Haiti Better Watch It: A Change Is Gonna Come

"'There is zero legacy from when Obama was here,' says Phillip Jackson, director of the Black Star Project, a community group dedicated to eliminating the academic-achievement gap. Jackson, like other local leaders, is reluctant to criticize Obama, however. 'I won’t minimize what Obama was doing then,' he says."

Heather Mac Donald, giving us "Chicago’s Real Crime Story" - and a picture of the president's role in it - which hasn't really been investigated, except in the City Journal.

"The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can't afford to live anywhere else.

But it's not safe to live here.

About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.

Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing - an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing."

Binyamin Appelbaum, showing us the "Grim proving ground for Obama's housing policy" - and a picture of the president's role in it - which was actually quite extensive, according to The Boston Globe.

"I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday."

Saul Alinsky, the president's ruthless political godfather - in Alinsky's now-infamous book "Rules For Radicals" - making a statement of purpose that would impress any Amused Cynic.

The Democrats Are Crumbling Like We The Bitch Who Cut They Hair

"Folks in the White House and folks in the NEA,..."

-- Michael Skolnick, "political director for Obama-mad hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons", explaining who was responsible for bringing a select group of creative types together on a phone call - for the purpose of creating Obama's government propaganda - before Skolnick, Barack, the gathered "artists", Russell Simmons, and the "folks" at the National Endowment for the Arts, all gulped down the biggest fucking batch of Kool-Aid you have ever seen, in The City Journal.

Why does Russell Simmons have a political director? Isn't he a Buddhism-spouting, yoga-doing, divorced Self-Help writer (telling black kids to "Be you") these days? That shit won't seem so damn "nice" and NeweAge-y after this stunt. And this was a blindingly stupid thing for Skolnick to say:

"All of us who are on this phone call were selected for a reason, and you are the ones that lead by example in your communities. You are the thought leaders. You are the ones that, if you create a piece of art, or promote a piece of art or create a campaign for a company, you tell our country and our young people sort of what do and what to be into, and what’s cool and what’s not cool."

Whoa, fuck. All I can see is "All of us on this phone call tell our country what to be into". I'm serious. That's all I can see.

But that's enough.

Fact: The Old White Guys Did Us A Lot Of Good

"This culture of repudiation has transmitted itself, through the media and the schools, across the spiritual terrain of Western civilization, leaving behind it a sense of emptiness and defeat, a sense that nothing is left to believe in or endorse, save only the freedom to believe. And a belief in the freedom to believe is neither a belief nor a freedom. It encourages hesitation in the place of conviction and timidity in the place of choice.

What, then, should our stance be in this existential confrontation? I think we should emphasize the very great virtues and achievements that we have built on our legacy of tolerance and show a willingness to criticize and amend all the vices to which it has also given undue space. We should resurrect Locke’s distinction between liberty and license and make it absolutely clear to our children that liberty is a form of order, not a license for anarchy and self-indulgence. We should cease to mock the things that mattered to our parents and grandparents, and we should be proud of what they achieved. This is not arrogance but a just recognition of our privileges.

We should also drop all the multicultural waffling that has so confused public life in the West and reaffirm the core idea of social membership in the Western tradition, which is the idea of citizenship. By sending out the message that we believe in what we have, are prepared to share it, but are not prepared to see it destroyed, we do the only thing that we can do to defuse the current conflict. Because forgiveness is at the heart of our culture, this message ought surely to be enough, even if we proclaim it in a spirit of irony."

-- Roger Scruton - who I have edited, ruthlessly, and with apologies - though we agree on many things, in the City Journal.

Non-Answers To Non-Problems Are No Solution

"Like medieval priests, today’s carbon brokers will sell you an indulgence that forgives your carbon sins. It will run you about $500 for 5 tons of forgiveness—about how much the typical American needs every year. Or about $2,000 a year for a typical four-person household. Your broker will spend the money on such things as reducing methane emissions from hog farms in Brazil.

But if you really want to make a difference, you must send a check large enough to forgive the carbon emitted by four poor Brazilian households, too—because they’re not going to do it themselves. To cover all five households, then, send $4,000. And you probably forgot to send in a check last year, and you might forget again in the future, so you’d best make it an even $40,000, to take care of a decade right now. If you decline to write your own check while insisting that to save the world we must ditch the carbon, you are just burdening your already sooty soul with another ton of self-righteous hypocrisy. And you can’t possibly afford what it will cost to forgive that.

If making carbon this personal seems rude, then think globally instead. During the presidential race, Barack Obama was heard to remark that he would bankrupt the coal industry. No one can doubt Washington’s power to bankrupt almost anything—in the United States. But China is adding 100 gigawatts of coal-fired electrical capacity a year. That’s another whole United States’ worth of coal consumption added every three years, with no stopping point in sight. Much of the rest of the developing world is on a similar path.

Cut to the chase. We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions—because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still.

We don’t control the global supply of carbon."

-- Peter W. Huber, on the solipsistic insanity that passes for environmentalism - and which is being shoved down our throats by the Democrats - it just doesn't make sense, at least not to New York's wonderful City Journal.

NewAge (Rhymes With Sewage)

"Much of what we associate with the Aquarian sixties was in fact old hat,...but if the pattern was visible to those with a sense of history, it wasn’t to the New Left, which,...'imagined itself radical pioneers, discovering a new world of ideas that had eluded all who had lived until the present.' Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) founder Tom Hayden, like many of the members of MoveOn.org today, exulted in his dismissal of all that had come before. 'In formulating our vision and ideas,' explained Hayden, 'it was most important to draw lessons from that same experience instead of relying on the textbooks of others.' There was no past, just a glorious future. In short order, the New Left had created its own version of the Nazi-Stalin pact by embracing both the leather-clad fascist thuggery of the Black Panthers and the Maoist version of Stalinism.

The sixties ended with SDS’s morphing into the violent Weathermen, leftists with wealthy backgrounds who tried to 'smash monogamy' through group sex and 'smash capitalism' with pipe bombs. It was all very nineteenth-century,..."

-- From Fred Siegel's review of A Conservative History of the American Left, by Daniel J. Flynn, in City Journal.

Life During Wartime

Just a quick greeting to everyone swarming in from City Journal and (my man) Panda Bear MD - "welcome" - and a few well-chosen (and borrowed) words of advice as you look around:

"This ain't no party/this ain't no disco/this ain't no foolin' around,..."

I'll speak (Oh, you bet I will),

The Crack Emcee