Posts Tagged ‘pritzker’

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.

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.

By John Ruberry

Now that people who only get their news from MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times have learned that Joe Biden is suffering from severe cognitive decline, there is an understandable panic among Democrats, as well as calls to replace him on the fall ballot. 

Had Biden chosen a running mate in 2020 based on the ability to serve as president, instead of identitarianism, the answer would be easy regarding a replacement at the top of the ticket, the sitting vice president. But Kamala Harris is the veep. This dopey DEI hire, until last week perhaps, polled even worse than Biden. She’s the poster child of a symptom of public sector incompetence: failing upwards.

Harris checked three boxes–Black, Asian, and female. Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s governor, who was said to be a finalist to be Biden’s running mate, checked only one.

Harris may still end up on top of the ticket if Biden bails, partly because the money raised so far by the Biden-Harris campaign can only be transferred to one other candidate–the president’s running mate. Also, the Dems may want to avoid a rancorous battle to replace Biden–and stick with Sleepy Joe–then hope for the best in 2028, because Donald J. Trump can only serve one term. 

Whitmer is part of the whispering campaign to replace Biden, as are three other governors, California’s Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, and Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker. 

Since I live in the Prairie State, I’m going to discuss Pritzker. Two years ago, when he was running for reelection, I covered Pritzker’s shortcomings in this DTG post, Reasons to oppose Pritzker for governor and president. That blog entry is in need of an update. Of course, the problems I listed in 2022 haven’t gone away.

Crime and the SAFE-T Act: Lawlessness was a problem in Illinois two years ago, particularly in Chicago and its inner suburbs. I live in one of those suburbs.

While the murder rate has gone a little bit in Chicago, assaults and thefts, particularly automobile thefts, have gone up. I haven’t been able to locate state statistics on crime, I’m confident they’re also bad.

Over three years ago, Pritzker signed into law the pro-criminal SAFE-T Act, making Illinois the first state to abolish cash bail. Criminality in Illinois was already encouraged by the catch-and-release prosecution policy of Cook County’s George Soros-funded state’s attorney, Kim Foxx. 

Pritzker and the Democrats must have had qualms about the SAFE-T Act, because it was set to take effect nearly two years after the governor signed it into law. A court challenge delayed that until last fall–just as violent crime makes it annual seasonal decline.

We are now a month into the first summer of the SAFE-T Act. In June, there were two egregious murders where the accused were free on pre-trial release. Jai’mani Amir Rivera, who was seven years-old, was shot to death on Chicago’s West Side was shot to death by a teen on electronic monitoring. Also on the West Side, a retired Chicago police officer, Larry Neuman, was fatally gunned down by two teens, both of them were on pre-trial release–one of the pair was on electronic monitoring.

To be fair, even without the SAFE-T Act, with Foxx as the so-called prosecutor, these thugs may have walked free. But Chicago’s failures are being replicated statewide.

Pritzker is active on X, he discusses a wide range of topics. 

I can’t remember the last time he mentioned the SAFE-T Act.

Obviously, he knows it’s a problem for him. It’s a more deadly problem for Illinois’ 12 million residents.

Health: I’m going to hurt some readers feelings with this segment. 

Shortly after his inauguration, Jimmy Carter released his federal tax returns to the public. And since then, Donald Trump being a notable exception, most presidential candidates have followed suit. 

Health records are probably next.

Now that the president’s cognitive decline is an established fact for everyone except for the Biden bitter-clingers, look for future presidential candidates to release specific details on their health, perhaps even making their personal physicians available to the media for unrestricted questioning.

Pritzker is morbidly obese. According to the Mayo Clinic, that condition is “associated with many diseases responsible for a high prevalence of morbidity and mortality, such as insulin-resistant diabetes mellitus, hypertension, coronary artery disease, hyperlipidemia [high cholesterol], and sleep apnea.”

Standards and expectations are understandably much higher for president than for a governor. Pritzker’s health will be an issue if he makes a White House run.

How heavy is Pritzker? I don’t know. But he’s weighty enough to likely cause a femur stress fracture by just standing. J.B. doesn’t even know how that bone broke. I had a stress fracture once–it was one of my fibulas. I know how I got mine–it was from running 32 marathons in 20 years.

Not reaching across the aisle: Harris is a predictable result of a bad candidate winning office in a state dominated by one party. Her goofiness–both in demeanor and in political views–is not enough of an impediment for her to lose to a Republican in California. Gavin Newsom is much more seasoned and serious, but he’s another example. In 2004, when he was governor of San Francisco, he announced a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness. There are more homeless people in San Francisco now than there has ever been twenty years later.

Harris, who was a US senator and the attorney general from California, didn’t have to, metaphorically speaking, reach across the aisle to win statewide. There are not enough Republicans in the Golden State to stop a Harris–or a Newsom.

Pritzker, while enormously popular in the Chicago area and university towns, is generally hated downstate. The Democrats enjoy supermajorities in the General Assembly. Which means Pritzker doesn’t need Republicans to rule. 

In the 2022 race, in many downstate counties, Pritzker’s Republican opponent, Darren Bailey, won more than 80 percent of the vote. In rural Edwards County, in southeastern Illinois, Bailey romped with 88 percent of the ballots, while in heavily Democratic Cook County, where Chicago lies, Pritzker collected a more modest 73 percent. About 1.4 million votes were cast in Cook so you can see how Pritzker comfortably won reelection, since the statewide vote total was four million in 2022.

Illinois’ listless media, dominated by leftists, rarely challenges Pritzker.

The governor’s speaking style is condescending. As I’ve remarked before, when he talks, he reminds me of a closer at a timeshare presentation. Yuck.

To win the presidency, no candidate can rely on one party’s votes. To govern effectively, a president needs to work with both parties.

Gerrymandering: With so many Republicans outside of Chicago, why do the Democrats have supermajorities in the General Assembly? It’s because of gerrymandering. As a candidate during his first run for governor, Pritzker vowed to veto gerrymandered legislative maps. He lied. Nationally, the Dems blame gerrymandering for not having a majority in the House of Representatives. While presidents have no power over state remaps, Pritzker’s gerrymandering flip flop certainly betrays a lack of character.

Depopulation: Like California, Illinois is losing residents. High taxes, a high crime rate, and high regulations are the catalyst. And as I mentioned earlier, with little or no political opposition, Illinois government is an echo chamber of liberal failure.

Pritzker has been governor for over five years. If Illinois is so great, why has state’s population gone down every year for the last decade?

Gaza: For the most part, I’ve supported Pritzker’s pro-Israel stance in its war with the Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Although the governor has not condemned the loud anti-Semitic voices within the Democratic Party, such as Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman. His silence on the Jew-haters in his party is disturbing.

Pritzker is Jewish. But since the Democrats are increasingly the anti-Semitic party–anti-Israel Dems like Bernie Sanders are given a pass from the pro-Hamas activists–his faith could be a problem for him. Sad, but true, in my opinion. Pennsylvania’s Shapiro, who is also Jewish, is pro-Israel too.

But the voters most likely to agree, generally that is, with Pritzker and Shapiro on Gaza are Republicans.

Pensions: Illinois’ public pensions are among the worst funded among the 50 states. The pension crisis–created by both parties–has not been adequately addressed by Pritzker. Great leaders solve difficult problems. Despite new taxes, Pritzker’s latest budget shorts Illinois’ pension plans. Such malfeasance is how Illinois ended up in this mess.

Education: Pritzker did nothing to stop Illinois legislators from letting Illinois’ school choice program expire. Thirty states have some sort of school choice program, Illinois is the first to end one. Just 27 percent of Illinois students perform at grade level in math, and only 35 percent of students read at grade level.

Obviously, Democrats, including Pritzker, are more interested in kowtowing to the teacher unions than educating Illinois’ kids. Who would Pritzker nominate to be Education secretary? A radical along the lines of Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates?

I covered additional negatives in my first post about a potential Pritzker presidential run. Those demerits include his tax scam to lower property taxes on his Chicago mansion by removing toilets from the mansion adjacent to his–which he also owned, as well as his ties, not deep, but ties they are, with Boss Michael Madigan, who faces trial later this year for corruption, as well as a connection with one of Illinois’ ex-con governors, Rod Blagojevich.

Pritzker is in the second tier of possible Biden replacements. His negatives are apparent, but the billionaire governor has contributed millions of his own funds to finance his gubernatorial campaigns, and he’s been a generous donor to other Democrats’ campaigns, so he can call in a lot of favors, which is what he did to bring the Democratic National Convention to Chicago this summer.

Because of his fat wallet, Pritzker can hit the ground running–not literally, of course–if he needs to start a presidential campaign tomorrow. But for now, like Newsom and Whitmer, Pritzker is firmly in Biden’s corner.

Conservatives, we need to keep a wary eye on Pritzker. If not in 2024, then in 2028. We laughed off Biden five years ago.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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.