are hard wired to have issues with negative people. If you sit around someone who is whining a lot, you get tired of it. The ABC station has a positive link, with people headed to something “historic” that features “life.”

It’s not just these two headlines. A search of CNN revealed the top headline as:

At March for Life, Trump shows he gets the power of abortion issue

…focused here on Trump wanting power. And Huffpost, never dissapointing me, posted this:

Trump To Attend Anti-Abortion March For Life In Person, Group Says

…insisting on inserting the “anti” portion, removing the President’s title and only saying he’s “attending,” a passive action.

This sounds like semantics. And who cares what others say? But its important, because it frames discussions we have with people. I see it when my kids tell me what their teachers push at their classrooms. I hear it when people bring up different subjects. Every conversation starts from a person’s level of understanding, and that, too often, comes from how they read an article. The article’s title often primes a reader to read it in a certain way. And if the person simply browses the title, even worse.

Although pro-life movements have made a lot of ground, they have an uphill battle against the media. They will have to change to continue to expand, especially when President Trump eventually leaves. Conveniently, Democrats have made abortion a binary issue to be in the party, and essentially no Democrat can openly support the pro-life movement. But abortion, which is a key issue for many conservatives, isn’t so for many liberal voters.

To change that, the pro-life movement should frame its movement as a scientific one, add adoption reform and also push for expanded maternity leave.

Any browsing of pro-life pictures will inevitably feature a christian cross, and likely reference the Catholic Church. That’s not a bad thing, but with so many young people not identifying with a religion, it will only serve to put the movement in a corner. Pro-life organizations should focus on adding lots of scientists to their numbers. Focus on how advances in science enable us to save babies when they are tiny. The fact that babies at the 22-24 week point can live outside the womb is a powerful scientific advancement that nobody can argue with. Seeing pictures of these children in the NICU is powerful imagery. An ultrasound picture can never compare to this. Doing this begins to make the pro-life movement the movement best linked to science, and adds further legitimacy.

Adoption reform would be an easy add to the pro-life movement. I know several people that have navigated the adoption process, and it is sad when its easier to adopt a baby from Africa than from the US. How can we call ourselves a modern society when we run good families through the ringer, especially financially, to adopt a child that needs a good home? Making adoption easier complements the pro-life movement, removing one more reason to kill a growing child. This is an easy vilification of an antiquated process, a reform that is needed, and a chance to add people who are on the fence about abortion into the pro-life movement.

While the media continues to paint pro-life as the “anti-woman” movement, the last easy win for the pro-life movement would be to advocate for maternity leave reform. More women are working outside the home, but struggle to balance having a family with a career. Children should be breast feeding for at least six months and require a lot of attention during that time. Giving women that opportunity, and finding a way to not punish businesses for that (perhaps some tax incentives?) is another great way to both remove pro-life opposition and bring more people to the pro-life side.

It’s sad when our modern society has to fight for basics like the right to live, but its a fight that should be fought.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Older Entries
Newer Entries