Ego, thy name is Trump. In a move sure to shock no one, The Donald tossed his MAGA cap in the ring for 2024. And the loonies are already salivating at the prospect of their messiah winning the Presidency again. For the, according to them, third time. Of course they fail to see the irony…if Trump ‘won’ in 2020, he would be ineligible to run in 2024. By running, he is admitting he lost to Biden.
Let that sink in.
Trump supporters have maintained that Biden stole the election, and that The Donald won. What do you want to bet they won’t even so much as think that their repeated statements must be reversed. They are a cult, in every way that matters.
And that is why the Republican Party needs to refuse to support Trump in any fashion. He has had four election cycles to show any actual leadership, and has failed at three of them. Despite the manner in which he won in 2016 – and that against the only candidate he could have beaten – he failed to uplift down-ballot candidates in 2018, lost to Biden of all people in 2020, and his chosen candidates tanked in 2022. Three strikes, Trump, you’re out.
Well, that happened. In an outcome that shocked no one, except perhaps the man himself, Darren Bailey was roundly beaten in the general election, returning Pritzker to Springfield for another term.
It’s almost like JB picked the opponent he thought he had the best chance of beating in the general election. Oh, wait.
He did.
And in every contest nationwide where the Democratic Party interfered in GOP primaries, their chosen lost. This is so pathetic even the Keystone Kops would be embarrassed. Our pundit and gadfly types love to point out the Democratic Party’s ludicrous straight ticket voting, leading to electing dead people (even in Chicago, they only vote), misogynists, and Fetterman. That really is a mote in their eye moment. The beam in our own is voting for their hand-picked candidates.
I commented on this with Bailey’s primary election ads being phrased in terms designed to attract conservatives while on the surface saying he was a bad choice. And look at that, I called it. JB Pritzker looked over the field, and decided Bailey was the easiest target, so he promoted him, and Illinois Republicans lapped it up. It was, in a word, pathetic.
Look, I do get it. Trump is a factor, and despite the fact that he needs to be sat on, for far too many Republicans, he is some kind of conservative messiah. Let me be clear…Trump needs to be the past. In fact, it would be great to, as a party, stop this messianic thing completely. Trump is not some sort of savior, neither is DeSantis, Crenshaw, Rubio, or any other Republican that manages to gain a following.
It is that simple. DeSantis is great for Florida, but would be trounced in an Illinois election . Crenshaw wouldn’t fly in California. And on and on and on. This obsession with copying a rising star is costing conservatives elections. As we saw with Bailey, being yoked to that star (in his case, Trump) is a election day liability.
It is time for the Illinois GOP to reset. You need to stop waiting for someone to look like a potential winner, or win a primary, before backing them. Some suggestions:
Focus on what is good for Illinois, not what is good for the Trumps of the world.
Endorse the best candidate, and stick with them.
If the opposition is in favor of a candidate, it disqualifies them for endorsement (the Bailey Rule).
Make endorsements public and obvious.
Get the party working together, and support each other
Run a fucking candidate for every office – Cook County had 43 Democrats running unopposed. Why?
Run the party the way it needs to be run, to win, and damn the opinions of the opposition.
Stop campaigning on social issues that are proven losers. Campaign on issues that matter today, can maybe be fixed, and let them scream about it. Or, less abortion more reducing crime.
Remember the GOP of old, who was in favor of reform. We had the better Roosevelt, let’s be inspired by him to do better.
Stop running idiots who don’t understand how the American system works! The Governor CAN NOT revoke signed legislation, impose term limits, or pass laws by fiat. Gods that is annoying. Let THEM do that (and what is ‘criminalize women’ there, Kwame?). Let them not know how their own offices work, and hit them on it!
This isn’t a quick fix. Illinois has been broken for decades, and it won’t be fixed overnight. But if the conservatives can get their head out of their asses, focus on winning (or even competing) in every election, we can make progress.
In a related note, can we start hammering election grifters like Jesus Garcia? Two days after being reelected to Congress, he announces a run for Mayor of Chicago. Hammer that. He flat out lied to his constituents about wanting to represent them. Make that a central point in two years, assuming he loses the mayoral race again. Maybe introduce a law that requires resigning your elected post if you are running for a different office. JB is totally running in 2024, force him to resign to do so. Punish the grifters lying to their constituents. Frame it as a way to make sure the people’s chosen officials keep their promises to serve.
So it wasn’t enough for the Illinois Republican party to nominate the Democrats hand-picked candidate. Of course, as soon as Bailey won the primary, the same PAC that promoted him let loose the attack ads – mostly regarding abortion. And by mostly, I mean only.
And had Bailey just been on camera (looks like an editorial board) saying he wouldn’t support abortion for a raped relative, no, we then have Bailey saying that the Holocaust dead are a fraction of the aborted.
Well, shit. Bailey is a putz, we knew that. But seriously dude, even if you are correct, there are lines you just don’t cross. Not if you want to win an election. But there he is…and it doesn’t look decades old – it looks like he’s in a campaign shirt. So, well done Republicans, you nominated a candidate who is on camera downplaying the Holocaust of all things.
Or is he?
Correct Doesn’t Mean Right
Ok, so first and always, the Holocaust not only happened (not sure how that got questioned), but the Nazi party murdered upwards of 19 million people, including an estimated 6 million Jews1. The scope is mind-numbing. And there is no way to lessen the evil that was the Nazi extermination programs.
But we are addressing Bailey’s comment – “The attempted extermination of the Jews of World War II doesn’t even compare on a shadow of the life that has been lost with abortion.” Removing the moral distaste, what do the numbers say, since that is what he is referring to.
Well, the numbers bear him out. First, let’s explain where these numbers come from. Both the Guttmacher Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)regularly report abortion statistics in the United States. They use different methodologies, so they report somewhat different abortion rates, but they show similar trends. The Guttmacher Institute attempts to contact every abortion provider. The CDC relies on voluntary reporting of abortion data from the states and the District of Columbia. As of July 2022, the Guttmacher Institute had reported abortion data for the years 1973 through 2020 and the CDC had reported abortion data for the years 1970 through 2019. Got that? Good, let’s get those numbers.
I am only using the numbers from 1973. This keeps it in the realm of legal actions, and it a way to compare like to like, as the Holocaust was legal too. Yes, that is a much longer period, but really, do you think the Nazis would have stopped had they not lost the war?
Ok, according to Guttmacher, there have been 59,936,193 abortions since 1973. The CDC shows 47,135,973. Or, 2.5 to 3 times more abortions in the US than total Nazi victims. But Bailey was specifically speaking about the 6 million Jewish victims. In that case, it is between 8 and 10 times more abortions.
Just to hammer that home – the World Health Organization estimates 73,000,000 abortions per year globally2.
Republican Abandonment
Of course, Pritzker has mobilized people to decry it, and insist that this alone disqualifies Bailey. Troublingly, there has been absolutely no response from Bailey or the Republican Party as a whole. On one hand, I get that, after all, no Republican wants to tie themselves to someone who seems to downplay the Holocaust. On the other hand, your dumbass voters nominated this chump, so show some loyalty and back your boy.
Not holding my breath on that – the Illinois Republican Party is notorious for only backing expected winners – if you are not a lock to win, I am told, you get nothing from the Republican Party.
I was convinced that literally anyone would be better than Pritzker. I may have been wrong.
At least the Illinois Republican gubernatorial primary is. In fact, there is so much weirdness that it feels like some kind of scam or end-run around the will of the electorate.
First, some background. Incumbent JB Pritzker is, at best, deeply flawed and unpopular. Of course, there are always true believers, but this is one of the least likable governors in memory. So, what we get is an open field on both sides – he is not running unopposed in the Democratic Party primary, and there are more candidates than usual on the Republican side.
And here is where it gets wonky. Of the six remaining candidates (4 dropped out), each has either severe problems internally, or a ‘strange bedfellows’ situation. Let’s look at them in alphabetical order…
I last did this back when several states had passed heartbeat abortion laws. The recent frenzy over Georgia’s SB202, with a 64 line formal title I won’t be reproducing here, also known as the Election Integrity Act of 2021, has spurred me to do this again. In brief, there is a law a great many people are commenting on, but very few seem to have read – and as I type this introduction, I am in that number.
So…the state is restricting voting by adding machines or precincts to make sure everyone can vote? Weird.
But I have downloaded a copy of the bill, (located here) as signed, and will read it to see how it actually impacts Georgia’s voting access and whom, exactly, it ‘disenfranchises’. My guess is, it expands voting (or at the minimum stabilizes it across the absurd number of GA counties) or does not reduce voting access. I also suspect that the only thing in there that has been commented on – the food & water bit – is the only thing in there that is actually controversial. We’ll see. Finally, a quick note – in Georgia the format is to strikeout old/removed stuff, and underline new. Now, on to the bill!
TL/DR: Media lied. Nothing in here is remotely as represented, even the water thing is not being honestly represented. Skip to Section 33 for the water.
Since there is a problem on the left of only reading what they want to read, let me clear this up in the beginning: masks are not mask mandates. That second word, MANDATES is the issue. On the off chance someone reads this, I just want to be sure it’s hard to misunderstand the point.
First, let’s look at masks. It is true that cloth masks cannot block a virus 50–200 nanometres across. No way to argue that. Second, the virus continues to spread despite masks. No disputing that either. But masks still work to slow the spread. How, if they cannot block the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a 50–200 nanometre particle?
It began as a joke – something so obvious even a blind lemur could see it. The Democrats seem canine-centric (Blue Dog, Yellow Dog), so I figured we on the right could use a fun animal, and frankly, lemurs are all the rage! So I hear. Kinda. Anyway, after deciding that the leadership is so inept that a blind lemur could lead better, I decided to create this movement. And perhaps even spin it off into the real world. Stranger things have happened.
