[Investors] 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.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/27/2012 00:00 ||
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#1
...and Chicago slowly shifts into position behind Detroit.....
Send for the smelling salts -- someone is feeling faint!
For the United States' first century, Americans elected their leaders in full view of their neighbors, gathering on courthouse steps to announce their votes orally or hand a distinctive preprinted ballot or unfolded marked paper to a clerk. Such a public process made elections ripe for bribes and threats, although the scene around American polling places never matched Australia's, where a population of criminals and goldbugs made electoral intimidation something of a democratic pastime. To end such shenanigans, each of Australia's colonies began shifting to a secret ballot during the 1850s, and in 1872 England followed suit.
A decade and a half later, the reform crossed the Atlantic. Louisville, Kentucky, enacted a so-called Australian ballot in 1888, and 32 states did the same by 1892--over the objections of machine politicians. By the turn of the century, most of the country had changed the public spectacle of Election Day into a solemn occasion for curtained isolation. This shift coincided with a dramatic drop in turnout rates, from nearly 80 percent of the eligible population in 1896--which had been typical for the era--to 65 percent eight years later.
As modern civic activists have tried to increase turnout, their focus has been on reducing the hassle of participation. The most-successful reforms of the past decade, however--early in-person voting, "no excuse" absentee ballots, elections entirely by mail--appear not to have lured new people to the polls so much as merely made it more convenient for regular voters to cast their ballots.
What actually works is mimicking some part of the 19th century's surveillance culture. The most effective tool for turning nonvoters into voters--10 times better than the typical piece of preelection mail, according to a 2006 Michigan experiment--is a threat to send neighbors evidence of one's apathy. Other experiments have found gentler approaches that serve a similar function: merely reminding citizens that whether they cast a ballot is a matter of public record, or promising to print the names of those who do in a postelection newspaper ad, can boost turnout too.
By introducing shame into the calculus of citizenship, the researchers behind these tests increased the psychological cost of not voting. In so doing, they restored the sense--sadly lost for a century--that voting ought to be not a personal act but a social one.
#2
And Australia's crimians and goldbugs (what the hell is that?) have nothing on the modern day SEIU Thug.
And I don't want someone who is so apathetic (or so lazy) that they can't get off their fat ass and vote - to vote. I don't think we should have motor-voter and I think we should be required to go down and re-register every 4-6 years. The only possible excemption would be those who are physically unable to vote.
They are just too apathetic or lazy to research the issues or make a decision outside of "ohhh... this canidate's hot!" (see MSM).
And by they - I meant those who are to lazy to go vote at the polls - not those unable to physically go (they should be able to vote by mail) - provided they have proof they are unable to physically go to the polls.
#4
And what steps will be taken to prevent voter intimidation (if you don't vote for our candidate, we will have a duty make you face the consequences of your oh-so-obvious dedication to oppression for oppression's sake)?
#2
By allowing guns to infiltrate Mexico's drug cartel, we thought we could trace them up the ladder to the leaders. Take off the head and the body dies.
Working blooding phueching well in Afghanistan isn't it? Interesting use of the personal pronoun "we".
#3
...not everything is our business. And in the political arena, there are things that should be and need to be kept quiet.
So much for the most transparent administration in the history of the universe. That's the problem; the MSM (such as CNN) has been running interference, carrying water for Obama, and abetting criminality by a bunch of thug dipwads who try to find ways to skirt and get around the law and the Constitution. What's going on must be what Reverend Wright meant by the chickens coming home to roost. Karma is indeed a b!tch.
#5
He draws an analogy between F&F and the Osama mission. Which is kind of odd, because we actually know more about the Osama mission than we do about F&F.
Posted by: Matt ||
06/27/2012 12:22 Comments ||
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#6
By allowing guns nuclear weapons to infiltrate Mexico's drug cartel Al Qaeda, we thought we could trace them up the ladder to the leaders. Take off the head and the body dies.
The Obama Administration is proof brainless bodies CAN live.
Thursday will be a big day, in the American Republic, if the Supreme Court indeed pronounces upon ObamaCare. Its decision is likely to include surprises, pleasant and unpleasant to all parties, and the arguments will themselves be unexpected to many. This is because the court currently has, among its nine members, perhaps six who are genuinely learned in the law, and therefore capable of thinking outside received media and academic categories.
It makes more sense to comment before the decision, than immediately afterwards, when pundits will fixate upon the immediate political implications. This is understandable in a presidential election year, when the fallout from the ruling will be substantial. The election result could depend on how the respective parties spin it -- so that, for instance, apparent defeat in court could be turned into victory in November, or a close finish turned into a rout.
But to my mind, the benchmark the justices will inscribe may have a larger consequence, as precedent, farther down the road. For the question about the "individual mandate" -- whether the U.S. federal government has the power, under the "commerce clause," to compel the citizen to purchase something he does not want, and may consider to be morally abhorrent -- goes to the heart of Roosevelt's New Deal, and the American Nanny State that was erected upon it.
#2
...the court currently has, among its nine members, perhaps six who are genuinely learned in the law, and therefore capable of thinking outside received media and academic categories.
I wonder who these members are in the author's mind? Most likely Kagan and Sotomayor. Who's the third?
#3
Kagan's a lefty shill. I heard some excerpts from her irt the on going Obamacare debate - I can't believe she has a law degree and is on SCOTUS. She clearly does not understand the Constitution or that you cannot simply make it say what you want it to in order to meet current political or economic exigencies.
#4
I'm not sure who the third one would be either. Hm!
I don't think Kagan is a lefty shill. She's more of a useful idiot than a hardcore ideologue, and she's way too intimidated by the power of her position to do anything crazy with it. She sounds dumb about the Constitution because she's used to be a litigator, whose job is not to be *know* but to *argue.* To take every position, however asinine, futile, or contradictory, leaving it to the wisdom of the impartial judge to decide who's slightly less whacked in the head. She's used to being "down here," not "up there."
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
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.
