Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a ...
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.
@JustAVet4@nicksortor@LeaderJohnThune@SenateGOP Like Massie pointed out, these bills are not single item bills. They contain other items that are objectionable . That is the nature of law making in the United States anymore. Massie complained about this the moment he set foot in DC.
🚨 Do you understand what just happened in the last 24 hours..
> Thomas Massie lost the most expensive House primary in American history.. over $30,000,000 spent by pro-Israel groups to remove one congressman from one Kentucky district..
> AIPAC. RJC. Miriam Adelson. Paul Singer. All in. Against a single man in a safe red district who kept naming them out loud..
> His opponent Ed Gallrein — Trump-backed, retired Navy SEAL — wins.. and Massie has to track him down to make the concession call..
> Massie's exact words at the concession: "I would have come out sooner but I had to call my opponent to concede and it took a while to find him in Tel Aviv"..
> he had already joked about this on the campaign trail.. said the area code for the concession call would be Tel Aviv.. turned out to be accurate..
> the man forced votes on Epstein files.. opposed regime-change wars.. named the foreign lobbies by name.. and did it all in a safe district he'd held for over a decade..
> and it still cost $30,000,000 to remove him..
every single congressman watching that concession speech got the same message.. name the pressure and they will spend whatever it takes to erase you..
all of this.. one primary night..
if you're not following me you're finding out about this 48 hours late from someone who read my post..
it's only getting crazier from here..
🚨 Do you understand what Karen Bass just admitted on CNN..
> she promised in june 2023 to end street homelessness in los angeles by 2026.. 100%.. gone.. finished.. her words..
> it's now 2026.. the deadline year.. street homelessness is down 17.6%..
> CNN asked her live: "why would people trust you're going to get to 100%?"..
> her answer: "when I said that.. I didn't realize the bureaucratic barriers. I'm prepared now."..
> she has been mayor since december 2022.. the bureaucracy she says she didn't realize existed.. she runs it.. she has been running it for three and a half years..
> her signature Inside Safe program housed 5,800 people in three years.. 40% of them returned to the streets.. 2,300 people.. back outside.. after billions spent..
> she is now citing a 10% drop in homeless mortality as the proof that things are working.. deaths are the metric of success..
> she told CNN she's "prepared now".. in the year the goal was supposed to already be complete..
> the bureaucratic barriers didn't appear after the promise.. they were there the whole time.. she just didn't ask..
every single mayor who makes a transformative promise and hits 17% of it tells you the same thing afterward.. "I didn't realize".. "I'm prepared now".. "we're not done but we're making progress"..
the deadline was 2026.. it's 2026.. and the explanation is that she's finally ready to start..
it's only getting crazier from here..
I'll share more updates shortly, turn on notifications before it's too late.
@EdGallrein Voting against the Iran strike IS America first. He did NOT vote against proof if cicizenship but against the house bill which had added other bills attached to it that he disagreed with. He didn’t vote for the govt to open because it was kicking the can to the next resolution