Posts Tagged ‘orwellian’

To fight back against the left, I say we should refer to all Illinois criminals as “justice-impacted individuals”

Posted: May 26, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

Oh, for the days when Illinois was normal.

My state is a solid blue state, but it wasn’t always that way. 

In the 20th century, only twice, in 1912 and 1916, Illinois failed to back the presidential winner in the general election.

The Land of Lincoln, the home of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, began its slide to the left in 1988, when George H.W. Bush won Illinois by just 95,000 votes in his blowout win, nationally that is, over Michael Dukakis. Democrat gerrymandering and feckless leadership from the state GOP have demoralized Illinois conservatives. Real conservatives, that is, not the country club phonies who are embarrassed by Donald Trump.

Illinois has now gone hard left, thanks to decades of gerrymandering. At the top of the heap is likely 2028 presidential candidate, J.B. Pritzker, who is nearly halfway into his second term as governor. 

To embellish his woke credentials for his presidential run, Pritzker signed into law and championed the SAFE-T Act, which abolishes cash bail in Illinois. It’s been in effect for nine months. The numbers are still coming in, but at least in Chicago, other than a slight dip in murders, violent crime is up.

Still, criminals manage to get caught and convicted in Illinois, despite the presence until December of a George Soros-funded so-called prosecutor, Kim Foxx, in the state’s largest county, Cook.

But some of those unlucky Illinois crooks soon may not soon be officially known as “felons,” “offenders,” or “convicts” or “ex-cons,” If it’s not on his desk already, it soon will be, but Illinois House Bill 4409 will classify participants in the Adult Redeploy Illinois program as “justice-impacted individuals.”

To be fair, not all convicted criminals in the state will be referred to as such if Pritzker signs HB 4409 into law, but considering that the billionaire governor has proven to be cautious about being out-woked, look for all lawbreakers to be referred to be officially classified as such in that sanitized, Orwellian phrase.

Conservatives and centrists, who, despite Democratic dominance in in the Land of Lincoln, still make up a majority in this state, have two surefire ways to fight back.

They can remind leftists that Illinois–for good reason–has been losing population annually for a decade. 

The other method of attack is to refer to criminals, when a progressive is in earshot or likely to read a social media post, as “justice-impacted individuals.” Leftists can’t process the wrongheadedness of their political beliefs, such as men being able to give birth, and they despise ridicule. 

Believers in common sense, you have your assignment. Think of yourselves as Groucho Marx and the leftist in front of you as the kind of pompous fool the legendary comedian regularly humiliated. 

With some laughs, we might be able turn Illinois, even slightly, to the right direction.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Fact-checkers are gaslighting Americans over definition of a recession

Posted: July 31, 2022 by John Ruberry in business, economy, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

“The fliparoo theory of PolitiFact is now confirmed,” Dan Bongino said early in his July 28 podcast, “The fliparoo theory is this: If a fact-checker, airquotes, PolitiFact, says something is true it is probably false. If PolitiFact says something is false it’s probably true.”

Which means, of course, that we are now in a recession. PolitiFact, in a piece written by propagandist Louis Jacobson entitled, “No, the White House didn’t change the definition of ‘recession,'” he fact-checked a claim that originally came from an Instagram post. In seemingly 10,000 words, meant to overwhelm low-information voters, Jacobson ruled that statement false.

Jacobson is wrong, he’s gaslighting us. We are in a recession.

And Jacobson is not alone.

The Biden White House, led by the embarrassment of a press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, has been redefining “recession” for at least a week. For decades, the generally accepted definition of a recession has been two successive months of negative GDP growth. In the first quarter of 2022, the American economy shrank by 1.4 percent, and it contracted by 0.9 percent in the second quarter. These are facts. 

“However, the two-quarter threshold cited in the Instagram post has never been official,” Jacobson said in his so-called fact-check. “It’s more like a rough guide,” he continued, “one piece of a complicated puzzle.” Translation: the wise and oh-so-brilliant Jacobson is right, and you are a semi-literate yokel for accepting the commonly agreed upon description of a recession. 

In another overly long fact-check, Newsweek’s Tom Norton, another hack apologist, also ruled “false” the claim that the Biden White House is redefining what a recession is. “Furthermore, the White House website doesn’t have a dictionary or catalog of all political terminology and jargon it uses (that is the case for other governments, such as those of the UK and Canada, too),” Norton offered. 

Wow. I’m convinced. Not.

In Norton’s Newsweak–or is it Newspeak?— fact-check, Norton quotes Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen, who, by the way, was wrong about inflation being “transitory,” that it is really up to a secretive private organization to determine a recession. Who knew? “There is an organization called the National Bureau of Economic Research that looks at a broad range of data in deciding whether or not there is a recession,” she revealed.

Another fact-check fabulist, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, appears to be on vacation so he hasn’t weighed in on the leftist-induced recession debate. Three years ago, while fact-checking Donald Trump, Kessler wrote, “A recession is two quarters of negative economic growth.” But Joe Biden wasn’t president then.

Another prominent (along the lines of someone having an ugly prominent nose) fact-checker, USA Today, also hasn’t recently given its opinion on what a recession really is. Oh, what’s this? In a 2020 fact-check USA Today informed us, “A recession is generally defined as two consecutive quarters of declining GDP, or gross domestic product, a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced during a specific time period.”

But on the other hand, Snopes is bowing to the Democrat Party mantra about recessions. Referring to a couple of social media messages, “The tweets quoted above may give readers the misleading impression that the Biden administration literally tried to revise the criteria economists use to determine when a recession has occurred. But that was not the case,” Bethania Palma chimes in for Snopes.

It is the case. Snopes is lying.

Here are some media talking heads talking not too long ago, based on who I see here and the chyrons, using the classical definition of a recession, in a montage compiled by the Media Research Center. You know the, you know the thing, as Biden likes to say, two consecutive quarters of declining GDP growth. C’mon man!

But, assuming briefly we are not in a recession when will we be in one? The Biden administration won’t say. Is it a recession when we have three successive quarters of declining growth? Four? Five-and-a-half?

Or will it be a recession only when there is a Republican president?

Dan Bongino is right. The fliparoo theory of “fact-checkers” is now confirmed. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.