Discussing “the end of white flight” from major cities including Boston, Seattle and San Francisco, with resulting proportional increases in whites, Wall St. Journal has this:
As neighborhoods grow more multicultural, conflicts over home prices, taxes and education are opening a new chapter in American race relations.
Welcome to Oak Park 30 years later.
What’s wrong with this statement, besides its content, namely government mixing politics with business?
As a flood of high-cost and reckless lending saturates our nation, Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) took a crucial and targeted step to clean up abusive consumer lending yesterday by introducing a 36 percent cap on annual interest, a move that will save America’s working middle class billions of dollars.
Got it yet? OK, I’ll tell you: “reckless lending,” with “abusive . . . lending” a close second, should be “reckless borrowing,” with maybe “self-abusive borrowing a throw-in for good measure.
Dick Turban (as Limbaugh refers to him) wouldn’t know about that.
This is from his PR release, by the way.
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From Reader D:
Sen. Turban: He’s an enabler if you are irresponsible and would like to be part of the permanent underclass receiving hand-outs.
He’s a harsh judge if you are defenders of liberty and believe in personal responsibility.(His one talent: knowing how to turn a belch into a soundbyte on the 10 o’clock news.)
Dick Durbin’s Republican opponent is “resorting to personal, hateful personal attacks,” a Durbin spokesman told Chi Trib.
“I don’t think that’s what people are looking for. I think people are looking for constructive discussion on issues and not scorched-earth, old-style politics.”
No they aren’t. Personal attacks win elections or tip close ones. Not that Durbin’s in a close one. He has a life seat in the U.S. Senate. But his attacks on personal attacks — this time “personal, hateful personal attacks,” for a double, even triple whammy — are common
“The hottest ring in hell is reserved for those in politics who attack their opponents’ families,” he said on Messy NBC, reacting to criticism of Mrs. O. “And if there are some Republican strategists who think that’s the way to win the election, I think they’re wrong.”
He’s wrong and knows it, which is why he came up with this ring-in-hell business.
On the other hand, he was one of 25 senators voting against condemning “personal attacks” on Gen. Petraeus by a MoveOn.Org last September. Ah, but that was different, was it not?
September is the cruelest month for Durbin, who in that month in 2005 from the Senate floor, during debate on an energy bill, compared Americans running Guatanomo to “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime——Pol Pot or others——that had no concern for human beings.”
For which he at first refused to apologize (said Aljazeera in a link now cached-only) but later did, with tears:
“Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line,” the Illinois Democrat said on Tuesday. “To them I extend my heartfelt apologies.”
To the others a wink.
Dick Morris has quite a good rundown here on “Why the race is tied,” including Obama’s carrying “flip-flopping to new heights”:
In the space of a month and a half, this candidate — who we don’t really yet know very well — reversed or sharply modified his positions on at least eight key issues
which he lists. He also addresses the politico-moral equivalence argument:
Obama’s breathtaking flips and flops are materially different from McCain’s. While McCain had opposed offshore oil drilling and now supports it, the facts have obviously changed. Obama’s shifts have nothing to do with altered circumstances, just a change in the political calendar.
Somebody has even called O. a
“black Bill Clinton,” a turnaround of the “first black president” moniker that had been pinned on Bill.
The comparison has relevance to another phenomenon, the O. campaign being all for itself, and the devil take other Dem candidates, to judge from this at Politico:
After a brief bout of Obamamania, some Capitol Hill Democrats have begun to complain privately that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is insular, uncooperative and inattentive to their hopes for a broad Democratic victory in November.
John Kass has the Supt. Weis questioning as politics as usual in Chi, W. having shaken up things that were just fine as far as aldermen are concerned — why did he have to go and do that? they wonder as K. sees it, probably with unerring accuracy.
Just a few years ago, even the Chicago mob had a big say in who worked where in the top echelons of the department.
William Hanhardt, the heroic chief of detectives, was once the guy to see in the department about promotions and transfers and so on, even though he wasn’t technically the superintendent, and the Hanhardt culture shaped the detective division. When he was later convicted of running an Outfit-backed jewelry-heist ring, using top cops to glean information about his targets from police computers, the aldermen neglected something.
They neglected to hold a hearing to get to the bottom of things. They didn’t ask any questions. Not one. Not even the mayor would condemn him, which is the Chicago Way.
In addition, an op-ed from an ex-FBI black guy living in Texas who grew up in Chi and got shot for his trouble by a ‘hood resident whom he tackled while fleeing with a snatched purse, says about the aldermanic grilling:
Chicago’s public officials are looking through the wrong end of the telescope when they indulge in second-guessing Supt. Weis’ shuffling of his command structure. And it’s not handguns that need to be controlled, it’s the hands holding the guns.
But the formidable Heather Mac Donald in WashPost has substance to beat all in the matter, pushing for the sort of police procedures that saved New York from itself in the 90s — “the single most effective urban policy of the last decade: accountable, data-driven policing.”
[I]n New York City in the 1990s, Police Commissioner William Bratton and a group of hard-charging reformers embraced the iconoclastic idea that policing could in fact radically lower crime.
Iconoclastic in view of “[t]he received wisdom of the Great Society . . . that crime could be lowered only by eliminating its “root causes”: poverty and racism.”
The N.Y.P.D. pioneered an array of techniques to provide precinct commanders with the most up-to-date information on crime patterns and to constantly evaluate which crime-fighting strategies actually worked. Most important, commanders were held ruthlessly accountable for crime in their jurisdictions.
Sans aldermanic or city council member input, it goes without saying.
The results were startling: From 1993 to 1997, major felonies in New York City dropped 41 percent and homicides 60 percent — a record unmatched anywhere else at the time.
New York “roared back to life”:
Not only the central business districts of Manhattan experienced this rebirth; businesses poured into predominantly minority areas in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. The residents of these once-troubled neighborhoods experienced freedom of movement and economic opportunities that had been deemed permanently lost.
Yes. Next time you hear about City Hall neglecting neighborhoods, do not think job training or subsidies. Think law and order. And if it’s not too heretical for you, look towards New York in the 90s.
This sort of thing makes me wonder if Jesuits have their heads screwed on right:
Confronting terrorism by police methods is frequently derided as ineffective, and military means are promoted as an appropriate tool for combating terrorists. But criminal prosecution against the 1993 World Trade Center bombers proved more successful than the military campaign against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The ’93 bombers are in prison; bin Laden is still at large.
Egad, they see it as Obama vs. U.S. “War” is not what’s happening. Maddening.
Moreover, they have found the enemy, and the enemy is us.
[I]In the years ahead our country must still come to grips with our national acquiescence to the politics of fear, which has led to the detention and abuse of hundreds of individuals. Among the necessary steps will be restoration of freedom to innocent detainees, accompanied by public apology and some monetary restitution for the years they lost to incarceration. [Italics added]
Praise abounds for all-around newsman, commentator, and presidential press secretary Tony Snow — “the best ever, without qualification,” says John Podhoretz.
He could speak with fluency, honesty, wit, and clarity on every subject under the sun; he remained poised, unruffled, and as sure of himself at the podium in the press room as he was on that boat in the Potomac nearly two decades earlier.
But this from Brendan Miniter tells about him in a way most memorably:
I last saw Tony several years ago as he was heading out the door of a Starbucks in Alexandria, Va., on his way to work. He wasn’t rushing. He had time for a man who was asking for spare change. Tony reached into his pocket, dug out several coins and at least one bill and handed it to the man. I saw Tony step closer to the man and heard him ask how he was. As the door closed, I couldn’t hear what else he said, but as Tony walked away both were smiling.
Confident in his benevolence.
John K, Wilson, author of Barack Obama, This Improbable Quest, takes a shot at rebutting Dennis Byrne, who accused O. of flip-flopping in the matter of campaign financing. Before, he was for it (taking fed money and calling off fund-raising), later he was against it (broken system, can’t condone it, can’t employ it, like a broken PC: can’t use it, you know, have to get a Mac).
Not so, says Wilson, who blogs at www.obamapolitics.com — “Barack Obama is quickly becoming America’s most popular politician” — and has criticized the U. of Colorado committee that punished prof Ward Churchill as “opening the door to a vast new right-wing witch hunt on college campuses that conservatives could easily exploit across the country.”
“Obama never made an unconditional promise to take public funding,” says Wilson in a letter to Chi Trib editor that identifies him as author of his book, which he would dearly like us all to know about — I didn’t — which is unusual in letter-writer (“Voice of the People”) identifications. Wouldn’t we all like our books given such display? The letters editor would be swamped.
To Wilson: What was the condition O. set? And what’s this “agreement” vs. “promise”? Publicly made, of course, to gain advantage in campaign sweepstakes.
“I defy Byrne to offer a single example,” says this doughty campaigner-book author.
Byrne accuses Obama’s campaign of “shading the truth” because “it implies that all the money comes from small contributions of $5, $10 or $20.”
But this was the entire import of O’s agreement-not-a-promise, was it not? That he as reformer would take the supposed reformer’s path? Wilson missed that?
Again the bluster, reminiscent of “I would challenge” to Chicago newsies to “dispute that basic fact” — that he’s not a typical Chicago politician:
Unless Byrne can come up with a single example in which Obama’s campaign claimed that all of its money comes from $20 donations or less, he’s “shading the truth” and owes Obama–and his readers–an apology.
En garde, Byrne! We bloggers at obamapolitics.com want to joust! Make our day!
Big O. and the gang should call this guy off, especially in view of its claim that this was “an extremely difficult decision.”
Of course. Breaking (up) an agreement is always hard to do.
Maybe a blip:
It will take a few more days to determine whether this recent tightening of the race reflects real change or is merely statistical noise. (see recent daily results).
But, my friends, it’s a horse race.
For the second straight day, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows that the race for the White House is tied.
Hoo boy, am I dumb. When Mary Mitchell called for more cops in black gangsters’ neighborhoods — “on the South Side where most of the shootings have occurred” — I simply asked, rhetorically, To do what? Can they get aggressive, or is that what causes riots (smaller things have caused riots), as Mitchell said, agreeing with Daley?
“[T]he mayor is right about one thing,” she wrote.
Community activists would have gone berserk had Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis ordered police to stop every white T-shirt, cap-cocked-to-the-side, medallion swinging, pants-sagging black and brown youth in and around the Taste.
“You have to be cautious. You can’t just send a hundred policemen and — say if it’s Gang X African-Americans — and start grabbing every African-American [in the area]. You’d have a full-scale riot,” the mayor said on Tuesday.
Had police harassed even one person who fit the profile of a gang-banger and that person turned out to be a harmless suburban kid in hip-hop gear, well, you can imagine the outcry.
No, what they do was not her point, to go by today’s “Weis wants a new SOS REVIVE DISBANDED UNIT? | Meets with aldermen after Taste violence,” in which the issue is switching cops from white non-gang wards to black (and hispanic) gang wards:
“[Weis is] doing a statistical analysis of crime and crime patterns with an eye toward realigning beats and districts,” said Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd).
Ald. Freddrenna Lyle (6th) said Weis “agreed there needs to be some kind of re-evaluation because it hasn’t been done in 25 years and everything has changed since then.” But she’s not holding her breath.
“Every superintendent we’ve had has said they’d look at it — and it still hasn’t happened. You’ve got to [be willing to] make some people mad,” Lyle said.
“Some people” indeed. Lyle meant white people living in non-gang wards, of course. It’s a matter of moving cops around. That’s what Mitchell was talking about.
It would have been nice to read her saying that more clearly, but she preferred tip-toeing on the subject. Even race-based columnists have their sensitivities.
Blithe Spirit 