🚨#BREAKING: Chaotic Scene Unfolds in Downtown Chicago as Teenagers Vandalize Cars and Gunfire Erupts
📌#Chicago | #Illinois ⁰ There is currently a significant police response taking place in downtown Chicago due to a large group of teenagers causing chaos. They have been… pic.twitter.com/n7xhBpsTKs
two teenagers were shot Saturday night as hundreds of youths streamed through downtown streets, prompting a heavy police response that resulted in more than a dozen arrests. The boys, 16 and 17, were among the large unruly crowd about 9 p.m. in the 100-block of East Washington Street when shots were fired, police said. The younger boy was shot in the right arm, and the other boy was shot in the left leg. Both were taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where they were listed in fair condition.
On the bright side nobody was killed at that incident but throughout the city 35 were shot and 8 killed this weekend past
In no way do I condone the destructive activity we saw in the Loop and lakefront this weekend. It is unacceptable and has no place in our city. However, it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.
And others are even funnier”
Since I’m a glutton for punishment and I’m sure I’m gonna get the most unhinged, crime weirdo replies but:
I would look at the behavior of young people as a political act and statement. It’s a mass protest against poverty and segregation.
In Tyrie Nichols the MSM/Left has finally found a case of black on black violence that they find newsworthy enough to publicly disapprove of
There are a lot of fine blogs and substack accounts out there worth making a free or cash subscription to, (I humbly suggest considering mine as I have writers to pay) but the best case I’ve seen made by someone to hit the button lately has come from Don Surber this morning with his spectacular piece on the better of the John Kennedys who served in the Senate:
“You will never win—never—the uber-woke sweepstakes. I understand that the pressure to run that race is fierce. You will never win it. Nothing you do will ever be enough. The uber-woke people in positions of power in this town think America was evil when it was founded and it’s even more evil today. You’re not going to convince them otherwise.”
He spoke that truth to power at a hearing on September 22, 2017, to Charles W. Scharf of Wells Fargo & Company, Brian Thomas Moynihan of Bank of America, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase & Co., Jane Fraser of Citigroup, William H. Rogers Jr. of Truist Financial Corporation, Andy Cecere of U.S. Bancorp and William S. Demchak of PNC Financial Services Group.
If that line alone doesn’t get you loving Senator Kennedy nothing will and if this piece doesn’t get you to subscribe to Mr. Surber’s substack nothing will
This week Project Veritas put out what was likely the single most important video it ever did, catching a Pfizer exec going on about mutating the COVID etc. It’s the type of expose that can change the narrative.
Within two days Youtube banned the video and gave him a strike. It “violated their guidelines” not because it was false, but because it was true.
This is going to cost people their lives.
One must under the rules of Christianity love your enemies but as Youtube is a corporation and not a person I don’t think I’m violating rules by awaiting the day of the company’s fall with some anticipation.
Remember once upon a time AOL ruled the roost too.
Went to the local comic store today to pick up Groo and Usagi Yojimbo. The only two comics I still read new. Their creators eighty five year old Sergio Argones (Groo) and sixty nine year old Stan Sakai (Usagi) have been doing their respective two comics for over 45 years (Sakai actually got his start lettering Groo and still does). I don’t go there much as there is a large sign on the door nothing CDC mask recommendations and suggesting people wear them (when I went yesterday nobody had one on) which turns me off but there was one thing worth noting.
Back in the 1980’s when I owned a comic store there were a couple of reprint series out there (Marvel Tales immediately comes to mind) but today it seems every third comic featured is a reprint of a comic from the 60’s or 80’s or 90’s.
Comic stores have apparently figured out they need something other than woke to sustain a business.
Still highly recommend both Groo & Usagi
Finally Yesterday I was watching an old Cary Grant Movie Father Goose (1964) a comedy about a drunken coast watcher who gets stuck with a 30 something year old woman and a bunch of kids from a girls school.
It’s a quaint movie but I don’t recommend watching it right after watched Mark Felton’s audio about the treatment of captive women by the Japanese in World War 2.
The movie gets very serious when you consider what happens if they’re caught.
A poll with surprising findings was released on Thursday by Fox Chicago about Chicago’s mayoral election on Friday. Yeah, yeah, I know, many political polls about the recently concluded congressional elections were wrong, and there were serious polling errors in 2016 and 2018 as well. But stick with me here.
The mayoral poll, conducted by M3 Strategies, shows that US Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia is favored by 28 percent of respondents, followed by former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas at 19 percent, incumbent Lori Lightfoot at 15 percent, and Willie Wilson, a businessman and philanthropist, at 13 percent.
There are eleven candidates for mayor of America’s third-largest–for now–city, although petition challenges might winnow the field. The first round of voting, along with races for alderpersons in each of Chicago’s 50 wards, as well as for city clerk and treasurer, will be held on February 28, if no candidates achieve a majority in their races, the top two candidates are matched in an April runoff.
So, if the poll is correct, that means that Lori Lightfoot, who in my opinion is America’s worst big city mayor, she won’t make it to the second round. Lightfoot’s term in mayor has been disastrous on many levels–too many to list here.
On the latest episode Fox Chicago Flannery Fired Up show, host Mike Flannery said about crime, “nearly three-fourths of Chicago voters now say is their number one issue.” Lightfoot, as a candidate said that the crime levels of 2019 were “unacceptable.” Flannery then fact checked Lightfoot’s recent statement that “we are down 15 percent in homicides, 20 percent in shootings.” But those are numbers looking back to last year. Flannery did the right thing, scolding Lightfoot.
“When she took office in 2019,” Flannery said, “she inherited a dramatically declining rate of bloody street violence, but the medical examiner reports that homicides this year are 41 percent higher than in 2019.”
It’s easy to understand why Lightfoot is polling so terribly. M3 Strategy’s Matt Podgorski was a guest on that Flannery Fired Up installment, of the incumbent he said, “You’re looking at a situation where [there is] a negative view of 74 percent of likely voters and about 70 percent of them think she does not deserve another term. Only two percent of Chicago voters haven’t formed an opinion of Mayor Lightfoot.”
“Those are unprecedently bad numbers,” Podgorski concluded.
I can’t see a way out for Lightfoot. Apparently, Chicago voters, up to a point, aren’t completely stupid.
Besides her inability to stem Chicago’s rise in violence–which her apologists point out is part of a national increase in mayhem while failing to mention that Los Angeles and New York, which are more populous, have lower murder totals–Lightfoot’s petulant and overbearing COVID-19 lockdown policy produced a tragic irony. After she spotted a large group of males congregating on a beach, the next day she ordered Chicago police officers to enforce the closure of that beach. Later that day, cops did next to nothing as rioters tore up and looted Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue shopping district.
Lightfoot has acted bizarrely, once allegedly told an Italian-American group who supports the return of Chicago’s Christopher Columbus statues to public view, “I have the biggest d*ck in Chicago.” She once went full-Jack Nicholson in The Shining in a repetitive email rant.
Chicago voters, as I alluded earlier, still have much room for improvement. Chuy Garcia, then a Cook County commissioner, surprisingly forced incumbent Rahm Emanuel into a runoff in the 2015 mayoral race, running to the left of Emanuel. In 2016 Garcia endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. Last year the leftist magazine In These Times, in a collaboration with the Chicago Reader, gushingly wrote of Garcia’s working with the Squad in Washington, “It’s not surprising that García has taken up with Congress’ left rebels.”
Garcia enjoys a sizeable lead in the Fox Chicago poll. Garcia collected $2,900 from indicted FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Worse, the Protect our Futures PAC spent over $150,000 on glossy mailers to introduce Garcia to new voters in his redrawn congressional district, even though Chuy was running unopposed in the November election.
Buying something, SBF?
What about the other two top contenders to replace Lightfoot? Willie Wilson, a gadfly candidate who somehow has convinced some Chicago conservatives he is one of them, can arguably–because of his regular grocery and gasoline giveaways--be called a vote buyer. Paul Vallas, another perennial candidate, is the only mayoral candidate talking real sense about crime. Unless I missed something, he’s the only mayoral candidate who is explicitly critical of Cook County’s catch-and-release prosecutor, Kim Foxx.
Whoever is Chicago’s next mayor, the, ahem, winner faces a monumental series of challenges. Besides crime, the mayor will have to cope with a declining tax base, as businesses are fleeing. And Chicago’s pension bomb looms–eventually it will explode. Chicago is the most corrupt city in America. And what about the lead in Chicago’s water pipes?
Father Marquette monument on Chicago’s Southwest Side
By John Ruberry
As I’ve stated many times before in this space, Chicago’s best days are behind it. Seemingly random and numbing violence is everywhere. Yes, shootings and murders are down from 2020 and 2021, but remain much higher than in 2019, the year its embattled mayor, Lori Lightfoot, was sworn into office.
However, theft, burglary, and automobile theft are dramatically higher compared to 2021–overall crime is up 36 percent. Since two waves of riots in 2020, major retailers such as Macy’s, the Gap, and the Disney Store have closed their massive stores on Chicago’s premier shopping district, North Michigan Avenue, for now at least, known as the Magnificent Mile.
Boeing is moving its headquarters out of Chicago, as is investment firm Citadel, which is headed by Ken Griffin, a prominent donor to Illinois Republican candidates. Griffin mentioned Chicago crime as a reason for departing for Miami.
Chicago’s CTA public transportation system includes its sprawling el train lines. Violent assaults and murders have become common on the el. The criminal descendants of Jesse James aren’t attacking trains from the outside, they are paying, well…maybe paying, customers. I suspect most of the creeps are turnstile jumpers.
Click here for my confrontation with a CTA thug, from my most recent, and perhaps last, ride on a Chicago el train.
In 2020, soon after the violent riot outside a Christopher Columbus statue in Grant Park, in the middle of the night Lightfoot had the statue removed for “temporary” storage. She was too much of a coward to do so during daytime, and too much of a financially reckless liberal to care about the expense, as it is likely the workers removing the Columbus statue were being paid doubletime wages. Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln and a solid Union state, has no Confederate monuments, but the always-angry left chose an old “favorite,” Christopher Columbus, both a brilliant and flawed man, to vent its rage.
Two other Columbus statues were also placed into storage around that time.
Since then, a former city of Chicago attorney claimed in a lawsuit that not only did Lightfoot, who is up for reelection early next year, prevent an agreement with a local Italian-American group to return the Columbus statues for public view, but she had this to say, “My d— is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest d— in Chicago.”
To be fair, in March, Lightfoot said she “fully expects” the Columbus statues to return to their former locations.
On Friday afternoon, in an old-school “news dump,” Lightfoot’s committee revealed its recommendations. It’s hard to believe, but Chicago’s Lincoln statues were on the committee’s hit list. Honest Abe survived, as did the other US presidents on the committee’s woke naughty list. But a whole bunch of others, including the Columbus statues, a Roman column monument to Italian aviator Italo Balbo, a Mussolini cohort, monuments to French explorers Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette–they were the first recorded Europeans to visit what is now Chicago–and a statue of General Phil Sheridan on horseback at the southern end of Sheridan Road, are recommended for removal. In regards to Marquette and Jolliet, semblances of “white supremacy” is the reason. Some monuments that have been in storage for years will not be returned to public view.
Sheridan’s prominent role in the Indian Wars is why he may be toppled from Chicago. Few people know these facts, but Sheridan, one of the North’s ablest generals in the Civil War, had a home in Chicago and “Fightin’ Phil” was present during the Chicago Fire. When the city’s mayor placed Chicago under martial law, Sheridan was in charge.
Three statues, including ones of George Washington and William McKinley, should have “artistic prioritized interventions,” the committee says. My guess is that signs will be placed next to them, pointing out the honored ones flaws. Who among us is flawless? Liberals can’t imagine the non-enlightened ones thinking for themselves, or using their smartphones to Google “President McKinley.” And yes, slavery is the worst scourge in American history, but how many Americans don’t know Washington owned slaves?
For now, Abraham Lincoln’s statues will be spared these “artistic prioritized interventions,” but the committee warns, “such measures may be employed in the future through ongoing program investments.” Illinois, of course, is known as “the Land of Lincoln.”
Lightfoot’s monument committee is recommending new monuments, mostly “red meat” ones appealing to the left, although I support a statue of Chicago’s gospel legend, Mahalia Jackson. But why not one for Muddy Waters too?
What about a Ronald Reagan statue? The Gipper was the first president to live in Chicago and the only one born in Illinois.
There is no monument recommended for Lightfoot, “Triple Threat” is not only an African-American, but she is Chicago’s second female mayor and its first lesbian one.
If a Lightfoot statue is ever erected, I’m sure I won’t be the only one focusing on her crotch.
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