Another weekend of violence in the president's hometown, now run by his former chief of staff. If you want to see the fruits of a presidential second term, look at the decline of his city.President B.O. and Rahm Emanuel, current mayor and former White House chief of staff, brought the "Chicago Way" to Washington in more ways than one. Not only did they bring a style of bare-knuckled backroom politics of intimidation and cronyism, they brought a statist philosophy of government knows best that has left America's Second City a second-rate city with nowhere to go but down.
Last weekend was all too typical in Chicago these days, with four dead and 29 maimed throughout a city that's been home to one of the nation's toughest gun laws. Chicago has become the murder capital of America with a 50% increase in violence for the past year.
Obama recently paid his hometown, where he maintains a residence, a visit. As Wayne Allyn Root, writing on FoxNews.com, noted, 35 were maimed and seven killed in shootouts with the president home that weekend. Included in that violent mess was a 16-year-old girl. Three of the murder victims were killed in one hour on Sunday morning. It was the third weekend in a row with gunshot murders and injuries in the double digits.
The Windy City briefly shone during the recent NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's headquartered in Belgium. That sez it all....
summit, held in a cordoned-off high-security enclave on the city's postcard Lakefront . The local Fraternal Order of Police took the occasion to erect billboards around town reminding people that for a decade the city has been 1,000 coppers short of complying with the legal minimum for police protection.
Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas recently disclosed a staggering $108 billion debt tab across various governing bodies in the county that translates to $63,525 per Chicago household. Unfunded pension liabilities make up nearly a quarter of that. Not all the debt is Chicago's, a city with the nation's highest sales tax, but enough of it is.
Chicago lost 200,000 people from 2000 to 2009. The only one of the nation's 15 largest cities to lose people. Of all cities, it fell between Detroit, reigning champion of progressive urban decay, and hurricane ravaged New Orleans, in the number of people fleeing to greener pastures.