Where was Feisel Adbul Rauf going to get the $100 million needed to construct his Cordoba House, excuse me! renamed as Park51 Islamic Center proposed to be sited within the zone of destruction caused by the 9/11 attacks?

Naturally, I suspected Middle Eastern sheiks and Islamists would simply be taking so many dollars off the top of this month’s package of financial aid to Hamas, al Qaeda, and the Taliban and sending it Abdul Rauf’s way. But, no, it’s better than that.

As Reuters reports, New York City may actually provide the bulk of the needed funding for the combined victory monument and recruiting center.

The Muslim center planned near the site of the World Trade Center attack could qualify for tax-free financing, a spokesman for City Comptroller John Liu said on Friday, and Liu is willing to consider approving the public subsidy.

The Democratic comptroller’s spokesman, Scott Sieber, said Liu supported the project. The center has sparked an intense debate over U.S. religious freedoms and the sanctity of the Trade Center site, where nearly 3,000 perished in the September 11, 2001 attack.

“If it turns out to be financially feasible and if they can demonstrate an ability to pay off the bonds and comply with the laws concerning tax-exempt financing, we’d certainly consider it,” Sieber told Reuters.

Spokesmen for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor David Paterson and the Islamic center and were not immediately available.

The proposed center, two blocks from the Trade Center site in lower Manhattan, has caused a split between people who lost relatives and friends in the attack, as well as conservative politicians, and those who support the project. Among those who support it are the mayor, civic and religious groups, and some families of victims.

The mosque’s backers hope to raise a total of $70 million in tax-exempt debt to build the center, according to the New York Times. Tax laws allow such funding for religiously affiliated non-profits if they can prove the facility will benefit the general public and their religious activities are funded separately.

The bonds could be issued through a local development corporation created for this purpose, experts said.

The Islamic center would have to repay the bonds, which likely would be less expensive than taxable debt.

John Podhoretz, in Commentary, admires the way the Ground Zero Mosque debate has suddenly caused liberals to embrace property rights.

One of the hilarious ironies attendant on the mosque debate is the sudden discovery by the liberal elites of the vital importance of property rights — how Imam Feisal Rauf and his people have purchased a site on which they should be able to build “as of right,” and how those who are objecting to the mosque’s construction are committing an offense not only against the free exercise of religion but against commonly accepted principles involving real estate.

For the past 40 years, especially in New York City, property rights have taken a back seat in almost all discussions of the proper use of real estate. Following the lamentable razing of the great old Penn Station, the general proposition has been that any major project should have a distinctly positive public use. Landmark commissions, zoning boards and the like have imposed all sorts of restrictions and demands on property owners that interfere with their right to build as they would wish. Laws have been written after the fact (especially when Broadway theaters were jeopardized by real-estate development in the early 1980s) to restrict the right of property owners to do as they would wish with the land and buildings they own.

Thus, the outrage which greeted the suggestion that zoning boards and the like should and could be used to block the Cordoba Intitiative is bitterly comic. Such boards have been used for decades to block projects for reasons involving the “sensitivities” of a neighborhood, like the time Woody Allen and others fought the construction of a building at the corner of 91st and Madison on the grounds that it would harm the historic nature of the area — when in fact he and his neighbors were concerned about a shadow the building might cast on their communal backyard. Walter Cronkite went on a tear against a tall building being built by Donald Trump on the East Side near the UN because it was going to block his view.

Perhaps we should just argue that, once the Saudis and Iranians have paid for putting up the new 15-story building, it should be open to “urban homesteading” by artists and the poor, as liberal New Yorkers have frequently advocated with respect to other people’s buildings.

Or we might simply have Zoning or one of those Neighborhood Development Authorities require Abdul Rauf to include so many low cost housing units as part of the permission price for being allowed to build anything.

Or, why wait? we could just send in some urban pioneering activists right now to set up living arrangements in the empty Burlington Coat Factory building just as it is, thereby acquiring by virtue of the quaint customs of the city squatter’s rights. Then let Abdul Rauf try getting one of the radical leftwing judges of New York City’s Housing Court to issue an eviction order.

Vaughn R. Walker

It seems that Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling in Perry v. Schwartzenegger striking down the State of California’s Proposition 8 ballot initiative which prohibited state recognition of Same Sex Marriage is highly vulnerable to being overturned on the grounds that the judge ought to have recused himself. John C. Eastman explains in the same San Francisco Chronicle which last February was assuring readers that Judge Walker’s personal sexual orientation was a “non-issue.”

Judge Vaughn Walker’s Proposition 8 decision last week has thrust his personal life into the limelight. The San Francisco Chronicle has reported that the fact that Judge Walker “is himself gay” is the “biggest open secret” in town. The BuzzTab blog calls him “the apple of gay advocators eyes.” The Los Angeles Times reported just last month, after the conclusion of closing arguments in the case, that he is “openly gay” and “attends bar functions with a companion, a physician.”

Is any of this relevant to Judge Walker’s ruling striking down Proposition 8?

Well, as University of Notre Dame law Professor Gerard Bradley recently noted, the mere fact that Judge Walker may be homosexual would not necessarily have required recusal. But the fact that he “attends bar functions with a companion, a physician,” and may therefore be in a stable homosexual relationship of the kind that could lead to marriage, is an entirely different matter.

The political philosopher John Locke noted in his Second Treatise on Civil Government that “it is unreasonable for men to be judges in their own cases (because) self-love will make men partial to themselves and their friends.” That sentiment, undoubtedly true, is actually codified in federal law. A judge is required to disqualify himself in any proceeding “in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, including but not limited to instances in which: (a) the judge has … personal knowledge of disputed evidentiary facts concerning the proceeding; [or] ... (c) the judge knows that the judge … has a financial … or any other interest that could be affected substantially by the outcome of the proceeding.”

If Judge Walker is indeed in a long-term, same-sex relationship, he certainly has an “interest that could be affected substantially by the outcome of the proceeding” – he and his partner are now permitted to marry! – and that, according to Judge Walker’s own finding, has financial benefits as well. Such conflicts would have required recusal, and cannot be waived by the parties.

In Afghanistan, intolerant Muslims claim the right to execute out of hand unarmed medical volunteers who’ve traveled at their own personal expense to provide eye care to Afghan villagers on the basis of suspicion that they were proselytizing the Christian faith. [Christian Science Monitor]

Currently, in New York City, Muslims also claim the right to erect an enormous mosque and cultural complex, two blocks from the site where an unprovoked attack by Muslims killed 3000 people during a time in which militant and utterly intolerant Islam is still waging war against the United States, its allies, and the Christian West.

Publius, at the (Canadian) Western Standard, identifies the ironies of the debate.

The construction of the near Ground Zero community center / mosque is seen through the prism of the cultural wars. Liberals, who regard Islamist terrorism as a mere criminal activity, do not see the project as a threat, and view opposition as an expression of bigotry. To many conservatives, who subscribe to the Clash of Civilizations thesis, it is a woeful concession to an avowed enemy. Islam, or variant of Islam, is the enemy, and if only for symbolic purposes, a mosque at Ground Zero would be a triumph for the other side. A modern day version, in reverse, of the Marines hoisting Old Glory over Iwo Jima.

Libertarians tend to focus little of their energy on foreign affairs. With some notable exceptions, it is a blind spot for the movement. This is typically justified as fighting for freedom at home, before you go fighting for it abroad. Having a naturally jaundiced view of government action, libertarians lean toward regarding Islamic terrorism as another one of those unfortunate side-effects of big government.

In this light, the narrative of a bumbling, and grasping, oil driven foreign policy creating, or exacerbating, terrorism seems quite plausible. The big government as bad approach is usually understood as a one way street. Big American government is bad, and it causes nasty things at home and abroad. Strangely the logic is rarely used on other countries, that really big and bad governments in other countries might be generating terrorism, Islamic themed or not.

This blind spot in libertarian foreign policy analysis dovetails with another, and broader, shortcoming in how many libertarians view politics, the fallacy of economic man being universal man. Human beings are certainly motivated by money. It is not for pleasure that commuters fight their way through heavy traffic each morning and evening. But along with economic man, who carefully strives for profit maximization, there is also social man, romantic man, spiritual man and dozens more like him. We are driven by many things, including our ideas and beliefs.

The believer in economic man assumes that violence is simply an expression, albeit a perverse one, of this profit maximizing tendency. Thus some libertarians subscribe to the poverty-causing-terrorism theory. This round peg, however, has a very square hole to enter. How is a suicide bomber behaving economically? Bits of flesh have a hard time enjoying the material benefits of life. Such fanaticism cannot be explained in economic terms, it can only be understood philosophically.

The bulk of conservatives understand that we are engaged in an philosophical struggle, one in which symbolism is indeed important. An Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero, however, isn’t that important a symbol. The most important symbol of our Clash of Civilizations is that after nine years there is still a hole in lower Manhattan. It took less than seven years to build the original twin towers. Yet, nearly a decade after primitive religious fanatics scarred the skyline of New York City, it remains scarred. A confident culture would have, and very quickly, rebuilt the World Trade Center, to a new and better standard. That symbolism is far more powerful that a mere mosque two blocks away.

When I read of the murder of those medical volunteers in yesterday’s news, I was reminded of the persistent outrages by Muslims against Christian travelers, traders, and pilgrims to Christian religious sites in the Holy Land that finally exhausted the patience of Christian Europe, and led many of her leaders to take up the cross and go on Crusade.

Islam insolently claims the right to prohibit not only religious conversion and missionary activity, but even religious observances by Christians in places like Saudi Arabia. Yet, at the same time, Muslims are attempting to fully exploit all of the West’s very different cultural traditions for their own advantage.

Permitting the erection of an Islamic landmark in the near vicinity of the site of a terrible and perfidious Muslim attack, whose pain is far from past and forgotten, and whose wrongs have not yet been completely avenged, would be an outrage.

Yes, theoreticians may argue that, in a purely libertarian state, there would be no religious test of any kind concerning the use of property, but New York City has virtually infinite amounts of zoning regulations, and any property use, however legitimate and conventional, in that city is commonly intensely debated and negotiated and fought over in arcane processes open to the manipulation of every kind of special interest and activist ideological group. Repairing the West Side Highway in New York City was once successfully blocked on the basis of the interests of joggers, bird watchers, and homosexuals seeking open air liaisons who liked using the decrepit and closed motorway the way it was.

Approval of the construction of a Financial District mosque undoubtedly required not simply ordinary due process, but extraordinary exemption from the customary squabble among competing interest groups and factions that commonly paralyze all forms of development in New York.

Larry Silverstein has not been able to obtain permission to get the World Trade Center rebuilt in nearly a decade, but Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf only bought an abandoned Burlington Coat Factory building on Park Place last summer [link] and he has already obtained approval from the city to build “Cordoba House.”

The relevant authorities would never have allowed Americans of Japanese descent to construct a Shinto temple in the immediate vicinity of Pearl Harbor while American forces were still fighting Imperial Japan in the South Pacific during WWII, and no Islamic mosque ought to receive construction approvals anywhere near the scene of an Islamic attack on US soil for a very long time.

Antonio, with a Bay area native’s perspective, lists all the reasons why New York City will never be a tech center in a very amusing rant.

Thinking the New York tech scene will ever equal Silicon Valley is as foolish as thinking San Francisco’s puny theater district will one day take on Broadway. Both Silicon Valley and Broadway are unique products of the cities that spawned them, and every attempt to create a Silicon Alley/Silicon Sentier/Skolkovo/whatever in various parts of the world have failed. So far, no one’s managed to do it, and New York sure as hell won’t either. ...

$2495 for a 500 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment.

There, that’s how much my first apartment in New York cost (in 2005).

Living in New York, you hemorrhage money, and don’t see much in return. My career salary high-water mark is still working as a quant on Goldman’s credit desk, and I lived worse, from a quality-of-life perspective, than I did as a Berkeley graduate student. ‘Ramen’ money in New York is enough to support three families, and then some, elsewhere. If YCombinator existed in New York, they’d have to dish 5x more than their already slim initial funding to keep new startups in Cheetos for three months.

Basically, startups flourish in the Bay Area the same reason the homeless do: decent weather, relatively cheap living, and no stigma attached to your lifestyle.

Read the whole thing.

James Carville’s own poll finds that 55% of Americans believe Barack Obama is accurately described as a socialist.

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Red China’s People’s Daily says that the Taliban are training monkeys (macaques and baboons imported from the jungle) in Waziristan to use AK-47s, Bren guns, and trench mortars against US forces whose uniforms the monkeys are being taught to recognize.

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Democrat Financial Reform Bill includes racial and gender quotas for US financial industry.
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With the Social Security system soon to go broke, even democrats are talking seriously about raising the retirement age to 70. (Talking Points Memo)
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Lightning hits the Willis Tower (formerly, the Sears Tower) and the Trump Tower in Chicago.

Chicago is a great city for weather watching and photography.

Ouch! I don’t get to type this often…: “He had acetylene torch injury to the penis.”
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John Hinderaker from Power-Line, respects Obama’s behavior.

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Conservative cultural commentary venues The Notes and Culture11 went under. (link 1 & link 2).

Some people think they were not populist enough, but I am inclined to believe that the fact I never previously heard of either one of them could be part of the problem.
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Cigarettes $10 a pack in NYC.

New Yorkers ought to take up chewing tobacco.
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Write fiction based on your own life experience and they’ll sue you.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Michael Barone associates Obama’s political methodology with the aberrant and pathological political culture of his adopted city and argues that the politics of Chicago cannot be successfully implemented on a national level.

An interesting thing about Barack Obama is that he chose, on two occasions, to live in Chicago—even though he didn’t grow up there, had no family ties there, never went to school there.

It was a curious choice. Chicago has a civic culture all its own and one that is particularly insular. Family ties and personal connections are hugely important. Professionals who have lived and worked there for a quarter-century are brusquely reminded, “You’re not from here.”

Nonetheless Obama moved upward in the Chicago civic firmament with apparent ease. The community organizer joined the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church in search of street credibility in the heavily black South Side. The adjunct law teacher made friends around the University of Chicago from libertarian academics to radical organizer William Ayers. The young state senator designed a new district that included the Loop and the rich folk on the Near North Side.

Obama could not have risen so far so fast without a profound understanding of the Chicago Way. And he has brought the Chicago Way to the White House.

One prime assumption of the Chicago Way is that there will always be a bounteous private sector that politicians can plunder endlessly. Chicago was America’s boom town from 1860 to 1900, growing from nothing to the center of the nation’s railroad network, the key nexus between farm and factory, the headquarters of great retailers and national trade associations.

The Mayors Daley have maintained Chicago’s centrality in commerce by building and expanding O’Hare International Airport and by fostering a culture of crony capitalism with the city’s big employers and labor unions. Chicago survived the Depression and recessions to thrive once again. Sure, small businesses and some outfits lacking political connections fell by the wayside. But the system seems to go on forever.

So it’s natural for a Chicago Way president to assume that higher taxes and a hugely expensive health care regime will not make a perceptible dent in the nation’s private sector economy. There will always be plenty to plunder.

Crony capitalism also comes naturally to a Chicago Way president. Use some sweeteners to get the drug companies and the doctors to sign on to the health care plan. If the health insurers start bellyaching, whack them a few times in public to make them go along. Design a financial reform that Goldman Sachs and JPMorganChase can live with even while you assail “Wall Street fat cats.”

The big guys will understand that you have to provide the voters with some political theater while you give them what they want. As for the little guys, well, hey, in Chicago we don’t back no loser. ...

To some it may seem anomalous that Obama, who began his Chicago career as a Saul Alinsky-type community organizer, should have taken to the Chicago Way. But Alinsky’s brand of community organizing is very Chicagocentric.

It assumes that there will always be a Machine that you can complain about and that if you make a big enough fuss it will have to respond. And that the Machine can always get more plunder from the private sector.

The problem with Obama’s Chicago Way is that Chicago isn’t America. The Chicago Way works locally because there is an America out there that ultimately pays for it. But who will pay for an America run the Chicago Way?

Shannon Love, at Chicago Boyz, explains (quite correctly) that it’s all about shifting the blame.

A lot of the big urban areas of the Northeast have turned into war zones. Virtually, without exception, they place the blame on lax “gun control”... laws for their sky-high murder rates. I wonder if their voters have ever asked themselves why their mayors are so obsessed?

I think the answer is simple: It give the mayors external actors to blame so they don’t have to answer for their own incompetence.

Think about it. What is every one of those mayors really saying when they talk about disarming the citizenry? They’re really saying, “Hey, it’s not my fault our city has become a shooting gallery, it’s the fault of those rednecks three states over! You can’t blame me because I can’t control what those rednecks do! Oh, if only we could overturn two centuries of Constitutional law we would have safe streets! Until that happens, don’t even think of voting me out! It wouldn’t be fair!”

Apparently, the urbanites’ regional, racial and class bigotries make them more willing to blame people outside of their communities than to accept responsibility for the safety of those very same communities. The mayors and the rest of the failing big-city pols have figured out that the age-old practice of blaming outsiders is the sure path to political job security.

The problem in the big cities of the Northeast isn’t guns. If guns caused problems, it’s rural America and pro-gun states like Texas that would be murder horror shows, not the Northeast cities crammed with people too self-righteously moral to accept the responsibility of protecting their loved ones and their communities. When young black men are safer in small, gun-packed southern towns than they are in northeastern urban areas, you know something has gone seriously wrong in the big city.

No, the problem in the Northeast’s urban areas is an unusually large population of individuals who chose to kill and a political and criminal-justice system that cannot or will not contain them. It is ineffective law enforcement that drives high murder rates, not access to guns.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

The Supreme Court is expected shortly to overturn the city of Chicago’s gun ban, and Mayor Richard M. Daley has been talking a lot about gun control.

Mike Dumke, a reporter for the in-no-way-conservative Chicago Reader, brought up at the mayor’s recent press conference the obvious point that Chicago’s draconian gun laws have been ineffective in stopping the use of guns in crime, and hizonner (while brandishing a police-confiscated military rifle complete with bayonet) proposed a hypothetical including the reporter.

Guns are one of the mayor’s favorite soapbox topics—he regularly goes out of his way to point out that he despises gun manufacturers and “extremists” like the NRA. “It’s really amazing how powerful they are,” he said today, standing next to a table covered with handguns, rifles, and even a machine gun that police had seized. “They’re bigger than the oil industry, bigger than the gas industry, bigger than Google, bigger than President Obama and the rest of them.” ...

But even supporters of tough gun regulations—myself included—have to admit that it’s not clear how much they reduce violence. Despite having some of the most restrictive laws in the country, Chicago is a national leader in shootings and murders, and the mayor himself noted that “we’ve seen far too many instances in the last few weeks” of firearm violence, including the shooting that left a cop dead last night.

So I asked: since guns are readily available in Chicago even with a ban in place, do you really think it’s been effective? ...

“Oh!” Daley said. “It’s been very effective!”

He grabbed a rifle, held it up, and looked right at me. He was chuckling but there was no smile.

“If I put this up your—ha!—your butt—ha ha!—you’ll find out how effective this is!”

For a moment the room was very, very quiet. I took a good look at the weapon. It had a long bayonet. (Was it seized during the Civil War?)

“If I put a round up your—ha ha!”

The photographers snapped away. Suddenly everybody started cracking up.

Daley went on. “This gun saved many lives—it could save your life,” he said—meaning, I think, that getting that gun off the street might have saved many lives, including mine.

And he went on some more. “We save all these guns that the police department seizes, you know how many lives we’ve saved? You don’t realize it. First of all, they’re taking these guns out of someone’s hands. They save their own life and they save someone else’s. You cannot count how many times this gun can be used. Thirty, forty times in shooting people and discharging a weapon. I think it’s very important.

“Next will be hand grenades, right? We’ll say that hand grenades are OK. I mean, how far can you go in regards to mass weapons? To me, any gun taken off saves thousands of lives in America. I really believe that, I don’t care what people tell me. You have to thank the police officers for seizing all these weapons. We lead the country in seizing weapons. This is unbelievable.”

I had to agree.

0: 24 video

Mayor Daley’s understanding of firearms and America is pretty sad. The National Rifle Association has typically around 3-4 million members, its membership roll fluctuating and tending to rise significantly when major new gun control initiatives make the news. The NRA is an influential lobbying organization, but its strength is not really a matter of the size of its membership or annual budget, which is certainly small potatoes compared to the oil and gas industries or Google. The NRA is influential because it represents the views of many millions of American sportsmen and gun owners who have demonstrated their opinions by voting against liberal politicians who supported gun control. The gun control issue has cost the democrats a great any congressional seats and certainly the Presidential election of 2000, in which Al Gore lost his home state of Tennessee. Mayor Daley’s adversary on the gun control issue is not the NRA. It is the American people.

Mayor Daley then holds up the military rifle with fixed bayonet. He is holding it sideways, so we can only see the bottom. It is short, a carbine, and seems to have an extended magazine. I think it was probably an SKS with a a folding bayonet.

Did confiscating that SKS really save anybody’s life? It seems doubtful to me.

There is plenty of crime and many shootings take place in Chicago, but gangbangers and muggers tend to use pistols which are considerably easier to carry and conceal than a carbine. Mayor Daley’s “To me, any gun taken off saves thousands of lives in America.” is obviously craziness.

Chances are overwhelming that that SKS was never used in any crime whatsoever. (Anybody hear of any bayonetings in Chicago recently?) And guns actually fired in the commission of a crime tend to be used once, by and large, and then discarded. There are many, perhaps hundreds of, millions of guns in private hands in the United States. Some collectors own hundreds. The percentage of firearms actually ever used in crime is infinitesimal.

People like Mayor Daley want to focus law enforcement efforts on confiscating objects instead of apprehending criminals simply because taking weapons away from people not committing any crimes with them is so much easier than catching the bad guys.

When Kitty Genovese’s rape and murder in Kew Gardens was ignored by 38 neighbors (none of whom bothered to summon the police) in Queens, New York in 1964, the entire country was appalled.

This time, in Jamaica, 25 people walked passed, or even actually examined, an injured man bleeding on the sidewalk, and again, no one called for help.

Kew Gardens and Jamaica are practically contiguous. map

New York Post:

A heroic homeless man, stabbed after saving a Queens woman from a knife-wielding attacker, lay dying in a pool of blood for more than an hour as nearly 25 people indifferently strolled past him, a shocking surveillance video obtained by The Post reveals.

Some of the passers-by paused to stare at Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax last Sunday morning and others leaned down to look at his face.

He had jumped to the aid of a woman attacked on 144th Street at 88th Road in Jamaica at 5:40 a.m., was stabbed several times in the chest and collapsed as he chased his assailant.

In the wake of the bloodshed, a man came out of a nearby building and chillingly took a cellphone photo of the victim before leaving. And in several instances, pairs of people gawked at Tale-Yax without doing anything.

Later, another man stopped, leaned over and vigorously shook Tale-Yax’s body. After lifting the victim’s head and body to reveal a pool of blood, he also walked off.

Not until some 15 minutes after he was shaken by the pedestrian — more than an hour and 20 minutes after the victim collapsed — did firefighters finally arrive and discover that Tale-Yax, 31, had died.

Firefighters were responding to a 911 call of a non-life-threatening injury at 7:23 a.m. when they found his body.

Cops said they received four 911 calls at around the time of the attack reporting a woman screaming, but found nothing. They received no other 911 calls.

1:23 video

Allee Bautsch and Joe Brown

We heard a great deal from democrats, the dinosaur media, and the punditocracy of the left recently about conservative rhetoric and all sorts of supposititious threats of violence to democrats who voted for the health care bill. No actual violence, of course, ever actually occurred.

It turns out, on the other hand, that leftwing violence these days is quite real. Last weekend, Allee Bautsch, an aide to Republican governor Bobby Jindal and her boyfriend were savagely beaten in New Orleans and both were seriously injured.

Nola.com:

The news release issued by New Orleans police Tuesday evening… notes that the 25-year-old female victim and the 28-year-old male victim were attacked in the 600 block of St. Louis Street after leaving an event at a restaurant in the 400 block of Royal Street.

Jindal’s office acknowledged on Monday that Bautsch, his chief campaign fundraiser, was recovering from a broken leg after an altercation with a group of people in the Quarter on Friday night. Bautsch was attacked after a fundraiser for the Louisiana Republican Party at Brennan’s Restaurant, 417 Royal Street, the governor’s office said. ...

New Orleans police say that the incident began about 10:45 p.m. when a group of three to five men made “derogatory comments” to Bautsch and her boyfriend. When the man described as the male victim “turned toward” the group of men, at least one of the men struck him repeatedly. The woman “fell to the ground and screamed,” the news release said.

Police released a description of one suspect, saying he was in his 20s, looked “dirty,” and wore his hair in an auburn-colored ponytail. The man was 6 feet, 1 inch tall with a thin build, police said. He wore a light-colored T-shirt and dark pants.

Officers in the area responded and requested EMS assistance. The woman used her purse as a pillow while waiting for help. Once she was in the ambulance, the woman realized her purse was missing, the release said.

Kyle Plotkin, a Jindal spokesman, said Bautsch had surgery during the weekend and is facing a recovery time of two to three months. According to the NOPD news release, Bautsch’s friend was treated at the hospital for a mild concussion, broken jaw and broken nose.

The attackers were probably persons involved in a radical protest against a Louisiana State Republican Party fund raising dinner taking place at a local restaurant. The Hayride, a local political blog, describes the protesters.

Michelle Malkin is discounting rumors that the couple was attacked for wearing Sarah Palin pins.

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UPDATE —4/17:

Several prominent conservative blogs are reporting today that the victims were uncertain about whether their attackers had any connection to the demonstration and did not identify any specifically political insults from their attackers, including both Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey.

Human Events talked to the victim’s mother:

Della Burning, mother of Jindal staffer Allee Bautsch, confirmed that her daughter had been savagely beaten. She refused to discuss whether or not politics were involved (although at one point in the interview she did say the report was “accurate” when New Orleans Police Information Officer said slurs hurled at her daughter during the attack were “political in nature”).

Burning confirmed her daughter’s leg is broken in four places and she has five surgical scars and a steel rod now running from her knee to her ankle with seven screws holding it all in place. She did not fall and break her leg as was reported in the lonely and inaccurate story done by the Associated Press.

Burning also confirmed that the attackers did not rob her daughter or her daughter’s boyfriend.

On the other hand, the local blog Hayride (which covered this story in a lot of depth) is still arguing today that the attack was definitely politically motivated.

I wonder exactly how much of the full story is yet to emerge at this point.

There are certain little details that bring home to traveler the fact that he really is in a foreign country. One of these which frequently strikes Americans is the way, in European countries where the citizens are typically completely legally disarmed, the cops stroll around carrying machine guns.

The American thinks of his own police armed normally only with a pistol, and feels something akin to the way the Edwardian Englishman did about living in a country in which police officers only carried a truncheon.

Well, the recent Moscow subway bombings provoked New York City authorities to leap into action and dispatch an elite squad of officers with helmets, goggles, and fully automatic M16 assault rifles to ride the city’s subway trains.

That will show those terrorists! Try reaching under your clothing to detonate your suicide vest, and that Hercules squad stormtrooper will pull his goggles down, check to see that his body armor is securely fastened, and then spray the entire car with high velocity .223 rounds. After that, it won’t even be necessary to use the bomb.

I find the machine gun-toting cops on New York subways development symbolically appropriate. We are, after all, now just one more European-style welfare state committed to cradle to the grave benefits for everyone. We prefer equality to opportunity and growth. The state is our keeper. Our cops should all have machine guns. The state is our master and they are its representatives. They require enormous firepower to keep all of us in line.

New York Post

The rich are different from you and me”, says Nick Carraway in Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, prompting Hemingway to retort: “Yes. They have more money.”

But even the rich are not immune from the impact of the current recession and the real estate market collapse.

The New York Times reports that the price of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s splendiferous Manhattan pied-a-terre has been slashed by slightly more than half.

THE worldly and the clever gathered at the dinner parties that William F. Buckley Jr. and his wife, Pat, gave in their Park Avenue maisonette. Yet even though the chairs in the formal dining room are still covered in chartreuse leopard print, it has been quite a while since anyone but a broker or a prospective buyer has spent much time there.

Mrs. Buckley, a socialite and mainstay of the charity circuit, died in 2007, and Mr. Buckley, the writer and godfather of modern conservatism, followed 10 months later in early 2008. Their 10-room duplex came on the market at $24.5 million in May 2008, but there were no takers; in early 2009, as the real estate market was choking, the estate decided to take down the for-sale sign.

Now, more than a year later, the apartment at 778 Park Avenue has been relisted at $12 million, less than half the original asking price. And it is not the only listing in the building to have had to, ahem, adjust its price. The late Brooke Astor’s 15th-floor duplex, with 14 rooms and 6 terraces, started at $46 million in May 2008 and is now being offered for $24.9 million.

Ms. Del Nunzio is quick to point out that the apartment has “the most extraordinary suite of entertaining rooms that you could find,” with a private entrance on East 73rd Street and an 18-foot-long marble entry hall that opens onto a 27-foot-long gallery, leading to a living room, a library and a dining room.

“This is the place,” Ms. Del Nunzio continued, “where all those conversations and dinners with statesmen and political figures, not to mention film and television stars, with a quiet family dinner thrown in here and there, happened. This is a rare opportunity to acquire a piece of New York’s intellectual history.”

The listing, with additional photos.

The LA Times is predicting that the Supreme Court will ultimately rule in McDonald v. Chicago as it did in District of Columbia v. Heller, striking down the City of Chicago’s complete ban on the private ownership of handguns.

Reading the tea leaves is not very hard, since Justice Anthony Kennedy these days casts the deciding vote.

[D]uring Tuesday’s arguments, the justices who formed the majority in the D.C. case said they had already decided that gun rights deserved national protection.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the individual right to bear arms is a “fundamental” right, like the other protections in the Bill of Rights. “If it’s not fundamental, then Heller is wrong,” he said, referring to the D.C. ruling, which he joined. Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. echoed the same theme.

At one point, Justice John Paul Stevens proposed a narrow ruling in favor of gun rights. Two years ago, he dissented and said the 2nd Amendment was designed to protect a state’s power to have a “well regulated militia.”

Now, however, Stevens said the court could rule that residents had a right to a gun at home, but not a right “to parade around the street with a gun.”

A lawyer representing the National Rifle Assn. scoffed at the idea and opposed a “watered-down version” of the 2nd Amendment.

Scalia also questioned the idea. In his opinion two years ago, he described the right to bear arms as a right to “carry” a weapon in cases of “confrontation.” Such a right would not be easily limited to having a gun at home.

The justices will meet behind closed doors to vote this week on the case of McDonald vs. Chicago. It may be late June before they issue a written ruling.

Jeremy Clarkson, of the British television program Top Gear, visited the United States back in 2006. He didn’t like a lot of the same things about this country that I don’t like.

Step out of the loop, do something unusual and you’ll encounter a wall of low-paid, low-intellect workers whose sole job is to prevent their bosses from being sued. As a result, you never hear anyone say: “Oh I’m sure it’ll be all right.” ...

You know the Stig. The all-white racing driver we use on Top Gear. Well, we were filming him walking through the Mojave desert when lo and behold a lorry full of soldiers rocked up and arrested him. He was unusual. He wasn’t fat. He must therefore be a Muslim.

It gets worse. I needed money to play a little blackjack in Vegas but because I was unable to provide the cashier with an American zip code he was unable to help. It’s the same story at the petrol pumps. Americans can punch their address into the key pad and replenish their tank. Europeans have to prove they’re not terrorists before being allowed to start pumping.

I seem to recall a television advertisement in which George W Bush himself urged us all to go over there for our holidays. But what’s the point when you can’t buy anything? Or do anything. Or walk across the desert in a white suit without being arrested.

The main problem I suspect is a complete lack of knowledge about the world. I asked people in the streets of Vegas to name two European countries. The very first woman I spoke to said: “Oh yes. What’s that one with kangaroos?”

Then you’ve got New Orleans, which, nearly a year after Katrina, is still utterly smashed and ruined. Now I’m sorry but insects can build shelter on their own. Birds can build nests without a state handout. So why are the people of Louisiana sitting around waiting for someone else to do the repairs? ...

Among the things I don’t like is the way everyone over 15 stone now moves about in a wheelchair. As a result, it takes half an hour to get through even the widest door. And I really don’t like the way that every small town looks exactly the same as every other small town. Palmdale in California and Biloxi in Mississippi are nigh on identical. They have the same horrible restaurants. The same mall. The same interstate drone. Live in either for more than a week and you’d be stabbing your own eyes with knitting needles.

But it’s the idiocracy that really gets me down. The constant coaxing you have to do to get anything done. “No” is the default setting whether you want to change lanes on a motorway or get a drink on a Sunday. It’s like trying to negotiate with a donkey. Once, I urged a cop in Pensacola, Florida, to use his common sense and let me load a van in the no loading zone, since the airport was shut and it would make no difference. “Sir,” he said, “you don’t need common sense when you’ve got laws.”

Mark Steyn discusses the Obama-style of presidential leadership: Chicago tough on domestic media opponents, boot-licking to foreign adversaries.

If you’re going to attack the press, you need a lightness of touch, not a ham-fisted crowbar such as the White House wielded Thursday, attempting to ban Fox from the pool interviews with the “pay czar.” Another bit of venerable Disraelian insouciance, on the scribblers of Fleet Street: “Today they blacken your character, tomorrow they blacken your boots.” For two years, the U.S. media have been polishing Obama’s boots, mostly with their drool, to a degree unprecedented in American public life. But now it’s time for the handful of holdouts to make with the Kiwi – or else.

At a superficial level, this looks tough. A famously fair-minded centrist told me the other day that he’d been taken aback by some of the near parodic examples of Leftie radicalism discovered in the White House in recent weeks. I don’t know why he’d be surprised. When a man has spent his entire adult life in the “community organized” precincts of Chicago, it should hardly be news that much of his Rolodex is made up of either loons or thugs. The trick is identifying who falls into which category. Anita Dunn, the Communications Director commending Mao Zedong as a role model to graduating high school students, would seem an obvious loon. But the point about Mao, as Charles Krauthammer noted, is that he was the most ruthless imposer of mass conformity in modern history: In Mao’s China, everyone wore the same clothes. So when Communications Commissar Mao Ze Dunn starts berating Fox News for not getting into the same Maosketeer costumes as the rest of the press corps, you begin to see why the Chairman might appeal to her as a favorite “political philosopher”.

So the troika of Dunn, Emanuel and Axelrod were dispatched to the Sunday talk shows to lay down the law. We all know the lines from “The Untouchables” – “the Chicago way,” don’t bring a knife to a gunfight – and, given the pay czar’s instant contract-gutting of executive compensation and the demonization of the health insurers and much else, it’s easy to look on the 44th president as an old-style Cook County operator: You wanna do business in this town, you gotta do it through me. You can take the community organizer out of Chicago, but you can’t take the Chicago out of the community organizer.

The trouble is it isn’t tough, not where toughness counts. Who are the real “Untouchables” here? In Moscow, it’s Putin and his gang, contemptuously mocking U.S. officials even when (as with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) they’re still on Russian soil. In Tehran, it’s Ahmadinejad and the mullahs openly nuclearizing as ever feebler warnings and woozier deadlines from the Great Powers come and go. Even Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is an exquisite act of condescension from the Norwegians, a dog biscuit and a pat on the head to the American hyperpower for agreeing to spay itself into a hyperpoodle. We were told that Obama would use “soft power” and “smart diplomacy” to get his way. Russia and Iran are big players with global ambitions, but Obama’s soft power is so soft it doesn’t even work its magic on a client regime in Kabul whose leaders’ very lives are dependent on Western troops. If Obama’s “smart diplomacy” is so smart that even Hamid Karzai ignores it with impunity, why should anyone else pay attention?

The strange disparity between the heavy-handed community organization at home and the ever cockier untouchables abroad risks making the commander in chief look like a weenie – like “President Pantywaist,” as Britain’s Daily Telegraph has taken to calling him.

The Chicago way? Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight? In Iran, this administration won’t bring a knife to a nuke fight. In Eastern Europe, it won’t bring missile defense to a nuke fight. In Sudan, it won’t bring a knife to a machete fight.

But, if you’re doing the overnight show on WZZZ-AM, Mister Tough Guy’s got your number.

Government vehicles on scene of investigation

Last Sunday, the FBI conducted a mysterious large-scale raid on First World Management Meat Processing, an Islamic slaughterhouse, in Kinsman, Illinois, owned by Dr. Syed Hamid, a resident of Chicago. No one was arrested on Sunday, but apparently authorities were still searching the place on Monday.

Voz iz Neias?:

Federal agents conducted a raid Sunday afternoon at a goat meat processing plant near Morris, Illinois. The secretive operation was led by the Chicago FBI office, the Feds are being very tight-lipped on what they found and why they were even there.

Spokesman Ross Rice confirms agents were at 6260 Kinsman Road, in Kinsman, Illinois. The business is called First World Management. Rice would not say why agents were there but said nobody was taken into custody.

The FBI said the raid began Sunday morning and ended in the late afternoon. They were at the plant about nine hours total.

According to sources, the plant provides goat, beef and lamb meat which is prepared in the Halal way in accordance with Muslim custom.

The government workers inside First World Management meat packing plant in Kinsman Monday wouldn’t say why they were there or why scores of FBI agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were there Sunday.

The trouble is the FBI isn’t saying much about what happened at this rural Grundy County plant. A spokesman confirms that the plant, which has a Muslim prayer room, was raided as part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

Several witnesses reported that the Grundy County Sheriff’s office was involved, as well, saying sheriff dept. vehicles were visible at the scene. The Sheriff’s department denies it was present.

When asked if the raid had something to do with undocumented aliens, the person wouldn’t say. A neighbor suggested that undocumented immigrants live in a trailer behind the facility and work there.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said the agency assisted in the raid, but had no further comment. According to sources, many of the FBI and ICE agents were armed.

Several USDA criminal investigators were on site at the plant on Monday, but they would not comment on the situation.

One man who was talking about the raid was Jim Cavaness. He’s a handyman who occasionally works at the plant where goats, sheep and cows are slaughtered. On Sunday, he witnessed the raid and says he was questioned by FBI agents.

Cavaness says the FBI asked him if he had seen anything unusual at the plant. He says he’s never seen anything unusual, but, he says, judging by the amount of firepower on the scene, the FBI wasn’t just working an immigration case.

“Way too much overkill for immigration,” Cavaness said.

Neighbors who saw the raid on Sunday told CBS 2 it was a huge operation, involving more than 100 agents, police officers and even what one believed to be National Guard troops.

Sources say during the raid, the driveway was filled with more than 50 government vehicles. There was a helicopter flying overhead and a command center set up. On top of it were government sharpshooters with rifles at the ready.

Channel 2 (Chicago) 2:29 video

The Chicago Tribune (Tuesday) says “a source” told them that Dr. Hamid had been taken into custody at his home in Chicago.

Also raided on Sunday was the owner’s home and two other locations in Chicago.

A concert pianist may get as little as $20,000 for a Carnegie Hall appearance. One of the stagehands made $530,044 in 2008.

That kind of compensation for semi-skilled manual labor can only result from union power rising to the level of extortion. Imagine what staggering sum total of dollars is siphoned annually out of the operating budgets of all the concert halls, museums, and theaters in New York City, and how much richer that city’s cultural life would be if workers were paid conventionally generous wages and the currently misappropriated surplus applied to delivering more exhibitions and performances to the public.

Bloomberg

Ted Kennedy has been sober for 5 days, and is now eligible to vote in Chicago!

(Internet Viral Humor)

Hat tip to John C. Meyer.

Kurt Hoffman finds the liberal perspective on guns just a bit bizarre.

One puzzling characteristic of citizen disarmament advocates is their bizarre apparent belief that “gun violence” is somehow “worse” than other forms of violence. One would think that being stabbed, beaten, bludgeoned, strangled, etc. to death would be just as bad as being shot to death, but apparently that’s not a universally held belief.

I was reminded of this peculiar attitude yesterday when reading “New York’s Gun Battle,” an article in the Gotham Gazette about current attempts to make gun laws in New York state even more restrictive than they are now (the Brady Campaign ranks New York the 6th most draconian state in the nation):

Bloomberg’s push to rid New York City of illegal guns has seen results. The number of guns recovered from crime scenes in the city dropped by 13 percent from last year. The number of people shot to death dropped from 347 in 2007 to 292 in 2008. Overall, murders increased from 2007 to 2008, but only due to an increase in crimes committed with knives.

The implication is that Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-gun jihad has been successful, despite an increase in murders, simply because fewer of those murders were committed with guns. Somehow, we are to believe that murders committed with knives are less tragic than those committed with guns. That’s something in which to take comfort in your last seconds of consciousness, as you bleed out from your slashed carotid artery.

Debra Moore reminds us:

After Barack Obama became an Illinois state legislator, his wife moved up as well, scoring a job as ‘vice president of community relations’ at the University Of Chicago Hospital for a very generous salary of $121,910. When Obama became a senator in 2005, her ‘salary’ leapfrogged to $$316,962 for the same job…and one of Senator Obama’s first acts in office was to see to it that the hospital received over a million dollars of your tax dollars as an earmark.

And Steve Gilbert notes Michelle Obama recently resigned her job to take on the role of First Lady, having been on a leave of absence since May of 2007 to participate in the presidential campaign.

Despite being on leave of absence, Michelle Obama received $62,709 in compensation from University of Chicago Hospitals last year. Less than her full salary, but not bad for a no-show job.

Now that Michelle has moved on to bigger things, the University of Chicago Hospitals has found that it doesn’t really need a vice president of community relations after all, and has simply eliminated the position.

Isn’t it wonderful that we have such noble and disinterested people rising to the top in American public life?

Hat tip to Gateway Pundit.

California’s San Francisco Bay area is notorious for both its inhabitants’ lack of enthusiasm for conventional religion and their hair-trigger political sensitivities.

Zomblog was consequently therefore more than a little surprised at the lack of protests, condemnations, or even public discussion of a new Islamic advertising campaign, funded by the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the North American branch of Jamaat-e-Islami, the fundamentalist Pakistani political party.

“No enemies to the left” seems to apply even to Islamic fundamentalism, and even in the Castro, despite the obvious problems with regarding organizations dedicated to the imposition of sharia law as being on the left.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.

The Wall Street Journal notes that the Chicago Tribune isn’t only financially bankrupt. It’s ethically bankrupt as well.

The Tribune’s selfish decision to break the Blagojevich corruption story early probably prevented the FBI from catching the actual sale of a Senate seat (to Jesse Jackson, Jr.) on tape, losing federal authorities half the bust.

Conventional wisdom holds that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald ordered the FBI to arrest Rod Blagojevich before sunrise Tuesday in order to stop a crime from being committed. That would have been the sale of the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.

But the opposite is true: Members of Fitzgerald’s team are livid the scheme didn’t advance, at least for a little longer, according to some people close to Fitzgerald’s office. Why? Because had the plot unfolded, they might have had an opportunity most feds can only dream of: A chance to catch the sale of a Senate seat on tape, including the sellers and the buyers.

The precise timing of Tuesday’s dramatic, pre-dawn arrest was not dictated by Fitzgerald, nor was it dictated by the pace of Blagojevich’s alleged “crime spree.” It was dictated by the Chicago Tribune, according to people close to the investigation and a careful reading of the FBI’s affidavit in the case.

At Fitzgerald’s request, the paper had been holding back a story since October detailing how a confidante of Blagojevich was cooperating with his office.

Gerould Kern, the Tribune’s editor, said in a statement last week that these requests are granted in what he called isolated instances. “In each case, we strive to make the right decision as reporters and as citizens,” he said.

But editors decided to publish the story on Friday, Dec. 5, ending the Tribune’s own cooperation deal with the prosecutor.

Read the whole thing.

Jonah Goldberg gleefully deconstructs all the shades of meaning in the Blagojevich indictment.

There are so many things to love about the Rod Blagojevich scandal it’s hard to know where to begin.

Wait. That’s not right. There are so many bleeping things to love about this bleeping-bleep Blagojevich scandal it’s hard to know where to begin.

For starters, the folks at the Chicago Tribune are Christmas Pony Happy because Blago tried to strong-arm the Trib’s owners to fire members of the editorial board. Instead, Trib editors will get to have a big tailgate party outside Blago’s cell window.

Newspaper people love that sort of thing. ...

For partisans, there’s the schadenfreude that comes with watching the Democrats — self-proclaimed anti-corruption zealots in recent years — explain why Blagojevich shouldn’t be lumped in with Congressmen Charlie Rangel (cut himself sweetheart deals), William Jefferson ($90,000 in his freezer) and Tim Mahoney (tried to bribe an aide he was sleeping with not to sue him — and you thought romance was dead) as part of a new Democratic “culture of corruption” storyline.

There’s the enormous I-should-have-had-a-V8! moment as the mainstream press collectively thwacks itself in the forehead, realizing it blew it again. The New York Times — which, according to Wall Street analysts, is weeks from holding editorial-board meetings in a refrigerator box — created the journalistic equivalent of CSI-Wasilla to study every follicle and fiber in Sarah Palin’s background, all the while treating Obama’s Chicago like one of those fairy-tale lands depicted in posters that adorn little girls’ bedroom walls.

Read the whole thing.

Obama shakes Blagojevich’s hand, December 2, 2008

According to Fox News, Obama’s future White House Chief of Staff, former congressman Rahm Emanuel, had several conversations with Blagojevich and his chief of staff related to the appointment of a replacement to Barack Obama’s forsaken Senate seat… and the FBI has those conversations on tape.

1:56 video

Ouch! No wonder Rahm Emanuel yesterday refused to take reporters’ questions.

Barack Obama has not even been sworn in yet, and the partisan dam that blocked media inquiry into his ties to corrupt Illinois politics has already started to burst. The signs of an imminent press feeding frenzy at Obama’s expense are visible.

Caroline Kennedy

NBC News New York:

Jennifer Lopez or Caroline Kennedy? Who is more qualified to be Hillary Clinton’s replacement as New York’s junior Senator?

Rep. Gary Ackerman, a veteran Queens Democrat wants to know.

“I don’t know what Caroline Kennedy’s qualifications are,” the 25-year Congressman said on Steve Malzberg’s WOR conservative chat-fest, becoming New York’s first prominent Democrat to openly challenge the credentials of JFK’s daughter as a potential replacement for Sen. Hillary Clinton.

“”Except that she has name recognition, but so does J.Lo,” Ackerman said, according to the New York Post. “I wouldn’t make J.Lo the senator unless she proved she had great qualifications, but we haven’t seen them yet.

I thought we’d seen Jennifer Lopez’s qualifications in several films actually.

Jennifer Lopez

John Kass is gloating in the Tribune at seeing some of the local sleaze facing a cleanup.

Now that Gov. Dead Meat has been arrested at his home and charged with selling Illinois by the pound—and Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate seat by the slice—let’s just savor the aroma.

I love the smell of meat over coals in the morning.

It smells like . . . victory.

The people of Illinois needed some good news and they got it. Former Republican Gov. George Ryan is in prison, and the arrest of his successor, Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, surely means that the Illinois Combine that runs this state can stop with the rumors that U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald will be leaving town.

And, as Blagojevich most likely prepares to be Ryan’s bunkmate, let’s not forget the scores of other politicos, of all parties, who’ve gone down on corruption charges—including some of Mayor Richard Daley’s guys who helped rebuild that Democratic machine the mayor says doesn’t exist.

At a news conference in the federal building in Chicago, authorities were asked about Illinois corruption.

“If it isn’t the most corrupt state in the United States, it’s certainly one hell of a competitor,” said Robert Grant, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Chicago office. ...

Though Illinois isn’t surprised—this is after all the home of the Chicago Way—the national media must be shocked.

They’ve been clinging to the ridiculous notion that Chicago is Camelot for months now, cleaving to the idea with the willfulness of stubborn children. It must help them see Obama as some pristine creature, perhaps a gentle faun of a magic forest, unstained by our grubby politics, a bedtime story for grown-ups who insist upon fairy tales. But now the national media may finally be forced to confront reality.

Barack Obama, of course, is an intimate associate of Illinois’ current governor, shared the same political contributors (Antoin Rezko), and was, like him, a loyal servant of the Daley Machine.

The latest anti-crime crusade in liberal San Francisco is focused on people lighting fireplaces on the wrong day. It’s important to have the right priorities about these things, after all.

SF Chronicle reports.

For the first time ever, residential fires are illegal under a new law, passed in July, that bans home burning on winter season Spare the Air days.

The first such ban took effect at noon. Seventy inspectors from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District planned to spend the day and evening patrolling residential neighborhoods, looking for telltale chimney wisps.

Violators will get warnings by mail. Repeat offenders face fines of as much as $2,000.

The fireplace police say they are determined to keep law and order in the living room.

“We’re serious,” said district spokeswoman Kristine Roselius. “This is a major health threat. The weather conditions are such that smoke is trapped closer to the ground and anyone with respiratory problems will have a hard time breathing.”

With 1.4 million fireplaces in the Bay Area, Roselius said the district is hoping for voluntary compliance. It notes that wood burning produces about one-third of the particulate pollution on a typical winter night.

The district predicts as many as 20 Spare the Air days during the winter season, which air quality officials define as Nov. 1 through Feb. 28. That means it could be illegal to fire up the fireplace as often as one day in every six.

Similar bans have been in place in the San Joaquin Valley and in the Pacific Northwest for several years.

After the initial warning, repeat violators will face fines, some as high as four figures. In other no-burn districts, offenders have been permitted to do penance by attending “smoke school,” similar to traffic school. But the Bay Area is a no-school zone.

Pursued by screaming homosexuals, San Francisco Police last Friday had to escort a Christian group, which regularly prays and sings hymns at the corner of Castro and 18th for the conversion of homosexuals, out of the district.

KTVU disingenuously portrays the police as “keeping the peace” between two groups of demonstrators. One group numbering about ten or twelve confronted by a hostile and threatening crowd large enough to fill the street for more than a block isn’t my idea of equivalence.

4:45 video

Jay Nordlinger, at the Corner, finds the traditional stereotype view of the Republican Party as the party of the rich and the democrat party as the party of the workingman deserving of assignment to the category of persistent, but out-dated, myths.

I’ve just come back from a weekend in Vermont — and here’s how I understand it: Modestly off people — “real Vermonters,” as some people say — are voting for McCain and Palin. Comfortably off people, such as those who own ski chalets, are voting for Obama and Biden. And the following has been frequently noted about the city of my residence, New York: The rich are voting Democratic. And those who work for them — driving cars, cleaning rooms, and so on — are voting Republican.

Yet, when I was growing up, the Republican party was always called the party of the rich, and it still suffers from that label. Over and over, that which I was taught is contradicted by the evidence of my lived experience.

Chicago developer Tony Rezko provided the bridge that made it possible for Barack Obama to buy his $1.65 million dream house by arranging for the price to be lowered by splitting the acreage and having his wife pay full price ($625,000) for a 9090 sq. ft. portion of the side yard accessible only through the main property now designated a “development lot.” Obama got $300,000 off the asking price for the rest.

Original story

Well, what do you know? It seems the side yard parcel purchased by Mrs. Rezko wouldn’t appraise, and the bank appraiser who rejected a $625,000 valuation was fired and a new reappraisal mysteriously substituted for his estimate of no more than $500,000.

They call that bank fraud.

The Washington Times has the story.

A prominent news agency is reporting that Antoin Rezko is singing like a bird to prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and that Illinois democrats are trembling in their boots.
————————————————————-

HillBuzz rumors that Fitzgerald is after the ultimate scalp for his personal collection: Barack Obama’s.

The Sun Times today gave a major clue that Barack Obama will indeed go down with Tony Rezko, sooner rather than later. It looks as though Rezko is about to turn on Alexi Giannoulias, the 30-year old State Treasurer of Illinois (who was elected only because Obama backed him).

Here’s where all the clues are…and then we’ll walk you through the local Chicago politics on how today’s hint by the Sun Times has us convinced, for the first time ever, that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald could indeed send Barack Obama to jail.

Sounds too good to be true, but we are certainly going to be keeping an eye out for further developments.

Facing sentencing for his political corruption conviction, Chicago real estate developer and long-time Obama financial supporter Antoin Rezko is reported to be considering cooperating with prosecutors.

Rezko’s trial this year laid bare a culture of scams, bribes and backroom deals stretching from City Hall to the Statehouse. It even became fodder in the presidential campaign of Democratic nominee Barack Obama, whose fundraising and personal ties to Rezko go back more than a decade.

Rezko has made no deal in the wake of his June corruption conviction, sources familiar with the situation said, but has had preliminary talks with prosecutors before an October sentencing that could put him in prison for years. Still, there are indications Rezko has already provided investigators with information.

Four attorneys have told the Tribune in recent days that federal prosecutors have telephoned them and other attorneys either with news Rezko is talking, or armed with details only Rezko could know. The lawyers speculated prosecutors are using the preliminary talks with Rezko to shake loose more cooperation from other witnesses.

“I had very recent a conversation with an assistant U.S. attorney that led me to believe they were getting specific information from either Mr. Rezko or Mr. Rezko’s lawyer,” said a defense attorney who said he represents a figure in the case. None of the attorneys interviewed would agree to be quoted by name, saying they didn’t want to hurt their clients.

The People’s Cube documents the reaction of Manhattan Upper West Siders to the passage of a McCain Campaign march through a local street fair.

The number of middle fingers in a “progressive” crowd is directly proportional to the number of PhD degrees in the ten block radius.

5:00 video

via Rusty Shackleford.

Stanley Kurtz, of National Review Online, finds his efforts to investigate the full extent of Barack Obama’s relationship with former terrorist, now university professor, William Ayers mysteriously blocked.

The problem of Barack Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers will not go away. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn were terrorists for the notorious Weather Underground during the turbulent 1960s, turning fugitive when a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally exploded in a New York townhouse. Prior to that, Ayers and his cohorts succeeded in bombing the Pentagon. Ayers and Dohrn remain unrepentant for their terrorist past. Ayers was pictured in a 2001 article for Chicago magazine, stomping on an American flag, and told the New York Times just before 9/11 that the notion of the United States as a just and fair and decent place “makes me want to puke.” Although Obama actually launched his political career at an event at Ayers’s and Dohrn’s home, Obama has dismissed Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” For his part, Ayers refuses to discuss his relationship with Obama.

Although the press has been notably lax about pursuing the matter, the full story of the Obama-Ayers relationship calls the truth of Obama’s account seriously into question. When Obama made his first run for political office, articles in both the Chicago Defender and the Hyde Park Herald featured among his qualifications his position as chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation where Ayers was a founder and guiding force. Obama assumed the Annenberg board chairmanship only months before his first run for office, and almost certainly received the job at the behest of Bill Ayers. ...With a writ to aid Chicago’s public schools, the Annenberg challenge played a deeply political role in Chicago’s education wars, and as Annenberg board chairman, Obama clearly aligned himself with Ayers’s radical views on education issues. With Obama heading up the board and Ayers heading up the other key operating body of the Annenberg Challenge, the two would necessarily have had a close working relationship for years (therefore “exchanging ideas on a regular basis”). So when Ayers and Dorhn hosted that kickoff for the first Obama campaign, it was not a random happenstance, but merely further evidence of a close and ongoing political partnership. Of course, all of this clearly contradicts Obama’s dismissal of the significance of his relationship with Ayers. ...

A large cache of documents housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), is likely to flesh out the story. That document cache contains the internal files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The records in question are extensive, consisting of 132 boxes, containing 947 file folders, a total of about 70 linear feet of material. Not only would these files illuminate the working relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers, they would also provide significant insight into a web of ties linking Obama to various radical organizations, including Obama-approved foundation gifts to political allies. Obama’s leadership style and abilities are also sure to be illuminated by the documents in question.

Unfortunately, I don’t yet have access to the documents. The Special Collections section of the Richard J. Daley Library agreed to let me read them, but just before I boarded my flight to Chicago, the top library officials mysteriously intervened to bar access. Circumstances strongly suggest the likelihood that Bill Ayers himself may have played a pivotal role in this denial.

Stephen Moore, in the Wall Street Journal, describes how the environmental movement has come to claim the right to regulate, tax, and control every aspect of every American’s life.

Earlier this month, while visiting a friend in San Francisco, I almost spilled my latte in my lap when I read this on the front page of the Chronicle: “S.F. Mayor Proposes Fines for Unsorted Trash.”

The story began: “Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents’ trash to make sure pizza crusts aren’t mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom.” Isn’t that what homeless people do—rooting around in other people’s garbage? If Bay Area residents are caught failing to separate the plastic bottles from the newspapers, according to the newspaper story, they could face fines of up to $1,000.

“We don’t want to fine people,” the mayor is quoted saying reassuringly. “We want to change behavior.” Translation: Do exactly as we say and no one gets hurt. And San Francisco considers itself one of the most progressive cities in America!

When I was a kid, the environmentalists promoted their clean skies and antilittering agenda mostly through moral suasion—with pictures of an Indian under a smoggy sky with a tear rolling down his cheek or the owl who chanted on TV: “Give a hoot, don’t pollute.” Such messages made you feel guilty about callously throwing a candy bar wrapper on the ground or feeling indifferent toward car fumes. Back then I was a devoted recycler, but not for sentimental reasons. It was the financial incentive: You got up to a nickel for every bottle you brought back to the grocery store. So I would scavenge the landscape to find unredeemed bottles to buy baseball cards and candy.

But now the the environmental movement has morphed into the most authoritarian philosophy in America.

Read the whole thing.

Let’s all go out and pollute something.

Original 7/29 Gawker photo

Richard published at Gawker published the original news item on Tuesday alleging that the above object had washed up on a Montauk, Long Island beach, and hinting that it may have originated from the federal Plum Island Animal Disease Center, the vacation spot promised fictional supervillain Hannibal Lector were he to help recover a Senator’s daughter kidnapped by a serial killer in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs.
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The authorities at Plum Island obligingly cooperated with the silliness by issuing a denial.

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The story spread, and was picked up by CNN who ran a

Over which development, Gawker’s Richard yesterday gloated.
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8/1 Newsday photo

The story went international, and the British Telegraph gravely reported:

The identity of this creature, which reportedly washed up on a New York beach last month, has captivated the blogosphere and is dividing animal experts.

The beast, dubbed the Montauk Monster after the Long Island resort where it was discovered, has a hairless, leathery body, sharp teeth and what appears to be a beak.

A photo of the animal appeared on the gossip website Gawker earlier this week under the headline “Dead Monster Washes Ashore in Montauk”, and the story has since been picked up by US networks Fox News and CNN.

The woman who claims to have taken the original photo on Montauk beach on July 12 says she had no idea what the creature was.

“We were looking for a place to sit when we saw some people looking at something,” said Jenna Hewitt.

“We were kind of amazed,” the 26-year-old added, “shocked and amazed.”

Other locals have now come forward to say they saw the animal, which has been variously identified by blog commenters as a dog, raccoon, and shell-less sea turtle.

The dog theory, which depends on the creature’s beak actually being a nasal cavity, currently appears to have most support.

An initial theory that the image may be a hoax produced as part of a viral marketing campaign has been undermined by the number of witnesses.

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All this was so much fun that today Newsday climbed on board with its own photograph and witnesses, claiming:

A. Something really did wash up in Montauk, one sunny day, two weeks ago.

B. More than four people saw it.

C. More than one person photographed it.

The surf was rough, flipping the thing, over and over, and over again.

Jenna Hewitt, of Montauk, and three friends crept up to examine one side. And Hewitt snapped the camera shot heard ‘round the world.

But here’s the rub.

Her group was the second on the scene that afternoon.

The first was a quartet of sun-worshipers from western Suffolk and New York City.

“It looked like nothing I’d ever seen before,” said Ryan O’Shea, of Brooklyn. “It looked like it died angry.”

They were so puzzled by what they saw, they left and came right back, with more friends.

The second time around, Christina Pampalone, of East Northport, borrowed O’Shea’s camera. She aimed and kept on firing.

The result is lots of—ew—gross photos of a carcass that looks more domestic than exotic, a bloated dog, not the Hound from Hell.

It shows ears. A big swatch of fur. And its proportions appear to be less distorted—making the head appear to be a suitable complement to the body.

“I was telling people, all day (Wednesday), that I had better photos,” Pampalone said.

“Everybody I showed her pictures to said it looks like a dead dog,” O’Shea said.

“But looking at the claws, and at the teeth in the front, it looked like it could be something else, something vicious.”

It was relatively small, roughly 21/2 to 3 feet long, he said.

She also told our man Wargas—who had started his workday high on the hope of seeing, and no doubt, smelling, the beast’s remains—that the carcass had been moved from the backyard of her friend to another location.

Damn.

But wait.

Joann Dileardo saw it at the end of Roe Avenue in Patchogue, a few weeks ago. “I didn’t know what that thing was,” she said. “It looked like a pig.”

Another reader, Pat, e-mailed that the ladies in his office saw it on an East Quogue beach—back in April.

Elizabeth Barbeiri said her family saw it about a mile east of Gurney’s Inn in Montauk, July 14. And Ryan Kelso, via iPhone, said he spotted it—alive!—in the Montauk dunes. “It looked about the size of an average fox, gray in color, eyes like a mole, hairless and was breathing quite heavily,” he wrote, “needless to say we were freaked out by this discovery and fled the area quickly.”

Lavey Fater saw a surfer bring one to shore, near Ditch Plains.

“It was hairless and gross,” Fater reported. “... The surfer said he had no idea what it was, but that he threw it in the dunes because he didn’t want to be surfing next to it.”

Keith found something last week in Greenport; Chris found one a month ago at Jones Beach east of Field 6. (“The one I saw had a longer snout or beak or whatever you want to call it.”) Sean said he buried one, 3 feet deep, in South Jamesport.

They’re multiplying.

And Tigerhawk is proud of the difference.

The flooding in eastern Iowa has reached the point of catastrophe. Towns are overwhelmed, businesses destroyed, and crops are gone. A fifth of the corn and soybeans are gone. Fox News is calling it “Iowa’s Katrina.” Here is a gallery of aerial photographs at the web site of the newspaper I used to deliver every afternoon, the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

The thing is, though, the people of eastern Iowa seem to be stepping up in the Iowa stubborn way. I have seen any number of man-on-the-street interviews, and nobody is complaining. They all seem to be working to solve their problem, which is not surprising because Iowans do not complain about tragedy. They complain about hot weather and dry weather, but not tragedy. And I have looked for reports of looting and come up empty so far.

Katrina has become a metaphor for many things beyond natural disaster, including governmental and individual incompetence (depending on your point of view). In Iowa there is a 500 year flood, but the people are not paralyzed, whining, or looting. There will be no massive relief effort from around the world, and nobody will step up to help Iowans except for other Iowans. Yet years from now, there will be no Iowans still in FEMA camps.

The difference is not in the severity of the flood, but in the people who confront the flood.

ArabianBusiness.com boasts that Dubai is in the process of replacing London and New York as world capital of the financial industry.

Dubai is picking up the mantle of the financial capital of the world, as global banking sectors London and New York continue to fade on the back of the global credit crises.

The new mantra in New York and London is “Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai or goodbye”, as job losses mount in both cities while opportunities in the east continue to rise.

Lehman Brothers on Tuesday became the latest investment bank moving one of its most senior positions to the UAE. Philip Lynch, the bank’s co-head of equities for Europe and the Middle East, will be relocating to Dubai after serving more than two decades in London.

The US investment bank, which has axed over 6,000 staff in the last nine months, said the move was aimed at serving the growing needs of clients in the Gulf region and the wider Middle East.

Lynch will find himself in good company. Barclays last month dispatched Roger Jenkins, one of London’s highest-paid bankers, to the emirate as chairman of investment banking and investment management.

Earlier in May Citigroup, which has so far cut 1,500 jobs because of the global credit crisis, announced it would send Alberto Verme, co-head of global investment banking from London to Dubai. ...

The relocation of roles from London and New York to Dubai, and to a lesser extent Mumbai and Shanghai, reflects the reshaping of global opportunities for investment banks.

With a surge in oil revenue, rapidly rising infrastructure needs, and the emergence of sovereign wealth funds at the head of M&A activity, the Middle East and Asia have become crucial for global investment banks looking to remain profitable.

Mayor Bloomberg’s attorneys argue in their brief, and the Second Amendment may wind up excluded, being traded for a similar gag order on references to the National Rifle Association, the New York Sun reports.

Lawyers for Mayor Bloomberg are asking a judge to ban any reference to the Second Amendment during the upcoming trial of a gun shop owner who was sued by the city. While trials are often tightly choreographed, with lawyers routinely instructed to not tell certain facts to a jury, a gag order on a section of the Constitution would be an oddity.

“Apparently Mayor Bloomberg has a problem with both the First and the Second amendments,” Lawrence Keane, the general counsel of a firearms industry association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said.

The trial, set to begin May 27, involves a Georgia gun shop, Adventure Outdoors, which the city alleges is responsible for a disproportionate number of the firearms recovered from criminals in New York City. The gun store’s owner, Jay Wallace, says his store abides by Georgia and federal regulations and takes steps to avoid selling firearms to gun traffickers. Mr. Wallace’s store is one of 27 out-of-state gun shops sued by New York City, and the first to go to trial.

City lawyers, in a motion filed Tuesday, asked the judge, Jack Weinstein of U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, to preclude the store’s lawyers from arguing that the suit infringed on any Second Amendment rights belonging to the gun store or its customers. In the motion, the lawyer for the city, Eric Proshansky, is also seeking a ban on “any references” to the amendment.

“Any references by counsel to the Second Amendment or analogous state constitutional provisions are likewise irrelevant,” the brief states. ...

Of the city’s recent motion to preclude mention of the Second Amendment, a lawyer for Adventure Outdoors, John Renzulli, said, “If you can’t discuss the Bill of Rights in a court of law, where should we discuss these issues? Should we reserve it for the tavern?”

Mr. Renzulli said the city’s lawsuit did implicate the Second Amendment: “The politics involved here is whether the city has the power to go into another state and control the lawful sale of firearms.”

Still, Mr. Renzulli said he did not plan to oppose the city’s request regarding references to the Second Amendment. Mr. Renzulli, who has defended suits against the gun industry in Judge Weinstein’s courtroom before, said that in the past the defense has struck a deal with the plaintiffs on the matter: Lawyers for the gun industry won’t mention the Bill of Rights to the jury, if the plaintiffs don’t mention the National Rifle Association.

“We usually say we’re not talking about the Second Amendment and you’re not talking about the NRA as a huge lobbying group that controls the legislature,” Mr. Renzulli said.

He said he expected a similar agreement to be struck in the Adventure Outdoors case.

The Sun article fails to note that care had to have been taken to assure that this suit will be coming up before Judge Jack B. Weinstein, an activist leftist appointed to the bench by Lyndon Johnson, who routinely makes headlines with rulings favoring this sort of politically-motivated litigation.

Adventure Outdoors needs a better attorney. How can anyone be properly represented in a lawsuit involving firearms who thinks there is some kind of stigma attached to the National Rifle Association?

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Chicago police shot a mountain lion found roaming Chicago’s North side in an alley behind the 3400 block of North Hamilton Avenue (a bit west of Lincoln Avenue and a bit north of Belmont Avenue.)

Chicago Tribune:

A cougar ran loose in Chicago on Monday for the first time since the city’s founding in the 19th Century. But by day’s end, the animal lay dead in a back alley on the North Side, shot by police who said they feared it was turning to attack.

No one knew where the 150-pound cat came from, though on Saturday Wilmette police had received four reports of a cougar roaming that suburb, roughly 15 miles from the site of Monday’s shooting.

Whatever its origin, the 5-foot-long cougar’s unlikely journey ended in the Roscoe Village neighborhood, where residents reported sightings throughout the day to the Chicago Commission on Animal Care and Control. Resident Ben Greene said police cornered the cougar shortly before 6 p.m. in his side yard on the 3400 block of North Hoyne Avenue.

Greene said he heard a volley of gunfire as he was bathing his 10-month-old son. His wife, Kate, ran upstairs screaming with their 3-year-old son, and they all took cover in a back room.

“At first, I’m thinking there’s a gun battle in the street,” said Greene, who owns a trucking company.

As the shots stopped, Greene heard the police yelling, “We got him! We got him!” He ventured downstairs and moved on his knees to the front door, where he saw police on his lawn. The officers had shot holes in an air conditioning unit on the side of Greene’s house while aiming for the tan cougar, which died in the alley near Greene’s garage.

Chicago Police Capt. Mike Ryan said the cougar tried to attack the officers when they tried to contain it. Police said they could not tranquilize the animal because police officers typically do not carry tranquilizer guns. Police said no one, including officers, was hurt and they did not know the cougar’s gender.

“It was turning on the officers,” Ryan said. “There was no way to take it into custody.”

2:13 video

Sun Times

Dave’s Urban Legends notes that the shooting occurred two months after the the Illinois Department of Natural Resources issued a statement debunking false Internet rumors about cougar sightings in the state.

“While it is not completely impossible for a cougar to be found in Illinois,” Acting IDNR Director Sam Flood said at the time, “sighting of a wild one is highly unlikely. Wild cougars have been found in neighboring states but again, very, very rarely.”

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The SF Chronicle describes how Obama’s famous “bitter” condescending remarks were captured by an enterprising (Vassar ‘68) Huffington Post blogger.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign has been in full damage control mode since the senator’s blunt remarks about the nature of small town Pennsylvania voters were secretly recorded by a Huffington Post blogger at a recent San Francisco fundraiser that was supposed to be off limits to the press.

Obama, asked last Sunday why it was so hard for him to reach blue-collar voters, said that many had been overlooked economically and that “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton pounced on the comment over the weekend, calling it “elitist and divisive.”

An Obama campaign insider tells us the blogger, Mayhill Fowler, had tried to get into one of two Obama fundraising events in the Bay Area a couple of months back where former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley stood in as a proxy.

She was turned away, even though she had offered to pay, says our source.

“There’s a very basic (fundraiser) rule – you don’t let press in, and anyone with an interest in reporting shouldn’t get in,” said the source.

Just how the MP3 – wielding Fowler managed to secure an invite to the $1,000 a head fundraiser at the San Francisco home of developer Alex Mehran wasn’t immediately clear – but Obama campaign higher-ups were said to be livid, with fingers pointing at a local fundraising consultant for the slip-up.

There should be a special award for bloggers like Charles Johnson (who debunked the Dan Rather forged National Guard letter in 2004), and Mayhill Fowler, who this year exposed the views about the common people that Barack Obama shared with a wealthy audience at a private fund-raiser held atop San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, whose reporting of the truth makes a significant impact on the course of Presidential Election contest.

AP:

Mesa, Ariz. Mesa Unified District – 77.1 – San Jose, Calif. San Jose Unified – 77.0 – Nashville, Tenn. Nashville-Davidson Co. School Dist. – 77.0 – Colorado Springs, Colo. Colorado Springs School District – 76.0 – San Francisco San Francisco Unified – 73.1 – Tucson, Ariz. Tucson Unified District – 71.7 – Seattle Seattle School District – 67.6 – Virginia Beach, Va. Virginia Beach City Public Schools – 67.4 – Sacramento, Calif. Sacramento City Unified – 66.7 – Honolulu Hawaii Department of Education – 64.1 – Louisville, Ky. Jefferson County School District – 63.7 – Long Beach, Calif. Long Beach Unified – 63.5 – Arlington, Texas Arlington ISD - 62.7 – Memphis, Tenn. Memphis City School District – 61.7 – San Diego San Diego Unified – 61.6 – Albuquerque, N.M. Albuquerque Public Schools – 60.8 – El Paso, Texas El Paso ISD - 60.5 – Charlotte, N.C. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools – 59.8 – Wichita, Kan. Wichita Public Schools – 59.6 – Phoenix Phoenix Union High School District – 58.3 – Austin, Texas Austin ISD - 58.2 – Washington District of Columbia Public Schools – 58.2 – Fresno, Calif. Fresno Unified – 57.4 – Boston Boston Public Schools – 57.0 – Fort Worth, Texas Fort Worth ISD - 55.5 – Omaha, Neb. Omaha Public Schools – 55.1 – Houston Houston ISD - 54.6 – Portland, Ore. Portland School District – 53.6 – Las Vegas Clark County School District – 53.1 – San Antonio San Antonio ISD - 51.9 – Chicago City of Chicago School District – 51.5 – Tulsa, Okla. Tulsa Public Schools – 50.6 – Jacksonville, Fla. Duval County School District – 50.2 –
Less than 50%:

Philadelphia Philadelphia City School District – 49.6 – Miami Miami-Dade County School District – 49.0 – Oklahoma City Oklahoma City Public Schools – 47.5 – Denver Denver County School District – 46.3 – Milwaukee Milwaukee Public Schools – 46.1 – Atlanta Atlanta City School District – 46.0 – Kansas City, Mo. Kansas City School District – 45.7 – Oakland, Calif. Oakland Unified – 45.6 – Los Angeles Los Angeles Unified – 45.3 – New York New York City Public Schools – 45.2 – Dallas Dallas ISD - 44.4 – Minneapolis, Minn. Minneapolis Public Schools – 43.7 – Columbus, Ohio Columbus Public Schools – 40.9 – Baltimore Baltimore City Public School System – 34.6 – Cleveland Cleveland Municipal City Sch.Dist. – 34.1 – Indianapolis Indianapolis Public Schools – 30.5 – Detroit Detroit City School District – 24.9 –

50-City Average – 51.8
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The bottom of the list contains Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Chicago.

NY Observer:

Eliot Spitzer’s photograph was removed from the wall in the room where reporters file their stories in the Capitol building in Albany.

It was placed on the floor, facing the wall in the corner.

with the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass, who finds himself unable to take a leap of faith.

Barack Obama looked me straight in the eye. I heard him speak. Yet unlike some other pundits, I felt no thrill going up my leg.

I did feel a twinge of Rezko, though, and figured Obama could feel it, too, like when the bottom of your foot cramps up inside your shoe and you can’t dance.

That’s “hardball” the Chicago way, as Barack visited the Tribune on Friday to discuss his old friend, fundraiser and real estate fairy, indicted political fixer Tony Rezko. Rezko himself was quite busy, in federal custody, preparing for this week’s testimony in his corruption trial. ...

Obama asks us to believe he can swim in the sewers of Illinois politics without catching a cold. He tells us that Rezko helped him scope out his dream house, yet Obama never thought he’d get a call from Tony saying his back was itchy.

“No,” Obama said. “Because I had known him for a long time, and so I would have assumed I would have seen a pattern [of Rezko asking for favors] over the course of 15 years.”

I’m too old to believe in fairy tales.

At issue is the purchase of the Obama dream house on the South Side in 2005. The Rezkos bought the lot next door from the same owners on the same day, even as Tony was leprous with federal subpoenas. The Obamas paid $300,000 less than the asking price. The Rezkos paid the full list for the lot. Everybody was happy until Tony got indicted.

Was it a favor, with a bigger payout intended for later?

“No,” Obama said again, reiterating that I was wrong for writing that he needed Rezko’s help to buy his home.

Obama said he asked Rezko about the federal investigations, if Rezko had any problems, and Tony said no, and Barack believed it.

What will he say when Vladimir Putin of Russia asks President Obama to believe him? President Bush has already looked into Putin’s eyes, thought he saw a soul in there, and was greatly mistaken.

Daniel Gross reports rejoicing on Wall Street at the downfall of a power-mad hypocrite and demagogue.

The stock market may be battered, the dollar may be plunging, and the economy may be tanking, but there’s a bull market in schadenfreude on Wall Street this afternoon. Even as the Dow was on its way to notching another triple-digit loss, whoops of joy erupted from the dispirited trading floors today on news of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s disgrace. Spitzer, who rose to prominence as a scourge of Wall Street, uprooting corrupt practices, coming down hard on bad actors, and establishing a new moral order, was laid low by reports that he had been involved in a prostitution ring.

Details are still emerging, and it’s uncertain how this will all shake out, but one thing is immediately clear: Spitzer has been hoisted by his own petard, brought down by the same kind of investigation he pioneered as a prosecutor.

The Wall Street Journal editorializes today:

One might call it Shakespearian if there were a shred of nobleness in the story of Eliot Spitzer’s fall. There is none. Governor Spitzer, who made his career by specializing in not just the prosecution, but the ruin, of other men, is himself almost certainly ruined. ...

In our system, citizens agree to invest one of their own with the power of public prosecution. We call this a public trust. The ability to bring the full weight of state power against private individuals or entities has been recognized since the Magna Carta as a power with limits. At nearly every turn, Eliot Spitzer has refused to admit that he was subject to those limits. ...

Mr. Spitzer’s recklessness with the state’s highest elected office, though, is of a piece with his consistent excesses as Attorney General from 1999 to 2006.

He routinely used the extraordinary threat of indicting entire firms, a financial death sentence, to force the dismissal of executives, such as AIG’s Maurice “Hank” Greenberg. He routinely leaked to the press emails obtained with subpoena power to build public animosity against companies and executives. In the case of Mr. Greenberg, he went on national television to accuse the AIG founder of “illegal” behavior. Within the confines of the law itself, though, he never indicted Mr. Greenberg. Nor did he apologize.

In perhaps the incident most suggestive of Mr. Spitzer’s lack of self-restraint, the then-Attorney General personally threatened John Whitehead after the former Goldman Sachs chief published an article on this page defending Mr. Greenberg. “I will be coming after you,” Mr. Spitzer said, according to Mr. Whitehead’s account. “You will pay the price. This is only the beginning, and you will pay dearly for what you have done.”

The New York Post supplies the juiciest details of the scandal:

Wall Street traders cheered the public fall of a man who had taken special delight in bringing down financial titans.

Wiretaps revealed Spitzer haggling over the price of a hookup that took place at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, on the eve of Valentine’s Day.

The hooker, identified in the complaint as a pretty, petite brunette named Kristen, said she didn’t find “Client-9” very “difficult” – the word a madam had used to describe him.

Spitzer is listed as “Client 9” in the Indictment. .

Excerpt:

LEWIS asked “Kristen” how she thought the appointment went, and “Kristen” said that she thought it went very well. LEWIS asked “Kristen” how much she collected, and ‘Kristen” said $4,300. “Kristen” said that she liked him, and that she did not think he was difficult. “Kristen” stated: ‘I don’t think he’s difficult. I mean it’s just kind of like . . .whatever. . . I’m here for a purpose. I know what my purpose is. I am not a . . . moron, you know what I mean. So maybe that’s why girls maybe think they’re difficult . . . . ” “Kristen” continued: “That’s what it is, because you’re here for a [purpose]. Let’s not get it twisted – I know what I do, you know.” LEWIS responded: “You look at it very uniquely, because . . . no one ever says it that way.” LEWIS continued that from what she had been told “he” (believed to be a reference to Client-9) “would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe – you know – I mean that . . . very basic things. . . . “Kristen” responded: “I have a way of dealing with that .. . I’d be like listen dude, you really want the sex? . . . You know what I mean.”

Rick Moran explains that B. Hussein Obama secured the support of the Daley Machine for his presidential run by making a deal, and that Machine tactics, deals, and political corruption are really the standard operating procedure for the supposed “candidate of Change.”

1. His very first race for state senate, he used the time honored Machine tactic of challenging the nominating petitions of every other candidate, getting all 4 of them removed from the ballot.

2. He cultivated a relationship with the ancient President of the Illinois State Senate Emil Jones who told a colleague in 2002 after the Democrats swept into office “I’m gonna make me a senator.” Jones then proceeded to give Obama credit on the passage of 26 key legislative measures – almost all of which had been pushed by other state senators for years – thus giving Obama a record of sorts to go with all that charisma. Obama calls Jones his “political godfather.”

3. While in the Senate, Obama has had numerous opportunities to live up to his promised “post partisan” reforms and has never – repeat never – participated in any bi-partisan agreement reached by Democrats and Republicans on any issue. He has gone so far as to reject the outcomes of those compromises on immigration reform and an agreement on confirming federal judges.

4. When faced with a choice between supporting a mayoral candidate who stood for clean government and the corruption of the Chicago Machine, Obama chose old fashioned power politics.

Obama’s political career is replete with examples of opportunism, cynical deal making, hack politics, and business as usual relationships with crooks and scam artists like Tony Rezko. His entire presidential campaign is built on a lie; that he is a different kind of politician and will be able to change the way business is done in Washington.

When given the opportunity in the past, Obama has usually chosen doing things the old fashioned way. Why in God’s name should we believe him now? Did he try and “reform” Chicago politics? Did he try and “reform” the Senate while his colleagues worked on bi-partisan agreements on vital issues?

You can support the man’s policies without holding him up (and throwing in our faces) the idea he is some kind of “new” politician who will change everyone’s lives. And if he keeps pushing that meme, he will look like the emperor with no clothes as facts about his relationships with various shady Chicago characters come to light, giving the lie to his grandiose claims like “We are the change that we are seeking.”

A bitter divorce fight unexpectedly brought down what had seemed to be a shoo-in Republican successor to a retiring incumbent Republican senator, and promoted an obscure state senator occupying a safe inner-city legislative seat to Washington. One stem-winding speech later, Barack Obama was widely viewed as presidential timber, and after a few Clinton campaign stumbles as the front-runner.

When there is a serious possibility that Barack Obama could be the next President of the United States, it seems desirable to look closely at his background, and it is impossible to understand the real character and background of Barack Obama without understanding Chicago, and The Chicago Way

John Kass, in the Chicago Tribune, opines that The Chicago Way isn’t the tough-guy creed of outdoing your opponent in aggression proposed by the Sean Connery-played cop in The Untouchables (1987):

He [ Al Capone] puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue…” says Connery’s cop. “That’s the Chicago Way.”

and suggests a very different definition.

The Chicago Way.

What is it? Is it easily abused? Is it dangerous in the wrong hands?

This is critical, as the nation’s eyes turn toward Chicago’s federal building, where Barack Obama’s personal real estate fairy, Tony Rezko, stands trial on federal corruption charges.

The phrase must be put in context, something the national media fails to do when they portray Obama as the boy king drawing the sword from the stone, ready to change America’s politics of influence and lobbyists, ignoring the fact that Chicago ain’t Camelot. ...

In the past, a few reporters have applied “The Chicago Way” to our pizza, theater and opera, thereby embarrassing themselves beyond redemption. ...

Chicago’s mob—we call it the Outfit—was slapped last summer by federal prosecutors in the Operation Family Secrets trial that convicted Outfit bosses, and cops and put political figures in with them. We’ve had our chief of detectives sent to prison for running the Outfit’s jewelry-heist ring. And we’ve had white guys with Outfit connections get $100 million in affirmative action contracts from their drinking buddy, Mayor Richard Daley, who must have seen them pink and white and male at some point.

That’s the Chicago Way.

“This country was built on taxes,” said a Democratic machine hack, Cook County Commissioner Deborah Sims, as she and other Democrats prepared to slap Chicago with the highest sales tax of any major city in the country.

Her belief, that America was built on taxes, is one of the unique features of our own city’s history, which reportedly began in 1776, when the Daleys boldly declared our independence from the English king.

“There’s not that many political hacks in Cook County,” Sims insisted after the tax hike.

Not that many hacks? The only one reporters need to bother about is also involved at the same federal building: the mayor’s own Duke of Patronage, Robert Sorich.

Sorich has been found guilty by a jury, but the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals above the Rezko courtroom is still deciding whether to redeem the jury or redeem the mayor, who’d much rather have Sorich happy than Obama in the White House.

Sorich was convicted two years ago of running the mayor’s massive and illegal patronage operation, and he’s still not in prison. Thugs, morons, idiots, and convicts were put on the city payroll to work the precincts so that Daley could keep getting elected. Obama’s spokesman, David Axelrod, defended Daley patronage in a Tribune op-ed piece.

The Daley family’s parish priest in Bridgeport, Rev. Dan Brandt, lovingly compared Sorich to Jesus Christ as both had troubles with the law.

“People often say, what would Jesus do?” he said, loyal not only to his faith but to the 11th Ward’s place at the head of Chicago Way. “I put a twist on it and say, ‘What would I do for Jesus?’ With whom Robert has a lot in common as far as legal problems … [The Lord] was a convicted felon. And Robert was convicted, and so he may have a lot in common with Jesus.”

When the parish priest does right by the patronage boss to protect the mayor who gets endorsed by that great reformer Sir Barack of O’bama, that’s the Chicago Way.

Naturally, there are some squares who don’t think taxpayers should pave the Chicago Way to make it easy for Rezko to help purchase the senator’s dream house in a kinky deal exposed by the Tribune and still not fully explained.

“It’s really the Old Chicago Way,” said Jay Stewart, executive director of the Better Government Association. “In the old days they would pretty much admit it up front, and now they deny it. It’s essentially about power, access to government jobs, government contracts and taking care of your own.”

Don’t miss his 2:49 video
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Corrected: I had mistakenly spoken of Jack Ryan as an incumbent, one of our commenters was kind enough to refresh my memory.