Bill Jackson

Not a basketball coach. RT not endorsements. Views always my own.

[Bill Jackson @BillnotPhil]

@fiago7 Truth? No, not in the U.S. I had architecture students as roommates in college and they took trips everywhere, but always talked the most about Chicago.

[Hunter Weiss @Hunter_Weiss]

Rich people love saying shit like this after they’ve made $100s of millions

[Emily Zanotti 🦝 @emzanotti]

In fairness, he’s not the first Nazi to lose the Battle of the Bulge

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that's been in the city since 1921.

They didn't lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they'd rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year.

Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move.

They lost them for two reasons.

The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they're bad at their jobs.

In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack.

Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn't even exist yet.

That fight dragged on for years.

The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn't reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois.

Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting.

So now it's all gone.

The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything.

Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize.

Pritzker: they're "an $8.5B valued business" that doesn't need propping up.

But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works.

Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team.

And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago.

Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes.

Pritzker after they left: "I wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team."

There it is. "Billionaire-owned."

That's how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you're saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line.

Meanwhile they're running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You're living in it.

Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that's $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances "the point of no return."

When you run things this badly, you sell what's left.

They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect.

Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check.

But a fixed property tax rate for a team that's been here 106 years? That's "propping up billionaires."

Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in.

Indiana didn't outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren't a disaster.

Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero. Ignore all the bad management but make sure to stick it to those evil, pesky billionaires.

[John Podhoretz @jpodhoretz]

Six years ago today. This was real. This was policy. This is how we found ourselves living in ANIMAL FARM.

[TV News Now @TVNewsNow]

🚨 NEW: Fox’s @BritHume CALLS OUT fired CBS host Scott Pelley: “I’ve worked in this TV news business for more than half a century and I’ve worked for many different bosses, many I liked and admired, and a few I did not. But I’ve always found a way to work with every one of them as best I could.”

“I never thought myself as some great guardian of journalistic integrity who wasn’t open to the ideas of others who I might at first disagree. And I’ve never had a problem finding a way to do the work in a way to please me and whatever boss I had - or at least satisfy them.”

“These 60 Minutes correspondents, led by Scott Pelley, seem to think they are the guardians of journalistic integrity. But it’s worth remembering how that show works.”

“Like all these TV magazine shows, as prominent as the correspondents who narrate on cameras seem to be, these shows are producer driven and these correspondents become famous largely because of the good work of producers who do the interviews, writing, supervise the shooting and editing of the pieces. The correspondents get to become big stars that way on a show that has the best lead-in on TV - the NFL on Sundays.”

“So these people are a little self-important to say the least.”

[Guy Benson @guypbenson]

This is Todd “Let’s Roll” Beamer, who died heroically while trying to retake United Flight 93 from Al Qaeda terrorists on 9/11. His final resting place, is in Cranbury, NJ — where he was living with his wife and children before his murder. Cranbury is located in NJ-12, where the new Democratic nominee for Congress is Adam Hamawy.

Hamawy was a close associate and translator to Omar Abdel-Rahman, aka the ‘Blind Sheikh,’ an arch terrorist convicted of masterminding multiple plots against targets in NYC — including the World Trade Center. Hamawy testified at Adbel-Rahman’s trial, as a defense witness.

It has also been reported that Hamawy traveled to Bosnia to volunteer at an organization that was later unmasked as an Al Qaeda front group.

One of Hamawy’s loudest and most high-profile supporters and endorsers has openly declared that America deserved the 9/11 attacks.

Hamawy is now the prohibitive frontrunner to represent Todd Beamer’s district in the United States Congress.

[Bill Jackson @BillnotPhil]

@KwikTrip You are still a bad person

[Marcus Pittman @ImKingGinger]

On another timeline, Stephen Colbert never became the host of The Late Show and these guys are still reading viewer emails.

Never forget what CBS took from us.

[Lucy Riles @LucyRiles]

@MatrixMysteries @AtlRey

[Bill Jackson @BillnotPhil]

@midwestern_ope They deserve more love for their 80 mph speed limit.

[Holden @Holden114]

These people's paranoia went so far they thought the Speaker of the House was using Nazi imagery in the House letterhead.

But an actual Nazi symbol on one of their candidates and they are full of nuance.

[pragmatometer @pragmatometer]

The Platner tattoo story isn’t about Platner.

It's about the people who spent years calling everyone on the Right a Nazi for the slightest association, only to line up like rank-and-file partisans behind a Democratic Senate candidate who wore a literal SS Totenkopf tattoo for 18 years.

It's a story about how years and years of moral indignation from the Very Serious People™ class proved to be a paper-thin veneer over your team jerseys.

[Mary Katharine Ham @mkhammer]

I dunno, man, it’s so odd that the list of things that make one a probable white supremacist doesn’t include a Nazi tattoo. I remain convinced a Nazi tattoo is a useful heuristic for “dumb and bad in the extreme” and one you’d absolutely use if you didn’t have a political need for him to beat Susan Collins. I reject the political DARVO that I’m the problem for not being supportive enough of this Marine bc I’m noticing a Marine who wants to be a Senator has a Nazi tattoo. It’s a fiction he didn’t know what it was and his old posts, former political director, and academic history and focus refute it.

[Ian Miller @ianmSC]

It really is remarkable how awful the Biden administration was. A mixture of spectacular incompetence, malicious disregard for common sense, and political extremism

It flies under the radar because Biden was mentally gone, but the whole thing was a massive trainwreck

[Secretary Sean Duffy @SecDuffy]

Nice job, Pete.

[Rep. Keith Self @RepKeithSelf]

If the government can shut off your car, then it’s not YOUR car anymore.

Kill the Kill Switch!

[Guy Benson @guypbenson]

Indescribably evil. It’s okay to root for America against the “death to America” assholes in this regime. Really.

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

This is coming from a place of warmth and acceptance…

-It’s ‘sleight of hand’
-It’s ‘bated breath’
-It’s ‘lo and behold’
-It’s ‘one fell swoop’
-It’s ‘brass tacks’
-It’s ‘free rein’

[Midwest vs. The Rest @midwestern_ope]

Baseball was invented so people could measure very large hail