With the formal nomination of Amy Coney Barrett and the knowledge that Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump already have the votes to put her on the Supreme Court the Democrats find themselves in one of the worst dilemmas that they need to face.
In a more pragmatic age the Democrats would make a few pro-forma statements ask a few pointed questions and make some fuss in the press and that would be it.
But this is not a normal age, this is an age of lunacy, an age of violent militant leftists and Bernie Bros who might not turn out for candidates who are not suffivently woke and angry.
Even worse for the left these folks are not above violence against their own side as Ted Wheeler can tell you.
If it was up to them the hearings would be the Charge of the Light Brigade with every gun firing and every voice shouting.
This of course is political suicide in an election where you need swing states and most importantly in an election where you have Democrats in the house and candidates for the senate who can’t appear as lunatics right before the voters vote.
So the Democrats need a feint, not so much to spook or fool the “Party of StupidTM (although if the make a mistake dumb enough to derail the nomination they’ll jump at it) but to fool the radical millitant left into thinking they’re ready to charge into the valley of death to stop her.
If it was up to me I’d go with the boycotting of the hearings and having some sort of large rally outside the SCOTUS. That way they can scream and shout and allow their minions to weep and gnash their teeth to their hearts content and throw in some “performance art” without actually doing anything on the record that might cost them votes they will need come election day. The angry/loony left which is their biggest danger tends to be moved by that kind of stuff.
If they are really desperate they can extend this to the actual vote where once the GOP has their 50th vote they can walk out enmasse, again plenty of symbolism without the stupidity.
Either way it’s their problem and I look forward to watching them crash and burn whatever they do
George Washington statue in Chicago’s Washington Park
By John Ruberry
Early Friday morning before sunrise Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s sneaky order to remove Chicago’s two Christopher Columbus statues, one just south of downtown at Grant Park and the other in Arrigo Park in the Little Italy neighborhood, was carried out.
A week earlier a riot, where 49 police officers were injured with 18 of them being hospitalized, broke out at the Grant Park Columbus statue, fireworks and frozen bottles of water were thrown at the cops by the rioters. Amazingly, the media, as far as I can tell, didn’t call this melee a “mostly peaceful protest.” So there is a bit of good news in this story.
Although removal of the statues was called “temporary” by Lightfoot mark my words: If these bronze monuments ever escape from the Raiders of the Lost Ark-type warehouse where they are hidden, they’ll end up indoors in a museum behind bullet-proof glass and proximity alarms.
At my own blog, Marathon Pundit, I called it a victory of the rioters’ veto. The anarchists won–law, order, and tradition were defeated.
Even before the riots and the overreaching COVID-19 lockdown, Chicago and Illinois were losing population. The trickle will become a flood.
Mayor Lightweight believes she has satiated the leftist beast–her base is the far-left by the way. But the regular protests outside her home by that base of hers should serve as a warning. Now that the Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other leftists have learned that riots bring results, they’ll push for more. Power gained, or I should stay seized, is not casually abandoned by usurpers.
City parks may be next.
This is not just a Chicago story. I’m only singling out America’s third-largest city because of my familiarity with it. They same battles will be coming to your woke city and town too.
There are over 600 parks within the Chicago Park District. One of them is named for Columbus. I’d be surprised if a year from now the great explorer’s name will be on it. There’s a Jackson Park on the South Side, where the Obama Presidential Library will be built. That park is named for Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder who forced Native Americans out of the southeast on the Trail of Tears. Chicago doesn’t have an Obama Park. It’s pretty easy to predict what Jackson Park’s new name will be.
About a mile away from Jackson Park is Washington Park, of course our first president. Up until a few months ago I would have told you that changing the name of this park was an absurd notion. In this era of wokeness, it’s not. On the edge of the park is a statue of General Washington on horseback, which was recently vandalized. Washington Park offers the leftists a two-for-one bargain. A park to be renamed and a statue to topple.
Last week Douglas Park, named for Abraham Lincoln’s Democratic rival Stephen A. Douglas, was renamed Douglass Park, in honor of civil rights pioneer Frederick Douglass. The legacy of “the Little Giant” is complicated, through his wife he was a slaveowner and his Kansas-Nebraska Act initiated the carnage of Bleeding Kansas, but as a US Senator he laid the foundation that transformed his adopted hometown of Chicago into the major city it is now. Douglas was a fervent supporter of the Union and Lincoln after the Civil War broke out, which is forgotten because he died in the summer of 1861. Last month I wrote that the Lincoln and Douglas statues on the sites of their famous 1858 debates could be endangered. So far they are safe. But Michael Madigan, the longtime state House speaker and state Democratic chairman, though a statement (Boss Madigan rarely communicates directly with the media), has called for the removal of the Douglas statue on the state capitol grounds.
Douglas is buried in a tomb on the grounds of his former Chicago estate on the South Side. No one, so far, is calling for him to be exhumed but three state legislators want to take down the statue of him, which rests on a 30-foot high obelisk.
Today, I join with my colleagues @RepTarver & @LamontJRobinson to implore @GovPritzker to remove the Stephen Douglas statue from the Neighborhood that I live in & rep. Douglas looked down on black people during his life. We shouldn’t allow it in his death. pic.twitter.com/qDu7n1b5le
Back to the parks. Chicago has two parks honoring Thomas Jefferson, and a Battle of Fort Dearborn Park. That last one refers to what was called the Fort Dearborn Massacre when I was a kid. The battle was between soldiers and Chicago settlers with the Potawatomi.
Will those park names vanish?
When the leftists win the park wars they’ll move on to street names. A tougher fight, yes, as businesses and even run-of-the-mill residents balk at such name changes. But those conflicts are coming to Chicago and many other cities and towns.
Unless ordinary folks stand up, that is. A few have already did so in Chicago Saturday’s Back the Blue march.
That’s a start.
John Ruberry regularly blogs just north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.
The NYT & the MSM don’t have a problem with Doxing (that is giving out the home address of) Tucker Carlson.
"She called 911 while hiding in a closet."@TuckerCarlson reveals the @NYTimes will be running a story revealing the location of his home and address. He says the story doesn't allege any wrongdoing.
The Democrats Mayors are united in demanding the President Trump not send in or remove the Department of Homeland Security in cities where they’ve been deployed protect federal property (like Portland Oregon) as they cede control of their cities to the mob:
BUT we are told by these same people that when strangers call their house to ask them who they are going to vote for, any suggestion that a large cross section of GOP voters in general and Donald Trump supporters in Particular are not being forthcoming is nonsense.
The MSM’s elevation and continued classification of any story as Nationally Newsworthy rather than only of local interest is in direct correlation to said story’s current ability to affirm any current Democrat/Liberal/Media meme/talking point, particularly on the subject of race or sexuality.
Thus when a local cop in Minneapolis exceeded his authority causing the death of George Floyd it became national news.
However when the riots which broke out pretty much destroyed a chunk of Minneapolis, when a part of Seattle was taken over by Antifa these stories were downplayed and ignored (until POTUS pushed the 2nd forward) as were the 20 deaths attributable to said riots.
Police said Turner was riding in a car with her mother and her mother’s friend when they exited the interstate at University Avenue. The driver tried to turn into the parking lot at 1238 Pryor Road when he was confronted by an “group of armed individuals” who had blocked the entrance.
“At some point, someone in that group opened fire on the vehicle, striking it multiple times and striking the child who was inside. The driver then drove to Atlanta Medical Center for help,” police said in a statement.
Police said the 911 caller told them they were heading to Atlanta Medical Center with the victim. The child died at the hospital.
But the real news here isn’t the shooting of eight year old Secoriea Turner it’s how the BLM riot / protest deaths are being reported or not, as David Bernstein notes concerning another Black lives matter protest related death this weekend…
I had to go to an Australian news source to discover that the driver of the vehicle that sped into BLM protesters in Seattle is an African American. (Apologies if one of my colleagues at Instapundit covered this, I have been away for the holiday weekend.) I have to assume that American media outlets know this, and decided intentionally not to mention it to create the implication that this was a racist murder, rather than a guy driving recklessly on what he thought was an abandoned highway. I increasingly feel like I’m living somewhere akin to the former USSR, in terms of the way the media are dedicated to a particular narrative regardless of the facts. At least unlike in the USSR I can access alternative sources to our equivalent of Pravda.
The murder of Secoriea Turner is a huge inconvenience to those who have gone all in on the protests being “mostly peaceful” (which is as accurate as saying my vegan soup recipe is “mostly unpoisoned” but the real question will be what happens next
If Black Lives Matter was true to its name, there would be as much global outrage over the death of eight year old Secoriea Turner, gunned down by anti-police protesters in Atlanta Sunday night, as there was for George Floyd….Or as Secoriea Turner’s tearful father, Secoriya Williamson, told local media in Atlanta, “They say black lives matter … but you killed your own this time. You killed a child. She didn’t do nothing to nobody.”
Of course, there won’t be any BLM protest marches held in honour of Jomo, little Secoriea, or any of the other innocents of any race slain in the ensuing crime wave.
No they won’t because highlighting her death would not cause sports leagues to funnel billions to the BLM front group to elect democrats in fact it might retard such cash. And of course there is the 4th law of media outrage:
The degree of media exposure of the corruption or illegality committed by any individual or organization under investigation is directly proportional to its distance from the media’s ideology.
Now I think the President won’t allow them to downplay this action by BLM but their media/democrat/blm left will do their best.
The truth is they don’t give a damn that Secoriea Turner was murdered, they just regret that it wasn’t done by someone who looks or votes like me.
THEN her life or rather her death would matter.
Update: Dad speaks out:
"They say Black Lives Matter. You killed your own." Secoriya Williamson, father of 8-year-old Secoriea Turner, addressed the public during a press conf. today after his daughter was shot and killed last night while riding in a car w/ her mother in Southeast Atlanta. @11AliveNewspic.twitter.com/odowRbSXsq
I predict that none of the money that the NBA, NFL or MLB gave to BLM will be spent remembering her, nor do I expect her name to be painted on any NBA court or her name worn on the jersey of any player as a social justice statement.
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