PJ Pesce

ItalianAmerican citizen of the world, mixologist, magician, guitarist, director/writer of film & television entertainments. Natural born skeptic. Fi/Fi Fo/Fum

[PJ Pesce @cappados]

On the historical scorecard, reality is undefeated, even if there are brief periods where idiocy seemingly wins.

[PJ Pesce @cappados]

@SteveKrak Statistically highly improbable.

[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.

[Joel Pollak @joelpollak]

Consider the implications of a voting system that REGULARLY creates the impression of one result and then delivers another.

Now ADD the fact that if Raman moves ahead of Pratt, there will be NO opposition voice in the general election to challenge a mayor who let the town burn.

[Richard Grenell @RichardGrenell]

California is no longer the state with the most Fortune 500 companies.

The largest state in the country is going backwards.

@GavinNewsom is to blame.

[Viva Frei @thevivafrei]

Last night, the Los Angeles mayoral race had in 65.8% of expected votes, with 291,000 outstanding.

Today, they have 64.3% of expected votes in (less than yesterday) with an estimated 311,000 outstanding (more than yesterday).

Are they just going to keep increasing the number of remaining votes depending on how many they need to push Nithya Raman past Spencer Pratt?

[Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @christopherrufo]

The California government is such a dystopia that they are denying our lawful records request on the argument that "the public interest served by not disclosing the record clearly outweighs the public interest served by disclosure of the record."

They've gone full Orwell.

[Nate Silver @NateSilver538]

It's hard to overstate how much of an outlier California is for its slow vote-counting relative to literally any other state or almost any other industrialized democracy.

[Kilgore Trout @RadioFreeStPaul]

@SenSanders Confiscating the wealth that drives this economy is the most ignorant tax policy imaginable

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

@MichaelEri14883 The new SCOTUS of 12 they're angling for?

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

There is already a movement to bind state electors in presidential races to the candidate who wins the national popular vote.

De facto abolition of the Electoral College.

But don't worry the Supreme Court will step in!

Or someone will.

Right?

[California Post @californiapost]

Look inside the nearly empty LA County voting facility costing taxpayers $300 million https://t.co/5P6i0bJKLZ

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

You don't think they know how to count votes? Ha!

They know how to count them.

And how to add them and how to subtract them.

They can even do fractions.

The system is not "a mess."

The opposite.

It's nearly perfect.

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

We need to elect people who want fair elections but first we need fair elections so we can elect them.

Escher world.

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

The California election is an epic & perhaps final boast. We sit behind this impregnable line, & here we have all power. Exhaust yourself in your fury, go ahead, & when it burns out, behold your impotence. You will do nothing in the end, for what can you do? It is a new age.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 NOW: Mass calls are erupting for the SUPREME COURT to step in and END THE MADNESS, California is undergoing another mail-in ballot scandal because it's built into their LAWS

Nearly 2,000 THOUSAND drop boxes statewide and Democrats LET ballots come in super late

PLENTY of time for fraud.

The votes remaining went UP

HEMMER: "What Hilton is talking about is the way California has changed its election laws. You got 58 counties. You got 1700 drop boxes. You got 23 million registered voters and everyone gets a mail ballot as of 2021."

"And that's the way they've been doing it in California. Now you got to match the signatures and all this takes an extraordinary amount of time. Nonetheless, 56% of the vote is still out."

[Coddled Affluent Professional @feelsdesperate]

So weird that all the people who want to ‘defend our democracy’ are totally fine with voting circumstances that are routinely associated with rigged elections in third world countries.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

These people are the villains out of Atlas Shrugged. Rand was a prophet because she understood that philosophy moves the world.

The tax will NOT soften any blow. It does the opposite. It delays and raises the cost of everything AI is already solving: cancer and Alzheimer's research, safer surgery, faster diagnosis, software that makes developers and businesses more productive, tools that help writers think. Tax the data centers and you slow all of it.

But she sees none of that. She sees only money to loot for her "causes." The producer is the threat to be managed, the disruption a pretext, the seizure a virtue.

They never create. They only wait for someone else to build something worth taking, then arrive with a tax and a speech about who they're cushioning. A despicable bunch indeed.

[CsharpUSA @RonGay19]

@SenWarren The answer to AI isn’t taxing it into submission. Every breakthrough, from the steam engine to the internet, created more jobs and wealth than it displaced. AI will do the same. Punishing innovation won’t protect workers; it will only help America fall behind.
Poor leadership!

[Erik Telford @ErikTelford]

@SenWarren If Henry Ford had been forced to bail out every buggy-whip manufacturer before selling a Model T, we’d still be riding horses.

Innovation creates new industries, new jobs, and new opportunities. That’s how progress works.