Posts Tagged ‘jb pritzker’

In Cook County, Illinois, the most consequential election in 2016 was not the presidential race

Posted: December 15, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, election 2024, elections, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

We are told, correctly, that it’s the local elections, not the glamorous races such as presidential contests, that effect voters the most.

That was so true in 2016 in Cook County, Illinois.

While Hillary Clinton comfortably won Illinois and Cook County–where I live– over Donald Trump, it was the state’s attorney race in Cook that had the biggest impact on the 5 million residents in Illinois’ largest county.

George Soros-funded Democratic candidate, Kim Foxx, resoundingly defeated her Republican opponent, Christopher E.K. Pfannkuche. Four years later it was much closer for Foxx, she gathered only 54 percent of the vote in heavily Democratic Cook County, over Republican Pat O’Brien and a Libertarian candidate.

Fortunately, unless you are a criminal, Foxx chose not to run for reelection this year.

Immediately after her swearing-in, Foxx raised the limit for felony theft from the state-mandated $300 to $1,000.00. Shoplifting prosecutions in Cook County dropped dramatically, as did narcotics prosecutions.

Murders soared in the last eight years.

While Foxx is best known for the Jussie Smollett debacle, other actions as state’s attorney will have a lasting, and acidic legacy.

If you want numbers, you’ll find some here, courtesy of the fantastic Illinois Policy Institute. But except for murders, they tell an incomplete story.

For instance, for much of Foxx’s misrule, my daughter, Little Marathon Pundit. worked at a nationally known department store in an affluent suburb. On average, once a day, a shoplifter ran out the door–some calmy walked out–with stolen merchandise. Not only were employees at this store told not to prevent the criminal from leaving, store managers never called the police. Not once. Why call the cops? Even if the perp is caught, Foxx’ office, unless the theft was a massive haul, wouldn’t prosecute it as a felony. Or he may not even bother prosecuting at all.

So those were unrecorded crimes. So crime numbers, outside of course of murders, can’t be trusted at all.

As I wrote on X last month, “the liberal media keeps telling us that crime is down. Six months ago when I last visited this Rosemont IL big box store the cosmetics section wasn’t roped off. Stop gaslighting us, ‘journalists.'”

https://twitter.com/Marathonpundit/status/1863256305886023844

Eileen O’Neill Burke, a Democrat, is the new state’s attorney in Cook County. She is already prosecuting accused thieves at the state-mandated $300 level for felony theft.

EOB is not perfect. She supports Governor JB Prtizker’s no-cash-bail SAFE-T Act.

But O’Neill Burke vows to call for more detainments of accused criminals who are charged with violent crimes.

Elections matter.

Including down-ballot races. Sometimes especially down-ballot races.

Sadly, the results of the last eight years of rampant criminality will wreak havoc for a very long time.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

The Great Chicago Train Robbery offers more proof of the city’s decline and fall

Posted: October 13, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

The evidence of Chicago’s decline and fall keeps piling up.

On Friday evening, at least 30 thugs looted Union Pacific rail cars in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood on the West Side.

The city’s leftist mayor, Brandon Johnson, who lives in Austin, was in London in advance of Sunday’s Chicago Bears game against the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Although he later backed away, slightly, from his statement, in 2020 “Branjo” called defunding the police “a political goal.”

As you’ll see, the looters are so casual in these videos as they unload the U.P. freight cars, it’s as if they calmly enjoying a visit to a suburban pick-your-own pumpkin patch. They’re not hiding their faces; they’re not covering up their licence plates. One enterprising criminal even brought a cargo truck to speed their 100-percent discounts along.

The mass thievery was so vast that commuter rail traffic on those rail lines was suspended for hours.

Society is rotting in Chicago–as well as suburban Cook County, because we have had a pro-criminal George Soros-funded so-called prosecutor, Democrat Kim Foxx, lackadaisically enforcing the law for that last eight years. Thankfully, she’ll be out of office in two months.

Criminals don’t fear getting caught in Chicago–and if they are–only those accused of the most heinous crimes are locked up to await trial. Since last year, courtesy of JB Pritzker’s SAFE-T Act, cash bail is banned in Illinois.

The Chicago establishment media, TV stations are an exception, are shameful. They minimize rampant criminality, calling it “a perception problem.”

On Facebook, an hour after the brazen looting, a Chicagoan on Facebook, a self-described “entrepreneur,” was advertising a back yard full of widescreen televisions for sale. As of this writing, 5:00pm EDT, those TVs are still for sale on the social network. Facebook doesn’t seem concerned. It’s a good thing this “entrepreneur” isn’t claiming that masks don’t work against COVID.

Then again, maybe it’s a coincidence that the “entrepreneur” is selling those televisions. But there are a lot of “coincidences” in America’s third-largest city.

So far only six people have been arrested for allegedly participating in the Great Chicago Train Robbery. Where were the Chicago Police on Friday? It took the cops over an hour to arrive to the West Side rail yard. ABC 7 News’ traffic chopper showed up much more quickly. Where was Union Pacific’s security detail? Just a thought, but U.P. may want to investigate their West Side employees. I suspect that this heist may have been aided by a tip from someone working in that freight yard.

There have been other thefts of U.P. trains in Chicago recently.

Finally, where are the decent Chicagoans?

There are some, right?

John Ruberry regularly blogs just north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.

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.

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.

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