Enough with the excuses!
The Capital Times Idea Fest kicks off next Monday. This weeklong program is not a robust contest of ideas like Bill Buckley once hosted on his televised Firing Line. More like a Members Only, progressive treehouse. No-Girlz-Allowed! Secret password required. Heresies will be condemned, orthodoxes confirmed, slogans recited, pronouns observed.
Idea Fest features a line-up of the Democrat party’s made men, like governors Tim Walz, J.B. Pritzker, and Tony Evers. And would-be governor, election-denier Stacey Abrams! All singing to the already converted choir in that progressive amen corner, Madison WI.
Resisting Trump is not an ‘idea’
Forgive us for wondering what might be their ideas? Defund the Cops? Open borders? Drag queen story hour? Reparations? Forgiven college loans? Government-run grocery stores? Taxpayer-paid abortion? No school choice for desperate black parents?
This progressive picnic needs more ants in its potato salad. Fair warning to event organizers! The Head Groundskeeper will embed himself among the progressives lapping up every cliché emanating from that jolly gerrymanderer, J.B. Pritzker. The mega-billionaire (Tax the Rich!) is chief executive of bright blue Illinois — one of the few states losing population. (A free people, voting with their feet in our federalist system! Now there is an idea!)
Send peace keepers to Chicago
By the time of his star turn Saturday 09-13-25 on the UW campus, Gov. Pritzker should be able to recount his resistance — like those heroes of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt — to Donald Trump’s proposed takeover of law enforcement in Chicago.
We’ll also have the final body count from another Labor Day weekend in his largest city. As of early Monday 09-01-25, WGN News reported 50 shot, including eight killed — the youngest age 14. More bloodshed than last year’s Labor Day.
However solid the constitutional ground upon which the heavy-set Pritzker commands, he surrenders the moral high ground. His governmental malpractice is killing people.
Question from a certain interloper in the audience: What is the chief executive of Illinois doing about murder in his big city? What are his (pause for dramatic effect) ideas?
Meanwhile in progressive Madison WI
Headline: “Madison’s independent police monitor ignores records requests, city attorney intervention.”
“The city council’s vice president is considering a cut in funding for the office. … The office receives just under $400,000 annually from the city and is seeking an additional $65,600 in the 2026 budget. Ald. MGR Govindarajan, council vice president, says he does not support the additional funding and might consider further cuts to the office’s budget.” — Isthmus has the goods.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: We pledge to donate $1 to the local Republican party every time we hear that verbal tic, “root causes” at Capital Times Idea Fest. Let’s not overthink this: the root cause of crime is … (sound of trumpets out of tune): CRIME! (Broken Windows, simplified.) Not poverty, not lack of “affordable housing,” not racist police, not poor schools. Crime begets crime.
Democrats are the party of government.
31 responses to “Hey, Democrats! What’s the big idea?”
Chicago is doomed unless they start voting in common sense politicians which might be a pipe dream. Chicago is my hometown & it breaks my heart to see it go to he**.
There has always been corruption but at least hardworking people & families could be relatively safe.
It’s almost like the criminals are taunting the city to see how much damage they can do. In turn the politicians are taunting the federal government. So so sad!!!!
Democrats are soft on crime because they want the populace to be scared, dependent and more easily controlled. Cue the ramblings of Liesack and Anonymous to underscore the point shortly.
Squire, your Constitution is stronger than mine if you could sit through Idea Fest. Yikes!
Scared, dependent and controlled by who? To what end? I bet you and Dave were both glued to your sets watching Dementia Don’s Cabinet of grifters hissing his fat butt for over three hours. SAD!!!!!!!!!
Trump makes himself available to America more in one week than Joe Biden did in four years. BTW: the “Dementia Don” thing isn’t working — not coming from a guy who swore up and down that poor old Joe was sharp as a tack.
OK. How about non-transparent trump. Love watching the Gop and faux news twist themselves into knots while the Epstein victims stand on the Capital steps telling their stories. Somehow this whole thing will blow up and a lot of people are going to get a spanking. Cankels is trying to find a fall guy right now. My guess is Bondi, Patel or his old standby Joey B. What say you paid up members of the right-wing?
Liesack: right on que.
Cankles? Is Hillary back in the game?
Be sure to take your RFK approved sunscreen and have a funnel cake.
Listening to Progressive Idiot Fest is like getting weight loss ideas from Pritzger, Abrams and Walz.
Historical correction. The Bar Kokhba revolt happened 60 years after the fall of Masada
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Kokhba_revolt
Idea fest, indeed–like Octoberfest without the beer. Progressives (liberals, what you will) are always blissfully unaware of their own self-parody, which should be richly on display next week. I would gladly add my voice to the Squire’s but I balk at paying good money to attend this self-righteous circle-jerk. Speaking of ideas, everyone has his own idea of Hell, but mine is being forced to listen to a fat slob from Georgia and and even fatter one from Illinois drone on endlessly about threats to democracy. What are the chances of Trump sending the WI national guard to break some heads at this gathering? At least that would be one Idea Fest worth remembering.
And let us all remember what state put Trump over the top in the all important electoral college.
The Democratic Socialists want to ban billionaires so where does Gov. J.B. Pritzker go?
Not to the salad bar, that’s for sure.
Surprised to see they have a Twitter link (yup the old bird logo). Takes you to an X page that last tweeted end of 2022. That’s the speed of Democrats alright.
Looking forward to the festival ending Sumo wrestling event. My money as always is on Satya.
When you rail against “Defund the Cops? Open borders? … Reparations? Forgiven college loans? Government-run grocery stores?,” many libs can respond, “Amen, brother — contrary to the piss-pour tribal dicta in which the “other” side is always evil incarnate.
However, when you retort against the call to also address “root causes,” you assume that necessarily means neither having sufficient police to patrol, nor imposing consequences. That is NOT true. You also appear to assume that addressing root causes does means that, after you have worked to address the root causes (and there are root causes), and giving downtrodden kids a second chance for inevitable mistakes, there will not be serious consequences. Also, NOT true.
To explain what this means concretely, when you say that it is “CRIME! (Broken Windows, simplified.) Not poverty, not lack of “affordable housing,” not racist police, not poor schools,” let me ask you to please consider these realities that we can, together, recount has happened here in Madison.
Here in Madison — yes, the same liberal bastion that takes excessive pride in its uber-morality, and constant focus on eliminating “systemic racism” and “White Supremacy” (regardless of the fact that they are unable to identify anything more than isolated pockets of microaggressions) — here in Madison NINETY-FIVE PERCENT of black students entering the city’s high schools cannot read at grade level, because for decades the District used the wrong teaching method that research conclusively demonstrated did not work for kids from not enriched home life, because phonics, which does work, was advocated by conservatives.
If a child cannot read at grade level by the end of third grade, that has a devastating impact on the direction they take in life, for then schools switch from learning to read, to reading to learn. Those whom the schools failed by that point, find themselves increasingly behind and frustrated, taking a toll on their sense of self respect, which often leads to anti-social behaviors that wind up in criminality.
Your words seem to say, that you and I others whom life smiled on can live an admirable life without giving something back by helping, or supporting others who strive to help, all kids to learn to read, unfortunate children who, through no fault of their own, wound up born on the wrong side of the tracks.
Your words seem to say it’s the helping, or striving to help that is an end to itself. I don’t have much respect for “help” that is exacerbating the problems.
Do you think a bunch of politicians and otherwise embedded liberals are going to get to the true root causes? I’d have some respect if this conference had some contrarians. Get Bret Weinstein to come in and discuss the public health response to COVID, or Katherine Birbalsingh to engage in a discussion about education reform.
Groups like this do not discover root causes.
I like your approach. A real idea fest. Got any more suggestions?
2 of my favorite nuanced thinkers:
Lyn Alden, author of “Broken Money”. She changed my mind on the US ever being able to fix the debt problem. “Nothing stops this train”.
David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework. He recently celebrated the end of 90’s “loser culture” epitomized by grunge music and Beavis and Butthead (I’d throw in Homer Simpson too). Yes culture really matters, even for white people.
You won’t get dogma from either one.
NHK Newsline (on PBS 6:30 pm weekdays) offers some good perspectives. They recently did a show about immigrant labor in China. Men in their 60s making $21 a day if they’re lucky.
Is it any different here?
Peter, the root cause of crime is … CRIME! Millions of poor people are law abiding. If young teens and pre-teens — I’m talking 11 and 12 years old — see car jackings and the neighborhood drug kingpin flashing a wad and a piece, guess what? Against national news, entertainment, and academic background noise saying It’s Not Your Fault! You Have Unmet Needs! Schools that keep dumbing discipline down until the kid makes his first bones.
Dave,
I think I may have not made my point adequately. The question of whether there ARE root causes is not a question of poverty, but of a broken home life. Just like the Asian kids born in poverty who succeed today, my mother was the daughter of dirt poor Jewish immigrants from a teeny village in Poland who was only given one dress a year (and that was hand sown). Poverty didn’t knock either of them off the beaten path because they had parents who raised them to succeed and to value education, which made them believe they would too (and usually to do so fairly).
The high proportion of African-American families who live in persistent poverty AND unenriched home lives with values is not because they are black. We ought not forget the 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow during which their home lives and education was deliberately destroyed — God I hate your making me sound wokish, but you miss the mark by a country mile if you blind yourself to that history. Many were able to escape the trap of broken homes and broken communities, but others did not. I suppose we can quibble endlessly about whether enough did overcome, but where does it get us when it comes to new children born innocently in those circumstances today with all the odds against them, making it extremely difficult for them to break out. Think Dave about all the things that you and I have done for our kids to help them succeed. These troubled kids too often get none, they get the opposite.
I have never believed that being a conservative meant not having a heart. Please, don’t make me rethink that.
Very best. – p
Conservatives have hearts, just not the bleeding kind. And that’s the paradox that most people don’t understand. The black community was on a good trajectory until the liberal welfare state came along and created a permanent underclass.
Perhaps read Riley’s “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed”
Spare us the “Open your heart” BS. Look at the facts.
That being said I also disagree with Conservatives on abortion. If I was in charge I’d have abortion mobiles cruising the city 24/7 and free contraceptives available through Amazon.com.
There are no root causes on stolen land.
Au contraire. There are nothing but root causes on stolen land: racism, imperialism, colonialism, blah, blah, blah. Read all about it in the 1619 Project.
Read Jason L. Riley in today’s Wall Street Journal. He writes what I have said many times: “Crime causes poverty.”
Dave, I did read Jason Riley’s Wall Street Journal article, and his first concern is Chicago Mayor Johnson’s refusal to recognize that policing IS an integral part of reducing crime and anti-social behaviors, instead arguing that all of those could be addressed with adequate low cost housing. I have no problem with that.
I thought I made clear that only a small (albeit vocal) part of the so-called left actually supported defunding police, and of especial note 80% of black respondents also opposed defunding police. That is not my concern because I emphasized I supported good policing, and which, instead, was being aghast that you would blind yourself to the concomitant impact of fractured home lives compounded in violent communities on young people figuring out which way to turn in their lives.
Read through to the end of Riley’s article. You’ll read his noting that, second, in addition to the role that police can play in reducing crime, “[f]amily makeup and education play important roles in reducing social pathology.”
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It was NOT a small minority of the Left that said defund the police. Stop revising history with your wishful thinking/delusion.
Defund the police was said by every Democrat politician that saw all the new pots of money that came from police budgets as they “rethought policing” and Obama federalized scrutiny of cop shops.
But that was wa-a-a-ay back when Black Lives Mattered unlike today in Chicago.
Or if they did not actually demand Defund the Police yielded the barricades to those who did.
Peter, no one is blind to the effects of poor upbringing. And you know better than to accuse me of that, knowing that I ran for Madison school board on the platform of providing in our public schools what was lacking at home; that being reading, leadership, good example, great expectations, and discipline. But the sine non qua of fighting crime is to fight crime. Conservatives are especially strong on the importance of a father-figure in the home. But not if that father is a drug dealer/gang banger. A blight on home and street. Too many of your progressive acquaintances (not necessarily you yourself) want these criminals back out on the street under the mistaken theory that any man in the home is better than none. We disagree.
I humbly offer a correction to your last statement: progressives want (black) criminals back on the street because their insatiable white guilt can’t abide the spectacle of a black person–any black person–behind bars. Evidence? When one of them commits a crime so egregious even a Madison judge can’t ignore it, we invariably learn that the criminal in question has a rap sheet longer than your arm.
Hey Democrats! Here’s an idea. Leave your party. Look how well that turned out for Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, Ronald Reagan etc. etc.
They are all much happier as a result and they can’t all be wrong.