democrats – Datechguyblog

Morton Grove, Illinois, February 27, 2022

By John Ruberry

By dodging a question on this weekend’s edition of Flannery Fired Up of Fox Chicago, US Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) offered up, unintentionally, perhaps the most vulnerable issue, and there are many or them, that Democrats face this fall.

That issue is soaring gasoline prices.

After explaining to host Mike Flannery how Russia supplies a large amount of natural gas to western Europe, Quigley said, without proof, “That is going to be shut off.”

Then Flannery serves up a fastball query to Quigley. “So, if we end up with four-dollar, five-dollar or more a-gallon gasoline, that’s going to hurt Democrats this fall. What should President Biden do about that? What can he do about it? Because we have American oil producers holding back, they’re saying that your Democrats in Congress and President Biden are hostile to energy.”

“You know I don’t buy that at all,” was Quigley’s flaccid response, then the Democrat retreated to a classic fallback, the appeal to sympathy fallacy, when he discussed how he met with residents of Chicago’s Ukranian Village neighborhood, and then pivoted to another logic fallacy, appeal to ridicule, by attacking former President Trump, stating, in a great exaggeration, how Trump recently praised Vladimir Putin.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average price of gasoline in the Chicago area, where Quigley and I live, was $2.47-a-gallon in January 2021, the month when Trump left office and was succeeded by Joe Biden. In January this year it was $3.56-a-gallon, more than a dollar more. I live in Cook County, where gas taxes are higher, I’m seeing $3.91-a-gallon now in Morton Grove, Illinois. Amazingly, again according to the BLS, the national average was only slightly higher than Chicago area prices, probably because the figures are skewed by California’s extortion-level overtaxing of gasoline.

Apologists for Biden and the Democrats claim a post-lockdown economic turnaround is responsible for the gas price hikes. That’s a lie, the worst of the lockdowns were over in the autumn of 2020, when Trump was still president. Among Biden’s first acts as president was cancelling the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The Biden administration is halting or delaying new leases to drill on federal land. Less petroleum means less gasoline which means higher prices.

Now, using the January 2021-2022 gas prices hike numbers, assuming you fill up your 15-gallon gas tank for your automobile once a week, you are now paying $16 -a-week additional for fuel. Spread that expense over a year and you are over $800 poorer now. And I was using the January 2002 price. And gas prices have gone up since then and they are headed higher, even Biden admits that, because of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Let’s Go Brandon!

Drill here, drill now, pay less, vote Republican!

Stop the Green New Deal!

“Fact-checkers,” the Ministry of Truth wing of the media and the Democratic Party, have produced numerous reports that such energy analyses as mine are “inconclusive” or “missing context.” These “fact-checkers” are keyboard propagandist tricksters of the three-card Monte variety. Luckily more people are laughing at them, or worse, since leftists crave attention of all kinds, even negative, they’re now ignoring the “fact-checkers.”

So, Quigley, when he avoided Flannery’s question, admitted his party’s biggest political vulnerability, high gasoline prices. If Biden reverses his anti-energy policies, it can be a potent weapon, a non-violent one, against Vladimir Putin and Russia, by driving down petroleum and natural gas prices. Western Europe of course is a major consumer of Russian natural gas, as Quigley explained.

If Biden stays the course on failure–high energy prices will deliver an electoral wipeout for the Dems.

They’ll deserve it.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

By John Ruberry

“You got him for 48 hours,” a prison official says to Jack Cates (Nick Nolte) in the movie 48 Hours.

And “him” was Reggie Hammond (Eddie Murphy), a prison inmate who is given an unauthorized furlough to assist Cates in solving some murders.

In Chicago and suburban Cook County we have a different kind of 48 Hours.

“When someone goes missing with home-monitoring–when they leave the house unauthorized,” state Sen. John Curran (R-Downers Grove) said on this weekend’s Flannery Fired Up on Fox Chicago, “they have to be gone for 48 hours before they can be charged now.”

“We’ve had stories, several stories,” Curran told the host Mike Flannery, “about people on home-monitoring committing additional acts of violent crime when they go missing.”

“And any violation [of electronic-monitoring] should bring an immediate charge–not a 48-hour window,” Curran added.

What type of people are on home-monitoring in Cook County?

“Seventy-five to 80 percent of my people on home monitoring are charged with a violent offense,” Cook County sheriff Tom Dart revealed in an online discussion last week. “I have about 100 people on home-monitoring who are charged with murder.”

The essential CWB Chicago site earlier this month reported on a Halloween carjacking where the accused was on electronic-monitoring for two armed robberies and a gun charge couldn’t be charged for violating his home confinement because he didn’t break the 48-hour threshold.

Last week some of Dart’s officers shot a Chicago man who fired at them first. The suspect is accused of a slew of sexual assault charges after he violated that 48-hour electronic-monitoring window.

There have been many other crimes committed by accused criminals under electronic-monitoring that don’t involve that two-day threshold. Some of them just simply remove the EM ankle bracelet.

Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, claims that 15 people were accused of murder while on Cook County home-monitoring in 2021. While the real number may be around 10, even that is a frightening number. Lightfoot is calling for changes in Cook County’s EM system, but her political position is weak because of her unpopularity; she is not politically close to Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney of Cook County who is one of those woke George Soros-funded prosecutors who apparently sees law enforcement as some elaborate psychological experiment rigged to enable criminals to be undercharged or to walk free. Equally culpable for this parlor-game-from-hell insanity is Cook County’s chief judge, Timothy C. Evans.

Chicago endured over 800 murders in 2021, the highest total since the crack epidemic gang wars of the mid-1990s. There were over 1,800 carjackings in Chicago last year, three times the total of 2019. And lately the Chicago area has been plagued by flash mobs of shoplifters.

Leftist apologists of course will blame the COVID-19 pandemic for the crime epidemic. Puh-leaze. While there are still mask mandates in the Chicago area, the lockdowns have been over for more than a year.

And a 48 hours free-pass in-all-but-name is only a tip of the crime iceberg in Chicago and is suburbs. As is overuse of electronic-monitoring.

And in Illinois, which saw over 100,000 people leave in 2021, there are always darker days on the horizon. Next year the state’s no-cash bail law goes into effect.

John Ruberry regularly blogs from suburban Cook County at Marathon Pundit.