Posts Tagged ‘Trump’

Would Kamala Harris actually be a worse president than Joe Biden?

Posted: July 25, 2024 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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Immediately after Joe Biden announced he was bowing out of the 2024 Presidential Election the sycophants who make up the liberal media began chanting the praises of Kamala Harris.  They have engaged in a concerted effort to distort reality and portray her as both a moderate and competent. 

It is painfully obvious from Kamala’s voting record from when she was a Senator that she is a hard left ideologue

Vice President Kamala Harris was rated the most liberal senator in 2019 — further left than even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — according to a GovTrack scorecard.

Harris, whom President Joe Biden opted to back after announcing that he will not seek reelection after all, was viewed as the most liberal senator prior to her becoming vice president.

According to GovTrack, the ideology analysis assigns a score to lawmakers according to their “legislative behavior by whether they sponsor and cosponsor overlapping sets of bills and resolutions with other Members of Congress.”

“The score can be interpreted as a left–right scale measuring the dominant ideological difference or differences among Members of Congress, although of course it only takes into account a small aspect of reality,” it explains.

In a list of all 100 senators in 2019, Harris scored #100, winning the title of the most leftist senator. For greater perspective, Sanders came in right behind her at #99. On the flip side, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) scored as the most conservative senator that year.

Just how damaging was the report on Kamala Harris’ voting record? Election Interference: GovTrack Deletes Its Page On Kamala As “Most Liberal of All U.S. Senators” (legalinsurrection.com)

Like all hardcore leftists, Kamala Harris does not place much stock in freedom.

Just like Obama and Biden, Kamala Harris would trample the individual liberty of each and American, and the Constitution, using unconstitutional executive orders: By The Way, Kamala Harris Is A Dangerous Authoritarian (thefederalist.com)

Kamala was never one for legalism. When candidate Biden argued that Harris’ promise to issue an executive order unilaterally banning access to certain guns would be unconstitutional, she retorted: “I would just say: Hey, Joe, instead of saying ‘No we can’t,’ let’s say yes, we can,’” before cackling at the very notion that presidents couldn’t do whatever they wanted.

As a national candidate, Kamala said she believed immigration laws should be treated as civil, rather than criminal, offenses. So, of course, Biden gave Kamala the job of border czar — she did not perform admirably, to say the least — where she noted that one of the “root causes” of the problem was a “lack of climate resilience,” before sending corrupt regimes hundreds of millions of dollars.

As a candidate, Harris supported abolishing private health insurance — “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on,” she told CNN. In addition to nationalizing health care and education, Kamala wants the government to control the manufacturing sector, the auto industry, food … and any industry that emits carbon.

Harris was in favor of getting rid of the filibuster to overturn state voting laws, nationalizing abortion on demand until birth, and passing the Green New Deal — an authoritarian takeover of the economy written by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which would not only ban all fossil fuels force Americans to retrofit every building in in the country, eliminate air travel and meat, create government-guaranteed jobs, among many other authoritarian measures. 

A fresh look at the movie Hillbilly Elegy

Posted: July 21, 2024 by John Ruberry in culture, election 2024, elections, entertainment, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

With the nomination of Sen. J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate, of course there is renewed interest in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and the Ron Howard movie based on it.

I’ve yet to read book, but I saw the movie in 2020 on Netflix, which distributed the film, and I thought it was a captivating look at Vance’s life. 

Both the book and the movie draw on Vance’s upbringing in the southwestern Ohio post-industrial city of Middletown. His maternal grandparents were from Jackson, Kentucky–in the Appalachian portion of the state, which is where Hillbilly Elegy begins. The young Vance (Owen Asztalos) gets a quick lesson in the importance of family loyalty after losing a fight. The Vances, unfortunately, are quite the dysfunctional family, particularly his drug-addicted mother, Beverly (Amy Adams). Eventually, Vance ends up in the care of his grandmother, Bonnie “Mawmaw” Vance (Glenn Close), a chain-smoking, cussing, mean, but ultimately loving authority figure.

The movie contains many flashbacks as the adult J.D. (Gabriel Basso), a US Marine veteran who is a Yale law student, finds his promising future tangled up with his troubled past. His girlfriend, Usha (Freida Pinto), provides him much needed emotional support.

As I said earlier, this is a captivating film, and Howard, a gifted director, makes skilled used of imagery, including perhaps his favorite, water, and a stunning symbolic use of the Middletown rail bridge tunnel.

However, by 2020, Vance was vocal about his conservative beliefs, and he had moved from the Never Trump camp of the Republican Party to being a supporter of the 45th president. Which, in my opinion, led to movie critics, a group which politically consists mostly of leftists, to offer a large dose of negative reviews of Hillbilly Elegy. The Chicago Sun-Times’ Richard Roeper was a notable exception, he gave the movie a four-stars-out-of-four review.

An even worse response came from the 2021 Golden Raspberry Awards, better known as the Razzies. The bad movie answer to the Academy Awards nominated Hillbilly Elegy for three Razzies: Worst Director (Howard), Worst Adapted Screenplay (Vanessa Taylor), and Worst Supporting Actress (Close). However, Close, was also nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the same role, and Hillbilly Elegy also garnered a Best Makeup and Hairstyling Oscar nomination.

Was this hatred was triggered by Vance’s politics?

I am certain of that, because also that year, Razzie “winners” included the documentary Absolute Proof, which questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election. Mike Lindell of My Pillow fame “won” Worst Actor for his role in that movie, and Rudy Giuliani “won” for Worst Supporting Actor for his brief role in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

Voters for the Razzies are not required to see the movies they vote on. Other “winners” of Razzies, not surprisingly, include other conservatives, among them are Ronald Reagan, Dinesh D’Souza, and Jon Voigt.

I apologize for that brief diversion, but the Golden Raspberry Awards needs a serious and prolonged slapping around.

To summarize, don’t believe the critics. Unless you are an unhinged leftist suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, Hillbilly Elegy is well worth your time.

The lessons from Hillbilly Elegy are conservative ones. Family bonds, hard work, and perseverance, while not a guarantee of success, make success more likely. 

I suspect that left-wing critics will have one more group lash-out at Hillbilly Elegy.

And from the only presidential term of Joe Biden comes another lesson: Don’t believe the media. Even movie reviewers can’t be trusted.

Hillbilly Elegy is available for streaming on Netflix, where as of this writing is ranked #4 in the movie category. It is rated R for violence, drug use, and foul language.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Was the Secret Service’s gross negligence orchestrated?

Posted: July 18, 2024 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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Before the Obama presidency the Secret Service was nonpolitical and the class of the world when it comes to protection.  The Secret Service was one of the victims of Obama’s fundamental transformation of the United States.  Like the FBI, CIA, and so many other federal agencies, Obama turned the Secret Service into a wing of the Democrat Party and the Deep State. 

It seems obvious from the disastrous response to the assignation attempt on President Trump, the Biden regime turned the Secret Service into an incompetent woke clown troop:

The director of the Secret Service is refusing to step down after one of the worst agency failures since President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981. On Saturday, former President Donald Trump had part of his ear blown off as a result of federal officials’ refusal to secure the rooftop of a building just 450 feet from a Pennsylvania rally platform.

The agency chief went on to blame local law enforcement in Pennsylvania for the cascade of security lapses that ultimately culminated in the Republican presidential nominee taking a gunshot to the ear and only surviving by a miracle. Two rallygoers were injured in the assassination attempt and a third was killed.

The screw ups perpetrated by the director of the Secret Service, who is a DEI hire, are truly mind boggling.

During her interview with ABC News, the Secret Service chief emphasized security of the building from where a gunman shot Trump was the responsibility of local police.

“In this particular instance, we did share support for that particular site and that the Secret Service was responsible for the inner perimeter,” she said. “And then we sought assistance from our local counterparts for the outer perimeter. There was local police in that building — there was local police in the area that were responsible for the outer perimeter of the building.”

With that statement the director proved to be absolutely clueless.

The Secret Service, however, is ultimately in charge of the overall security plan, and according to The Washington Post, “also has primary responsibility for addressing the risk of a long-range shooter and blocking lines of sight, including by instructing local police to secure or stand guard at buildings that could provide an opportunity for an attacker.”

Three counter-snipers were positioned in the building underneath the roof from which Saturday’s gunman fired multiple shots. According to Channel 11 News, a local Pennsylvania outlet, law enforcement had spotted the shooter nearly a half hour before Trump was hit. NBC News reported the Secret Service was even made aware of the unique threat presented by the building at the rally “days” before the event, and yet the Secret Service chief said the reason law enforcement did not secure the rooftop was because it was “sloped.”

The level of incompetence demonstrated by the Secret Service when it mattered the most was far to coincidental to be spontaneous.  That level of negligence requires careful planning: Biden’s Team Crippled Trump’s Security To Allow Murder Attempt (thefederalist.com)

They kept the rooftop open, watched the shooter, kept Trump on the stage, and didn’t do a damn thing until after he had been shot. And we’re supposed to believe it was an innocent oopsie?

Nobody wants to hear this because of the implications, but oh well, because it needs to be said: Joe Biden’s security regime deliberately and with malice aforethought created the conditions that led to an attempted assassin shooting Donald Trump in the head. It is by the grace of God that he lived and our nation is not currently in the midst of a violent civil war.

They deliberately starved Trump’s security team of the resources it needed. And they did it repeatedly, over many weeks and months.

This next set of coincidences are quite a damning indictment of the Secret Service in particular, and the Biden Regime in general.

With Trump’s security detail understaffed, under-resourced, and stretched to its limits, Biden’s security regime reportedly diverted even more resources to a hastily planned Jill Biden event that just happened to be in the area.

Biden’s security regime then ordered the most obvious assassination perch in the entire area to remain outside the main security perimeter.

Furthermore, Biden’s Secret Service director ordered law enforcement and counter-snipers OFF the roof the assassin used.

If that weren’t enough, Biden’s security regime also refused to block the line of sight from the assassin’s perch to Trump’s location. When law enforcement radioed in a suspicious person using a laser range finder at the building and even took photos of him, nothing was done to detain the assassin.

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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