Posts Tagged ‘illinois’

Journalists should be forced to wear clown suits

Posted: August 11, 2024 by John Ruberry in election 2024, elections, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

In the words of George Romney, father of Mitt, American voters are in the midst of “the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.”

Romney, who was then the governor of Michigan, was a leading contender for the 1968 Republican nomination when he made his “brainwashing” gaffe.

Leaders, let alone presidents, don’t allow themselves to be brainwashed. Well, Joe Biden has, but what’s left of his mind was washed away at Rehoboth Beach.

Getting brainwashed by clowns is even more humiliating. I’ll get to them in a little bit.

Our ongoing mass brainwashing, although now it’s usually called gaslighting, began, as Mollie Hemingway tells us, with the lamestream media covering up Joe Biden’s senility in 2020.

“There is nothing mainstream about the so-called mainstream media,” Hemingway said last week. “They are far-left. They tend to help [Kamala Harris] out with her politics. But it reminds me so much of what we saw in the 2020 race when Joe Biden was allowed, through the complete help of that corporate media, to run his campaign from the basement … The result of that is that we have a country and world in chaos.”

There was a three-week respite from the gaslighting by the media this summer, when the self-appointed puppet masters decided Senile Joe had to go, and they finally reported on his dementia. Biden’s replacement at the top of the Democrats’ presidential ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris, is an empty pantsuit. Her greatest skill, is something that can only be accomplished in the public sector, is failing upwards.

Move ahead in our Wayback Machine from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. This election is almost forgotten now, but Dianne Feinstein, who succeeded George Moscone as mayor of San Franciso, ran for a full-term in 1979. She won in the runoff, but the first round of voting bears noting. In his leftist agitprop campaign, Jello Biafra, the lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, a punk rock band, astonishingly finished in fourth place with 3-percent of the vote.

Oddly enough, Harris’ base is San Franciso, her first election win occurred in the 2003 district attorney race.

But I have the media in mind for this blog post.

Part of Biafra’s mayoral platform, with one change, needs to be put in place, nationally. 

The punk rocker favored forcing business leaders to wear clown suits. Instead, I support requiring journalists to don clown costumes. Because they are clowns–evil ones, that is.

Before that happens, politely and within the law, we need to confront these liars and clowns, whether in person, on social media, or by email, and let them know we are well past believing their gaslighting.

As they did with Biden’s senility, the lamestream media is ignoring or minimizing the reporting on Harris’ far-left record, including her opposition to fracking–a spokesperson recently walked that one back–her support of spending less money on law enforcement, and her backing of a what the leftists call single-payer health care, which means the elimination of our private healthcare system.

And since Harris refuses to do sit-down interviews–the media is squelching that story too–the vice president can’t be confronted with questions about her unpopular political positions.

By the way, what kind of journalists aren’t clamoring for public figures to speak to them?

Clown-type journalists, that’s who. Frauds who put three-card monte dealers to shame.

After Donald Trump’s upset win over Hillary Clinton, there was a collective, and yes, welcome response by the media along the lines of, “We didn’t get it right in the Trump-Clinton election and we refused to take Trump supporters seriously–but we’re going to reach out to them, so we don’t make the same mistake again.”

Well, that attitude lasted about two weeks. Then the corporate media leftists, the clowns, hitched their out-of-date wagon to the Trump-Russia collusion lie.

The time for reproachment with the mainstream media is over. Journalists, most of them, need to find another line of work. Yes, of course, learning to code is an option for them. I’ve been on the wrong side of receiving pink slips, I know too well the pain of losing a job. But I was earning an honest living when I whenever I was let go.

And not only has the time arrived to confront the lamestream media, but the moment is also here to cancel your subscriptions to publications that repeatedly insult the public with disinformation and yes, brainwashing.

An aside: Here in Illinois, there is a bill on the desk of our Democrat governor, J.B. Pritzker, that will offer taxpayer-funded subsidies to state newspapers. It’s a terrible idea, which means of course Pritzker will sign the subsidy bill. Besides, Pritzker’s party benefits the most from our dishonest media. He’ll be helping out his pals and political allies.

But government subsidies will not save newspapers and other mainstream media outlets. The market for honest media has moved on. Besides, when government gets involved with business, it always picks the losers. And the media, especially in hellholes like Illinois, is playing their fellow wokesters, who at best, make up 20 percent of the population. We are a center-right country.

Send away the clowns. I’ll be leading the laughing when that happens.

Replace them with real journalists.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Another bitter harvest of demonization? The My Lai massacre and the Sonya Massey killing

Posted: July 28, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

Did demonization of cops lead to a police-involved murder? Just as demonization of the military may have contributed to the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War?

Earlier this month, Sonya Massey, a black woman from Woodside Township, Illinois, was shot to death, according to police bodycam video footage, by Sangamon County deputy sheriff Sean Grayson. Massey called the police because she believed there was a prowler at her home. The cop, who has since been fired and is now charged with murder and other charges, has a rocky employment history, being employed either part-time or full-time by six different central Illinois police departments in four years, although in one of those jobs, for a small-town police department, he was let go because wouldn’t reside within 10-miles of the village.

Grayson is white, and the racial angle has brought rare national media attention to downstate Illinois. 

He is a military veteran who left the service under a general discharge. According to KSHB-TV in Kansas City, Grayson “was discharged from the U.S. Army for serious misconduct during his year-and-a-half service in Fort Riley.”

According to KSDK-TV in St. Louis, Grayson has two DUI convictions, one in 2015 to which he pleaded guilty to, and another the following year he weas found guilty in a bench trial.

In his last job, according to Capitol News Illinois, prior to being hired full time by the Sangamon County sheriff’s office–another deputy sheriff position with Logan County–Grayson’s performance was poor. In a report, a chief deputy wrote that Grayson need “extensive” training after failing to follow commands. The same officer wrote that Grayson needed “additional traffic stop training, report writing training, high-stress decision making process classes, and needs to read, discuss and understand issued Logan County Sheriff’s Department policies.”

Capitol News Illinois offered additional disturbing details. “Seven months on. How are you still employed by us?” the chief deputy asked Grayson in a meeting about his job performance. “I don’t know,” was his reply.

As for My Lai, the massacre, which occurred in 1968, saw at least 300 civilians killed, including elderly people, children and infants. Some women and children were brutally gang raped. The only soldier convicted for the massacre was 2nd Lieutenant William Calley. Originally given a life sentence of hard labor in a military court martial, President Richard M. Nixon commuted that sentence to three years of house arrest.

At the time, Americans wondered how Calley, a junior college dropout who failed most of his courses, became an officer. While he did score well in a military exam, Linda Greenhouse, writing for the New York Times in 1974, said of Calley that he was someone who “apparently failed at almost everything he had tried to do.” Between quitting junior college and enlisting in the US Army in 1966, Calley’s jobs included working as a bellhop and as a dishwasher.

Normally, such a background wouldn’t be considered the makings of officer material. While the anti-war movement hadn’t reached its peak in 1966, plenty of young college graduates were being told by their parents and peers to dodge the draft, in a stealth fashion, by enlisting in the National Guard instead.

In short, the talent pool for American military officers wasn’t deep during the Vietnam War. Hence, Calley.

As for Grayson, he was hired for his first part-time police job, in the small town of Pawnee, in August 2020. That was six years after the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, Missouri and the Laquan McDonald murder in Chicago. Both were of course police-involved killings–ones that ramped up anti-cop sentiment.

And three months before Grayson started his law enforcement job in Pawnee, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Not only was the anti-police rhetoric sent into hyperdrive by the media and agenda-driven leftist politicians, but it was also the beginning of the Defund the Police movement.

Four years after Floyd’s murder, because of retirements and struggles in hiring replacements, many police departments don’t have enough cops. For instance, three months ago, Chicago’s police superintendant, Larry Snelling, said of the CPD, “We’re down close to 2,000 officers.”

The ACAB–All Cops Are Bastards–sentiment so many Americans believe in, or have been indoctrinated in, may be offering a bitter harvest.

The Massey shooting death could be the beginning of a tragic trend.

UPDATE July 30:

Yesterday the Washington Post reported that Calley, 80, died in hospice care in April. Citing the Social Security Index, the New York Times confirmed his passing. The cause of Calley’s death is not known.

John Ruberry regularly blogs in Illinois at Marathon Pundit.

The last three weeks have shown us that taxpayer-funded media is a terrible idea

Posted: July 14, 2024 by John Ruberry in internet/free speech, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

Newspapers have been folding fairly regularly for decades. Unable to adapt to the rise of television in the 1950s and the rise of the internet in the 1990s, the marketplace has spoken. 

And it’s still speaking

Despite the rapid evolution of news consumption, the one finite resource is still time. If someone is scrolling X (Twitter), or worse, Facebook, then they’re not reading a newspaper, whether it’s an online edition or print. Sure, newspapers, magazines, broadcast and cable networks, and local TV stations utilize social media to attract visitors, but most users only casually scan the headlines. 

As for the dead tree media, Chicago still has two major daily newspapers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, and both are bat sh*t crazy woke. Even in a deep blue city like Chicago, my guess is at best 30-percent of the population are members of the far-left. Once you include the suburbs, again it’s my guess, there’s a center-right majority. 

Even if I’m wrong, the greatest athlete ever to put on a Chicago professional sports uniform, Michael Jordan, proved he had more common sense than most left-wing Chicago journalists and publishers. “Republicans buy sneakers too,” he said decades ago.

Since the June 27 Joe Biden debate wipeout, the media, both nationally and here in the Chicago area, have been exposed as collection of liars and propagandists. Conservatives have known that for years, only now everyone else is aware, with possible exception of the dumbest person on the internet, pro-Biden brat Harry Sisson.

During the spring session of the Illinois General Assembly, the gerrymandered empowered Democratic supermajorities passed a series of bills–all first of its kind–that will offer taxpayer funded subsidies to dying newspapers and other media outlets. I covered this subject five months ago in this Da Tech Guy post: Journalism’s “extinction event” will lead to new and better choices for news.

Forbes offered a summary of this awful-offal bills in May:

Several of the new provisions [according to that legislation] aimed at shoring up local news outlets are written into the Illinois state budget as employment tax credits. They provide $25 million to newsrooms that hire or retain local reporters over five years. Specifically, newsrooms will receive $15,000 for each current reporter they employ and $25,000 for each new hire. The incentives are available to nonprofit and for-profit organizations alike, though there are limits on how much individual newsrooms and media companies can receive.

Separately, the Strengthening Community Media legislation, which passed both Illinois legislative chambers at the end of May and is awaiting signature by the governor, dedicates 50% of state advertising to local news outlets. It also requires that any newspaper in Illinois that intends to sell itself to an out-of-state company notify the public and its own employees 120 days before a sale occurs. The goal of this measure is to give in-state businesses and nonprofits the chance to bid on the outlet and increase the likelihood that ownership stays in state.

Terrible, terrible, terrible.

I’d like to say that it’s not up to Illinois to pick winners and losers, but the situation is worse than that. Illinois will be picking the losers.

For example, the headline of Sunday’s e-edition of the Chicago Tribune reads, “Trump ‘safe’ after gunfire.” A more accurate headline would be “Trump survives assassination attempt.” The Trib refuses to portray Trump sympathetically–it needs to placate its fellow wokesters.

After the very bloody July 4th weekend, Chicago’s far-left mayor and former Defund the Police advocate, Brandon Johnson, in a rambling press conference, blamed Richard M. Nixon, who resigned the president 50 years ago next month, for the carnage.

Okay, he didn’t flat out say, “Over 100 people were shot in Chicago last weekend–and it’s because of Nixon.” Again, Johnson didn’t utter those words.

Here’s what the mayor said:

Black death has been unfortunately been accepted in this country for a very long time. We had a chance 60 years ago to get at the root causes. And people mocked President Johnson, and we ended up with Richard Nixon.

So yes, Brandon Johnson blamed Nixon.

But the Chicago Sun-Times, in a laughably wretched fact-check, claimed he didn’t blame Nixon. As with the Tribune e-edition X post, the comments on X accompanying the Sun-Times fact-check are quite entertaining.

As Dan Bongino says so often, “The media wants to tell a story, not THE story.”

Understandably Chicago area readers, except for those wokesters, tune out the Tribune and the Sun-Times.

The rest of Illinois has other legacy newspapers that are equally rotten. Gannett’s Rockford Register Star, it’s deriders know it as “the Red Star,” immediately comes to mind.

The bills to offer taxpayer subsidies to these propaganda outlets are awaiting Governor J.B. Pritzker’s signature. I suspect Pritzker, a billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune and a Chicago Democrat, will sign them.

Pritzker is a likely presidential candidate in 2028–if not sooner. He’ll want his story, not the story, to get out. He’ll want the Democrats’ story–subsidized by taxpayers– to be told, not the real story.

Again, I have to tell Illinois’ legacy media that it makes more business sense to reach out to a majority of people as opposed to a few. But ideologues don’t cope well with common sense.

One more thing: Both nationally and in Illinois, the media has been claiming that Trump is a threat to democracy. If that was true, of course, then why didn’t 45 set up a dictatorship after the 2016 election?

John Ruberry regularly blogs from the Chicago area at Marathon Pundit.

Chicagoan speaking about July 4th weekend: “It’s assassination day…” UPDATED, mayor blames Republicans for the violence

Posted: July 7, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

“Christmas means carnage.” Ferdinand the duck, in the movie Babe.

“It’s assassination day…” is what a Chicago woman, Edith Pinkerton, according to ABC Chicago said of July 4, although Pinkerton may have been speaking of the next day, July 5, when her 74-year-old friend was wounded. 

As of this writing, late Sunday afternoon on July 7, this Independence Day weekend has been quite bloody in Chicago. So far, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, over the long July 4th weekend, 17 people have been killed and at least 82 others have been wounded. Four mass shootings have so far occurred.

Back to July 5. According to Hey Jackass.com, last Friday, when 45 people were shot, that day was “the 3rd highest, single day total found in our dataset since 2013.”

Last year, a majority of Chicago’s severely misguided voters had a choice between Paul Vallas, a moderate law-and-order Democrat, and Brandon Johnson, a onetime supporter of the Defund the Police movement, who was pushed over the top by the far-left Chicago Teachers Union.

Johnson, closely followed by Chicago’s two major daily newspapers, the Sun-Times and the Tribune, as well as Crain’s Chicago Business, has been the chief minimizer of street mayhem in Chicago. 

While he was still mayor-elect, when asked about a downtown flash mob riot, Johnson said it was important not to “demonize” the thugs. A couple of days later when asked about what Chicago’s listless media calls “unrest,” Johnson offered more sanitization of widespread lawlessness, “They’re young. Sometimes they make silly decisions.”

A central part of the mayor’s approach to crimefighting for this summer was to hire “violence interrupters.” During the mayoral campaign, Johnson suggested sending social workers to domestic incidents, instead of Chicago police officers.

To be fair, had Vallas prevailed, Chicago would still be a mess. She’ll be out of office in five months, but the policies of Kim Foxx, Cook County’s Soros-funded prosecutor, continue to wreak havoc. And as I’ve noted in prior DTG posts, this summer is the first one since Illinois’ SAFE-T Act, which abolishes cash bail, became law.

Two months ago, the mayor’s choice as Chicago police superintendant, Larry Snelling, said the city is short 2,000 cops.

Johnson, to placate his leftist base, wants to cancel the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection system, but not until after next month’s Democratic National Convention.

Chicago has almost three years to suffer under Brandon Johnson.

Rather than address the Chicago’s crime crisis, Johnson’s prefers to deflect. At the Juneteenth flag raising ceremony, Johnson called for reparations for Black people.

Speaking from the realm of common sense, Corey Brooks, Chicago’s legendary “Rooftop Pastor,” threw a bucket of cold water at that demand.

Where are the reparations for the city’s failure to produce adequate protection for its residents? Where are the reparations for the city’s failure to provide adequate schooling to inspire kids toward the American Dream instead of nihilistic violence? And where are the reparations for the city’s woke legal system that puts the interest of violent criminals above the interests of the city’s hardworking citizens?

For now, look for more Chicagoans to say, “It’s assassination day.”

UPDATE July 8, 7:15pm EDT:

The official July 4 weekend Chicago Police Department figures are in, and they’re brutal. There were 109 people wounded by gunfire during the long Independence Day weekend, 19 of them fatally.

At a press conference this morning not only did Mayor Johnson not take responsibility for the widespread bloodshed, but he blamed Republicans, including President Richard Nixon, who left office 50 years ago this summer. Chicago hasn’t had a GOP mayor since Big Bill Thompson–a crook by the away–who was voted out in 1931. While we’re at it, Democrats hold supermajorities–thanks to gerrymandering–in the state General Assembly, and Illinois hasn’t had a Republican governor since 2003, when another crook, George H. Ryan, retired. Of Chicago’s 50 alderpersons, none are Republican, although four or five have some conservative leanings.

On the other hand, there are six socialists in the Chicago City Council, but make that seven, in my opinion at least, when Mayor Johnson casts a tie-breaking vote.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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