Sen. Roland Burris is “Tombstone” to Chi Trib’s John Kass, and rightly so, but he made some sense in a South Side community meeting last week.  Pestered by former Chicago Housing Authority Director Phil Jackson (who complained mostly about Obama’s neglecting poor people), Burris 

told Jackson there was little the government could do to solve the problems of broken African-American families.

“No government, no senator, no alderman, no representative is going to be in your family dealing with those kids that we’re raising,” he said.

And Burris, 71, said he found himself at a loss trying to stop some children from turning to crime, saying “an old gentleman like me trying to deal with 10- and 12-year-olds that will cuss you out in a minute if you look at ’em . . . ”

Jackson interjected: “That’s what we need help on.”

“A dollar bill ain’t going to help that,” Burris replied.

“We need help to put structures into place,” Jackson countered.

There’s a lot in that “dollar bill” remark, and a lot in Jackson’s reply.  J. himself had raised the broken-family issue, which he sees in terms of “structures” to be installed by elected officials, starting with Obama, specifically

CeaseFire, an anti-gang violence program in the city which hasn’t gotten any federal stimulus money.

This is sad.  A government program is supposed to create a whole new culture for black families?  The same government that installed welfare-dependence structures that for generations made families virtual wards of the state?

And that all-purpose “stimulus.”  Of what?  Jobs for counsellors?

Competition is alive and well in the U.S.A., no matter how the gentiles rage — i.e. “gentes,” or nations, in the Psalms, reading here U.S. Treasury and the governmental leviathan.

The results [lower than expected quarterly loss, thanks to union-contract negotiating and bond-buybacks] reflect in part Ford’s strategy: to steal customers from its weakened crosstown rivals and separate Ford from GM and Chrysler in the minds of the public, investors and lawmakers.

The strategy is part of a longer-term vision that would have Ford rise above its age-old competitors to form a new, global Big Three with the two largest car makers, Toyota Motor Corp. and Volkswagen AG, say people familiar with the company’s thinking.

Look.  It’s natural to man (and woman); so socialists, beware.  You can’t snuff this thing out.

Similarly, the Calif. home-builder builds a better mousetrap, not only installing furniture, but also making it worth a resident’s worthwhile to move in and add to salability.

This $1.2 million seaside pied-a-terre is occupied by Johnna Clavin, a 45-year-old Los Angeles event planner and decorator who has seen business slow. In exchange for giving the townhouse a stylishly lived-in look, she gets to stay there at a steep discount and stands to earn a bonus if the house sells fast.

It’s what you call making do, American-style.  How’d it happen?

Ms. Clavin responded to a Craigslist ad placed by Quality First Home Marketing, a San Diego startup. It aims to fill high-end empty houses with occupants who play the part of happy homeowners, in a bid to remove the price-depressing stigma of vacancy.

Go American!

Georgia is going against the grain, cutting taxes, Stephen Moore reports in the email-accessible WSJ.Com’s Political Diary.

Senate Majority Leader Dan Moody says: “We are trying to create a contrast with the overspending and overtaxing in D.C.” Jonathan Williams of the American Legislative Exchange Council adds: “We know from recent history that those states that cut their taxes will gain more jobs and will have a faster economic recovery.”

No soaking the rich down there, at least if the Republican governor goes along.

Gotcha, John Maynard:

John Maynard Keynes often employed flowery language like “animal spirits” and “liquidity trap” to describe things he did not understand. He was, after all, more of a bureaucrat than an economist. In fact, he would best be described as an anti-economist because he eschewed things like supply and demand and held the opinion that government could run the economy.

He be the devil-may-care proponent of our newly resurrected borrow-and-spend philosophy.  He may rest in peace again some day, but not yet.

Looking, acting, talking like a . . . duck?

President Obama showed his hand this week when The New York Times wrote that he is considering converting the stock the government owns in our country’s banks from preferred stock, which it now holds, to common stock.

This seemingly insignificant change is momentous. It means that the federal government will control all of the major banks and financial institutions in the nation. It means socialism.

Dick Morris cutting to the chase.

The view from Jerusalem:

[I]f Obama feels that he has to be the one to greet a man like Chavez, must it be with the kind of ear-to-ear grin that one might show girl scouts selling cookies? It must surely be disheartening for those who suffer oppression in countries like Venezuela, Cuba and Saudi Arabia to see the American president backslapping their oppressors when these victims have always looked up to the United States as their champions.

There was more, as we know, including:

the incident of President Barack Obama seeming to bow before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the G-20 summit in London. The president’s people denied it was a bow, but it certainly was a sign of great deference from the American president to the dictator of a country who just six weeks ago sentenced a 75-year-old woman to 40 lashes for having been secluded with her nephew after he delivered bread to her home.

And then there’s the overture to Cuba,

a country which engages in systemic human rights abuses, including torture, arbitrary imprisonment, unfair trials and extrajudicial executions. Censorship is so extensive that Cubans face five-year prison sentences for connecting to the Internet illegally. And not only is emigration illegal, but even discussing it carries a six-month prison sentence.

He’s too bad to be true:

While he was campaigning for the presidency, Obama promised, “As president I will recognize the Armenian genocide.” But in a press conference in Ankara with President Abdullah Gul, he refused to use the word “genocide” when challenged by a reporter on the issue. Yet, it was Obama’s early foreign policy adviser Samantha Power of Harvard who wrote A Problem from Hell, the definitive book on the American non-intervention in repeated 20th-century genocides, beginning with the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks which killed 1.5 million between the years of 1915 and 1923.

The book changed the writer’s life, he says, he being a Jew who does not want the world to forget the Holocaust.  He presents a scenario:

Suppose Obama succeeds in building friendships with Chavez, Castro, Ahmadinejad and the Taliban. What then? Does America still get to feel that it stands for something? Will we still be the beacon of liberty and freedom to the rest of the world, or will we have sold out in the name of political expediency? And do any of us seriously believe that presidential friendship is going to get a megalomaniac like Hugo Chavez to ease up on the levers of power, or are we just feeding his ego by showing him he can be a tyrant and still have a beer with the president of the United States? Will the Iranians really stop enriching uranium through diplomacy rather than economic sanctions?

And yet, oddly, the man prizes Obama’s “sunny optimism.”  That’s what it is?  Not lunacy?