With judge's ruling, Obama gets his lakefront Temple of Love

John Kass
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/john-kass/ct-met-obama-presidential-library-chicago-kass-20190611-story.html
June 12, 2019

Barack Obama points out features of his proposed presidential center in Chicago, May 3, 2017.(Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Now that a federal judge has decreed that Chicago’s great temple to Barack Obama can be built without delay — you can almost hear Obama himself say the words, “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!” — there remains a nagging question:

Did Obama truly help Chicago, the city of his political birth, by taking care of the Daleys and installing Rahm Emanuel as mayor?

Or did Obama turn his back on Chicago once he became president, worrying more about his March Madness brackets than the constant slaughter by the street gangs that continues to this day?

It’s probably best that we leave that to the historians.

Let’s hope they fight it out, perhaps even to the death on the roof of the gigantic Obama Temple of Love and Fealty.

Best they fight before a giant stone carved head of Obama, the head gliding on a series of cunningly placed ball bearings, so that it might swivel this way and that to fix its glowing green eyes upon evil.

Chicago is beset by unending violence, unending political corruption and unyielding public workers pension debt, and lags far behind other cities in economic development for poor neighborhoods.

But at least Chicago will have the $500 million Obama Temple. Politicians can hold fundraisers there. Chicago will be the envy of the world.

I can’t wait till they name some of the meeting and entertainment areas. My preferences? The Kim Foxx Recusal Room, the Fast and Furious Ante Room, and the Jussie Smollett Lounge of Justice.

All that may or may not happen — probably not. But it might, you just never know.

What we do know for certain is that U.S. District Court Judge John Blakey on Tuesday tossed out a federal lawsuit filed by a group called Protect Our Parks that would have stopped construction of the Obama center.

Judge Blakey, who had the good fortune to have been made a federal judge by President Obama, said there “should be no delay” in construction, adding with a flourish, “this case is dismissed.”

The protect the parks group said it would appeal.

Who does Protect Our Parks think they are, anyway?

Federal judge tosses suit seeking to stop Obama center in Jackson Park, compares project to Soldier Field »

They had the audacity to believe that Chicago officials really meant it back in 1836 when they designated the lakefront as “Public Ground — A Common to Remain Forever Open, Clear and Free of any Buildings, or other Obstruction Whatever.”

The “Forever Open, Clear and Free” line was used to stop the Lucas (aka Star Wars) Museum, which could have been nice if our politicians dressed up in furry Ewok costumes and re-enacted thrilling action scenes from the space opera.

And “Forever Open, Clear and Free” was also used to stop a lakefront park land grab by the politically influential Chicago’s Children’s Museum, whose top cheerleader was the then-Mayor Richard M. Daley.

But “Forever Open, Clear and Free” had no chance against the Obama Temple of Love and Fealty, because, well, it’s Barack Obama, and he has superpowers.

“I would like to see us get to a point where we can get this resolved,” said Mayor Lori Lightfoot. “It’s a great honor for our city that the Obamas have chosen Chicago for their presidential center, but I also understand the concerns of people in the neighborhood in particular who are worried about what this huge megadevelopment is going to mean for their lives.”

Technically the huge building on the lakefront is being called the Obama Presidential Center, not the Obama Presidential Library, since a presidential library holds presidential papers for historians, and that’s not what’s planned in Chicago. They probably think we can’t read.

If it’s going to be just a pretentious temple of secular worship, couldn’t they at least call it a Presidential Centre?

But Chicago will at least get a place to quietly contemplate the awesomeness of Obama, while the city goes broke, and it’ll only cost about $500 million, with another $200 million or so from taxpayers for street construction. Maybe more. Who knows?

I heard a rumor that the Pritzkers, who are pushing this thing, have a few bucks, maybe more than a few?

If they want an Obama Temple, why don’t they buy the land and build it in, say, South Chicago, where Obama was once a community organizer?

They could plop down this political love temple at 87^th and Commercial rather than building it in a once inviolate lakefront park. Come on, rich Pritzkers, where do you think you are, ancient Rome?

Just a few years or so ago, most people agreed that the lakefront should be left alone. Other cities defiled their lakefronts, but Chicago didn’t.

But Obama wants his temple of love, fealty and adoration.

And what Obama wants, Obama gets, no matter who pays.

Listen to "The Chicago Way" podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — atwww.wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass

Not ordering a special prosecutor in Jussie Smollett mess would be 'unsettling, nay, repugnant'

By John Kass
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-john-kass-jussie-smollett-leroy-martin-20190503-story.html
May 3, 2019


Kim Foxx and Jussie Smollett

Retired appellate Judge Sheila O’Brien’s call for a special prosecutor to investigate the stinking Jussie Smollett fiasco is making some people very upset.

They find it quite unsettling, nay, repugnant, including Cook County Judge LeRoy Martin Jr., chief of the Cook County Criminal Division.

He’s taking a few days to ponder the unsettling, nay, repugnant aspects of all this.

He’s quite upset because O’Brien said he should recuse himself from the question of a special prosecutor, since his son, a lawyer, works in Cook County State’s Attorney KimFoxx’s office.

Foxx is the prosecutor who, inexplicably and abruptly, dropped 16 counts against Smollett, the actor and entertainer with Obama Celebrity Friends, for allegedly faking a racial hate crime and blaming it on supporters of President Donald Trump.

And I agree.

It’s repugnant to have watched Smollett preen on national TV about being a victim of racism and homophobia, while clinging to his idiotic tuna sandwich story, and then when finally unmasked, he just walked away from it all wearing a smirk thanks to Foxx.

And it is quite unsettling that Foxx, who had ambitions to become the next U.S. senator from Illinois, would throw her career away like that.

The only way we’ll have a chance at finding out what really happened is if a special prosecutor — a real one, not some pasty insider like Dan Webb — is appointed.

The fact that a special prosecutor hasn’t already been appointed is also quite “unsettling, nay, repugnant.” I don’t usually write like that, but this is a legal matter and lawyers and judges write phrases like “unsettling, nay, repugnant,” which sound, well, legal-ish.

Clearly, Judge Martin is upset with O’Brien, who confronted him in court as she petitioned for a special prosecutor, and asked that he recused himself.

"You’re going to decide whether the state’s attorney, your son’s boss, is telling the truth,” O’Brien said. “Your son’s career is tied to the potential witness’s career.”

Martin took great umbrage. His son is a prosecutor in the juvenile division, far from the Smollett case, Foxx’s office argued.

“Never before has this issue come up … It troubles me that we’re having this discussion about my family members because bringing one’s family into these kinds of circumstances is troubling,” said Martin.

I really can’t see how you can argue with her.

Knowing who is connected to whom isn’t just a Chicago parlor game. It’s a necessary survival skill. That knowledge can separate the cowboys from the livestock driven through the chutes.

Some may say that asking about a judge’s potential conflicts of interest is wrong. But you know what I say?

Who you crapping?

This is Cook County. This isn’t some fantasyland of gentle-talking forest creatures and magic lions and giggling fauns that feed you tea and cakes.

Cook County is the most crooked place in American politics.

Oh, I know we treat judges as if they’re angels from on high, as beings who never spit or use the water closet, but judges are human too.

And in Cook County — the land of we don’t want nobody nobody sent — a judge isn’t merely selected or elected. A judge is “made” by bosses.

For years, judges were made by Ald. Edward Burke, 14th, who now has federal legal issues, and Boss Michael J. Madigan, and the notoriously mobbed up 1st Ward.

But the old 1st ward was erased, and the judge-picking duties were appropriated by the equally earthy 36th Ward Regular Democratic Organization, run by the late ward boss Sam “Pastries” Banks.

One of the favorite political crews of the 36th Ward was The Coalition for Better Government, a group of tough guys who got out the vote.

One member was John “Quarters” Boyle, a two-time felon who stole millions in quarters from the state tollway. Quarters became a star in this column again, quite recently, for running away from an accident and being chased by the feisty Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza.

As some loyal readers may remember, Quarters’ brother is retired Chicago Fire Department Lt. Jeffrey Boyle.

Lt. Jeffrey Boyle, a convicted and prolific arsonist, was called “Matches.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

In 2002, Matches Boyle was pushed past 200 other more qualified candidates and made lieutenant. But he liked setting fires. In 2006 he was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to eight arson fires. He confessed to 20.

How did he learn to become such a prolific arsonist? On the job, Matches said in a 2008 hearing.

“The hotter it got, the more it would burn,” Matches testified.

Sounds logical, doesn’t it?

The Firefighter’s Annuity & Benefit Fund denied his pension, but it went to court before none other than Judge LeRoy Martin Jr.

Martin pointedly ignored Matches’ 2008 testimony about what he’d learned on the job, and strangely said there was no connection between the two.

“This court finds it unsettling, nay, repugnant, that after violating the public trust, Mr. Boyle should stand poised to collect a pension,” Judge Martin said in November 2009. “However, the court is duty bound to apply the law. There is simply nothing in the record before this court that points to Boyle using any of his training as a fireman to further the commission of his felonious activities.”

This is the same Judge Martin who’ll decide if a special prosecutor should be named in the Smollett fiasco or whether he should recuse himself.

If you’re a stranger, you might say all of this is unsettling, nay, repugnant.

Unless you were born here. Then you know that it’s all just Cook County.

Listen to "The Chicago Way" podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — atwww.wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass

Kim Foxx cleans Jussie Smollett up, the Chicago Way

By John Kass
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-jussie-smollett-rahm-emanuel-kass20190326-story.html
March 27, 2019


Cook County state's attorney Kim Foxx speaks to reporters at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse in Chicago, Ill., February 23, 2019.(Kamil Krzaczynski/Reuters)

In some cities, people might be shocked if the mayor called out the prosecutor for running a crooked system that allowed a Hollywood star like the smarmy Jussie Smollett to walk away from charges he created a fake hate crime.

But this is Chicago, and is there anything, really, that surprises Chicago anymore?

No.

Thanks to the office of Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, Smollett gets to walk away from 16 felony counts of a grand jury indictment. Her office dropped all charges.

Smollett blamed the alleged attack on mythical Trump supporters. According to his story, he apparently fought them off with a tuna fish sandwich in one hand and his cellphone in the other, just like real Hollywood tough guy Jason Momoa.

Or not.

But there’s more to it. There’s always more to it.

Kim Foxx’s office didn’t merely drop all the charges against Smollett, not long after Foxx began playing “Obama Celebrity Friends” with former first lady Michelle Obama’s onetime chief of staff.

Foxx’s office dropped the charges, yes. But also as part of the deal, her office wiped him clean. His record was expunged.

The stain of the 16 counts in the indictment was scrubbed right off him.

You might say Foxx bathed him in the waters of the Chicago Way, cleansed him, and made a new man out of him.

And now he’s smirking at the city, the mayor, the cops, everyone. Can’t wait until he files that multimillion-dollar lawsuit.

“Foxx expunged it all,” said a top Chicago police official. “The media’s really not focusing on that. What does it mean? It means you’ll never see the (police) interviews or read the notes.

“The case has been expunged. I can’t even tell you if Jussie Smollett was ever arrested or charged,” the official said. “Charged with what? Faking hate crimes? Indictments, what indictments? She wiped him clean.”

Foxx isn’t saying much. She hasn’t said much at all since it was learned that she’d been contacted about Smollett by lawyer Tina Tchen, Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff.

Tchen reportedly wanted Foxx’s help to lobby the Chicago Police Department and police Superintendent Eddie Johnson. It didn’t work.

Foxx was out over her skis on that one, completely out of her depth. She was compromised and was compelled to recuse herself in the case.

Now that Robert Mueller is free, I wonder if he could subpoena Foxx to ask if Michelle and Barack like to watch “Empire,” the TV show that made Smollett famous.

Toni Preckwinkle, Foxx’s political patron and candidate for mayor of Chicago, doesn’t have much to say either. Too bad.

Because Preckwinkle did more than merely help Foxx get elected. Preckwinkle is not only the president of the Cook County Board. She’s chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party.

But to be a true boss, Toni needed the prosecutor’s office for real leverage. And Kim Foxx was made.

“I’m not a lawyer and I’m not the state’s attorney,” Preckwinkle said Tuesday when asked about Foxx’s decision at a mayoral debate. “I think it’s really important that the state’s attorney be allowed to provide a fuller explanation as time goes on.”

As time goes on? Really? What about now, Toni?

You elected her. She’s your political creation. She’s not your hand, but she is your muscle. And time’s running out for talking, Toni.

After Foxx had to recuse herself from the case for playing Obama Celebrity Friends, Joseph Magats, the first assistant state’s attorney, took over.

“The fact that (Smollett) feels we have exonerated him, we have not,” Magats told the Tribune. “I can’t make it any clearer.”

You can’t make it any clearer? Well, I can’t make this any clearer.

Smollett is a star. Your boss jammed herself up some way we don’t know about. But she jammed herself. And so, you cut him a deal.

You expunged him. You let him work off “community service” with a couple of days doing odd jobs at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. I hoped he sold a few Jesse Jackson action figures. But then Rainbow/PUSH said it had no idea his volunteer work had anything to do with the criminal case.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, right, and Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson appear at a news conference in Chicago, Tuesday, March 26, 2019, after prosecutors abruptly dropped all charges against "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett, abandoning the case barely five weeks after he was accused of lying to police about being the target of a racist, anti-gay attack in downtown Chicago. The mayor and police chief blasted the decision and stood by the investigation that concluded Smollett staged a hoax. (AP Photo/Teresa Crawford)

Mayor Rahm Emanuel didn’t waste time. He put the rhetorical boots to Foxx, and later, his buddy David Axelrod twisted the knife in there too, just as Axelrod twisted the knife in Foxx’s predecessor, Anita Alvarez, when Alvarez was the fall guy for the Laquan McDonald fiasco.

“This is without a doubt a whitewash of justice,” Emanuel said.

Rahm Emanuel is precise with his word weapons. Even when angry, he pauses and considers the meaning and context of each thrust, unlike his predecessor, who babbled and blurted.

Emanuel used “whitewash” about half a dozen times at his news conference. It was no accident.

“And it sends a clear message that if you’re in a position of influence and power you’ll get treated one way. Other people will be treated another way,” Emanuel said. “There is no accountability in the system. It is wrong. Full stop.”

It was a clear political indictment of a fellow Democrat who climbed up the ladder of identity politics.

He was asked: What about the politics of all this?

“To the state’s attorney,” he said, “the question about whether it was politically motivated or not is something you have to ask them, because only they can answer their motivation.”

And only under oath.

Listen to "The Chicago Way" podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — atwww.wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass

Democrats use tear gas image as sentimental weapon to avoid clearheaded immigration debate

By John Kass

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-immigration-caravan-kass-20181127-story.html

November 28, 2018

Central American migrants run along the Tijuana River near a border crossing after Border Patrol agents used tear gas on November 25, 2018.(

Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images)

If there is one thing worse than that photograph of a little Honduran boy breathing through an oxygen mask after being hit with tear gas on our Southern border, it’s this:

Using that image as a sentimental weapon to fend off or obliterate clearheaded immigration policy.

But that’s where we are now, aren’t we? The caravan of thousands of Central American migrants is finally at the border. Mexico is keeping them back. The other day, after rocks were thrown at American border officials, several hundred migrants bolted through, trying to illegally rush their way into America, and some were hit with tear gas.

One was the little boy in the photo, receiving medical care in Tijuana. Mexico has made arrests and is in the process of deporting about 100 of the migrants back to Central America.

And now, the left has no answers to what’s going on along the southern border. Instead, we’re given shrieks of rage at President Donald Trump. They conveniently forget that under President Barack Obama, migrants who tried crashing the border and threatening border officials were hit with chemical agents.

Some journalists conveniently forgot this, or perhaps didn’t even bother to look at what Obama had done. The American people who are concerned about their porous borders know this, which is one reason journalism is held in low regard.

The history of illegal immigration along the southern border has long been cynically bipartisan. Establishment Republicans didn’t mind if business was the beneficiary of cheap labor. Republicans talked about border enforcement but repeatedly caved to supply agricultural and other workers important to political donors.

Democrats were once opposed to unfettered immigration, when they were the party of the working class. But Democrats now mock the working class and win elections in the richest counties in America. They’ve long taken the African-American vote for granted, and black voters are finally becoming increasingly dissatisfied. Democrats know they need a new crop of future voters. And they know where they can be found.

Most Americans are offended by this bipartisan cynicism. Trump understood, tapped into it, and became president.

Now I can’t think of any responsible person who likes the idea of children suffering. I don’t think you like it either. Parents brought the little ones into that chaos on the border. I wouldn’t have done it, and perhaps you wouldn’t subject your children to that danger. Yet still, it tears at the heart to see it.

But the heart is not the mind. And as liberal pundits wring their hands about the tear gas and bleat about Trump’s stringent border enforcement, casually tossing words like “fascist” and “racist,” something else is happening.

Millions of Americans who do not consider themselves to be hateful — Republicans and Democrats — are asking simple questions:

Is there anything wrong with mandating that immigrants legally apply for asylum rather than break into the U.S. and fade into America? I happen to think that’s fair, and it’s legal.

Yet where are the liberal Democratic solutions to address those in the migrant caravans determined to push illegally across the borders?

Political asylum is reserved under law for those who are threatened or attacked because of who or what they are. Asylum doesn’t apply to the majority who’d like to come here for better paying jobs and social welfare benefits.

What we have in place of Democratic policy is a steady stream of wailing, anger and virtue signaling. If you want to know how extreme, how ridiculous it is becoming, consider that Democratic darling U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has compared the caravan to Jews fleeing the Holocaust.

Unlike what happened to the Jews in Europe, the Central American migrants are not being exterminated by their own government. In tweeting this nonsense, Ocasio-Cortez diminishes the horrors of the Holocaust, and proves herself to be, of course, a fool.

Remember that for several weeks leading up to the midterm elections, as the migrant caravan formed in Central America and made its way north, Trump, in his typically heavy-handed and overstated Trumpian fashion, kept loudly insisting that the caravan was a danger, replete with “criminals” and “Middle Easterners.”

Are there “Middle Easterners” among them? It sounds far-fetched. Are they all “criminals”? No. Some are thugs, but many want a better life.

Tony Hernandez, the brother of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, is allegedly something of a narco kingpin. He was just arrested the other day in Miami on cocaine and weapons charges.

But if living in fear because violent narco kingpins are nearby is grounds for asylum, people in a few Chicago neighborhoods I can think of should apply.

The Democratic response to the caravan as it trudged north was also cynical. Democratic politicians insist they’re not for open borders, but they don’t support strict border enforcement. Theirs is a let-them-in-and-sort-it-out-later approach. This is a de facto open borders policy.

And just weeks ago, those who dared suggest that a country should have secure borders were subject to media shaming. Caravan? What caravan? They’re just women and tiny children in strollers. How dare you say otherwise?

But that wasn’t true either, was it? You read the pundits, you heard the snickers over the radio, and saw the smirks on TV. Americans got the point: Shut up about securing your own borders or be shamed.

And that’s not sound policy, either, is it?

Listen to “The Chicago Way” podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — atwww.wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass

Burning books like 'To Kill a Mockingbird' is the honest next step for the anti-Kavanaugh left

By John Kass

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-kavanaugh-democrats-kass-20181009-story.html

October 10, 2018

A member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of "un-German" books on the Opernplatz in Berlin in 1933.(US Holocaust Museum)

A great fire, a bonfire of burning books like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Ox Bow Incident” and other troublesome works containing offensive ideas.Now that Brett Kavanaugh has finally been sworn as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court — after several ugly weeks of ritual defamation by the hard left that has seized the Democratic Party — there is just one more unfinished ritual to complete.

These titles were once prized by my good and liberal schoolteachers, who remembered McCarthyism and what happens to a people who abandon the notion of presumption of innocence of the accused and warned us about giving in to mob rule to satisfy our politics.

But for the past few weeks it has been the Democrats, hostages of the hard left, seeking to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation through public shaming and the evisceration of his once stellar reputation on uncorroborated allegations that, while in high school 36 years ago, he was a sexual predator.

My old teachers were young in the 1960s. They were civil libertarians and liberals, yes, but not in the modern sense. A liberal then and the hard left of today are very different creatures. And the American Civil Liberties Union has, for partisan political purposes, abandoned the presumption of innocence where Kavanaugh was concerned.

My teachers taught those books with care and purpose. But if they were teaching today, they might be fearful to speak, lest they be branded as the enemy by the mob that has ruthlessly shouted down dissent in American universities.

As a student, the idea of book burning was terrifying to me, something done by a totalitarian government reaching into the hearts and minds of its people to convince them to erase threatening ideas.

Yet given the way the left has treated Kavanaugh, it would be fitting for them to put a match to the pile.

The acrid smell of burning paper and the sight of bright sparks shooting into the night sky would bring much-needed clarity.

And perhaps ritual chant, in the manner of those captured on the video of anti-Kavanaugh protesters in the Senate corridors, parroting the commands of organizers to shout down any senator who might even consider confirming Kavanaugh.

Protest leader: “I am going to go to Heidi Heitkamp’s office.” Protesters: “I am going to go to Heidi Heitkamp’s office!”

On that video, a confused protester asked, “Why? She’s on our side.”

The group leader turned and looked at her as if she were an insect.

I grew up with the belief that individual liberty was sacred, that tyranny of the majority must be resisted, and the rule of the mob was something to be feared. But those ideas have been scorched now, haven’t they?

Republicans have seized the theme of Democrats pushing mob rule to help them in the November midterm elections. And the left and their handmaidens in the Democratic Media Complex are mocking that notion, as if leftist mobs are some cynical GOP fantasy.

But mockery doesn't change the reality.

Years ago, Republicans used similar techniques to shout down dissent as the neoconservative-led GOP insisted on sending American troops to war in the Middle East.

The weapons were patriotism and fear. And those who dared questioned war were shamed as enemies of the state.

Back then I allowed myself to be herded into supporting war in Iraq. Years later, I promised that I would never be herded again. I hate being herded.

The goad used by the Democrats now is that all women who accuse men of sexual harassment are to be believed without question, even if there is no corroborating evidence. And those who dare question this are to be shamed.

The claims of women who’ve been sexually harassed should be treated with serious concern. But every American is entitled to the presumption of innocence, and evidence is necessary to destroy someone.

I won’t litigate the claims of Christine Blasey Ford, who says she was the victim of sexual assault 36 years ago. But her witnesses would not corroborate her story.

And other wild accusations, that Kavanaugh was a facilitator of gang rape, were so incredible that Americans saw through them. Yet these, too, were parroted by media, and perhaps because of the venom of it all, the tide of popular opinion, at least among political independents, began to turn.

Even in defeat the left threatens revenge. The warning of Lenin is repeated, that those who oppose them are on the wrong side of history and shall be shamed. A special education teacher tweets out that someone should “kill Kavanaugh.” A former American astronaut dared to quote Winston Churchill and was compelled to apologize.

The hard left has made it clear that once commonly held notions that maintained civil society are garbage to be burned, like those books.

And so, there is that one honest thing the left could do. Strike the match. Burn them. Burn them that all Americans might witness.

Burn Harper Lee’s novel about an accusation made by a white woman against a black man. Burn Walter van Tilburg Clark’s novel of cowboys hunting cattle rustlers.

As Major Tetley tells the posse, “Law, as the books have it, is slow and full of holes.”

So, those words would burn as smoke in the sky as would these from another book that’s often ignored:

“The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For after all, how do we know that two and two makes four?”

Listen to "The Chicago Way" podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — atwww.wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass

You want to talk about separating families? Let's talk about Mollie Tibbetts.

John Kass

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-mollie-tibbetts-john-kass-20180822-story.html

August 23, 2018

Go and play your word games and tell me about the cruelty of borders, the kindness of sanctuary cities and the political wisdom of abolishing ICE.

Tell me about government’s lack of compassion, and of the heartbreak of families separated from each other through broken immigration policy.

Tell me how racist it is, how cruel it is to think that a nation should control its own borders and stop, rather than reward, illegal immigration.

And then tell me about Mollie Tibbetts.

The 20-year-old University of Iowa student was separated from her family too.

She was separated from those she loved a month ago, when she went jogging near her home near Des Moines. Her accused killer, Cristhian Bahena Rivera, authorities said, was in the country illegally. He worked at a large dairy farm owned by a prominent Iowa Republican.

KASS: While we focus on Trump, the left devours itself with emotion »

His lawyers, seeking a gag order in the case, insist Rivera is here legally. The truth will eventually come out, as well as the circumstances of her death, with an autopsy to be performed.

Investigators said her alleged killer stalked her, approached her, then said he blacked out and couldn’t remember much. But he remembered enough to help police find her body in a cornfield.

And ever since, Mollie Tibbetts has been pulled at by politics.

Democrats who want the Latino vote ignore her or they pivot, smoothly, making their pitch for “compassionate” immigration policy and attacking President Donald Trump.

Republicans who are pushing stronger border control use her as an emotional symbol. Republicans whose agribusiness political contributors want cheap labor for their packing houses and their farms avoid her, as if she was never here.

Apparently, they really don’t mind a few dead Americans if they can keep to their political talking points.

And Trump, who rode to the White House by tapping into a real, desperate and bipartisan American desire to stop illegal immigration, disfigures the debate. He exaggerates the threat of crime by those in the country illegally, making it seem as if they’re driving a violent national crime spree when statistics say otherwise.

But victims of violent immigrants here illegally are more than mere statistics or a point from which to pivot and attack.

They’re more than broken eggs in the political policy wars.

They were real people. They lived real lives. They were loved. They were daughters and sons and husbands and wives. And they are dead, the result of immigration policy and partisan politics.

KASS: The Wrath of the Omarosa »

Because if we actually did something about illegal immigration, rather than shout at each other and play politics, Mollie Tibbetts would be alive today.

She’d be alive like so many others would be alive.

Kate Steinle would be alive. She wouldn’t have died while walking along a pier in San Francisco with her father when a habitual criminal here illegally fired a gun. He claimed it was all an accident and was acquitted of murder.

“Help me, Dad,” were her last words.

We don’t know the last words of Dennis McCann of Chicago. But he’d be alive too.

Instead, McCann was dragged to his death under a car driven by a drunk in Chicago in 2012. McCann was hit so hard that his shoes were left on the pavement. The rest of him was pulled a half-mile under the car along Logan Boulevard.

The drunk was jailed and charged, but under an allegedly compassionate policy pushed by Cook County Democrats pandering for Latino votes, the driver, Saul Chavez, was not held for pickup by federal immigration authorities.

He was compassionately allowed to make bail. And once out on the street, Saul Chavez fled back home to Mexico. And there were no real answers for McCann’s horrified and stunned family.

All they were given were vague, political regrets and mind-numbing Democratic Party talk by Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle about process and writs. Preckwinkle’s a powerful political boss. McCann is dead. Chavez is gone.

So please, tell me about political cruelty.

Trump vaulted to the top of the Republican presidential pile by targeting illegal immigration. The Republican establishment was not pleased. And Democrats campaigning against Trump use his exaggerations as reason to avoid victims like Tibbetts.

Or step over them quickly, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and presumptive candidate for president, did on CNN the other day.

“I’m so sorry for the family here and I know this is hard not only for her family but for the people in her community, the people throughout Iowa,” Warren said.

Warren will go through Iowa next year and eat corn and talk about close-knit families and demonstrate warmth as she campaigns in what her aides will call “the heartland.” She might pick up a pork chop and pose in farm clothes next to a bale of hay.

But she stepped over Mollie Tibbets and then it was time for her pivot, a pivot that was ruthless as it was obvious in its cynicism.

“Last month, I went down to the border and I saw where children had been taken away from their mothers,” Warren said on CNN. “I met with those mothers — who had been lied to, who didn’t know where their children were, who didn’t have a chance to talk to their children. And there was no plan for how they would be reunified with their children.”

Sen. Warren, isn’t that horrifying, parents not knowing the whereabouts of their children, not having a chance to say goodbye?

Like the parents of Mollie Tibbetts, after their daughter went out for a run, never to come home.

Listen to "The Chicago Way" podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — atwww.wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass

MORE COVERAGE

Mexican man charged in slaying of Mollie Tibbetts worked under fake name »

Man in U.S. illegally is charged with murder in missing Iowa student's death »

Shooting Up Chicago

Thugs Terrorize Their Neighbors in the Windy City


By Heather Mac Donald
https://www.city-journal.org/html/chicago-violence-16098.html
August 7, 2018



(Chicago Sun-Times)

An explosion of drive-by shootings erupted on Chicago’s South and West sides this weekend. At least 74 people were shot, and 11 killed, between 3 p.m. on Friday and 6 a.m. on Monday. In one seven-hour stretch, starting around midnight on Saturday, at least 40 people were shot, four fatally, as gunmen targeted a block party, the aftermath of a funeral, and a front porch, reports the Chicago Tribune. Over two and a half hours that morning, 25 people were shot in five multiple-injury shootings, including a 17-year-old who died after being shot in the face. An 11-year-old boy, a 13-year-old boy, and a 14-year-old girl were also hit over the course of the weekend’s bloodbath. Mt. Sinai’s emergency room shut down for several hours due to the overload of bodies; in May, the entire hospital went into lockdown following a virtual riot in its lobby among gangbangers, reported Tribune columnist John Kass.

Meantime, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan recently celebrated the issuance of a 232-page draft consent decree for the Chicago Police Department, possibly the longest police consent decree ever written. Among numerous other red-tape-generating provisions, it requires the CPD to revise its protocols regarding “transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming individuals,” to make sure that the CPD policies properly define these terms and that officers address intersex, transgender, and the gender non-conforming with the “names, pronouns and titles of respect appropriate to that individual’s gender.” Last Thursday, a so-called anti-violence march shut down Lake Shore Drive to demand that the CPD hire more black officers and that City Hall spend more on social programs in the black community. Few voices, in other words, are tackling the actual cause of Chicago’s violence: the breakdown of the black family structure and a demoralized police department.

If the mayor signs the consent decree, the police department will have to divert further resources from on-the-ground enforcement toward collection of racial data and training in the phony theory of implicit bias. A court granted the ACLU of Illinois and Black Lives Matter Chicago permission to intervene in the consent decree negotiations. This is the same ACLU that muscled the CPD into introducing a new three-page stop, question, and frisk form in January 2016 that contributed to Chicago’s shooting spike, already accelerating due to Black Lives Matter-driven anti-cop hatred. The ACLU and BLM Chicago will also be able to enforce the new consent decree in court, spelling further trouble for professional policing.

To be sure, shootings are down this year, compared with the high-water marks of 2016 and 2017, but that’s cold comfort for the 1,700 people—more than eight daily—shot through the end of July. But while shootings have crested at least temporarily, other indications of chaos and disorder are up. Carjackings have nearly tripled since 2015, with an increasing share committed by juveniles, thanks to a law exempting young carjackers from adult penalties. In downtown Chicago, youth mobs have been running riot. Large groups of teens regularly swarm across major intersections, jumping on the tops of cars caught in the stampede. Over the 2018 Memorial Day weekend, teens ran down Michigan Avenue, punching people and vandalizing stores; a group of eight to ten boys knocked a fifteen-year-old boy to the ground, then stomped on his head and kicked his ribs, back, and face, before emptying his pockets and taking his shoes. The police made almost no arrests during the melee, preferring to avoid confrontation. In March, gunfire erupted during a fight between two groups of youths in the Water Tower Place mall.

“The city is lost,” a federal prosecutor tells me. “We have never had crimes like this downtown—people getting shoved and robbed at 3 p.m. It’s just brazen.” This prosecutor has started avoiding the Magnificent Mile on Saturday afternoons. “I’m scared to be downtown,” she says. A Chicago police detective with 24 years on the job observes: “The kids who are mobbing downtown are the same ones doing the carjackings. This generation of kids has grown up with no one daring to touch them.”

Chicago’s mayoral contenders seized on this weekend’s violence to further their campaigns. Sadly for Chicago, a leader in Black Lives Matter, Ja’Mal Green, is one of those mayoral candidates. If Green has ever seen a police officer whom he supports, he is not letting on. Black Lives Matter was front and center during the protests against the CPD following an officer shooting of an armed man last month. Predictably, Green called for more government “investment” in inner-city neighborhoods.

Garry McCarthy, who headed the CPD when Laquan McDonald was infamously shot in 2014, blasted Emanuel for ignoring the violence in favor of downtown development. (The McDonald shooting triggered the consent-decree process, initially prosecuted by the Obama Justice Department but thankfully halted by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, only to be resurrected by Madigan and Emanuel.) But McCarthy engaged in some fake news, suggesting that the public should not buy the fact that the murder rate is actually down, in light of this weekend’s violence. McCarthy ran Compstat (the revolutionary police-accountability system) for the New York Police Department; he of all people should know that both facts can be true: murder and shootings can be down from the 2016 and 2017 rates and still be unacceptably high.

McCarthy should be talking about two things on the campaign trail: getting out of the street-stop agreement that he himself signed with the ACLU, and halting the impending consent decree. Until the shooting of McDonald, the academic Left had celebrated the CPD as a model of progressive policing. It still is. What it needs is support from the public and Chicago’s political class and the confidence to go back to proactive enforcement.

But policing is only a second-best solution to the anarchy in inner-city communities. The best solution is a culture of marriage that expects boys to take responsibility for the children they conceive. As long as more than three-quarters of Chicago’s inner-city children are raised without their fathers, black-on-black violence will continue. And the national press will take notice only when the numbers are too egregious to ignore.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of The War on Cops and the forthcoming The Diversity Delusion.