Chicago’s Real Crime Story

Why decades of community organizing haven’t stemmed the city’s youth violence

winter 2010
city-journal.org
by Heather Mac Donald

Barack Obama has exploited his youthful stint as a Chicago community organizer at every stage of his political career. As someone who had worked for grassroots “change,” he said, he was a different kind of politician, one who could translate people’s hopes into reality. The media lapped up this conceit, presenting Obama’s organizing experience as a meaningful qualification for the Oval Office.


This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over the airwaves and across the Internet. None of the news outlets that had admiringly reported on Obama’s community-organizing efforts mentioned that the beating involved students from the very South Side neighborhoods where the president had once worked. Obama’s connection to the area was suddenly lost in the mists of time.

Yet a critical blindness links Obama’s activities on the South Side during the 1980s and the murder of Derrion Albert in 2009. Throughout his four years working for “change” in Chicago’s Roseland and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods, Obama ignored the primary cause of their escalating dysfunction: the disappearance of the black two-parent family. Obama wasn’t the only activist to turn away from the problem of absent fathers, of course; decades of failed social policy, both before and after his time in Chicago, were just as blind. And that myopia continues today, guaranteeing that the current response to Chicago’s youth violence will prove as useless as Obama’s activities were 25 years ago.
read more

Obama College Thesis: 'Constitution is Inherently Flawed'

Obama Thesis Raises Doubts

Brian Lancaster
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Jumpinginpools.blogspot.com

UPDATE: Rush Limbaugh said that this article is satire.

President Barack Obama's college record has officially been under strict secrecy since his run for the White House began in 2007. This record includes two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, two years at Columbia University, and finally at Harvard Law School.

During his time at these colleges, Obama gained notoriety for being an especially bright and hardworking student. At Harvard, he was later elected as the editor of the Harvard Law Review, which many observers see as the beginning of his political career.

However, many things regarding the future President's time at these colleges have remained private. Under order of the Obama campaign, all information not directly allowed published by Obama himself, is not to be disclosed to any media. These included grades, attendance records, rewards received, and papers submitted................

.................However, the President also singled out the American Constitution:

"... the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy."

It is yet unknown if more of this thesis will be released. It was also noted that the President received an A- for the paper, which later led to his graduation.

read more

Medical Care is a Successful and Growing Industry, not a Liability

americanthinker.com
By Wesley Clark, MD
September 03, 2009

The people of the United States find themselves in the midst of a severe recession, with unemployment higher than it has been in many years, housing prices cratering, retirement plans collapsing, and their lifestyles constricting.

The financial industry collapsed. We had to come to the rescue, pouring our own futures into saving the banks, brokerages, and insurance companies from their own greedy foolishness. The stagnant American automobile industry was imploding, and the people had to bail them out too, further mortgaging the future of their children.

Our politicians responded to this catastrophe by spending our future for us, and then by voting a $787 billion dollar "stimulus" bill that has so far produced no discernible improvement, but has flung pork into every corner of the nation, while funding their community organizer and special-interest groups. The government -- the State -- now effectively owns several giant banks, investment bankers, AIG, and two out the three domestic auto companies that were failing dismally.

There is still an industry that is growing and successful, that produces 17% of the Gross Domestic Product, and that employs over 10% of all American workers. The medical industry incorporates more than 820,000 businesses: hospitals, physician's offices, dentist's offices, home healthcare services, kidney dialysis centers, medical laboratories, X-Ray imaging centers, radiotherapy facilities, mental hospitals, physical therapy centers, nursing homes, outpatient surgical centers, dental laboratories, rehabilitation facilities and ambulance services with combined annual revenue of over $1 trillion. It immediately plows most its growing income right back into the economy for wages, and directs additional business to satellite industries such as pharmaceuticals, drugstores, and insurance companies. It even produces billions of dollars in revenues for the medical malpractice trial lawyers. Americans medical care costs more than government programs elsewhere, but it provides better care and better results, the best in the world. American patients, even the destitute, do not give birth in hallways, or wait months for essential diagnostic tests and treatments.

Suddenly, it seems that brisk industrial growth, creation of new technologies, expansion of employment, healing of once-fatal illnesses, prolongation of life, and prevention of pain are not even success, but a just terrible fiscal burden that our overlords deeply resent. They want that money to spend elsewhere, for monuments to their narcissistic prowess.
read more

CZAR WARS: THE PHANTOM MENACES

THE REAL POWER IN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION IS UNCONFIRMED AND UNACCOUNTABLE

New York Post
By MICHELLE MALKIN
July 26, 2009

If you can't beat 'em, czar 'em. This is the standard operating procedure in Obama World. The time-honored Senate confirmation process proved to be a dangerous landmine for one too many of the president's picks. But the White House found the perfect cure for Obama Nominee Withdrawal Syndrome: Avoid future debacles by circumventing the nomination process altogether.

So far, czars have been installed in at least 35 posts through presidential executive orders that require no Senate approval. No Senate review, no questions. No questions, no problems.

read more

Video: Economic reporting, then and nowposted

June 9, 2009 by Ed Morrissey hotair.com
Ed Frank finds something amiss in today’s media environment when it comes to economic trends and analyses. Frank notices that the media today seem willing and even eager to parrot the White House and Barack Obama in his sunny optimism, despite unemployment shooting up higher and faster than anytime in the last 70 years. Back in 2003-4, when the American economy recovered from what looks in comparison to a speed bump, Frank recalls a much different media environment:




read more